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Ugh, it’s so much simpler than that. Everyone’s number one objective in any company is to make their individual life easier. Full stop. The most obvious way to

Ugh, it’s so much simpler than that. Everyone’s number one objective in any company is to make their individual life easier. Full stop. The most obvious way to do that, if you have the ability/budget, is to hire people to do your work for you. Then you can brag about managing higher headcount, you do less work, and you flounder around as a very bad manager with no accountability so long as you keep your workload below the level of your manager (who, remember, hired you just to remove work from their own plate). Now remember that everyone you hired has the exact same incentive. It keeps going til the money runs out or until the company buckles under its own organizational complexity.

killingtime74 4y ago
I feel like you tried to describe it as a negative but that is called delegation and the trait of a good manager. Of course it's a spectrum and there are negatives and positives but the concept itself is not bad.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  It's not intrinsically negative, but IMO it's a far more powerful and far more prevalent force than the countervailing forces in most tech orgs.
deepsquirrelnet 4y ago
It is simpler, but not for the reasons you describe. The issue is that once you have layers of middle managers - as in managers managing managers, a snake pit ensues. Nobody gets into middle management and says “ahh at last, I’ve arrived”. The goal is to amass influence and push up as quickly as possible to try and reach the executive level. From here, it becomes a very political situation, rife with corporate climbers try to push each other down into the mud to reach upward. One way to appear influential is to manage a large team of people. Your main goal is to pull headcount for your org chart, while your peers are also trying to do the same. So you invent ridiculous “strategies” with inflated headcount requirements and promise astronomical results. It all stems from the personal ambitions of the people in the middle. And of course, they’re usually the most out of touch with the real operations of the company because they’re only peripherally connected to any actual work as a distant connection in the telephone game.
P_I_Staker 4y ago
I’ve seen lots of cases where this isn’t true. People are promoted to management because of their hard work and continue to work absurd hours. Some of them really do love work and are workaholics… more commonly they’ll always find a reason why they’re “needed”, because there will always be so much more to do. It’s often tough to tell the difference. However, I rarely see cases where less workload is a motivation for hiring. Often times it’s practically impossible for it to be… and hiring is really the only way they can get work added.
babyshake 4y ago
Equity is supposed to be the counterbalance to this. That is, if you have a very significant stake in a company and every person you hire you need to also give a significant stake, and every person they hire, on and so forth, you would think twice about just trying to throw more people at the problem of creating value. Of course, in reality the early folks just try to get fools to become bagholders of illiquid options that probably don't have a chance of being worth much once you factor in the liquidation preferences of VCs and that they are priced at absurd valuations once the VCs have gotten involved.
majikaja 4y ago
Or salaries come down to match the simplified workloads.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Every single thing in your comment rings false to me, as someone who has been both an IC and manager at startups and large corporations. Most importantly, there are very few managers and business leaders who think "You know what would make my life easier? Having a lot more people to manage!" The usual reason people are hired is because the needs (or anticipated needs, which can often be wildly off as we've seen recently) of the business require it, and without more people there will either be lost business opportunity or risk that existing employees are working at an unsustainable rate. I'm definitely not saying that businesses can't be inefficient, but when I read your sentence "Everyone’s number one objective in any company is to make their individual life easier" (with a "full stop" no less as if that somehow guarantees its unassailability), I honestly didn't know what you were talking about.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Heh a lot of people in this thread also seem to miss that as a company grows you have an accruing amount of vacation time on your team and need enough people to ensure the operation always runs. The operation also needs to be bus proof, over the last 2 years the branch we are in has had 3 people killed in car accidents around the world. And then we also have people leaving and new people being on boarded which means they won't be really useful for a month or more. We look at people and they generally work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Is it going to be surprising we need a whole lot of people running global operations 24/7?
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > Most importantly, there are very few managers and business leaders who think "You know what would make my life easier? Having a lot more people to manage!" If you're talking about good managers, then yes, having more people creates more work. The lazy middle managers aren't interested in hands-on middle management, though. They cultivate teams of people who can self-manage or be managed through fear. They take the people who need a lot of attention and they transfer them to other roles. They penalize anyone who asks too many questions or requires too much management input. These aren't good, hands-on managers. They may be great at talking big in meetings and schmoozing around the office, but they're not putting in the work to be hands-on with their employees.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
Every company I've worked for has had some core group of people who cared about doing good work and doing the right thing. No company can maintain that dynamic at scale, though. As you grow, you accumulate people who are good at presenting an image of doing the good work, but they're actually operating adversarially in a way that collects the most rewards with the least effort. It's not just managers. A lot of ICs treat the workplace like a min-max game, where they are trying to maximize their compensation and minimize the work they do. Every time I mention this, there are comments about how that's actually a good thing because companies have the same strategy, but the people who do this usually screw their teammates more than the company. Big companies don't suffer if random people are slacking off and refusing to do their work, but their teammates who want to get a promotion or build their skillsets are going to suffer the consequences of deadbeat coworkers. Small companies aren't immune from these problems, but it's so much easier to identify and remove the dead weight in a small company. When you have 20 people in a company, it's clearly obvious when someone isn't pulling their weight. But when you have 100,000 people in a company, a large number of people are going to find ways to settle into obscure roles where their output is hard to measure and they'll coast as much as they can.
- zcw100 4y ago
  I think I'm on number four... > Posting this just never gets old... > > It must have been a couple of months because... > >> I keep this link sitting around and enjoy dusting it off every couple of > >> months or so > >> https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
- 8note 4y ago
  Doing the right things tends to also not align with promotions either. The thing that helps your team mates us ignoring the business needs and min/maxing the promotion game. That's less fun than doing the right things, and more work than min/maxing your quality of life
  - ravenstine 4y ago
moomoo11 4y ago
Make things simpler? That’s news to me. If anything the more we have grown the more over engineering and obnoxious processes we have. All because late stage people just don’t really get it imo. When you start needing to have meetings so people can “feel like they belong” which translates to weeks of wasted cycles trying to find “what works for us” it’s ludicrous. You’re hired to do a job, maybe you’re a Java or Go engineer hired to work on services or infra. Or you’re hired to build UIs. You aren’t hired to waste time on setting up slack bots that become annoying af 2 sprints later and removed, or trying experiments instead of shipping. I can understand having technical processes to make our codebase better, but this side organizational engineering bullshit is just annoying. Idk it’s just stupid. Imo companies need to be leaner and have less people who actually just do their job. You know, the thing they’re paid 300k plus TC for. I’ve personally been picking up the slack on a bunch of people on my team along with a couple of OGs and new hires who are actually really good. It’s getting annoying now when people just literally are not doing their job and writing 20 page documents on process improvements. did we hire a consulting firm jokers or software engineers?
- chasd00 4y ago
  i've seen this before, people get obsessed with process. Then designing the process to do the job starts to become the job for them. You have to snap them out of it. It's not easy and sometimes they have to be shown the door.
- drain0 4y ago
  [dead]
- japanman425 4y ago
  You’re exactly the sort of person I’d hire, you’d do all my work for me!!
- Jensson 4y ago
  > If anything the more we have grown the more over engineering and obnoxious processes we have. That is because all the managers who have outsourced all their work to their direct reports now has to still produce evidence that the manager is still needed. So they ask you for reports and data, that they can hand to their managers. And those managers also try to come up with that sort of evidence, so middle managers asks for lots of reports and data from line managers that they can hand directly as is to their superiors etc. Too much work compiling all those reports etc? Hire a manager to do it for you, then hire more, try to ensure that their tasks produce the artifacts you need to hand to your manager. This isn't efficient for the company, but very efficient for your career. And that is the hardest part about being a manager, that the other managers acts like this and try to push all the real work onto you while taking all the credit.
satvikpendem 4y ago
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber is about exactly this phenomenon. Everyone should read it.

