4 ms·

> Imagine you work for the customers' support team: you unblock the client, the client is happy, and you also fix the public doc to unblock anyone after you… Th

by phh 4y ago

> Imagine you work for the customers' support team: you unblock the client, the client is happy, and you also fix the public doc to unblock anyone after you… That’s all great. But at large organizations (namely: Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn) people ask: should we have a CS team at all? Isn’t that objective unscalable and trying to satisfy people a feature we shouldn’t have because every solution should be a product, not a process? First on the "scalable": CS is most definitely scalable, the question is how much. Without using any tooling whatsoever I dare say it scales in O(N*(log N)^2). I can understand the will to optimize it, and with good tooling, I have no doubt it can become sub-linear, which is more than enough. Anything sub-linear wins money with growth, so no need to "make it a product" (which I read as: Put a team of O(1) to replace those people, but maybe I'm misunderstanding) Anyway on to my point: Your Google example proves TFA's point: Google having broken CS is one of the major pain point against Google most people here have. Another Google pain point can probably be explained by misuse of KPIs: Google products that keep getting killed, and replaced, again and again. Even the best people are subject to "the spreadsheet mentality". Even when they are aware of it! My employer's founder bought back the company to stop focusing on the company's share price. Musk would like to take Tesla private. France renationalized EDF which was already >80% own by the state. etc.

someguydave 4y ago
I suspect The Spreadsheet Mentality (when it comes to people management) is reinforced by the radical blank-slate/egalitarian civil rights law and enforcement culture relating to employment in the US. There are many legal landmines around Officially Noticing and Considering various differences between individuals, so thinking of people as interchangeable cogs is the most legally defensible approach.
- mmierz 4y ago
  You’re using super obfuscated language so it’s hard to follow what you’re actually saying. It sounds like you’re saying because you can’t evaluate people with lazy mental shortcuts like race or religion, which would be illegal, you have to try and determine their actual merit, which is harder, and that is the source of corporate spreadsheet hell. Consequently, businesses would spend less time in spreadsheet hell if they could just go back to discriminating against classes of people that are now protected by law. Is that really what you mean?
  - microtherion 4y ago
    It's possible to read the post you're responding to a lot more charitably than that, and I think it would be more along what HN aspires to be to do so. I understood his point to be that due to the heightened scrutiny given to all questions of discrimination nowadays, any sort of "holistic" evaluation was abandoned in favor of supposedly objective "Spreadsheet Mentality" evaluations. This certainly has advantages, not only against conscious discrimination, but also unconscious biases (the infamous "team fit" ending up in homogeneous team composition). But it has large disadvantages as well, in that all employee contributions which do NOT easily fit into the few "objective" metrics are disregarded, which can lead to employees' value to an organization being substantially distorted. I find the rating scales I've seen a highly imperfect fit to the entire contribution an employee can bring. And the underlying assumption that such rating scales are objective and not subject to manipulation or biases is highly questionable. Ultimately, it all comes down to a manager's judgement, and a bias does not disappear if you dress it up with a numerical weight.
    - burnished 4y ago
      I think their rephrase was the charitable version. Now at least if that person did not realize how they were coming across they do now.
      - someguydave 4y ago
        I understood both readings of my post and left it vague. For instance: consider the plight of an all-white all-Muslim company who would face a possible lawsuit for not hiring a black guy who says he loves to eat well barbequed Southern-style pork in the office for lunch daily. Is hiring discrimination in this case racial, religious, dietary or “team fit”? To me, any answer other than “it is none of your damn business why we hire anyone” is against the First Amendment’s assembly clause.
        burnished 4y ago
        Oh, so you're intentionally mixing up traits that are intrinsic with actions or beliefs that people choose. It looks like you're trying to construct a 'gotcha!' and I dislike it.

by phh 4y ago

someguydave 4y ago

I suspect The Spreadsheet Mentality (when it comes to people management) is reinforced by the radical blank-slate/egalitarian civil rights law and enforcement culture relating to employment in the US. There are many legal landmines around Officially Noticing and Considering various differences between individuals, so thinking of people as interchangeable cogs is the most legally defensible approach.

mmierz 4y ago
You’re using super obfuscated language so it’s hard to follow what you’re actually saying. It sounds like you’re saying because you can’t evaluate people with lazy mental shortcuts like race or religion, which would be illegal, you have to try and determine their actual merit, which is harder, and that is the source of corporate spreadsheet hell. Consequently, businesses would spend less time in spreadsheet hell if they could just go back to discriminating against classes of people that are now protected by law. Is that really what you mean?
- microtherion 4y ago
  It's possible to read the post you're responding to a lot more charitably than that, and I think it would be more along what HN aspires to be to do so. I understood his point to be that due to the heightened scrutiny given to all questions of discrimination nowadays, any sort of "holistic" evaluation was abandoned in favor of supposedly objective "Spreadsheet Mentality" evaluations. This certainly has advantages, not only against conscious discrimination, but also unconscious biases (the infamous "team fit" ending up in homogeneous team composition). But it has large disadvantages as well, in that all employee contributions which do NOT easily fit into the few "objective" metrics are disregarded, which can lead to employees' value to an organization being substantially distorted. I find the rating scales I've seen a highly imperfect fit to the entire contribution an employee can bring. And the underlying assumption that such rating scales are objective and not subject to manipulation or biases is highly questionable. Ultimately, it all comes down to a manager's judgement, and a bias does not disappear if you dress it up with a numerical weight.
  - burnished 4y ago
    I think their rephrase was the charitable version. Now at least if that person did not realize how they were coming across they do now.
    - someguydave 4y ago
      I understood both readings of my post and left it vague. For instance: consider the plight of an all-white all-Muslim company who would face a possible lawsuit for not hiring a black guy who says he loves to eat well barbequed Southern-style pork in the office for lunch daily. Is hiring discrimination in this case racial, religious, dietary or “team fit”? To me, any answer other than “it is none of your damn business why we hire anyone” is against the First Amendment’s assembly clause.
      - burnished 4y ago
        Oh, so you're intentionally mixing up traits that are intrinsic with actions or beliefs that people choose. It looks like you're trying to construct a 'gotcha!' and I dislike it.