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Building empires is quite standard in management. I work at $BIGCO as a manager and have been told that, in practice, if I want to get a promotion to the next l
by rippercushions 4y ago
Building empires is quite standard in management. I work at $BIGCO as a manager and have been told that, in practice, if I want to get a promotion to the next level, I'll need to grow my team large enough to have other managers reporting to me first. So my primary target is to convince the powers that be to give me headcount, and what my team actually does is strictly secondary.
Now I'm a mere peon, but this replicates up the chain increasing an order of magnitude each level, meaning up top you get VPs backstabbing each other to take over the victim's headcount and wrangle that sweet SVP promotion.
- wonderwonder 4y agoCompanies get what they incentivize for.
- indigochill 4y agoBut if you were CEO and you wanted to, how would you engineer the incentives such that actually productive managers succeeded? Or is there something about corporate structure that makes it impossible?
- Consultant32452 4y agoStep 1: Read every Dilbert comic Step 2: Realize that what you requested is impossible for sufficiently large organizations Step 3: Negotiate a golden parachute for yourself. Don't hate the player, hate the game
- pc86 4y agoI would think an easy way - and coincidentally, the best for business - would be to make it too dangerous to be the stereotypical office politics back-stabbing VP type. Make it known that that behavior will land you out on your ass, with no severance or parachute, and no recommendations for future employment. But, I've never seen that in practice. Maybe the politics of the C suite mean you want those office politics back-stabbing folks around to take those high level positions?
- Tyr42 4y agoI mean, then the backstabbers just need to frame someone for backstabbing and get their path cleared up. You also need a good way to tell apart the backstabbers from the good guys.
- dh2022 4y agoC-suite people from different companies end up working together on company boards later in their career. To fire with cause and no severance and no parachute some back-stabbing VPs would make it more difficult to work with said back-stabbing VP later on a company board.
- adventured 4y agoFirst, you have to hire exceptional people, if you can. If you can't get good enough people, you're going to fail hard inevitably no matter what you do (if you've got a quasi monopoly moat it may take a long rot to get there).
- asda_ 4y ago[dead]
- version_five 4y agoGive them a budget and agree on a set of accountabilities. The same model as buying a managed software consulting project.
- dan-robertson 4y agoPaying for consultants often isn’t a good use of money though, right? Like often the problem is that the right metrics are hard to know in advance and they are typically games in a way that makes it easy for the consultant to meet them without actually delivering what is desired. I think they also make it hard to take (calculated) risks which isn’t necessarily what you’d want.
- ninjagoo 4y agoThere might be fundamental incompatibilities here because of orthogonal goals - if you're an ambitious person in a corporate hierarchy won't one (or maybe even primary) goal be to climb the ladder? And if you're a founder won't your goal be to 'grow the product or service'? Now one way to climb the ladder may be to grow the product or service, but in a larger org the ability to influence a product or service in a major way might be a bit limited, with decision-making at the business level being controlled by upper echelons. So the ladder-climbing process would select for different skills and temperament than founding/running a company. Essentially, in a corporate hierarchy, we're asking people with ladder-climbing skills to become business people as they reach the top, and not everyone can make that transition successfully. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that very few can actually make that transition successfully. Human brains learn through feedback [1]. To become a good business person, you need to run a business and get feedback just like a real founder/CEO, including business failures. Your question essentially becomes - how can a CEO structure incentives so that managers at all levels become good business people? It's a great question, to which there is no simple answer that I know of. Would appreciate any pointers to potential solutions. One way could be to treat each team at a certain level (say no more than 50 people) as a business of its own. It might not be the most efficient way for the corporation to deliver on its objectives, but it would likely create a lot of business-savvy managers. But now you have a pool of business-savvy folks that want to get paid like founders, and that might not be possible in a corporation. In terms of (in)efficiency, you could have duplicate teams that provide similar services, wasting resources, and adding costs to spin up new teams as existing ones fail or move on. Something like this might be more feasible at a societal level - a capitalistic structure that encourages the growth of smaller size businesses while inhibiting the growth of mid- to large corporates. Open source organizations actually seem to be the closest that I've seen that seem to operate this way. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA
- mooreds 4y agoHire people with the right kind of ambition, says Ben Horowitz: https://www.fastcompany.com/1685869/right-kind-ambition https://www.fastcompany.com/1685869/right-kind-ambition
- deltree7 4y agoI know HN hates him, but Elon Musk has figured this out and that's why he will always deliver outstanding returns compared to others.
- scarface74 4y agoHis company hasn’t delivered outstanding returns as far as profits. Tesla’s stock is mostly hype.
- chris11 4y agoTwitter is private, but Elon definitely destroyed value when he took it over.
- stuff4ben 4y agoHow exactly has he figured this out? I see an egomaniac that drives his employees as if they're just cogs in a machine.
- rippercushions 4y agoPer this thread, this seems preferable to letting managers spend all their time building empires. Also, if you're working for any large company, you are a cog in the machine.
