5 ms·

Productive work and non-productive work largely pay the same. Almost all middle-earning but high-productivity jobs will have a legion of support staff earning a

Productive work and non-productive work largely pay the same. Almost all middle-earning but high-productivity jobs will have a legion of support staff earning almost exactly the same wage but doing nothing that is productive in itself. The only place I have found this not to be true is in finance, where there is a clear incentive to reduce operational costs in order to increase the bonus pool. In engineering, tech, healthcare (almost everywhere in local govt), actually acquiring skills is pointless (if you are able to nepo your way into a management role). That is how you end up with large numbers of over-qualified people simultaneous with low productivity. All the subsidies and incentives for firms to train staff make no difference, we have all the skills we need but the price of those skills is very low. The problem is management competence. Most managers are also unskilled, even managers with technical skill usually come into management after graduating not after working at a lower level. This kind of mismanagement happens everywhere but is the rule in the UK. The US is quite far from perfect, but the UK is not even close to this level yet. We are still at the level where the system is not working.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Hot gptchat take of the minute: programmers are less threatened than middle management Imagine replacing middle managers with basically dictation and tracking personnel and delegatingdecisions and report to chatgpt.
- skippyboxedhero 4y ago
  A colleague who is non-tech but does light ETL work (this relates to the subject: only in the UK could they fail to hire someone to actually do this work properly) was propounding to me about the benefits of ChatGPT. He could ask it for Python or SQL, and he could just paste it in and it would do all his tasks. His conclusion was: programmers are getting replaced, and he will replace them. In reality, he will get replaced because all he is doing copy-pasting snippets. To actually build a full system that will slough away staff requires domain knowledge that a chatbot doesn't have. ChatGPT will come first for the people using it most now. I often think about starting a business-process outsourcing company in the UK. I know there are companies in Japan (also a country known for overhiring). But then you talk to managers about their processes, and you realise they genuinely do not understand anything about technology...it is just pointless, like trying to teach German to a chimp. The stuff you see in local govt/healthcare would bring people on here to tears. The local govt was trying to hire people to improve processes...their listed tech contained no programming languages and just included managed services. You see tech roles, and it is all the same: just managed services, no actual coding...it is incredible.
  - cosmodisk 4y ago
    I'm currently in some surreal world because of a large government contract our company had won. Multiple companies are involved. Lack of any meaningful systems, people who have no technical understanding about anything making decisions, data requests have timelines as we could simply magic them up on demand. People don't understand data, statistics, not to mention systems. Some are paid handsomely for, frankly speaking ,not doing much. I often have an imposter syndrome,but it looks like the bar is really really low.
    - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
      I think this is the issue everywhere with govt (if you are not based in the UK). But yes, it isn't the lack of use of tech in management, they aren't even aware of what modern tech is. From what I have seen, the managers are "experts" in managed services deployments, there is no capacity for actual tech hires (and then they hire consultants who fuck it up, and they complain about how hard tech is...when a core part of their job should be to hire and run the project). Complaining about govt is eternal though. My local council offers unskilled, internal-only jobs at pay levels similar to dev jobs in the private sector at the same level of seniority...and the council has twenty people to the job of one person...what can you say?
  - _dain_ 4y ago
    >The stuff you see in local govt/healthcare would bring people on here to tears. The local govt was trying to hire people to improve processes...their listed tech contained no programming languages and just included managed services. You see tech roles, and it is all the same: just managed services, no actual coding...it is incredible. you talk about hiring under-qualified people, but they also hire over-qualified people and don't know what to do with them. I got hired out of university as a "data scientist" in the govt; but it turned out they actually didn't have any data science to give me. they just slotted me into the same excel clusterfuck workflows they always had. the inefficiency was unimaginable, it was like the spreadsheet dark ages. i tried to clean things up on my own initiative, automate them, have proper version control and data pipelines in code rather than manual steps described in piles of word documents; but I was the only person in my section of the org chart who had the skills or even cared about the problems. I could make things better in my tiny corner, but everyone I had to work with was clueless, so there was only so much I could do. so I just quit out of boredom and frustration. then I got a SWE job for more than twice the pay.
- dumbfoundded 4y ago
  Programmers just move up the stack with some staying behind to manage the edge cases and optimizations in the underlying tech. Same thing happened with the move to cloud. It's unclear which jobs with be enabled with more productivity vs replaced completely.
- ben_w 4y ago
