8 ms·

The reward for success in most corporations is to be able to hire more people. I can’t think of many situations where being successful means you get to degrade

The reward for success in most corporations is to be able to hire more people. I can’t think of many situations where being successful means you get to degrade the quality of what you are doing. The problem is peoples egos and signaling. I once worked at a company and did this huge set of projects on a shoe string using creativity and hard work. A manager was hired in another parallel group to mine and they got to immediately hire six people. It made me so annoyed because it felt like I had demonstrated results and not gotten resourced. It sets off these ego driven hiring wars. Once one manager starts staffing up, you immediately felt threatened and under siege and at war. If your competitor peers (they are never your friend) out hire you, then soon their people are coming into your area trying to take over work under you. The entire thing is super corrupt. Like I personally don’t like over hiring but if you have never felt what it is like to be put in that position - it is quite threatening. It also signals if you don’t hire the way other teams are hiring they you are a failure as a manager or as a team. After this experience I realized how compromised you are being middle management: you lose skill and value and you become at the mercy of impossible to control politics coming from all directions. And then what happens next? Well, many times the hiring manager who built their little empire leaves and dumps all the people they hired loose. They all end up in a sort of limbo. Original manager had an idea of what to do with them, now someone else ends up having to baby sit them, often without any vision for what to do. This process of hiring and leaving just degrades the talent and dead weight: it’s such a sort of baked in disease and hard to get rid of. I personally won’t be a middle manager ever again. At least not one that doesn’t report direct to a ceo.

