15 ms·

The Need to Remove Bad Management

263 points by luu 6y ago

xenihn 6y ago
The first thing that came to my mind when I saw this headline was not corporations/companies, but administrations for public school districts and universities.
- aspaceman 6y ago
  This place sure does have an insistence about returning to the exact same conversations. Is this something old people do? The article is about trains sir, trains, not university administrators.
  - xenihn 6y ago
    im just trying to get mentioned on n-gate poggers
pmichaud 6y ago
I know nothing about this area, but I'm not actually sure why the author is so sure the American managers are wrong that there is a big difference between what they can do and what can be done in other countries? Labor laws and availability, safety standards, material costs, etc. seem like plausible things to be very different. Can someone who knows something about this domain chime in?
- burlesona 6y ago
  We get freeway projects done because they’re sufficiently popular that the administrator who gets a freeway completed can use that as the good star on his or her resume forever. But Americans don’t seem to care much about any other kind of infrastructure, so it doesn’t get done.
- bluGill 6y ago
  Standards in various parts of Europe are not that different, and sometimes they have harder standards. In Asia you often find high standards as well.
Ozzie_osman 6y ago
> I connect this with solipsism, because this failure to acknowledge is paired with severe incuriosity about the rest of the world. I don't know if solipsism is the right word, but the second part of that sentence ("severe incuriosity about the rest of the world") is definitely a huge part of dysfunctional / mediocre organizations. I've interfaced with a lot (think low-level government bureaucracy in developing countries), and you often hear things like: * "X is impossible" -> "How come this other person or organization has been able to do it?" -> "Nope, impossible!" -> "But what if we tried Y?" -> "Nope, impossible!" This so-called "impossibility" is often because someone tried something and failed years ago, and so a huge part of possibility is now impossible via an immutable, sweeping generalization. No curiosity to revisit that assumption, no willingness to question if it's wrong. No willingness to consider whether times have changed, or whether someone else has figured out something we haven't. No willingness to experiment. It was incredibly frustrating.
- TrispusAttucks 6y ago
  Is it also possible that they know those underneath and horizontal who will need to do the work will make it impossible?
  - Ozzie_osman 6y ago
    Possibly, but that ends up looking a little different. Its more like learned helplessness. "X is possible, but we could never do it." That's different than "X is literally impossible".
- salixrosa 6y ago
  What I've found recently is that the thing is impossible within the scope of the bureaucracy we're working in. For example, it's impossible to get this 3rd party hardware working in another 3rd party's network because none of the people who understand the product are being given access to the system in the ways needed to figure out what's going wrong. It's impossible to build a particular feature because that part of the tech stack is officially another team's territory, or because the process to approve the new feature hasn't itself been approved yet. Ugh.
burlesona 6y ago
> All of this is possible, it just requires elected officials who have the ambition to take risks to effect tangible change rather than play petty office politics every day. Welp, we’re toast.
- beckingz 6y ago
  The issue is limited upside if their risks work out, and career ending downside if their risks end in failure.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
This is an excellent article and spot on. One of the things we have yet to achieve in "the west," as it were, is to create a viable feedback mechanism that improves the functioning or efficiency of a bureaucracy rather than optimizing for tenure. I ran into it early on when I was trying to pry costs out of the San Jose light rail agency. It is so frustrating.
- gonzo41 6y ago
  Ignoring the west. Has what you described ever existed? I think maybe Lean techniques as practiced by car builders. But even there, change is slow.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  Early in my career, I worked for a company that was run by the British. The CEO was a fairly classic "toff." Erudite, aloof, sarcastic and remote. The management was terrible. At that time, TQM was a new buzzwürd du jour, and the company decided to do a TQM exercise that involved the CEO, sitting down for "frank and open" conversations with employees. This was a data processing company. The product was engineering. I was a [fairly junior] software engineer. During our "fireside chat," he asked us to mention the problems that we saw with the way management was working. Most gave mealy-mouthed drivel that amounted to "Everything you're doing is fine. No need to change." Then it got to me. I mentioned that, from where I sat, engineers were treated as "second-class citizens," despite being the bread and butter of the company. Managers were treated as exalted, flawless beings (I was probably a bit -but not much- more polite. It was a long time ago). I indicated that all we really needed was a tiny bit of respect. What I do remember, is him, taking off his glasses, which was always considered an awful sign, and admitting that he did, indeed think of engineers as "second-class citizens." Absolutely not a word, indicating he considered that a problem. The TQM exercise didn't survive much longer, after that, and quelle surprize, nothing changed. I tend towards cynicism, here.
  - u678u 6y ago
