7 ms·

What's amazing to me is that we have the amazing gains in productivity, but we've avoided the predicted unemployment by adding huge numbers of unnecessary manag

by Grakel 5y ago

What's amazing to me is that we have the amazing gains in productivity, but we've avoided the predicted unemployment by adding huge numbers of unnecessary managers and paper pushers. It's hard to fathom why companies (and schools!) Just keep hiring admin, HR, development, etc.

ggm 5y ago
Its a tacit admission that the economy needs us to have money, but also seems bizarrely to need to distribute it unequally to get where it wants to go. If the economy needs us to have money but distributed it equally, the 'value' property would become really moot. Its also a tacit admission that most 'jobs' have no relationship to productive labour, or even necessarily create value. But, I'm a believer in the labour theory of value, so there's that...
- lumost 5y ago
  Historically it was exceptionally common to grow unproductive jobs up to the limit that the economy could support e.g. the Edo era of Japan. It's quite plausible/likely that part of the industrial revolutions magic was that economic growth outpaced the economies ability to add unproductive jobs. Note that by unproductive jobs I'm specifically refferring to what could be called BS jobs. Jobs that were previously done by one person, but are now done by 10 people without an increase in measurable output.
  - taffer 5y ago
    > Jobs that were previously done by one person, but are now done by 10 people without an increase in measurable output. Is there any data to support this claim?
    - cxr 5y ago
      Good luck trying to get an organization with BS jobs to competently implement a program that can deliver that kind of data. You're going to run into selection bias right of the gate, and then after that, you need to worry about the reliability of the data that you do get. The key name to attach to your queries when trying to research this is "Graeber".
      - barry-cotter 5y ago
        > Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs > David Graeber’s ‘bullshit jobs theory’ has generated a great deal of academic and public interest. This theory holds that a large and rapidly increasing number of workers are undertaking jobs that they themselves recognise as being useless and of no social value. Despite generating clear testable hypotheses, this theory is not based on robust empirical research. We, therefore, use representative data from the EU to test five of its core hypotheses. Although we find that the perception of doing useless work is strongly associated with poor wellbeing, our findings contradict the main propositions of Graeber’s theory. The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions. Marx’s concept of alienation and a ‘Work Relations’ approach provide inspiration for an alternative account that highlights poor management and toxic workplace environments in explaining why workers perceive paid work as useless. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067
        cxr 5y ago
        It seems like you're trying to make a point about some altogether different topic, probably inferring some intent on my part based on a non-literal reading of what I wrote. (For example, that I'm personally endorsing Graeber. Hard to say, really, because you yourself didn't really say anything.) The literal reading of my comment is the correct one. I said the relevant name when trying to turn up data would be to search for "Graeber"—which, as your comment indicates, is correct.
- spenczar5 5y ago
  I don’t understand this sort of explanation. A “tacit admission” by who? “The economy” does not actually take actions, and definitely doesn’t have objectives; it just describes the broad system resulting from many individual agents. Are you suggesting that corporate VPs hire managers with a goal of distributing money unequally so their products get sold? That seems like a huge stretch - they benefit so little in that way from their individual hiring decisions. Are you suggesting that there is an “invisible hand” which pushes systems towards hiring do-nothing managers, because companies that don’t get outcompeted? I don’t see how that would happen - it seems like the opposite would occur.
