5 ms·

> The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40 This has to be hyperbole but the rest of your comment makes me think you're being serio

> The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40 This has to be hyperbole but the rest of your comment makes me think you're being serious. I have only worked at small companies <50 people, so I don't have first hand experience with how waste can hide in large companies but 1:40 excellent to useless people? I can't believe it'd even be half that. My guess is you thought those people were useless because you didn't understand the role they played in the company. However, I'll admin again that I don't have first hand experience. I'd genuinely love to hear from others who have experience with large companies.

schmookeeg 6y ago
Oh it's reality. My experience at Sony was about 1:25, but other big dumb companies I have worked for have met and exceeded the 1:40 rule. It is amazing how process generates dead weight and worthless humans and nobody seems to care. At one point I posited that Sony USA were merely a political pawn for Sony Japan. Hire a few tens of thousands of Americans, gain political capital -- and care not what they actually do all day. In our case, it was death by scrum and sticky notes.
- dpe82 6y ago
  I worked for a tiny tiny unit of Sony USA that was itself once a startup that Sony had acquired. We were 25 or so engineers with our own little profitable(ish) product in our own office in Madison, WI. I once went to HQ in San Diego and couldn't believe how many people there were doing... well, I never could quite figure out what.
- TwoBit 6y ago
  Wow I worked at Oculus and the ratio was at least 30/40, if not higher.
  - eggsome 6y ago
    Did you see much change after the attempt to move the software guys out of Texas?
dpe82 6y ago
Large companies can hide inefficiencies and incompetence of staggering proportion. Often there's little incentive to really improve things, but tons of bureaucracy that helps maintain the status quo or let it slide ever worse. People can only judge how good something is against their experience, so if you've only ever worked at that bigco and only known incompetence then you might not even realize anything is wrong. Meanwhile the proverbial frog slowly boils...
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  1:20 is pretty realistic. Seen with my own eyes and ears. I wasn’t the 1, I was part of the 20. Didn’t do shit all day mainly because incentives were not aligned to motivate me. I get the same salary if I put in the extra effort. So why. Knew one guy who had a vision and the stamina to push through with PowerPoint precision. He was the 1.
  - asddubs 6y ago
    > He was the 1. aw come on, I'm sure you'll meet somebody, find happiness and forget all about him
    - systemvoltage 6y ago
      Nice 1 :-)
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
Well if you think about it, it's not that hard to imagine how it happens. First, you have Price's Law [0] which states that half the work is done by the square root of the number of people. This in itself already implies a lot of useless people, especially at a company the size of Intel. You might also have whole orgs/departments where pretty much everyone is phoning it in, so that would drive it up as well. The way I see it is the more layers there are and the more removed people at the top are from the work, the greater chance the of useless people being able to go under the radar. [0] https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/ https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/
- imtringued 6y ago
  Interesting. I am pretty sure that it's not a case of individual failure. It has more to do with organizational structure. Most of the low hanging fruits can be picked by one individual. Instead of trying to pick more apples from the same tree people should make sure that there are not too many people assigned to the same tree. The article confirms my idea: >Look at your current profession. Are you in a position to create substantial value? If the answer is no, move on to a different place where you CAN.
e_y_ 6y ago
I question if those people are actually bad workers, but I could easily imagine people being assigned to work on useless projects and just going along with it for a steady paycheck instead of leaving or trying to push the boundaries. I've worked for 100-person, 1000-person, and 100000-person companies, and the biggest companies have so many resources that they barely know what to do with them all. Most startups would kill for a fraction of a percent of the "let's screw around" R&D money that the big corps have.
nurspouse 6y ago
Disclaimer: I worked at Intel. Calling them useless may be a bit of a stretch. If you said "mediocre", I'd believe it. Also, in my experience there, the ratio is not uniform - you could go to a department with lots of top notch folks, and then to another department with everyone being mediocre. Some data points: Asked a person in a SW interview to write a function to calculate the factorial. The candidate was repeatedly told he could use whatever language he wants. He insisted on using a language he had little experience in (C++), and not the one he was experienced in (Python). He was given latitude to use any method he wanted: Recursive, iterative, etc. He didn't even come close to solving it. He was still hired. He is not an outlier when it comes to SW folks at Intel. Yes, Intel definitely has some really good SW engineers, but the 1:40 ratio easily applies in that sphere. Up till 2014, my department insisted on using cvs for version control. They said they saw no benefit to git (or even SVN). In another team I was in, we were stuck with SVN. The senior manager wouldn't allow us to use git because he was sure it would be over the heads of many of the employees (sadly, he may have been right). Then in 2017, when IT announced that SVN was being EOL, to avoid git they switched to MS TFS (even though TFS themselves recommend git!) I still hear from folks there about the resistance to switch to git. And the following comment I've heard from multiple folks: "I don't want to use git because it comes from Microsoft!" (conflating github with git, and upon further discussion realizing they have no idea MS bought Github - they think Git and Github both originated from MS). BTW, I'm not a git fan boy - I much prefer mercurial. If you're good at SW and somewhat up to speed with current technology, Intel is a very frustrating place to work. But then again, their compensation for SW is simply not competitive: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Intel/salaries/Software-Engineer/Grade-5/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Intel/salaries/Software-Engin...
- elihu 6y ago
  I work at Intel. Maybe my experiences are not representative, but everyone I've worked with is competent at what they do, and most people are helpful and friendly. But the trouble is that isn't enough. The really effective programmers aren't just good at writing code, they're also good at designing elegant interfaces, and at understanding customer problems, and strategic thinking, and so on. Competent programmers aren't useless if they don't have those skills, but you need some people that do if you want to make great products rather than just check off boxes in feature lists. Intel doesn't have as many of those great programmers as I would like, but I think their bigger problems are organization rather than individual. There just isn't enough high-level coordination and sharing of information. Every group just kind of does their own thing, and if you want to know how something works you have to know who to ask. Too much tribal knowledge (which often has a short expiration date) and too little writing stuff down in one place where it's easy to find. It's funny you mention git, because I joined Intel from a startup that used SVN and that was the one bright spot about Intel's technical culture that they used git pretty extensively. I don't think I've ever used a non-git source repo at Intel. I assume that there was some major internal struggle to get to that point, but it was before my time.
blihp 6y ago
There are absolutely staggering amounts of waste in large, especially market dominating, companies. Mainly because they can afford it... for a while. The difference with most smaller, and even mid-sized, companies is that if they made even a fraction of the number and size mistakes (and I'm only talking in relative, rather than absolute, terms) that large companies do they would be bankrupt in a year or two. Large companies typically have momentum and either very large (i.e. other large companies and governments) or very large numbers (i.e. many 10's or 100's of millions of consumers) of customers who are slow to change. (Intel has both) It will often be years before catastrophic mistakes will even be acknowledged and even longer before the company is irreversibly impacted by them. As a result, you can pack in people for years who really have no business being there without immediate negative impact. While people would likely disagree on the exact ratio in a given company, it's far worse than you would ever imagine. The inevitable eventually happens: they cease being able to make (or make very well) the very product(s) they're known for. Occasionally companies will get shocked back to life as they see it all slipping away. More commonly they just wither and die as they are unable or unwilling to change the culture that got them to that point. Do I believe 1:40? If anything, I think that might be a conservative number at this point. Intel has become tragically/comically incompetent.
- Rury 6y ago
  I like how Steve Jobs explains it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