    > and admitting that he did, indeed think of engineers as "second-class citizens." Lol that's classic. TBH though I think I prefer an old school British manager that will tell you the truth instead of an American one bullsh*tting you. Maybe he revised his view or took some of your ideas on.
imbnwa 6y ago
Feel like in America the game has become "how can I make the organization work for me" rather the other way around; we're a long way off from Kennedy's speech. Just fundamental misalignment of interests everywhere: PMs gaming JIRA, so-called "senior engineers" squashing anything that exposes their mediocrity and the fact that they're just punching JIRA tickets one paycheck to the next instead of modeling the problem, even engineers and consultants padding their resume in one org building keyword architectures as a launchpad for working somewhere else with a better salary. Everyone knows it, but its impolite/immature to point out the bullshit explicitly. Shut up, shit down, and listen to yet another round of empty hand wringing about values and culture at the all-hands meeting when the truth is there aren't any; delude ourselves we're doing something at all. These infrastructure 'managers' don't strike me as any different. It's a blight on American culture and its only getting worse the bigger the inequality gap. Everyone's trying to find the parachute to jump out of the burning plane that's in freefall diving to the ground. The (ultimately false) class antagonism narrative of /r/WSB that the game really is rigged is a fitting end to a decade that at the outset told everyone they could be a unicorn (or enjoy part of the spoils) if they could deliver a cash cow to elite investors if they only pulled up their sleeves and grinded through. The Governor of Texas just got on Hannity to bad mouth a New Green Deal as people died in Texas cause no one cared enough to make sure the wind turbines worked in the cold.
- whateveracct 6y ago
  it's just way better to grift your employer. when salaried, the less you actually work, the higher your effective wage. shrink that denominator!
  - laurentdc 6y ago
    Sure. Unless there's a generous bonus on quality of work or project completion, the only rational way to play the game as a random employee is to maximize the gain and minimize the effort.
    - yalta5 6y ago
      This is a consequence of society breaking down into a collection of selfish individuals, which I think is largely a result of economic theories turning into self-fulfilling prophecies. Nobody is going to take pride in their work when it's viewed as nothing more than a selfish and cynical bargain by society at large.
GartzenDeHaes 6y ago
Management has little to do with these types of issues. The Governor appoints the heads of the various state agencies and these people then hire their own cronies into key management roles. As a group, they protect and enable whoever it is that's is funding the Governor's campaign and hiring his or her relatives and cronies. Whether it's purchasing or maintenance contracts, there's a reason those managers are doing what they are doing and it's not stupidity.
tempfs 6y ago
The role of "Management" is supposed be the oversight and allocation of human resources and other assets towards the completion of the org's stated goals. This is the one thing that *never* seems to happen. What does happen consistently is that management simply gatekeeps between two major classifications of subordinates, climbers and the productive. Making sure to 'partner' with the climbers in order to share credit for their faux accomplishments and make sure that the productives stay right where they are to keep the machine from completely exploding before that manager can move up and on. Bad management and truly poor leadership in general is just pervasive in public and private institutions. In GOOG, APPL, and MSFT it is 10x.
- 0x1DEADCA0 6y ago
  How do I survive as a software engineer in this culture? What do I say and do to not be fired?
  - maximente 6y ago
    entire blogs have been written about this, but the easiest way is to never, ever cross someone (to include embarrassing, etc) with power. that includes compromising social/team situations as well. that means that even if the scrum lord is a complete fool, the staffing choices made by your boss are horrible, your team is the worst, and you hate node.js but have to use it, just do your tickets and keep moving. do not suggest big "improvements" or things to "think about" as they will flag you as a class of person that is a potential rival or insubordinate, which may bode horribly for you. keep engaged but lightly so: no heroism. and trust me, if you're asking this question, you have shown you are not prepared to go toe to toe with "them" on their turf, so don't even try. you will get annihilated. as an engineer you probably aren't sensitive to how power dynamics manifest in day to day interactions - that's why you /must/ lay low and see what's up, despite any drive to do otherwise.
    - selimthegrim 6y ago
      He’s right. If the answer in your head isn’t “potentially get their wife out of a job for crossing you” you’re not ready for this.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> This gets more important the more complex a project gets. It is possible, for example, to build high-speed rail between Boston and Washington for a cost in the teens of billions and not tens, let alone hundreds, but not a single person involved in any of the present effort can do that With bold claims of being able to build high-speed rail at fractions of the cost of official estimates, I expected the author to be somehow trained in large-scale construction or other civic issues. From their bio, it appears they are a pure mathematician who took up a side interest in urban issues. While American (and a handful of other countries) do have unreasonably high construction costs for transit projects, I doubt the cost issue can be reduced to a simple problem with complacent middle management. I also seriously doubt that we can fix it all by simply swapping in new managers who promise to do it cheaper. If we're going to be serious about this, we need to examine why American costs are so much higher than other countries, rather than simply taking costs out of context from other countries with very different infrastructure, geographical, and regulatory situations.