  - paganel 5y ago
    > Are you suggesting that there is an “invisible hand” which pushes systems towards hiring do-nothing managers, because companies that don’t get outcompeted? Not the OP but in a sense that's what happens, yes, even though I wouldn't use that "invisible hand" metaphor (which I personally find it a little over-used) but more like the "BS-jobs class system" (composed of most of the C-execs, of most middle-managers, of some HR and marketing people) making sure it is successful at reproducing itself.
    - spenczar5 5y ago
      I’m still confused. What do you mean when you say the “system makes sure?” I have the same issue as before - I don’t think of systems as having intent or “making sure” of anything. That might be a metaphor around a mechanism or feedback loop - what is that mechanism?
neffy 5y ago
That's not actually what has happened. Roll back 100 odd years, the average age of entry into the work force would be around 14 for males (very useful in coal mines for the narrow bits), retirement was 65, but most people didn't make it that far. The typical working week was 6 days. Now we have a significant percentage of the population studying into their twenties, and at the other end retired and living into their eighties or nineties. That's the predicted "unemployment". There are probably significantly fewer managers per se, than there used to be - companies like GE used to have hierarchies 40 or more levels deep.
- temp10298385 5y ago
  I'm really curious how a managerial hierarchy of 40 works in practice. If a manager is responsible for a headcount of 2 then GE would have 2^40 = ~1 trillion employees. Since this is obviously not possible then what does the org chart of a firm with 40 levels of hierarchy look like.
  - jrockway 5y ago
    It's not necessarily a balanced tree. One path can have length 40, while another could be 2. I think at megacompanies, the hierarchy can be pretty deep before you get into what is normal for medium sized companies. Global -> Region ("Americas") -> Country ("USA") -> Region ("Northeast") -> State ("New York") and then you just have a company with a CEO (called something else at this level), SVPs, Directors, Managers, Supervisors, Shift Supervisors, etc.
- crazygringo 5y ago
  Do you have a source for that regarding GE? That seems incredibly implausible. I'm moderately familiar with the history of corporate organization, and never heard of anything even remotely close to a hierarchy of 40 levels -- not even when combining reporting chains of conglomerates, regions, and local management.
kfprt 5y ago
Hard to fathom if you are only considering the institutional goals and not the perfectly reasonable goals of the rational actor individuals within the institution.
crazygringo 5y ago
That's not what has reduced employment at all. As a rule, businesses exist to make a profit, and make gigantic efforts to eliminate unnecessary positions, such as mass layoffs after mergers. Just because you don't understand the necessity of middle management or "paper pushers" doesn't mean they're not necessary. The real reason we avoid unemployment is the same reason we've avoided it ever since 90% of households were farmers. It's because however efficient we get, consumers always want better things. We avoid unemployment not because of "bullshit jobs". We avoid it because humans have an insatiable demand for more travel, novel restaurants, video game consoles with more realistic graphics, fancier theme parks, new blockbuster movies. Our desire for new and better things will never stop. So the desire for people to take jobs to invent and provide those things will never stop. "Unnecessary managers and paper pushers" has utterly nothing to do with it.
- cxr 5y ago