schmookeeg 6y ago

Oh it's reality. My experience at Sony was about 1:25, but other big dumb companies I have worked for have met and exceeded the 1:40 rule. It is amazing how process generates dead weight and worthless humans and nobody seems to care. At one point I posited that Sony USA were merely a political pawn for Sony Japan. Hire a few tens of thousands of Americans, gain political capital -- and care not what they actually do all day. In our case, it was death by scrum and sticky notes.

dpe82 6y ago
I worked for a tiny tiny unit of Sony USA that was itself once a startup that Sony had acquired. We were 25 or so engineers with our own little profitable(ish) product in our own office in Madison, WI. I once went to HQ in San Diego and couldn't believe how many people there were doing... well, I never could quite figure out what.
TwoBit 6y ago
Wow I worked at Oculus and the ratio was at least 30/40, if not higher.
- eggsome 6y ago
  Did you see much change after the attempt to move the software guys out of Texas?

dpe82 6y ago

Large companies can hide inefficiencies and incompetence of staggering proportion. Often there's little incentive to really improve things, but tons of bureaucracy that helps maintain the status quo or let it slide ever worse. People can only judge how good something is against their experience, so if you've only ever worked at that bigco and only known incompetence then you might not even realize anything is wrong. Meanwhile the proverbial frog slowly boils...

systemvoltage 6y ago
1:20 is pretty realistic. Seen with my own eyes and ears. I wasn’t the 1, I was part of the 20. Didn’t do shit all day mainly because incentives were not aligned to motivate me. I get the same salary if I put in the extra effort. So why. Knew one guy who had a vision and the stamina to push through with PowerPoint precision. He was the 1.
- asddubs 6y ago
  > He was the 1. aw come on, I'm sure you'll meet somebody, find happiness and forget all about him
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    Nice 1 :-)