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  > If we're going to be serious about this, we need to examine why American costs are so much higher than other countries, rather than simply taking costs out of context from other countries with very different infrastructure, geographical, and regulatory situations. That is precisely what Alon is doing. They probably have the most comprehensive comparative database of transit project costs, and they have actually drilled down into the line item budgets to figure out why some projects are so bloody expensive.
- bluGill 6y ago
  The author has been looking into this for years. The problem is of course complex. However in the end there are two possible problems : a fundamental difference, or bad management. New York has more complex rock and slightly higher wages vs Spain, thus fundamentally it should cost about 1.2x more to build in new York, but we have direct comparisons so we.know new York is about 7x more expensive.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  > we need to examine why American costs are so much higher than other countries I read a paper on the cost of building tunnels. I remember two factors. The percentage cost of labor is higher than you might expect. And labor costs more in the US. And the US bids out contracts to place the risk if something goes wrong on the contractor. End result, fewer bids by only the largest contractors. And contractors pad their bids so they won't lose money no matter what goes wrong.
op03 6y ago
Well unfortunately for humanity, people who are "curious learners and experts" are most of the time bad managers :) But the way this works over the long term is there is a cycle...a sort of ebb and flow of who gets in and out of authority positions. The Novelty Seekers/Curious/Neurotic personality types are quite bad at anything as boring as herding cats day in day out for years and years. It just drives them nuts. The Conscientiousness personality types love it. Its what they do best and it works out great with problems that have known solutions. Its when problems get more complex/ambiguous where curiosity and imagination matter that they start blundering and looking incompetent, and thats when the doors open for the neurotics to reenter the arena. This is where they shine. After they find imaginative solutions if you keep them incharge of day to day ops they start blundering away too. Managing these transitions is no simple thing.
- lostcolony 6y ago
  'Well unfortunately for humanity, people who are "curious learners and experts" are most of the time bad managers' Why do you say that? All my best managers have loved to learn, and been expert in some areas. They just -also- were sufficiently self aware to recognize that having the people under them all be out learning things, and owning the decision, was far more efficient than them trying to learn and become an expert, and then dictating decisions. You need the latter to be good; I'd argue the former is entirely orthogonal (except maybe being an added benefit, in being able to recognize who is going to be aggressively learning).
  - op03 6y ago
    Its called the exploit-explore tradeoff. MOST work involves exploit, as in once your scout finds a gold mine on the map what do you do with him? Do you send him off to go look for new ones or do you make him mine manager and task him with hiring people who spend the whole day digging. The more experience a person gains doing one thing (explore) or the other (exploit), the harder it is for them to switch when conditions change. A good explorer has a itch to constantly explore. A good mine manager knows how to sit in one place and keep the spice flowing. You can find people who have a mix but they will always be outclassed by specialists in both camps. Its always hard when the time come to manage transitions from one mode to another. Once in a while the weather is good and resources exist to keep people of both camps on payroll. But thats rare cause weather conditions are always changing.
huntermeyer 6y ago
Am I the only one having a really hard time reading this font? Its weight is way too light/thin and the letters are really close together.
presentation 6y ago
Somewhat off topic but I wish the font were easier to read.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  Agreed, the strokes feel a bit too thin.
sbayona573 6y ago
I don’t understand why the author mentions the $200K salaries paid to those managers. As if there is a threshold that has been crossed. That sort of thinking is problematic.
anm89 6y ago
>the main barrier to good US infrastructure construction, or at least one of the main barriers, is personal incompetence on behalf of decisionmakers. Those decisionmakers can be elected officials The real message here is that this guy thinks he is too good for democracy and has found a better way. That scares me more than our infrastructure problems (which are pretty terrifying)
- voxic11 6y ago
  Isn't think kind of reasoning the driving force behind city managers? https://ballotpedia.org/Council-manager_government https://ballotpedia.org/Council-manager_government
- JackFr 6y ago