  > Just because you don't understand the necessity of middle management or "paper pushers" doesn't mean they're not necessary. This is presumptuous. Having worked in groups where I understood my job and the jobs of my coworkers who held the same position as me at least as well as they understood their jobs themselves: unnecessary paper pushers exist. > As a rule, businesses exist to make a profit, and make gigantic efforts to eliminate unnecessary positions, such as mass layoffs after mergers. People say stuff like this all the time—Paul Graham famously trotted it out as a retort to the existence of a gender pay gap—but it doesn't comport with observations. From some of my personal notes on this topic last week: There's a widespread belief that capitalism seeks out efficiency. With most organizations being capitalist enterprises, so the belief continues, they are an extension of this. You can see this show up in arguments about the gender pay gap. If we could cut costs just by hiring women to do the same job, they say, then we would. The veracity of the claims about the size of the pay gap notwithstanding, the claim that corporations would seize the opportunity to cut costs like this doesn't jibe with reality. Corporations are not observed to be a perfect extension of the law of capitalist efficiency. A corporation as an entity is not a perfectly rational actor operating in its own self interest, following both from the irrationality of the people who make it up and from instances of where they do behave rationally operating in their own individual self interests, counter to the organization's. There is hardly ever a Taylor-like figure [around]. ... i.e., someone tasked with stamping out the sorts of inefficiency in the way that these arguments demand it is being addressed. We need to coin some sort of shorthand akin "the Gell–Mann amnesia effect", where we comment upon the tendency of people to automatically ascribe e.g. competence and efficiency to institutions, on the basis that they are institutions, while ignoring immediately available evidence to the contrary.
cxr 5y ago
You're describing one manifestation of cost disease. Controversial opinion: Programmers think that they're exempt from this, but they're not. I used the term "devops shovelware" the other day in reference to the dominant culture that you can see on display in the present. That sort of thing is just another type of unnecessary paper pushing. Resume-driven development, churn for churn's sake, and much of what accounts for the little green squares on GitHub contribution graphs are all manifestations of the very same cost disease.
- lkrubner 5y ago
  I strongly agree with this. I've tried to write about this seriously, and then I tried to write about it with humor. Here is the humor: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/my-final-post-regarding-the-flaws-of-docker-kubernetes-and-their-eco-system http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/my-final-post-regardi...
fny 5y ago
Is there any evidence of managerial excess at the expense of profits (I don't mean anecdata)? Genuine question. I've always worked in small companies, so I don't have any experience with large companies. But someone is footing the bill for a salary on the premise that enough revenue will be generated to cover managerial costs and some. Right?
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Headcount is probably the more appropriate number. Original commenter's claims on whether it's gone up or down aside, there is some minimum number of managers for a number of employees, and of support staff for same. That number may be larger or smaller, but it exists. An organization can't function effectively with 1,000 people reporting to one manager. (See: Valve) Note: from what I can find, it historically and currently hovers around 10:1. If we're talking about profits though, headcount matters more, because it requires the other things. If you can run the same revenue on 100 people as you can on 1,000, you save on their salaries, but also on the salaries of all the management and support the extra 900 would require.
naveen99 5y ago
manager and paper pushers are mostly required due to regulations and government. It’s hard to fathom why companies just give 21% of their income to the irs, until you look up certain regulations.
Synaesthesia 5y ago
Not really, if you look at their goals which are to maintain managerial control, David Graeber wrote a book about the phenomenon called Bullshit Jobs.