  My experience with ChatGPT is that while it knows more than I do about anything I'm not an expert in, it isn't as good as me in my expertise — a literal jack of all trades and a master of none — so while I would expect it to be better than a junior manager fresh out of management school, and definitely better than someone who shambled into management by accident when they founded a company and needed to grow it, I don't expect it to be as good as even an average manager.
  - staunton 4y ago
    The interesting question is: what roles will it be able to replace first when it gets yet much better at everything it does now?
    - ben_w 4y ago
      Propaganda. That is the first thing I can think of where it doesn't need to be particularly connected to reality. Even fiction needs to have long-term coherence; propaganda can be "arguments as soldiers".
  - porknubbins 4y ago
    I work on cars and motorcycles and for fun I like to ask ChatGPT how to do certain repair tasks. It usually perfectly outlines the steps to complete the repair, then glosses over all the details a real world human would want to know. Like step 6 to rebuild a brake caliper will be something like “next rebuild the caliper”. I suspect this information is just not in its training data. It would be interesting if it could learn from youtube videos somehow.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      In principle it can be used as part of a larger system that learns from videos (NVIDIA did that with Minecraft) though I'd say it's a meaningfully different kind of AI at that point. https://youtu.be/5LL6z1Ganbw https://youtu.be/5LL6z1Ganbw
- Spooky23 4y ago
  That would be fun. “Hello individual contributor, this is WorkGPT, you have completed 6 TPS reports, and your minimal quota is 2. Rectify the situation immediately or join the PIP program. Have a Nice Day!”
  - precompute 4y ago
    Brazil vibes
- vsareto 4y ago
  It's nice to imagine, but tech puts its quality gates around developers. That means developers will end up having to prove they are better than a manager-using-ChatGPT, rather than managers having to prove anything.
- jollofricepeas 4y ago
  The reason we have managers in engineering is: - some developers don’t want to work - some developers have no social skills and work to ruin the morale of everyone else on their team - some developers don’t want to interact with the client or the business - some developers don’t want to do anything that remotely looks like project management or agile or otherwise. - some developers have no idea what the business does or how to meaningfully contribute as engineers - some developers don’t want to pair, mob or provide training of any kind to junior engineers - some developers don’t want to participate in interviewing or recruiting others on the team - some developers just want to write code and go home there’s a reason we have middle managers and until devs want to do more than “just write code” than… …there will always be middle management in engineering.
  - precompute 4y ago
    > some developers just want to write code and go home This is the only good point here. The truth is, middle managers exist because technical work is seen lowly anywhere the management is stupid enough to think that technical competency is easy to acquire. Also, these developers that never participate are usually the ones that get promoted to middle management.
    - jollofricepeas 4y ago
      Tried reading this comment a few times and I don’t understand it at all. Please clarify.
      - precompute 4y ago
        Sorry for the run-on sentence. Managers that do not value technical competence very often think that it is easy to acquire; that it only takes a few years of work, and / or that being able to interface with computers is a rather banal skill. This makes them grossly undervalue people that work with software / computers. Middle Managers are hence elected as buffer between them and the "peasants" (AKA "IT Guys"). Usually, these middle managers are elected right from the peasantry, and often it's the person that sticks out. This is also often the least technically competent member of the team / department.
acatnamedjoe 4y ago
Do you have any evidence to support the statement that this is "the rule in the UK"? Anecdotally (in the UK) I've only ever known managers of technical teams to have risen from technical roles, and have never heard of anyone going straight into technical management from university. I'm not super experienced though so very open to my experience not being the norm, just curious if you were speaking from experience or research.
- skippyboxedhero 4y ago
  Yes, you are right. Within IT, that is definitely true...and creates it's own problems because devs (in the UK) often lack business skills..and the alternative is a non-dev who lacks tech skills. But the example I gave is more prevalent within engineering generally. Engineering grads will hope to either work in banking or go directly into management scheme (GE was the premium one...when GE was big, defence is the other big one). The pay for actual engineering work (outside O&G) is very low, and only attractive because PHd work is even more exploitative.
Felger 4y ago