killingtime74 4y ago

I feel like you tried to describe it as a negative but that is called delegation and the trait of a good manager. Of course it's a spectrum and there are negatives and positives but the concept itself is not bad.

ethanbond 4y ago
It's not intrinsically negative, but IMO it's a far more powerful and far more prevalent force than the countervailing forces in most tech orgs.

deepsquirrelnet 4y ago

It is simpler, but not for the reasons you describe. The issue is that once you have layers of middle managers - as in managers managing managers, a snake pit ensues. Nobody gets into middle management and says “ahh at last, I’ve arrived”. The goal is to amass influence and push up as quickly as possible to try and reach the executive level. From here, it becomes a very political situation, rife with corporate climbers try to push each other down into the mud to reach upward. One way to appear influential is to manage a large team of people. Your main goal is to pull headcount for your org chart, while your peers are also trying to do the same. So you invent ridiculous “strategies” with inflated headcount requirements and promise astronomical results. It all stems from the personal ambitions of the people in the middle. And of course, they’re usually the most out of touch with the real operations of the company because they’re only peripherally connected to any actual work as a distant connection in the telephone game.

P_I_Staker 4y ago

I’ve seen lots of cases where this isn’t true. People are promoted to management because of their hard work and continue to work absurd hours. Some of them really do love work and are workaholics… more commonly they’ll always find a reason why they’re “needed”, because there will always be so much more to do. It’s often tough to tell the difference. However, I rarely see cases where less workload is a motivation for hiring. Often times it’s practically impossible for it to be… and hiring is really the only way they can get work added.

babyshake 4y ago

Equity is supposed to be the counterbalance to this. That is, if you have a very significant stake in a company and every person you hire you need to also give a significant stake, and every person they hire, on and so forth, you would think twice about just trying to throw more people at the problem of creating value. Of course, in reality the early folks just try to get fools to become bagholders of illiquid options that probably don't have a chance of being worth much once you factor in the liquidation preferences of VCs and that they are priced at absurd valuations once the VCs have gotten involved.

majikaja 4y ago

Or salaries come down to match the simplified workloads.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