by Grakel 5y ago

ggm 5y ago

Its a tacit admission that the economy needs us to have money, but also seems bizarrely to need to distribute it unequally to get where it wants to go. If the economy needs us to have money but distributed it equally, the 'value' property would become really moot. Its also a tacit admission that most 'jobs' have no relationship to productive labour, or even necessarily create value. But, I'm a believer in the labour theory of value, so there's that...

lumost 5y ago
Historically it was exceptionally common to grow unproductive jobs up to the limit that the economy could support e.g. the Edo era of Japan. It's quite plausible/likely that part of the industrial revolutions magic was that economic growth outpaced the economies ability to add unproductive jobs. Note that by unproductive jobs I'm specifically refferring to what could be called BS jobs. Jobs that were previously done by one person, but are now done by 10 people without an increase in measurable output.
- taffer 5y ago
  > Jobs that were previously done by one person, but are now done by 10 people without an increase in measurable output. Is there any data to support this claim?
  - cxr 5y ago
    Good luck trying to get an organization with BS jobs to competently implement a program that can deliver that kind of data. You're going to run into selection bias right of the gate, and then after that, you need to worry about the reliability of the data that you do get. The key name to attach to your queries when trying to research this is "Graeber".
    - barry-cotter 5y ago
      > Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs > David Graeber’s ‘bullshit jobs theory’ has generated a great deal of academic and public interest. This theory holds that a large and rapidly increasing number of workers are undertaking jobs that they themselves recognise as being useless and of no social value. Despite generating clear testable hypotheses, this theory is not based on robust empirical research. We, therefore, use representative data from the EU to test five of its core hypotheses. Although we find that the perception of doing useless work is strongly associated with poor wellbeing, our findings contradict the main propositions of Graeber’s theory. The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions. Marx’s concept of alienation and a ‘Work Relations’ approach provide inspiration for an alternative account that highlights poor management and toxic workplace environments in explaining why workers perceive paid work as useless. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067
      - cxr 5y ago
        It seems like you're trying to make a point about some altogether different topic, probably inferring some intent on my part based on a non-literal reading of what I wrote. (For example, that I'm personally endorsing Graeber. Hard to say, really, because you yourself didn't really say anything.) The literal reading of my comment is the correct one. I said the relevant name when trying to turn up data would be to search for "Graeber"—which, as your comment indicates, is correct.
spenczar5 5y ago
I don’t understand this sort of explanation. A “tacit admission” by who? “The economy” does not actually take actions, and definitely doesn’t have objectives; it just describes the broad system resulting from many individual agents. Are you suggesting that corporate VPs hire managers with a goal of distributing money unequally so their products get sold? That seems like a huge stretch - they benefit so little in that way from their individual hiring decisions. Are you suggesting that there is an “invisible hand” which pushes systems towards hiring do-nothing managers, because companies that don’t get outcompeted? I don’t see how that would happen - it seems like the opposite would occur.
- paganel 5y ago
  > Are you suggesting that there is an “invisible hand” which pushes systems towards hiring do-nothing managers, because companies that don’t get outcompeted? Not the OP but in a sense that's what happens, yes, even though I wouldn't use that "invisible hand" metaphor (which I personally find it a little over-used) but more like the "BS-jobs class system" (composed of most of the C-execs, of most middle-managers, of some HR and marketing people) making sure it is successful at reproducing itself.
  - spenczar5 5y ago
    I’m still confused. What do you mean when you say the “system makes sure?” I have the same issue as before - I don’t think of systems as having intent or “making sure” of anything. That might be a metaphor around a mechanism or feedback loop - what is that mechanism?

neffy 5y ago

That's not actually what has happened. Roll back 100 odd years, the average age of entry into the work force would be around 14 for males (very useful in coal mines for the narrow bits), retirement was 65, but most people didn't make it that far. The typical working week was 6 days. Now we have a significant percentage of the population studying into their twenties, and at the other end retired and living into their eighties or nineties. That's the predicted "unemployment". There are probably significantly fewer managers per se, than there used to be - companies like GE used to have hierarchies 40 or more levels deep.

temp10298385 5y ago
I'm really curious how a managerial hierarchy of 40 works in practice. If a manager is responsible for a headcount of 2 then GE would have 2^40 = ~1 trillion employees. Since this is obviously not possible then what does the org chart of a firm with 40 levels of hierarchy look like.
- jrockway 5y ago
  It's not necessarily a balanced tree. One path can have length 40, while another could be 2. I think at megacompanies, the hierarchy can be pretty deep before you get into what is normal for medium sized companies. Global -> Region ("Americas") -> Country ("USA") -> Region ("Northeast") -> State ("New York") and then you just have a company with a CEO (called something else at this level), SVPs, Directors, Managers, Supervisors, Shift Supervisors, etc.
crazygringo 5y ago
Do you have a source for that regarding GE? That seems incredibly implausible. I'm moderately familiar with the history of corporate organization, and never heard of anything even remotely close to a hierarchy of 40 levels -- not even when combining reporting chains of conglomerates, regions, and local management.

kfprt 5y ago

Hard to fathom if you are only considering the institutional goals and not the perfectly reasonable goals of the rational actor individuals within the institution.

crazygringo 5y ago

That's not what has reduced employment at all. As a rule, businesses exist to make a profit, and make gigantic efforts to eliminate unnecessary positions, such as mass layoffs after mergers. Just because you don't understand the necessity of middle management or "paper pushers" doesn't mean they're not necessary. The real reason we avoid unemployment is the same reason we've avoided it ever since 90% of households were farmers. It's because however efficient we get, consumers always want better things. We avoid unemployment not because of "bullshit jobs". We avoid it because humans have an insatiable demand for more travel, novel restaurants, video game consoles with more realistic graphics, fancier theme parks, new blockbuster movies. Our desire for new and better things will never stop. So the desire for people to take jobs to invent and provide those things will never stop. "Unnecessary managers and paper pushers" has utterly nothing to do with it.