This is almost the same situation in France. Very same issue with management. Most middle earning jobs don't need hard skills anymore, so most of employees gradually lost them over the time (and not the opposite, like a muscle). The gen-Z is additionnaly often missing the most basic soft skills : basic, social skills, punctuality... or even coming to work at all. So we are gradually building a generation where about two-thirds of people have... no more or almost no skills whatsoever. Can't change a wheel, can't swap a breaker, can't replace a tap, can't do more than basic IT-assisted tasks in a predefined process. More and more youngs must try hard to get their driver license, and so city dwellers conveniently skip it (but a good thing in the end). To the point that basic maths are a thing of the past for them. Perhaps 10% are currently able to write this very comment. Let's not even talk about financial education at this point, more than 60% fail at giving you the right amount of two years worth of an account interests. I can witness that even business holders are gradually losing skills at running their own businesses those last two decades. Their skill in the differents subjects they must address all day long are almost all declining, even their core ones. They don't want to make longer work hours anymore than their employees and want to "Netflix and Chill" like everyone else. Remains about the 20% skilled, but I have the feeling that over the last 20 years their portion is progressively shrinking. Lack of forecast made health pro number dwindle, "true" engineers (mechanical/electrical/civil) are harder and harder to find since a non-negligible part of them leave the country after completing their studies. Are we going to make Idiocracy a reality sooner that expected ?
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  I don’t know about the merits of this argument, but it feels like a bit of an old-man ‘back in my day’ argument. A few things I note: - France has significantly higher productivity per hour than the U.K., but possibly this is due to workers working fewer hours. France has also had (slightly) better productivity growth since the financial crisis - Is it actually relevant for young people to be able to replace taps or whatever? Cars are more reliable these days so there are fewer forced learning opportunities. If you are young and live in some city apartment, maybe you don’t even drive and maybe you shouldn’t be doing DIY plumbing on a property you don’t own. But these also feel to me like quite arbitrary standards – most young people likely have jobs that don’t require them to know how to change a tap and when you were young, your jobs likely didn’t require you to know how to use the Internet (or whatever – I don’t know how long ago you were starting work). - If you look at the standardised international measures for things like literacy and numeracy, you’ll likely find that (1) the highest level feels like a pretty low level of ability to you and (2) a percentage of any developed country you pick won’t perform at this level, and you’ll likely find that percentage surprisingly high - So, maybe there’s also an effect where the older people you interact with have picked up random skills over the years and become more ‘stratified’ such that you are less likely to interact with someone whom you think doesn’t know much but the young people you meet haven’t had so many of these random chances and are a more representative sample of the general population? I don’t know anything about the situation in France though. Maybe you’re just plain right.
marcinzm 4y ago
>The problem is management competence. Most managers are also unskilled, even managers with technical skill usually come into management after graduating not after working at a lower level. My observation is that in general managers are optimizing the thing that personally benefits them the most: their pay, promotions and careers. The company doing well has rather little impact on that so they don't optimize for that. Promotions for managers either in the same company or at a new company are often based on headcount they managed. So they focus on making the team grow irrespective of value from that. Their bosses are aiming for the same thing so everyone is aligned. It's not incompetence but a lack of belief that helping the corporation for the sake of helping the corporation is of any value.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  I also hear this as a pretty common complaint of companies in the US (including big tech companies). It feels too generic to explain why things are different for the UK
osrec 4y ago
As someone who spent a number of years in finance, finance is really not that different to the other industries you mentioned.
- skippyboxedhero 4y ago
  I think it is definitely true that finance overuses over-skilled, low-wage workers but my point is that there is also quite a strong incentive to keep a lid on those costs due to the organization distinction between back and front-office work. Imo, banks are the rare example of an industry that has moved with the times in the UK (largely because many of them, even the British ones, are run and managed by non-UK people). They are far from perfect, but you don't see bankers getting paid the same back-office admin guy...that does happen in engineering though.
danaris 4y ago
> Almost all middle-earning but high-productivity jobs will have a legion of support staff earning almost exactly the same wage but doing nothing that is productive in itself. Gotta be somewhat careful about these kinds of characterizations, though. A lot of support staff may not be doing things that are directly producing profitable output for the company, but they still provide necessary services (and, well, support) that enable the people who are "line workers" to be more, and more consistently, productive. A great example is IT, especially in a non-tech-oriented company. Without a competent IT department, your workers will struggle every time there's a bug, or the power goes out, or they forget their passwords. And yet, as has been seen all too often, IT is a "cost center". And, indeed, it's not at all uncommon for there to be many incompetent IT people in a given large company, who are exactly the kind of unproductive drag on the business that you describe. My point, ultimately, is that any attempt to divide employees into "produces value, good for the company" and "unproductive, bad for the company" cannot be done by simple categorization; it requires actually evaluating the individuals' contributions. Which, exactly as you say, far too few managers are actually capable of doing.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