WalterBright 4y ago
> The reward for success in most corporations is to be able to hire more people. In business: 1. success => more budget 2. failure => budget gets cut In government: 1. success => budget gets cut 2. failure => more budget
- rqtwteye 4y ago
  Not necessarily true. In my company the rule is: 10 offshore devs/testers get nothing done => hire 20, if that that doesn't work, hire 50. The actual work could probably be done by 2 or 3 competent people.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Are you sure your company isn't doing government contract work? I made the expensive mistake of hiring government contractors once. They did a great job of sending me massive bills while accomplishing nothing at all. I fired them and refused to pay those bills. They threatened to sue. I replied I had all their documentation and progress reports that showed they accomplished nothing. Never heard from them again.
    - acdha 4y ago
      I’ve seen that in every sector (.com, .edu, and .gov) — there’s a huge management culture pushing untruths (e.g. “a good manager can manage anything”) and contempt for the actual workers which causes those pathological outcomes anywhere so afflicted. Part of what makes it popular is that when one contracting company produces another 8-9 figure write-off you can blame them and try again with the latest set of expensive suits swearing they’re completely different, but it’s harder to shirk responsibility if it’s people who report to you. This is more common in government due to politics: if agencies aren’t allowed to hire competent technical staff, the contractors will be poorly supervised but when it fails the same people who cut staffing will use it to argue even more things need to be contracted out. Again, the problem isn’t the sector but the lack of an effective feedback loop.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        the lack of an effective feedback loop. Of course. The feedback loop for government is different from that for business. Failure in business means going out of business. This powerfully incentivizes business to stop rewarding failure. Like when Alexa lost $billions and Amazon cut off its funding. No such feedback exists for government operations.
        rrdharan 4y ago
        Do you mean Alexa instead of Azure?
- WalterBright 4y ago
  For example, in the public schools: 1. fail to get kids to meet grade academic standards => teachers get a raise and more budget 2. gifted programs succeed => gifted programs get canceled
  - acdha 4y ago
    That’s not an example, it’s just wrong. School performance is heavily politicized so many people have an incentive, sometimes financial, to say public schools are failing but what actually happens is what close to a century of research has shown: student performance tracks their household socioeconomic status, but we tend to approach the problem backwards for ideological reasons and see it as “improve school performance to fight poverty” when every bit of data says it should be “deal with poverty to improve school performance”.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      If failure is never the school's fault, why do they keep getting more funding?
      - acdha 4y ago
        You have to look at the details: for example, is the enrollment static or do you see things like more students requiring support services which we’ve chosen to put on schools rather than funding through a national health service like most of our peer countries? That one’s especially important when making historical comparisons because the United States no longer excludes special needs kids or tracks lower-performing poor kids into work. Comparisons with other countries are similar - people will talk about countries like Singapore being far ahead but once you compare similar SES cohort performance, the effect becomes much smaller. Is it the case that the amount of money spent on infrastructure is increasing unnecessarily or because previous generations voted against maintenance until things failed completely? Is spending going up due to teacher salaries or because the solution to perceived problems is adding more layers of much higher-compensated management who will reliably divert staff time away from education? Again, I’m not saying that everything is perfect with no room for improvement but rather that there’s both deliberate misrepresentation (e.g. the charter school industry literally banks on this belief) and significant confusion caused by trying to find a cheap fix for complex social problems.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  This feels like an oversimplification: it would be foolhardy for the government to cut funding for e.g. a bridge if it begins to run over, because paying $500M for an incomplete bridge is a significantly worse outcome than paying $600M for a finished bridge.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    > it would be foolhardy for the government to cut funding for e.g. a bridge if it begins to run over Exactly. They failed, so they get more budget. Happens with nearly all government projects. It's almost as if the department/contractor knows that if they fail they'll get more budget. Hmmm...
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      In which case, it seems like your blame is misplaced: the government is not particularly guilty of waste (although not innocent either), but is instead is mostly powerless to prevent private contractors from abusing the public's interest.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        > the government is not particularly guilty of waste Sorry, but LOL. For one fine example, the cost of a NASA launch vs the cost of a SpaceX launch. > is mostly powerless to prevent private contractors from abusing the public's interest. The government? Powerless? The government writes the contracts. There are a vast array of regulations specifically aimed at government contractors.
        woodruffw 4y ago
        I'm talking about bridges. Depending on political proclivities, anybody can find an example of government waste to suit any particular argument. The observation is very simple: if the government estimates and allocates $500 million for a bridge and finds a contractor that claims to be able to do it for that price, there's very little reasonable power we can grant them to make the contractor meet their claimed budget. We could allow the government to throw contractors in prison for bilking them but, well, we already allow that (and it doesn't recoup the costs anyways). Regulatory capture and special interests seem to be the bigger problem here. Complaining about NASA without considering why the government so fecklessly pays Lockheed Martin et al. billions a year is short-sighted.
- vharuck 4y ago
  In my experience for government: 1. Spend all your budget => equal or greater budget 2. Spend less than your budget => budget gets cut
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    This applies everywhere.
- dette 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Sometimes I feel I'm the only one on HN who is in favor of free markets. It's also clear that apparently many people who respond have never heard anyone make a case for free markets before. It's amazing, because free markets have produced the prosperity and high standard of living we all enjoy. Leftism has never delivered the goods. Maybe I make a dent, maybe not.
    - brigandish 4y ago
      It might be because they’ve worked in the private sector but not the public sector. Once I’d worked in a team that spanned across different government departments it changed my view forever, it was like the most dysfunctional companies I’d worked for but with huge budgets and no chance of change through competition or being bought up etc. You can’t unsee waste like that.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        My dad was a socialist as a young man. Being in the military for 23 years cured him of that. We lived on military bases for years, and seeing how they operated is worthy of much sad hilarity. I also toured East Berlin in 1969 at the height of the Cold War. Modern folk often extol how great the USSR was. They'll tell me the Wall was built to keep the West out. Well, I've seen it with my own eyes. Dingy, gray, and sad. The bus slipped right in through Checkpoint Charlie with just a passport check. Exiting was another story entirely. We all had to exit the bus while guards with machine guns gave it a very thorough search, including underneath.
    - tome 4y ago
      I, for one, welcome you sharing your point of view. It’s a breath of fresh air. HN is certainly very different from around 15 years ago when the ethos used to be “libertarianism or GTFO”. I remember getting a heated response for merely suggesting that government might have some role. I guess the change is due to the shift from focus on startups to general technology. It’s just another form of eternal September.
- naasking 4y ago
  > In government: > >1. success => budget gets cut > >2. failure => more budget So the US military has been failing for 70 odd years then?
  - eep_social 4y ago
    Since the Korean War, yes, that sounds about right.
slickrick216 4y ago
This and your other comment in this post are such spot on sage advice and align so well with my own experience I feel we must have worked in the same companies. Thank you for putting words to some things.
- cutemonster 4y ago
  Yes and thanks for sharing your perspective as a (former) manager. I start thinking that many misbehaving managers, would stop over hiring and such bad things, if the organization was able to give them the right incentives. (But how? Hmm, there were some books mentioned in a comment elsewhere, by the author of the article.) I mean that many managers want to do what's good for the organization, but because of they way things are, they cannot. (Because then some other manager, who prioritizes his/her own career and influence, "takes over everything".) I wonder what would happen if a company added a rule: Max team size is 10. End of over hiring (well, up to 10)? But would have other odd consequences.
pixl97 4y ago
Intercompany competition is something that's not addressed often enough
- the_jeremy 4y ago
  I believe they're talking about intracompany competition, actually.
screwturner68 4y ago
"The reward for success in most companies is to be able to hire more people" This is because the more people you manage the more powerful you become, the guy with 100 reports is more valuable than the guy with 20 reports. Those 100 reports could sit in their chairs all day and drool but 100 is always better than 20.
- cutemonster 4y ago
  Yes, and (maybe sounds silly), how does that actually work? I mean, companies aren't democracies -- then, how does it matter that one guy has 100 droolers^H^H reports and the other guy has 20? Is it that everyone subconsciously thinks that "they are more people so they get to decide"? I don't think this is formalized in any way? (There's no written rule that says "bigger team gets to decide")
Phiwise_ 4y ago
Is there a particular reason you made every sentence into its own paragraph except for two of two sentences and one of three? Made this kind of hard to read.

