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>Do you hire that employee? Of course not. It doesn't make any business sense. It's more work for you, more risk for the company, and most importantly it provid

>Do you hire that employee? Of course not. It doesn't make any business sense. It's more work for you, more risk for the company, and most importantly it provide $0 financial value to the company. It's an easy no. That's what the model predicts, but it's unfortunately not how companies beyond a certain size work in practice. Hiring decisions are not made by the business owner to increase profit, but middle-ranking members of the hierarchy who have their own parallel goals. Businesses can, and do, regularly hire employees that bring in zero or negative value. Often, these people will make up more than 50% of the company by headcount, and the only reason the company still turns a profit is because their existence is subsidised by a small minority of hyper-productive people.

brokencode 5y ago
There is usually no way to quantify how much value each developer is contributing. I mean, if your job for 6 months is to go through your company’s software and update to a new API since an old one is getting deprecated, how much business value did you produce? Yet you did something that needed to be done. There are people who take on big, flashy projects that generate a lot of measurable value, and there are people who do the boring stuff that needs to be done too. Without one, you don’t get the other.
woadwarrior01 5y ago
> Businesses can, and do, regularly hire employees that bring in zero or negative value. Often, these people will make up more than 50% of the company by headcount, and the only reason the company still turns a profit is because their existence is subsidised by a small minority of hyper-productive people. Or the company has a near monopoly over certain lucrative markets.
ehnto 5y ago
> Businesses can, and do, regularly hire employees that bring in zero or negative value. Often, these people will make up more than 50% of the company by headcount, and the only reason the company still turns a profit is because their existence is subsidised by a small minority of hyper-productive people. I think at this point it's unfair if we were to say the specific people are the issue. A big business has a lot of required components in order to keep running, and some of them are not directly revenue generating, but you still need most of them. That's a value of small companies, being so lean you can be hyper-focused and efficient. Bigger companies can perform at scales smaller ones can't, but that comes at the cost of inefficiencies of orchestrating the bigger operation. Just getting all the people aligned to do the things the business needs them to do is a huge and messy cost that smaller companies don't have, but it's required else your conglomerate would fall apart.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  Honestly, after working at my previous employer (Blackmagic Design in Port Melbourne, 500+ employees across many products), I just can't believe that. There was no HR, no management class, no purchasing agents or head of IT, maybe one hour of meetings a month and everything worked ridiculously, buttery smoothly. We built the products that needed building, everyone pitched in and morale was generally high. I could name one person who I'd consider had a "bullshit job", and another who's job was semi-bullshit. This is out of maybe 100 people I met across multiple departments.
  - ehnto 5y ago
    I don't think we disagree, I think your example fits with what I was saying but I didn't really explain what I meant by required components. It's going to be different for every company too. Like at Blackmagic Design, there is probably a team handling the accounting, and that doesn't directly generate profit by putting products in the hands of consumers but it's a required component to operate with 500+ employees. I really just meant that bigger companies can have more cost center requirements. I agree that a lot of businesses can cut down on bullshit process and bullshit jobs and keep running fine, but there's a lot of "cost centre" style jobs that are non-negotiable, especially when it comes to compliance and government reporting. Compliance and reporting is a business requirement that the software industry very rarely has but I'm expecting to see that change over the next decade. Accounting kind of falls in that category actually. An aside, Blackmagic sounds great to work at. I avoid big companies specifically to avoid the bullshit process and people, so that sounds like a dream.
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      Yeah, of course! There was an accounting team, of course, as well as support and the most competent IT department on planet Earth (consisting of two guys for the whole company), but they were nimble and didn't overreach in terms of their authority. Legal was outsourced, AFAIK. >An aside, Blackmagic sounds great to work at. It really was. The culture was amazing.
  - 5y ago

brokencode 5y ago

There is usually no way to quantify how much value each developer is contributing. I mean, if your job for 6 months is to go through your company’s software and update to a new API since an old one is getting deprecated, how much business value did you produce? Yet you did something that needed to be done. There are people who take on big, flashy projects that generate a lot of measurable value, and there are people who do the boring stuff that needs to be done too. Without one, you don’t get the other.

woadwarrior01 5y ago

ehnto 5y ago

> Businesses can, and do, regularly hire employees that bring in zero or negative value. Often, these people will make up more than 50% of the company by headcount, and the only reason the company still turns a profit is because their existence is subsidised by a small minority of hyper-productive people. I think at this point it's unfair if we were to say the specific people are the issue. A big business has a lot of required components in order to keep running, and some of them are not directly revenue generating, but you still need most of them. That's a value of small companies, being so lean you can be hyper-focused and efficient. Bigger companies can perform at scales smaller ones can't, but that comes at the cost of inefficiencies of orchestrating the bigger operation. Just getting all the people aligned to do the things the business needs them to do is a huge and messy cost that smaller companies don't have, but it's required else your conglomerate would fall apart.

AussieWog93 5y ago
Honestly, after working at my previous employer (Blackmagic Design in Port Melbourne, 500+ employees across many products), I just can't believe that. There was no HR, no management class, no purchasing agents or head of IT, maybe one hour of meetings a month and everything worked ridiculously, buttery smoothly. We built the products that needed building, everyone pitched in and morale was generally high. I could name one person who I'd consider had a "bullshit job", and another who's job was semi-bullshit. This is out of maybe 100 people I met across multiple departments.
- ehnto 5y ago
  I don't think we disagree, I think your example fits with what I was saying but I didn't really explain what I meant by required components. It's going to be different for every company too. Like at Blackmagic Design, there is probably a team handling the accounting, and that doesn't directly generate profit by putting products in the hands of consumers but it's a required component to operate with 500+ employees. I really just meant that bigger companies can have more cost center requirements. I agree that a lot of businesses can cut down on bullshit process and bullshit jobs and keep running fine, but there's a lot of "cost centre" style jobs that are non-negotiable, especially when it comes to compliance and government reporting. Compliance and reporting is a business requirement that the software industry very rarely has but I'm expecting to see that change over the next decade. Accounting kind of falls in that category actually. An aside, Blackmagic sounds great to work at. I avoid big companies specifically to avoid the bullshit process and people, so that sounds like a dream.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    Yeah, of course! There was an accounting team, of course, as well as support and the most competent IT department on planet Earth (consisting of two guys for the whole company), but they were nimble and didn't overreach in terms of their authority. Legal was outsourced, AFAIK. >An aside, Blackmagic sounds great to work at. It really was. The culture was amazing.
- 5y ago