Hot gptchat take of the minute: programmers are less threatened than middle management Imagine replacing middle managers with basically dictation and tracking personnel and delegatingdecisions and report to chatgpt.

skippyboxedhero 4y ago
A colleague who is non-tech but does light ETL work (this relates to the subject: only in the UK could they fail to hire someone to actually do this work properly) was propounding to me about the benefits of ChatGPT. He could ask it for Python or SQL, and he could just paste it in and it would do all his tasks. His conclusion was: programmers are getting replaced, and he will replace them. In reality, he will get replaced because all he is doing copy-pasting snippets. To actually build a full system that will slough away staff requires domain knowledge that a chatbot doesn't have. ChatGPT will come first for the people using it most now. I often think about starting a business-process outsourcing company in the UK. I know there are companies in Japan (also a country known for overhiring). But then you talk to managers about their processes, and you realise they genuinely do not understand anything about technology...it is just pointless, like trying to teach German to a chimp. The stuff you see in local govt/healthcare would bring people on here to tears. The local govt was trying to hire people to improve processes...their listed tech contained no programming languages and just included managed services. You see tech roles, and it is all the same: just managed services, no actual coding...it is incredible.
- cosmodisk 4y ago
  I'm currently in some surreal world because of a large government contract our company had won. Multiple companies are involved. Lack of any meaningful systems, people who have no technical understanding about anything making decisions, data requests have timelines as we could simply magic them up on demand. People don't understand data, statistics, not to mention systems. Some are paid handsomely for, frankly speaking ,not doing much. I often have an imposter syndrome,but it looks like the bar is really really low.
  - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
    I think this is the issue everywhere with govt (if you are not based in the UK). But yes, it isn't the lack of use of tech in management, they aren't even aware of what modern tech is. From what I have seen, the managers are "experts" in managed services deployments, there is no capacity for actual tech hires (and then they hire consultants who fuck it up, and they complain about how hard tech is...when a core part of their job should be to hire and run the project). Complaining about govt is eternal though. My local council offers unskilled, internal-only jobs at pay levels similar to dev jobs in the private sector at the same level of seniority...and the council has twenty people to the job of one person...what can you say?
- _dain_ 4y ago
  >The stuff you see in local govt/healthcare would bring people on here to tears. The local govt was trying to hire people to improve processes...their listed tech contained no programming languages and just included managed services. You see tech roles, and it is all the same: just managed services, no actual coding...it is incredible. you talk about hiring under-qualified people, but they also hire over-qualified people and don't know what to do with them. I got hired out of university as a "data scientist" in the govt; but it turned out they actually didn't have any data science to give me. they just slotted me into the same excel clusterfuck workflows they always had. the inefficiency was unimaginable, it was like the spreadsheet dark ages. i tried to clean things up on my own initiative, automate them, have proper version control and data pipelines in code rather than manual steps described in piles of word documents; but I was the only person in my section of the org chart who had the skills or even cared about the problems. I could make things better in my tiny corner, but everyone I had to work with was clueless, so there was only so much I could do. so I just quit out of boredom and frustration. then I got a SWE job for more than twice the pay.
dumbfoundded 4y ago