  You cutoff the end of a sentence to make it sound like the opposite of what the author wrote. WTF? > Those decisionmakers can be elected officials, with levels of authority ranging from governors down to individual city council members; political appointees of said officials; quasi-elected power brokers who sit on boards and are seen as representative of some local interest group; public-sector planners; or consultants, usually ones who are viewed as an extension of the public sector and may be run by retired civil servants who get a private-sector salary and a public-sector pension. In this post I’d like to zoom in on the managers more than on the politicians,
  - anm89 6y ago
    Those other actors all seem like direct reports of the democratically elected leadership. You don't elect people to literally pick up shovels and build infrastructure. You elect them to delegate.
    - lostcolony 6y ago
      And? He's "zooming in on the managers more than the politicians" because they can be easily replaced by any politician who gives a damn about infrastructure, and the whole point of the project is to give an idea of cost so politicians who give a damn can determine when a manager is bad. He's not trying to address what to do if a politician doesn't care about infrastructure.
perryizgr8 6y ago
TFA is not about "management". It is about government. Government will always be inefficient, since it is spending looted money. You can't fix this problem by firing managers or some other micro-management strategy. You fix it by limiting government's scope and field of influence.
- Catsandkites 6y ago
  Yes, because private companies don't "loot" whatsoever. They definitely don't respond to accusations of obviously unethical and damaging but legal behaviour with "but it's legal!(continues looting)". Doesn't government suck because our best and brightest often do not choose to work in government? Isn't that what we should really change?
  - perryizgr8 6y ago
    > Doesn't government suck because our best and brightest often do not choose to work in government? No, it sucks because it extorts money from citizens using violence.
rawgabbit 6y ago
The managers the author describes are enforcers of the status quo. Their role even if they will never admit it is to keep the gravy train flowing until it eventually dies of neglect. This has happened in two companies I worked for. One was a major airline who could not care less about customer service. The other was a construction company whose sheer incompetence was off the charts. One example was that a Director was fired after he and his team of consultants laid a huge pile of crap. It was discovered that the project manager he hired only previous work experience was as a hair stylist and she was in charge of a multi million dollar fiasco. It was unreal.
systematical 6y ago
None of this surprises me. I've worked for a federal contractor for the last year and I am not impressed with management at all. It has to be one of the worst run projects I've ever seen. It's so bad that if other federal contracts look this way that I question what chance this government actual has. Some days I sit back and wonder how much Uncle Sam (and me and you) is paying for this ineptitude. On a personal level, it makes me wonder what I am doing wrong where I am clearly more capable than this individual, yet I am stuck under them trying to clean up their messes. It would be better if this person did zero work instead of the little work they do. I hope this project is an outlier.
crocal 6y ago
Spot on. By the way, one can purchase multiple units (brand new) for 1.2M€ per car, and that’s before negotiating. 2.5 is really expensive. And I am talking European price, not Indian or Chinese.
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
We know how to get better. We have a model. (several!) Airline crash investigation, medical training. These all show we can extract best practise and identify improvements. Have open reviews on everything. How did that year long project go? Was it properly thought out in first place? we're expectations matched with funding? We can improve. Edit: (Good) Journalism is a rough proxy for this mechanism - and one could make a case for countries that have better free press have better results (and that's not just limited to dictatorships - compare say US press to say Norway). Anyway - why do we leave such an important jobs to haphazard civilian publishers ?
- banannaise 6y ago
  The operative problem is that usually the primary output of an investigation is blame, and the primary method of improvement is punishing the people who are to blame. It's retributive justice as process improvement, and that's directly at odds with proper root cause analysis and process improvement.
  - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
    Which is why air crash investigations are a good model - they don't often blame the pilots (solely) and have the force to implement fixes (mostly because federal agencies have sway over Boeing and the large US market). But it has worked well for a very long time even if 737-Max suggests it's weakening.
flr03 6y ago
I did a trip to NY last year, exactly 10 years after my first. What struck me is how little things have changed, I had the feeling a lot of infrastructures are outdated, comparing to other places I've lived or been (Europe, China, East Asia). I didn't have a sense of modernity at all. It's just my personal observation, but I wonder if others share this view?
- nine_zeros 6y ago
  Yep. America feels like a "has been" for the most part. Short-termism and debt servicing woes has ensured there is nothing new happening. Oh wait, there's still some development happening. Razing of woods and praires for more cookie cutter housing still happens quite often but even that appears to be slowing.
AcerbicZero 6y ago
Bad managers == unaccountable managers. If decision makers aren’t liable for decisions, they tend to get worse. There is been a serious misunderstanding circulating around the office for as long as I can remember - management isn’t the same as leadership, no matter how many times someone is referred to as “senior leadership”.