Every single thing in your comment rings false to me, as someone who has been both an IC and manager at startups and large corporations. Most importantly, there are very few managers and business leaders who think "You know what would make my life easier? Having a lot more people to manage!" The usual reason people are hired is because the needs (or anticipated needs, which can often be wildly off as we've seen recently) of the business require it, and without more people there will either be lost business opportunity or risk that existing employees are working at an unsustainable rate. I'm definitely not saying that businesses can't be inefficient, but when I read your sentence "Everyone’s number one objective in any company is to make their individual life easier" (with a "full stop" no less as if that somehow guarantees its unassailability), I honestly didn't know what you were talking about.

pixl97 4y ago
Heh a lot of people in this thread also seem to miss that as a company grows you have an accruing amount of vacation time on your team and need enough people to ensure the operation always runs. The operation also needs to be bus proof, over the last 2 years the branch we are in has had 3 people killed in car accidents around the world. And then we also have people leaving and new people being on boarded which means they won't be really useful for a month or more. We look at people and they generally work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Is it going to be surprising we need a whole lot of people running global operations 24/7?
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> Most importantly, there are very few managers and business leaders who think "You know what would make my life easier? Having a lot more people to manage!" If you're talking about good managers, then yes, having more people creates more work. The lazy middle managers aren't interested in hands-on middle management, though. They cultivate teams of people who can self-manage or be managed through fear. They take the people who need a lot of attention and they transfer them to other roles. They penalize anyone who asks too many questions or requires too much management input. These aren't good, hands-on managers. They may be great at talking big in meetings and schmoozing around the office, but they're not putting in the work to be hands-on with their employees.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

Every company I've worked for has had some core group of people who cared about doing good work and doing the right thing. No company can maintain that dynamic at scale, though. As you grow, you accumulate people who are good at presenting an image of doing the good work, but they're actually operating adversarially in a way that collects the most rewards with the least effort. It's not just managers. A lot of ICs treat the workplace like a min-max game, where they are trying to maximize their compensation and minimize the work they do. Every time I mention this, there are comments about how that's actually a good thing because companies have the same strategy, but the people who do this usually screw their teammates more than the company. Big companies don't suffer if random people are slacking off and refusing to do their work, but their teammates who want to get a promotion or build their skillsets are going to suffer the consequences of deadbeat coworkers. Small companies aren't immune from these problems, but it's so much easier to identify and remove the dead weight in a small company. When you have 20 people in a company, it's clearly obvious when someone isn't pulling their weight. But when you have 100,000 people in a company, a large number of people are going to find ways to settle into obscure roles where their output is hard to measure and they'll coast as much as they can.

zcw100 4y ago
I think I'm on number four... > Posting this just never gets old... > > It must have been a couple of months because... > >> I keep this link sitting around and enjoy dusting it off every couple of > >> months or so > >> https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
8note 4y ago
Doing the right things tends to also not align with promotions either. The thing that helps your team mates us ignoring the business needs and min/maxing the promotion game. That's less fun than doing the right things, and more work than min/maxing your quality of life
- ravenstine 4y ago

moomoo11 4y ago

Make things simpler? That’s news to me. If anything the more we have grown the more over engineering and obnoxious processes we have. All because late stage people just don’t really get it imo. When you start needing to have meetings so people can “feel like they belong” which translates to weeks of wasted cycles trying to find “what works for us” it’s ludicrous. You’re hired to do a job, maybe you’re a Java or Go engineer hired to work on services or infra. Or you’re hired to build UIs. You aren’t hired to waste time on setting up slack bots that become annoying af 2 sprints later and removed, or trying experiments instead of shipping. I can understand having technical processes to make our codebase better, but this side organizational engineering bullshit is just annoying. Idk it’s just stupid. Imo companies need to be leaner and have less people who actually just do their job. You know, the thing they’re paid 300k plus TC for. I’ve personally been picking up the slack on a bunch of people on my team along with a couple of OGs and new hires who are actually really good. It’s getting annoying now when people just literally are not doing their job and writing 20 page documents on process improvements. did we hire a consulting firm jokers or software engineers?

chasd00 4y ago
i've seen this before, people get obsessed with process. Then designing the process to do the job starts to become the job for them. You have to snap them out of it. It's not easy and sometimes they have to be shown the door.
drain0 4y ago
[dead]
japanman425 4y ago
You’re exactly the sort of person I’d hire, you’d do all my work for me!!
Jensson 4y ago
> If anything the more we have grown the more over engineering and obnoxious processes we have. That is because all the managers who have outsourced all their work to their direct reports now has to still produce evidence that the manager is still needed. So they ask you for reports and data, that they can hand to their managers. And those managers also try to come up with that sort of evidence, so middle managers asks for lots of reports and data from line managers that they can hand directly as is to their superiors etc. Too much work compiling all those reports etc? Hire a manager to do it for you, then hire more, try to ensure that their tasks produce the artifacts you need to hand to your manager. This isn't efficient for the company, but very efficient for your career. And that is the hardest part about being a manager, that the other managers acts like this and try to push all the real work onto you while taking all the credit.

satvikpendem 4y ago

Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber is about exactly this phenomenon. Everyone should read it.