ZephyrBlu 6y ago

Well if you think about it, it's not that hard to imagine how it happens. First, you have Price's Law [0] which states that half the work is done by the square root of the number of people. This in itself already implies a lot of useless people, especially at a company the size of Intel. You might also have whole orgs/departments where pretty much everyone is phoning it in, so that would drive it up as well. The way I see it is the more layers there are and the more removed people at the top are from the work, the greater chance the of useless people being able to go under the radar. [0] https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/ https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/

imtringued 6y ago
Interesting. I am pretty sure that it's not a case of individual failure. It has more to do with organizational structure. Most of the low hanging fruits can be picked by one individual. Instead of trying to pick more apples from the same tree people should make sure that there are not too many people assigned to the same tree. The article confirms my idea: >Look at your current profession. Are you in a position to create substantial value? If the answer is no, move on to a different place where you CAN.

e_y_ 6y ago

I question if those people are actually bad workers, but I could easily imagine people being assigned to work on useless projects and just going along with it for a steady paycheck instead of leaving or trying to push the boundaries. I've worked for 100-person, 1000-person, and 100000-person companies, and the biggest companies have so many resources that they barely know what to do with them all. Most startups would kill for a fraction of a percent of the "let's screw around" R&D money that the big corps have.

nurspouse 6y ago

Disclaimer: I worked at Intel. Calling them useless may be a bit of a stretch. If you said "mediocre", I'd believe it. Also, in my experience there, the ratio is not uniform - you could go to a department with lots of top notch folks, and then to another department with everyone being mediocre. Some data points: Asked a person in a SW interview to write a function to calculate the factorial. The candidate was repeatedly told he could use whatever language he wants. He insisted on using a language he had little experience in (C++), and not the one he was experienced in (Python). He was given latitude to use any method he wanted: Recursive, iterative, etc. He didn't even come close to solving it. He was still hired. He is not an outlier when it comes to SW folks at Intel. Yes, Intel definitely has some really good SW engineers, but the 1:40 ratio easily applies in that sphere. Up till 2014, my department insisted on using cvs for version control. They said they saw no benefit to git (or even SVN). In another team I was in, we were stuck with SVN. The senior manager wouldn't allow us to use git because he was sure it would be over the heads of many of the employees (sadly, he may have been right). Then in 2017, when IT announced that SVN was being EOL, to avoid git they switched to MS TFS (even though TFS themselves recommend git!) I still hear from folks there about the resistance to switch to git. And the following comment I've heard from multiple folks: "I don't want to use git because it comes from Microsoft!" (conflating github with git, and upon further discussion realizing they have no idea MS bought Github - they think Git and Github both originated from MS). BTW, I'm not a git fan boy - I much prefer mercurial. If you're good at SW and somewhat up to speed with current technology, Intel is a very frustrating place to work. But then again, their compensation for SW is simply not competitive: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Intel/salaries/Software-Engineer/Grade-5/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Intel/salaries/Software-Engin...

elihu 6y ago
I work at Intel. Maybe my experiences are not representative, but everyone I've worked with is competent at what they do, and most people are helpful and friendly. But the trouble is that isn't enough. The really effective programmers aren't just good at writing code, they're also good at designing elegant interfaces, and at understanding customer problems, and strategic thinking, and so on. Competent programmers aren't useless if they don't have those skills, but you need some people that do if you want to make great products rather than just check off boxes in feature lists. Intel doesn't have as many of those great programmers as I would like, but I think their bigger problems are organization rather than individual. There just isn't enough high-level coordination and sharing of information. Every group just kind of does their own thing, and if you want to know how something works you have to know who to ask. Too much tribal knowledge (which often has a short expiration date) and too little writing stuff down in one place where it's easy to find. It's funny you mention git, because I joined Intel from a startup that used SVN and that was the one bright spot about Intel's technical culture that they used git pretty extensively. I don't think I've ever used a non-git source repo at Intel. I assume that there was some major internal struggle to get to that point, but it was before my time.

blihp 6y ago

There are absolutely staggering amounts of waste in large, especially market dominating, companies. Mainly because they can afford it... for a while. The difference with most smaller, and even mid-sized, companies is that if they made even a fraction of the number and size mistakes (and I'm only talking in relative, rather than absolute, terms) that large companies do they would be bankrupt in a year or two. Large companies typically have momentum and either very large (i.e. other large companies and governments) or very large numbers (i.e. many 10's or 100's of millions of consumers) of customers who are slow to change. (Intel has both) It will often be years before catastrophic mistakes will even be acknowledged and even longer before the company is irreversibly impacted by them. As a result, you can pack in people for years who really have no business being there without immediate negative impact. While people would likely disagree on the exact ratio in a given company, it's far worse than you would ever imagine. The inevitable eventually happens: they cease being able to make (or make very well) the very product(s) they're known for. Occasionally companies will get shocked back to life as they see it all slipping away. More commonly they just wither and die as they are unable or unwilling to change the culture that got them to that point. Do I believe 1:40? If anything, I think that might be a conservative number at this point. Intel has become tragically/comically incompetent.

Rury 6y ago
I like how Steve Jobs explains it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4