263 points by luu 6y ago

The first thing that came to my mind when I saw this headline was not corporations/companies, but administrations for public school districts and universities.

aspaceman 6y ago
This place sure does have an insistence about returning to the exact same conversations. Is this something old people do? The article is about trains sir, trains, not university administrators.
- xenihn 6y ago
  im just trying to get mentioned on n-gate poggers

pmichaud 6y ago

I know nothing about this area, but I'm not actually sure why the author is so sure the American managers are wrong that there is a big difference between what they can do and what can be done in other countries? Labor laws and availability, safety standards, material costs, etc. seem like plausible things to be very different. Can someone who knows something about this domain chime in?

burlesona 6y ago
We get freeway projects done because they’re sufficiently popular that the administrator who gets a freeway completed can use that as the good star on his or her resume forever. But Americans don’t seem to care much about any other kind of infrastructure, so it doesn’t get done.
bluGill 6y ago
Standards in various parts of Europe are not that different, and sometimes they have harder standards. In Asia you often find high standards as well.

Ozzie_osman 6y ago

> I connect this with solipsism, because this failure to acknowledge is paired with severe incuriosity about the rest of the world. I don't know if solipsism is the right word, but the second part of that sentence ("severe incuriosity about the rest of the world") is definitely a huge part of dysfunctional / mediocre organizations. I've interfaced with a lot (think low-level government bureaucracy in developing countries), and you often hear things like: * "X is impossible" -> "How come this other person or organization has been able to do it?" -> "Nope, impossible!" -> "But what if we tried Y?" -> "Nope, impossible!" This so-called "impossibility" is often because someone tried something and failed years ago, and so a huge part of possibility is now impossible via an immutable, sweeping generalization. No curiosity to revisit that assumption, no willingness to question if it's wrong. No willingness to consider whether times have changed, or whether someone else has figured out something we haven't. No willingness to experiment. It was incredibly frustrating.

TrispusAttucks 6y ago
Is it also possible that they know those underneath and horizontal who will need to do the work will make it impossible?
- Ozzie_osman 6y ago
  Possibly, but that ends up looking a little different. Its more like learned helplessness. "X is possible, but we could never do it." That's different than "X is literally impossible".
salixrosa 6y ago
What I've found recently is that the thing is impossible within the scope of the bureaucracy we're working in. For example, it's impossible to get this 3rd party hardware working in another 3rd party's network because none of the people who understand the product are being given access to the system in the ways needed to figure out what's going wrong. It's impossible to build a particular feature because that part of the tech stack is officially another team's territory, or because the process to approve the new feature hasn't itself been approved yet. Ugh.

burlesona 6y ago

> All of this is possible, it just requires elected officials who have the ambition to take risks to effect tangible change rather than play petty office politics every day. Welp, we’re toast.

beckingz 6y ago
The issue is limited upside if their risks work out, and career ending downside if their risks end in failure.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

This is an excellent article and spot on. One of the things we have yet to achieve in "the west," as it were, is to create a viable feedback mechanism that improves the functioning or efficiency of a bureaucracy rather than optimizing for tenure. I ran into it early on when I was trying to pry costs out of the San Jose light rail agency. It is so frustrating.

gonzo41 6y ago
Ignoring the west. Has what you described ever existed? I think maybe Lean techniques as practiced by car builders. But even there, change is slow.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Early in my career, I worked for a company that was run by the British. The CEO was a fairly classic "toff." Erudite, aloof, sarcastic and remote. The management was terrible. At that time, TQM was a new buzzwürd du jour, and the company decided to do a TQM exercise that involved the CEO, sitting down for "frank and open" conversations with employees. This was a data processing company. The product was engineering. I was a [fairly junior] software engineer. During our "fireside chat," he asked us to mention the problems that we saw with the way management was working. Most gave mealy-mouthed drivel that amounted to "Everything you're doing is fine. No need to change." Then it got to me. I mentioned that, from where I sat, engineers were treated as "second-class citizens," despite being the bread and butter of the company. Managers were treated as exalted, flawless beings (I was probably a bit -but not much- more polite. It was a long time ago). I indicated that all we really needed was a tiny bit of respect. What I do remember, is him, taking off his glasses, which was always considered an awful sign, and admitting that he did, indeed think of engineers as "second-class citizens." Absolutely not a word, indicating he considered that a problem. The TQM exercise didn't survive much longer, after that, and quelle surprize, nothing changed. I tend towards cynicism, here.
- u678u 6y ago
  > and admitting that he did, indeed think of engineers as "second-class citizens." Lol that's classic. TBH though I think I prefer an old school British manager that will tell you the truth instead of an American one bullsh*tting you. Maybe he revised his view or took some of your ideas on.