WalterBright 4y ago

> The reward for success in most corporations is to be able to hire more people. In business: 1. success => more budget 2. failure => budget gets cut In government: 1. success => budget gets cut 2. failure => more budget

rqtwteye 4y ago
Not necessarily true. In my company the rule is: 10 offshore devs/testers get nothing done => hire 20, if that that doesn't work, hire 50. The actual work could probably be done by 2 or 3 competent people.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Are you sure your company isn't doing government contract work? I made the expensive mistake of hiring government contractors once. They did a great job of sending me massive bills while accomplishing nothing at all. I fired them and refused to pay those bills. They threatened to sue. I replied I had all their documentation and progress reports that showed they accomplished nothing. Never heard from them again.
  - acdha 4y ago
    I’ve seen that in every sector (.com, .edu, and .gov) — there’s a huge management culture pushing untruths (e.g. “a good manager can manage anything”) and contempt for the actual workers which causes those pathological outcomes anywhere so afflicted. Part of what makes it popular is that when one contracting company produces another 8-9 figure write-off you can blame them and try again with the latest set of expensive suits swearing they’re completely different, but it’s harder to shirk responsibility if it’s people who report to you. This is more common in government due to politics: if agencies aren’t allowed to hire competent technical staff, the contractors will be poorly supervised but when it fails the same people who cut staffing will use it to argue even more things need to be contracted out. Again, the problem isn’t the sector but the lack of an effective feedback loop.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      the lack of an effective feedback loop. Of course. The feedback loop for government is different from that for business. Failure in business means going out of business. This powerfully incentivizes business to stop rewarding failure. Like when Alexa lost $billions and Amazon cut off its funding. No such feedback exists for government operations.
      - rrdharan 4y ago
        Do you mean Alexa instead of Azure?
WalterBright 4y ago
For example, in the public schools: 1. fail to get kids to meet grade academic standards => teachers get a raise and more budget 2. gifted programs succeed => gifted programs get canceled
- acdha 4y ago
  That’s not an example, it’s just wrong. School performance is heavily politicized so many people have an incentive, sometimes financial, to say public schools are failing but what actually happens is what close to a century of research has shown: student performance tracks their household socioeconomic status, but we tend to approach the problem backwards for ideological reasons and see it as “improve school performance to fight poverty” when every bit of data says it should be “deal with poverty to improve school performance”.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    If failure is never the school's fault, why do they keep getting more funding?
    - acdha 4y ago
      You have to look at the details: for example, is the enrollment static or do you see things like more students requiring support services which we’ve chosen to put on schools rather than funding through a national health service like most of our peer countries? That one’s especially important when making historical comparisons because the United States no longer excludes special needs kids or tracks lower-performing poor kids into work. Comparisons with other countries are similar - people will talk about countries like Singapore being far ahead but once you compare similar SES cohort performance, the effect becomes much smaller. Is it the case that the amount of money spent on infrastructure is increasing unnecessarily or because previous generations voted against maintenance until things failed completely? Is spending going up due to teacher salaries or because the solution to perceived problems is adding more layers of much higher-compensated management who will reliably divert staff time away from education? Again, I’m not saying that everything is perfect with no room for improvement but rather that there’s both deliberate misrepresentation (e.g. the charter school industry literally banks on this belief) and significant confusion caused by trying to find a cheap fix for complex social problems.
woodruffw 4y ago
This feels like an oversimplification: it would be foolhardy for the government to cut funding for e.g. a bridge if it begins to run over, because paying $500M for an incomplete bridge is a significantly worse outcome than paying $600M for a finished bridge.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > it would be foolhardy for the government to cut funding for e.g. a bridge if it begins to run over Exactly. They failed, so they get more budget. Happens with nearly all government projects. It's almost as if the department/contractor knows that if they fail they'll get more budget. Hmmm...
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    In which case, it seems like your blame is misplaced: the government is not particularly guilty of waste (although not innocent either), but is instead is mostly powerless to prevent private contractors from abusing the public's interest.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      > the government is not particularly guilty of waste Sorry, but LOL. For one fine example, the cost of a NASA launch vs the cost of a SpaceX launch. > is mostly powerless to prevent private contractors from abusing the public's interest. The government? Powerless? The government writes the contracts. There are a vast array of regulations specifically aimed at government contractors.
      - woodruffw 4y ago
        I'm talking about bridges. Depending on political proclivities, anybody can find an example of government waste to suit any particular argument. The observation is very simple: if the government estimates and allocates $500 million for a bridge and finds a contractor that claims to be able to do it for that price, there's very little reasonable power we can grant them to make the contractor meet their claimed budget. We could allow the government to throw contractors in prison for bilking them but, well, we already allow that (and it doesn't recoup the costs anyways). Regulatory capture and special interests seem to be the bigger problem here. Complaining about NASA without considering why the government so fecklessly pays Lockheed Martin et al. billions a year is short-sighted.
vharuck 4y ago
In my experience for government: 1. Spend all your budget => equal or greater budget 2. Spend less than your budget => budget gets cut
- HWR_14 4y ago
  This applies everywhere.
dette 4y ago
[flagged]
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Sometimes I feel I'm the only one on HN who is in favor of free markets. It's also clear that apparently many people who respond have never heard anyone make a case for free markets before. It's amazing, because free markets have produced the prosperity and high standard of living we all enjoy. Leftism has never delivered the goods. Maybe I make a dent, maybe not.
  - brigandish 4y ago
    It might be because they’ve worked in the private sector but not the public sector. Once I’d worked in a team that spanned across different government departments it changed my view forever, it was like the most dysfunctional companies I’d worked for but with huge budgets and no chance of change through competition or being bought up etc. You can’t unsee waste like that.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      My dad was a socialist as a young man. Being in the military for 23 years cured him of that. We lived on military bases for years, and seeing how they operated is worthy of much sad hilarity. I also toured East Berlin in 1969 at the height of the Cold War. Modern folk often extol how great the USSR was. They'll tell me the Wall was built to keep the West out. Well, I've seen it with my own eyes. Dingy, gray, and sad. The bus slipped right in through Checkpoint Charlie with just a passport check. Exiting was another story entirely. We all had to exit the bus while guards with machine guns gave it a very thorough search, including underneath.
  - tome 4y ago
    I, for one, welcome you sharing your point of view. It’s a breath of fresh air. HN is certainly very different from around 15 years ago when the ethos used to be “libertarianism or GTFO”. I remember getting a heated response for merely suggesting that government might have some role. I guess the change is due to the shift from focus on startups to general technology. It’s just another form of eternal September.
naasking 4y ago
> In government: > >1. success => budget gets cut > >2. failure => more budget So the US military has been failing for 70 odd years then?
- eep_social 4y ago
  Since the Korean War, yes, that sounds about right.