- dasil003 4y agoI think both you and the GP are missing the essence of what Elon is. He is neither an amazing operator and businessman, nor is he a slave driving demon. He does have a huge ego and need for attention, I'll give you that, but fundamentally he is someone who cares more about solving big problems than he does about money or people. The push to deify or villify him is all about satisfying ones own judgement, but personally I find those reductive opinions to be far less interesting than actually looking at the various things he's done and evaluating them on their own merits.
- potatolicious 4y agoA few thoughts having worked at a bunch of large companies before, with varying degrees of rewarding empire-building. - The orgs most susceptible to rampant empire-building are ones where execs seem disconnected from the product. IMO the best way to discourage rampant headcount growth is for upper-level execs to scrutinize hiring needs. Some orgs (especially pre-2022) have been apt to approve headcount growth without sufficient oversight as to what the new people are actually supposed to be doing, and whether or not they're necessary. Loose hiring policies result not only in corp bloat and high expenditures, but reward empire-builder managers more than product-oriented managers. - To double down on that point, part of the problem is that in too many companies execs and managers don't speak product. The point of hiring is ostensibly to ship more/different/better product, but when execs themselves do not speak product hiring becomes divorced from this underlying goal. You hire so your seniors have juniors to mentor. You hire so a manager can get promoted. You hire to "expand your scope". But at the end of the day there is only one valid reason to actually hire: so the company can produce more/different/better products that it otherwise cannot do without hiring. This is especially true at companies like Google and Meta where the PM track and Engineering tracks are fully decoupled.
- mooreds 4y agoI remember in my first job, one of the older guys telling me that at a certain size of company, it's all about the turf battles between the upper level managers. And as a line level employee, you just want to be on the right side of the battle. Sounds pretty miserable to me; I suppose that's why I've stayed at smallcos/startups my entire career.
- andix 4y agoI think once a company hits around 2-5k office workers, the whole company can be occupied with internal processes, without delivering any value at all.
- rot13xor 4y agoCommunication overhead, like edges in a graph, scales quadratically. The computing analogy is going from 1 core to 8 core CPU gives far less than 8x performance if your task is not parallelizable. The solution is compartmentalization and clear interface boundaries, which is why microservices are so popular. Instead of 5k people working on 1 project, have 100 projects each with 50 people plus a few architects who define the interfaces.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 4y agoOh, so that's why the linux kernel uses microservices so much.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- djbusby 4y agoIs joek? Gotta be.
- bradleyjg 4y agoIt’s easy to say that but there’s lots of large, old, dysfunctional dinosaurs shipping oil, cars, or life insurance policies day in and day out. Meanwhile there’s plenty of small, nimble, managed-by-best-practices would be disruptors not shipping much of anything.
- scarface74 4y agoYou act as if this behavior is unique to management. Every leveling guideline I’ve seen for any big tech company (including the one I work for) requires you to demonstrate “scope” and “impact”.
- rippercushions 4y agoFor ICs those are usually measured with product metrics, not butts in seats.
- scarface74 4y agoHow many Google engineers got promoted by launching a product that was cancelled soon after?
- satvikpendem 4y agoIsn't this exactly what the book Bullshit Jobs is about? People build mini empires as a proxy for value.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago> I work at $BIGCO as a manager and have been told that, in practice, if I want to get a promotion to the next level, I'll need to grow my team large enough to have other managers reporting to me first. Imagine if at $BIGCO they told you that in practice, you need to reduce headcount and run as lean as possible so that your team brings as much monetary value for the company with the least amount of expense instead...
- HWR_14 4y agoI imagine a lot of IT folks or those in compliance would be promoted very fast and then quickly leave the company before the hidden costs caught up with them.
- greedo 4y agoThat's simply counter to how $BIGCOs work. Just look at infosec for a big corporation. There's no incentive on their part to minimize cost or disruption with strict security policies and audits. The people who feel the pain are the workers, not the CISSPs pushing STIG hardening rules. And if the C-Suite starts to wonder if all the time and money is worth it? Just show them some news reports of breaches. In many industries (especially highly regulated ones), the entire audit world of Deloitte et al is designed to make things unproductive.
- davidw 4y agoI read this stuff and I want to check out of the corporate world completely. Yeesh.
- munificent 4y ago> Building empires is quite standard in management. The same impulse exists in individual contributors too, which is why you see people architecting giant sprawling armies of microservices for something that could be a simple program running on a single machine. Some people like to just show off their ability to make big things without caring enough about what it's for.
- Traubenfuchs 4y agoI once built a series of microservices doing the same thing but with different external vendors. Originally I thought it would be best to add a dispatcher/orchestration microservice that other services would have to go through, because I thought the externally connected services would all end up with differet APIs. In the end, I managed to give all those services the same API, making the dispatcher service obsolete and overengineered. Ultimately I just shipped it because changing the architecture would have meant endless discussions with that one lead architect who actually gave nor shit about anything but pointless discussion and I was out of time. So I shipped all the services. In the last performance review, my boss complimented the amount of new services I put into production. I hate software engineering.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]