imbnwa 6y ago

Feel like in America the game has become "how can I make the organization work for me" rather the other way around; we're a long way off from Kennedy's speech. Just fundamental misalignment of interests everywhere: PMs gaming JIRA, so-called "senior engineers" squashing anything that exposes their mediocrity and the fact that they're just punching JIRA tickets one paycheck to the next instead of modeling the problem, even engineers and consultants padding their resume in one org building keyword architectures as a launchpad for working somewhere else with a better salary. Everyone knows it, but its impolite/immature to point out the bullshit explicitly. Shut up, shit down, and listen to yet another round of empty hand wringing about values and culture at the all-hands meeting when the truth is there aren't any; delude ourselves we're doing something at all. These infrastructure 'managers' don't strike me as any different. It's a blight on American culture and its only getting worse the bigger the inequality gap. Everyone's trying to find the parachute to jump out of the burning plane that's in freefall diving to the ground. The (ultimately false) class antagonism narrative of /r/WSB that the game really is rigged is a fitting end to a decade that at the outset told everyone they could be a unicorn (or enjoy part of the spoils) if they could deliver a cash cow to elite investors if they only pulled up their sleeves and grinded through. The Governor of Texas just got on Hannity to bad mouth a New Green Deal as people died in Texas cause no one cared enough to make sure the wind turbines worked in the cold.

whateveracct 6y ago
it's just way better to grift your employer. when salaried, the less you actually work, the higher your effective wage. shrink that denominator!
- laurentdc 6y ago
  Sure. Unless there's a generous bonus on quality of work or project completion, the only rational way to play the game as a random employee is to maximize the gain and minimize the effort.
  - yalta5 6y ago
    This is a consequence of society breaking down into a collection of selfish individuals, which I think is largely a result of economic theories turning into self-fulfilling prophecies. Nobody is going to take pride in their work when it's viewed as nothing more than a selfish and cynical bargain by society at large.

GartzenDeHaes 6y ago

Management has little to do with these types of issues. The Governor appoints the heads of the various state agencies and these people then hire their own cronies into key management roles. As a group, they protect and enable whoever it is that's is funding the Governor's campaign and hiring his or her relatives and cronies. Whether it's purchasing or maintenance contracts, there's a reason those managers are doing what they are doing and it's not stupidity.

tempfs 6y ago

The role of "Management" is supposed be the oversight and allocation of human resources and other assets towards the completion of the org's stated goals. This is the one thing that *never* seems to happen. What does happen consistently is that management simply gatekeeps between two major classifications of subordinates, climbers and the productive. Making sure to 'partner' with the climbers in order to share credit for their faux accomplishments and make sure that the productives stay right where they are to keep the machine from completely exploding before that manager can move up and on. Bad management and truly poor leadership in general is just pervasive in public and private institutions. In GOOG, APPL, and MSFT it is 10x.

0x1DEADCA0 6y ago
How do I survive as a software engineer in this culture? What do I say and do to not be fired?
- maximente 6y ago
  entire blogs have been written about this, but the easiest way is to never, ever cross someone (to include embarrassing, etc) with power. that includes compromising social/team situations as well. that means that even if the scrum lord is a complete fool, the staffing choices made by your boss are horrible, your team is the worst, and you hate node.js but have to use it, just do your tickets and keep moving. do not suggest big "improvements" or things to "think about" as they will flag you as a class of person that is a potential rival or insubordinate, which may bode horribly for you. keep engaged but lightly so: no heroism. and trust me, if you're asking this question, you have shown you are not prepared to go toe to toe with "them" on their turf, so don't even try. you will get annihilated. as an engineer you probably aren't sensitive to how power dynamics manifest in day to day interactions - that's why you /must/ lay low and see what's up, despite any drive to do otherwise.
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    He’s right. If the answer in your head isn’t “potentially get their wife out of a job for crossing you” you’re not ready for this.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