cxr 5y ago
> Just because you don't understand the necessity of middle management or "paper pushers" doesn't mean they're not necessary. This is presumptuous. Having worked in groups where I understood my job and the jobs of my coworkers who held the same position as me at least as well as they understood their jobs themselves: unnecessary paper pushers exist. > As a rule, businesses exist to make a profit, and make gigantic efforts to eliminate unnecessary positions, such as mass layoffs after mergers. People say stuff like this all the time—Paul Graham famously trotted it out as a retort to the existence of a gender pay gap—but it doesn't comport with observations. From some of my personal notes on this topic last week: There's a widespread belief that capitalism seeks out efficiency. With most organizations being capitalist enterprises, so the belief continues, they are an extension of this. You can see this show up in arguments about the gender pay gap. If we could cut costs just by hiring women to do the same job, they say, then we would. The veracity of the claims about the size of the pay gap notwithstanding, the claim that corporations would seize the opportunity to cut costs like this doesn't jibe with reality. Corporations are not observed to be a perfect extension of the law of capitalist efficiency. A corporation as an entity is not a perfectly rational actor operating in its own self interest, following both from the irrationality of the people who make it up and from instances of where they do behave rationally operating in their own individual self interests, counter to the organization's. There is hardly ever a Taylor-like figure [around]. ... i.e., someone tasked with stamping out the sorts of inefficiency in the way that these arguments demand it is being addressed. We need to coin some sort of shorthand akin "the Gell–Mann amnesia effect", where we comment upon the tendency of people to automatically ascribe e.g. competence and efficiency to institutions, on the basis that they are institutions, while ignoring immediately available evidence to the contrary.

cxr 5y ago

You're describing one manifestation of cost disease. Controversial opinion: Programmers think that they're exempt from this, but they're not. I used the term "devops shovelware" the other day in reference to the dominant culture that you can see on display in the present. That sort of thing is just another type of unnecessary paper pushing. Resume-driven development, churn for churn's sake, and much of what accounts for the little green squares on GitHub contribution graphs are all manifestations of the very same cost disease.

lkrubner 5y ago
I strongly agree with this. I've tried to write about this seriously, and then I tried to write about it with humor. Here is the humor: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/my-final-post-regarding-the-flaws-of-docker-kubernetes-and-their-eco-system http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/my-final-post-regardi...

fny 5y ago

Is there any evidence of managerial excess at the expense of profits (I don't mean anecdata)? Genuine question. I've always worked in small companies, so I don't have any experience with large companies. But someone is footing the bill for a salary on the premise that enough revenue will be generated to cover managerial costs and some. Right?

ethbr0 5y ago
Headcount is probably the more appropriate number. Original commenter's claims on whether it's gone up or down aside, there is some minimum number of managers for a number of employees, and of support staff for same. That number may be larger or smaller, but it exists. An organization can't function effectively with 1,000 people reporting to one manager. (See: Valve) Note: from what I can find, it historically and currently hovers around 10:1. If we're talking about profits though, headcount matters more, because it requires the other things. If you can run the same revenue on 100 people as you can on 1,000, you save on their salaries, but also on the salaries of all the management and support the extra 900 would require.

naveen99 5y ago

manager and paper pushers are mostly required due to regulations and government. It’s hard to fathom why companies just give 21% of their income to the irs, until you look up certain regulations.

Synaesthesia 5y ago

Not really, if you look at their goals which are to maintain managerial control, David Graeber wrote a book about the phenomenon called Bullshit Jobs.