Programmers just move up the stack with some staying behind to manage the edge cases and optimizations in the underlying tech. Same thing happened with the move to cloud. It's unclear which jobs with be enabled with more productivity vs replaced completely.
ben_w 4y ago
My experience with ChatGPT is that while it knows more than I do about anything I'm not an expert in, it isn't as good as me in my expertise — a literal jack of all trades and a master of none — so while I would expect it to be better than a junior manager fresh out of management school, and definitely better than someone who shambled into management by accident when they founded a company and needed to grow it, I don't expect it to be as good as even an average manager.
- staunton 4y ago
  The interesting question is: what roles will it be able to replace first when it gets yet much better at everything it does now?
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Propaganda. That is the first thing I can think of where it doesn't need to be particularly connected to reality. Even fiction needs to have long-term coherence; propaganda can be "arguments as soldiers".
- porknubbins 4y ago
  I work on cars and motorcycles and for fun I like to ask ChatGPT how to do certain repair tasks. It usually perfectly outlines the steps to complete the repair, then glosses over all the details a real world human would want to know. Like step 6 to rebuild a brake caliper will be something like “next rebuild the caliper”. I suspect this information is just not in its training data. It would be interesting if it could learn from youtube videos somehow.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    In principle it can be used as part of a larger system that learns from videos (NVIDIA did that with Minecraft) though I'd say it's a meaningfully different kind of AI at that point. https://youtu.be/5LL6z1Ganbw https://youtu.be/5LL6z1Ganbw
Spooky23 4y ago
That would be fun. “Hello individual contributor, this is WorkGPT, you have completed 6 TPS reports, and your minimal quota is 2. Rectify the situation immediately or join the PIP program. Have a Nice Day!”
- precompute 4y ago
  Brazil vibes
vsareto 4y ago
It's nice to imagine, but tech puts its quality gates around developers. That means developers will end up having to prove they are better than a manager-using-ChatGPT, rather than managers having to prove anything.
jollofricepeas 4y ago
The reason we have managers in engineering is: - some developers don’t want to work - some developers have no social skills and work to ruin the morale of everyone else on their team - some developers don’t want to interact with the client or the business - some developers don’t want to do anything that remotely looks like project management or agile or otherwise. - some developers have no idea what the business does or how to meaningfully contribute as engineers - some developers don’t want to pair, mob or provide training of any kind to junior engineers - some developers don’t want to participate in interviewing or recruiting others on the team - some developers just want to write code and go home there’s a reason we have middle managers and until devs want to do more than “just write code” than… …there will always be middle management in engineering.
- precompute 4y ago
  > some developers just want to write code and go home This is the only good point here. The truth is, middle managers exist because technical work is seen lowly anywhere the management is stupid enough to think that technical competency is easy to acquire. Also, these developers that never participate are usually the ones that get promoted to middle management.
  - jollofricepeas 4y ago
    Tried reading this comment a few times and I don’t understand it at all. Please clarify.
    - precompute 4y ago
      Sorry for the run-on sentence. Managers that do not value technical competence very often think that it is easy to acquire; that it only takes a few years of work, and / or that being able to interface with computers is a rather banal skill. This makes them grossly undervalue people that work with software / computers. Middle Managers are hence elected as buffer between them and the "peasants" (AKA "IT Guys"). Usually, these middle managers are elected right from the peasantry, and often it's the person that sticks out. This is also often the least technically competent member of the team / department.