> This gets more important the more complex a project gets. It is possible, for example, to build high-speed rail between Boston and Washington for a cost in the teens of billions and not tens, let alone hundreds, but not a single person involved in any of the present effort can do that With bold claims of being able to build high-speed rail at fractions of the cost of official estimates, I expected the author to be somehow trained in large-scale construction or other civic issues. From their bio, it appears they are a pure mathematician who took up a side interest in urban issues. While American (and a handful of other countries) do have unreasonably high construction costs for transit projects, I doubt the cost issue can be reduced to a simple problem with complacent middle management. I also seriously doubt that we can fix it all by simply swapping in new managers who promise to do it cheaper. If we're going to be serious about this, we need to examine why American costs are so much higher than other countries, rather than simply taking costs out of context from other countries with very different infrastructure, geographical, and regulatory situations.

jcranmer 6y ago
> If we're going to be serious about this, we need to examine why American costs are so much higher than other countries, rather than simply taking costs out of context from other countries with very different infrastructure, geographical, and regulatory situations. That is precisely what Alon is doing. They probably have the most comprehensive comparative database of transit project costs, and they have actually drilled down into the line item budgets to figure out why some projects are so bloody expensive.
bluGill 6y ago
The author has been looking into this for years. The problem is of course complex. However in the end there are two possible problems : a fundamental difference, or bad management. New York has more complex rock and slightly higher wages vs Spain, thus fundamentally it should cost about 1.2x more to build in new York, but we have direct comparisons so we.know new York is about 7x more expensive.
Gibbon1 6y ago
> we need to examine why American costs are so much higher than other countries I read a paper on the cost of building tunnels. I remember two factors. The percentage cost of labor is higher than you might expect. And labor costs more in the US. And the US bids out contracts to place the risk if something goes wrong on the contractor. End result, fewer bids by only the largest contractors. And contractors pad their bids so they won't lose money no matter what goes wrong.

op03 6y ago

Well unfortunately for humanity, people who are "curious learners and experts" are most of the time bad managers :) But the way this works over the long term is there is a cycle...a sort of ebb and flow of who gets in and out of authority positions. The Novelty Seekers/Curious/Neurotic personality types are quite bad at anything as boring as herding cats day in day out for years and years. It just drives them nuts. The Conscientiousness personality types love it. Its what they do best and it works out great with problems that have known solutions. Its when problems get more complex/ambiguous where curiosity and imagination matter that they start blundering and looking incompetent, and thats when the doors open for the neurotics to reenter the arena. This is where they shine. After they find imaginative solutions if you keep them incharge of day to day ops they start blundering away too. Managing these transitions is no simple thing.

lostcolony 6y ago
'Well unfortunately for humanity, people who are "curious learners and experts" are most of the time bad managers' Why do you say that? All my best managers have loved to learn, and been expert in some areas. They just -also- were sufficiently self aware to recognize that having the people under them all be out learning things, and owning the decision, was far more efficient than them trying to learn and become an expert, and then dictating decisions. You need the latter to be good; I'd argue the former is entirely orthogonal (except maybe being an added benefit, in being able to recognize who is going to be aggressively learning).
- op03 6y ago
  Its called the exploit-explore tradeoff. MOST work involves exploit, as in once your scout finds a gold mine on the map what do you do with him? Do you send him off to go look for new ones or do you make him mine manager and task him with hiring people who spend the whole day digging. The more experience a person gains doing one thing (explore) or the other (exploit), the harder it is for them to switch when conditions change. A good explorer has a itch to constantly explore. A good mine manager knows how to sit in one place and keep the spice flowing. You can find people who have a mix but they will always be outclassed by specialists in both camps. Its always hard when the time come to manage transitions from one mode to another. Once in a while the weather is good and resources exist to keep people of both camps on payroll. But thats rare cause weather conditions are always changing.

huntermeyer 6y ago

Am I the only one having a really hard time reading this font? Its weight is way too light/thin and the letters are really close together.

presentation 6y ago

Somewhat off topic but I wish the font were easier to read.

TulliusCicero 6y ago
Agreed, the strokes feel a bit too thin.

sbayona573 6y ago

I don’t understand why the author mentions the $200K salaries paid to those managers. As if there is a threshold that has been crossed. That sort of thinking is problematic.

