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"It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would." No, not in a lot of industries. Many large, establishe
by sonnyblarney 8y ago
"It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would."
No, not in a lot of industries.
Many large, established industries have oligarchies that are all more or less inefficient.
For an established company, there's nary any reason to provide hulking, outsized returns because expenses for whatever can always be justified.
Think - surpluses start to develop - is the money going to go into some kind of dividend/repurchase? Or is the Director who's been clamouring for 'more heads for this or that' going to get his staff? It will be the later.
Every manager wants to 'hire hire hire' because it gives them more power. And it's pretty easy to justify it to their bosses and to themselves.
Google could easily fire 10K people tomorrow and wouldn't skip a beat.
Also, it's often surprisingly difficult to measure the efficiency of groups or teams.
Some teams, heck even entire divisions, can be full of hardworking, smart, professional people churning out 'great work' as judged by their CEO. But that 'great work' actually may not move the needle one bit.
The ability to determine how valuable work is to outcomes is something that startup people start to understand, but some go through their entire careers having no clue.
I worked at two Unicorns and then a Fortune 50. It was very inefficient. What totally blew me away is that nobody - not the staff, not the directors, VPs or CEO had a clue - or at least every let on they did. It was difficult because for a couple of years I didn't believe my own intuition, I assumed ' the executives must know better'. Nope. It was a kind of shocking/reckoning to see how dear leaders can be totally out of touch.
I will say this: it's hard to be efficient on large teams. What might seem like 'BS' is really just because you're only operating at 50% efficiency. In product marketing I realized that if our team made only one, single important decision for the company per year - our sales were so big, that it would be worth it. So you could say the company was hiring us for talent, not for work, but we have to show up every day anyhow.
- bena 8y agoI think working a bit as a consultant/contractor made me realize just how many very prominent companies are being held together by the equivalent of spit and glue.
- maxxxxx 8y agoI had that insight a while ago when I had to dig into a process that was sometimes brittle and supposed to be automated. There were probably 10 departments involved and we never found anybody who actually understood all the details. the thing just had evolved over the years and worked without anybody ever having designed it.
- bena 8y agoI think it's turned me into a bit of a nihilist. I worked initially as in-house for a doctor's office trying to break into medical software while running his solo practice. So I figured a little "spit and glue" is par for course. It's essentially a mom and pop. Then I became a contractor and the first time I ran across a multi-million dollar company doing serious business off of a shoddy Access database that sometimes corrupted the data and needed to be reverted to a previous backup, I was legitimately horrified. I thought it was a fluke. Then another. And another. Even hospitals and national chains. And I realized that none of us know what we're doing, so don't worry about it. The worst that could happen isn't actually so bad.