slickrick216 4y ago

This and your other comment in this post are such spot on sage advice and align so well with my own experience I feel we must have worked in the same companies. Thank you for putting words to some things.

cutemonster 4y ago
Yes and thanks for sharing your perspective as a (former) manager. I start thinking that many misbehaving managers, would stop over hiring and such bad things, if the organization was able to give them the right incentives. (But how? Hmm, there were some books mentioned in a comment elsewhere, by the author of the article.) I mean that many managers want to do what's good for the organization, but because of they way things are, they cannot. (Because then some other manager, who prioritizes his/her own career and influence, "takes over everything".) I wonder what would happen if a company added a rule: Max team size is 10. End of over hiring (well, up to 10)? But would have other odd consequences.

pixl97 4y ago

Intercompany competition is something that's not addressed often enough

the_jeremy 4y ago
I believe they're talking about intracompany competition, actually.

screwturner68 4y ago

"The reward for success in most companies is to be able to hire more people" This is because the more people you manage the more powerful you become, the guy with 100 reports is more valuable than the guy with 20 reports. Those 100 reports could sit in their chairs all day and drool but 100 is always better than 20.

cutemonster 4y ago
Yes, and (maybe sounds silly), how does that actually work? I mean, companies aren't democracies -- then, how does it matter that one guy has 100 droolers^H^H reports and the other guy has 20? Is it that everyone subconsciously thinks that "they are more people so they get to decide"? I don't think this is formalized in any way? (There's no written rule that says "bigger team gets to decide")

Phiwise_ 4y ago

Is there a particular reason you made every sentence into its own paragraph except for two of two sentences and one of three? Made this kind of hard to read.