anm89 6y ago

>the main barrier to good US infrastructure construction, or at least one of the main barriers, is personal incompetence on behalf of decisionmakers. Those decisionmakers can be elected officials The real message here is that this guy thinks he is too good for democracy and has found a better way. That scares me more than our infrastructure problems (which are pretty terrifying)

voxic11 6y ago
Isn't think kind of reasoning the driving force behind city managers? https://ballotpedia.org/Council-manager_government https://ballotpedia.org/Council-manager_government
JackFr 6y ago
You cutoff the end of a sentence to make it sound like the opposite of what the author wrote. WTF? > Those decisionmakers can be elected officials, with levels of authority ranging from governors down to individual city council members; political appointees of said officials; quasi-elected power brokers who sit on boards and are seen as representative of some local interest group; public-sector planners; or consultants, usually ones who are viewed as an extension of the public sector and may be run by retired civil servants who get a private-sector salary and a public-sector pension. In this post I’d like to zoom in on the managers more than on the politicians,
- anm89 6y ago
  Those other actors all seem like direct reports of the democratically elected leadership. You don't elect people to literally pick up shovels and build infrastructure. You elect them to delegate.
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    And? He's "zooming in on the managers more than the politicians" because they can be easily replaced by any politician who gives a damn about infrastructure, and the whole point of the project is to give an idea of cost so politicians who give a damn can determine when a manager is bad. He's not trying to address what to do if a politician doesn't care about infrastructure.

perryizgr8 6y ago

TFA is not about "management". It is about government. Government will always be inefficient, since it is spending looted money. You can't fix this problem by firing managers or some other micro-management strategy. You fix it by limiting government's scope and field of influence.

Catsandkites 6y ago
Yes, because private companies don't "loot" whatsoever. They definitely don't respond to accusations of obviously unethical and damaging but legal behaviour with "but it's legal!(continues looting)". Doesn't government suck because our best and brightest often do not choose to work in government? Isn't that what we should really change?
- perryizgr8 6y ago
  > Doesn't government suck because our best and brightest often do not choose to work in government? No, it sucks because it extorts money from citizens using violence.

rawgabbit 6y ago

The managers the author describes are enforcers of the status quo. Their role even if they will never admit it is to keep the gravy train flowing until it eventually dies of neglect. This has happened in two companies I worked for. One was a major airline who could not care less about customer service. The other was a construction company whose sheer incompetence was off the charts. One example was that a Director was fired after he and his team of consultants laid a huge pile of crap. It was discovered that the project manager he hired only previous work experience was as a hair stylist and she was in charge of a multi million dollar fiasco. It was unreal.

systematical 6y ago

None of this surprises me. I've worked for a federal contractor for the last year and I am not impressed with management at all. It has to be one of the worst run projects I've ever seen. It's so bad that if other federal contracts look this way that I question what chance this government actual has. Some days I sit back and wonder how much Uncle Sam (and me and you) is paying for this ineptitude. On a personal level, it makes me wonder what I am doing wrong where I am clearly more capable than this individual, yet I am stuck under them trying to clean up their messes. It would be better if this person did zero work instead of the little work they do. I hope this project is an outlier.

crocal 6y ago

Spot on. By the way, one can purchase multiple units (brand new) for 1.2M€ per car, and that’s before negotiating. 2.5 is really expensive. And I am talking European price, not Indian or Chinese.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

We know how to get better. We have a model. (several!) Airline crash investigation, medical training. These all show we can extract best practise and identify improvements. Have open reviews on everything. How did that year long project go? Was it properly thought out in first place? we're expectations matched with funding? We can improve. Edit: (Good) Journalism is a rough proxy for this mechanism - and one could make a case for countries that have better free press have better results (and that's not just limited to dictatorships - compare say US press to say Norway). Anyway - why do we leave such an important jobs to haphazard civilian publishers ?

banannaise 6y ago
The operative problem is that usually the primary output of an investigation is blame, and the primary method of improvement is punishing the people who are to blame. It's retributive justice as process improvement, and that's directly at odds with proper root cause analysis and process improvement.
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  Which is why air crash investigations are a good model - they don't often blame the pilots (solely) and have the force to implement fixes (mostly because federal agencies have sway over Boeing and the large US market). But it has worked well for a very long time even if 737-Max suggests it's weakening.

flr03 6y ago

I did a trip to NY last year, exactly 10 years after my first. What struck me is how little things have changed, I had the feeling a lot of infrastructures are outdated, comparing to other places I've lived or been (Europe, China, East Asia). I didn't have a sense of modernity at all. It's just my personal observation, but I wonder if others share this view?

nine_zeros 6y ago
Yep. America feels like a "has been" for the most part. Short-termism and debt servicing woes has ensured there is nothing new happening. Oh wait, there's still some development happening. Razing of woods and praires for more cookie cutter housing still happens quite often but even that appears to be slowing.

AcerbicZero 6y ago

Bad managers == unaccountable managers. If decision makers aren’t liable for decisions, they tend to get worse. There is been a serious misunderstanding circulating around the office for as long as I can remember - management isn’t the same as leadership, no matter how many times someone is referred to as “senior leadership”.