acatnamedjoe 4y ago

Do you have any evidence to support the statement that this is "the rule in the UK"? Anecdotally (in the UK) I've only ever known managers of technical teams to have risen from technical roles, and have never heard of anyone going straight into technical management from university. I'm not super experienced though so very open to my experience not being the norm, just curious if you were speaking from experience or research.

skippyboxedhero 4y ago
Yes, you are right. Within IT, that is definitely true...and creates it's own problems because devs (in the UK) often lack business skills..and the alternative is a non-dev who lacks tech skills. But the example I gave is more prevalent within engineering generally. Engineering grads will hope to either work in banking or go directly into management scheme (GE was the premium one...when GE was big, defence is the other big one). The pay for actual engineering work (outside O&G) is very low, and only attractive because PHd work is even more exploitative.

Felger 4y ago

This is almost the same situation in France. Very same issue with management. Most middle earning jobs don't need hard skills anymore, so most of employees gradually lost them over the time (and not the opposite, like a muscle). The gen-Z is additionnaly often missing the most basic soft skills : basic, social skills, punctuality... or even coming to work at all. So we are gradually building a generation where about two-thirds of people have... no more or almost no skills whatsoever. Can't change a wheel, can't swap a breaker, can't replace a tap, can't do more than basic IT-assisted tasks in a predefined process. More and more youngs must try hard to get their driver license, and so city dwellers conveniently skip it (but a good thing in the end). To the point that basic maths are a thing of the past for them. Perhaps 10% are currently able to write this very comment. Let's not even talk about financial education at this point, more than 60% fail at giving you the right amount of two years worth of an account interests. I can witness that even business holders are gradually losing skills at running their own businesses those last two decades. Their skill in the differents subjects they must address all day long are almost all declining, even their core ones. They don't want to make longer work hours anymore than their employees and want to "Netflix and Chill" like everyone else. Remains about the 20% skilled, but I have the feeling that over the last 20 years their portion is progressively shrinking. Lack of forecast made health pro number dwindle, "true" engineers (mechanical/electrical/civil) are harder and harder to find since a non-negligible part of them leave the country after completing their studies. Are we going to make Idiocracy a reality sooner that expected ?

dan-robertson 4y ago
I don’t know about the merits of this argument, but it feels like a bit of an old-man ‘back in my day’ argument. A few things I note: - France has significantly higher productivity per hour than the U.K., but possibly this is due to workers working fewer hours. France has also had (slightly) better productivity growth since the financial crisis - Is it actually relevant for young people to be able to replace taps or whatever? Cars are more reliable these days so there are fewer forced learning opportunities. If you are young and live in some city apartment, maybe you don’t even drive and maybe you shouldn’t be doing DIY plumbing on a property you don’t own. But these also feel to me like quite arbitrary standards – most young people likely have jobs that don’t require them to know how to change a tap and when you were young, your jobs likely didn’t require you to know how to use the Internet (or whatever – I don’t know how long ago you were starting work). - If you look at the standardised international measures for things like literacy and numeracy, you’ll likely find that (1) the highest level feels like a pretty low level of ability to you and (2) a percentage of any developed country you pick won’t perform at this level, and you’ll likely find that percentage surprisingly high - So, maybe there’s also an effect where the older people you interact with have picked up random skills over the years and become more ‘stratified’ such that you are less likely to interact with someone whom you think doesn’t know much but the young people you meet haven’t had so many of these random chances and are a more representative sample of the general population? I don’t know anything about the situation in France though. Maybe you’re just plain right.

marcinzm 4y ago

>The problem is management competence. Most managers are also unskilled, even managers with technical skill usually come into management after graduating not after working at a lower level. My observation is that in general managers are optimizing the thing that personally benefits them the most: their pay, promotions and careers. The company doing well has rather little impact on that so they don't optimize for that. Promotions for managers either in the same company or at a new company are often based on headcount they managed. So they focus on making the team grow irrespective of value from that. Their bosses are aiming for the same thing so everyone is aligned. It's not incompetence but a lack of belief that helping the corporation for the sake of helping the corporation is of any value.

dan-robertson 4y ago
I also hear this as a pretty common complaint of companies in the US (including big tech companies). It feels too generic to explain why things are different for the UK

osrec 4y ago

As someone who spent a number of years in finance, finance is really not that different to the other industries you mentioned.

skippyboxedhero 4y ago
I think it is definitely true that finance overuses over-skilled, low-wage workers but my point is that there is also quite a strong incentive to keep a lid on those costs due to the organization distinction between back and front-office work. Imo, banks are the rare example of an industry that has moved with the times in the UK (largely because many of them, even the British ones, are run and managed by non-UK people). They are far from perfect, but you don't see bankers getting paid the same back-office admin guy...that does happen in engineering though.

danaris 4y ago

> Almost all middle-earning but high-productivity jobs will have a legion of support staff earning almost exactly the same wage but doing nothing that is productive in itself. Gotta be somewhat careful about these kinds of characterizations, though. A lot of support staff may not be doing things that are directly producing profitable output for the company, but they still provide necessary services (and, well, support) that enable the people who are "line workers" to be more, and more consistently, productive. A great example is IT, especially in a non-tech-oriented company. Without a competent IT department, your workers will struggle every time there's a bug, or the power goes out, or they forget their passwords. And yet, as has been seen all too often, IT is a "cost center". And, indeed, it's not at all uncommon for there to be many incompetent IT people in a given large company, who are exactly the kind of unproductive drag on the business that you describe. My point, ultimately, is that any attempt to divide employees into "produces value, good for the company" and "unproductive, bad for the company" cannot be done by simple categorization; it requires actually evaluating the individuals' contributions. Which, exactly as you say, far too few managers are actually capable of doing.