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>Why would anyone hire someone just to make sure they stayed busy< This happens _constantly_. It is a side effect of how the promotion ladder in the management
by foobiekr 4y ago
>Why would anyone hire someone just to make sure they stayed busy<
This happens _constantly_. It is a side effect of how the promotion ladder in the management profession typically works at large companies: your likelihood of being promoted to the next grade depends entirely on a small number of metrics one of which is how many people you manage.
I actually have been documenting a very strong example of this for a book I have been thinking about writing about what destroyed a high flyer after the dotcom. After the collapse of the dotcom, one group, which had the CEO's ear as "the project that will save us" had effectively unlimited headcount even while the rest of the company was in cuts-and-freeze mode for 2+ years, and because of the headcount = promotion issue, they hired armies of people that they were barely even interviewing. The project ended up 2-4 years late depending on whether you count the first release as a viable product (it wasn't).
I have seen this behavior in every single large company I have worked for. I'm not going to give more details because it would ID me, but this is very common and I was in a position to witness it with actual data, not just a leaf node engineer telling myself stories about why XXX got a promotion to VP or whatever.
- ForHackernews 4y agoThis is accurate. As an engineering manager, one of the primary criteria I'm judged on when interviewing for new roles is the size of the teams I've managed previously. Bigger = better.
- WalterBright 4y agoThis is why over time large companies tend to slide and then fail. Instead of growing and growing until they take over the world.
- foobiekr 4y agoWhen I was younger and crasser I noted that most large companies end up infested with tumors that exist to serve the tumor and not the company. Now that I'm older, I observe that truly large companies actually even develop an analog of the hypertumors that whales get where the tumors find it easier to steal from one another than from the rest of the company. Actually working for large companies has left me with a very bleak outlook on human organizations.
- WalterBright 4y agoJust think of the human organization that is orders of magnitude larger - the government.
- ido 4y agoGovernments are not orders of magnitude larger than the largest corporations. Walmart employs 2.3 million people. The US federal government employs 2.85 million.
- WalterBright 4y agoDon't overlook 1.3 million servicemen. Don't overlook state & local government.
- corrral 4y agoDon't overlook all of wal-mart's vendors and service providers then, I guess? Those aren't one organization, but thousands.