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That article was a very nice surprise and apart from how crushingly accurate it is (before somebody jumps in to defend all the corporate chaos, of course) it al

That article was a very nice surprise and apart from how crushingly accurate it is (before somebody jumps in to defend all the corporate chaos, of course) it also had me giggling several times while reading it. The answer of course is financial incentives. It is the answer 99% of the time, I know quite a few high-profile managers at this point and they are all very smart and get stuff done people and yet they allow themselves be dragged into endless meetings and they know the script (that the OP author is referring to several times) and they recite it by heart. Because if they don't, their manager is going to think they are useless and will inevitably fire them. People find a cushy place to work in with a good salary, then just work their way up the economical ladder (or the organizational) and will do anything that's needed to achieve that goal. It's as simple as that, and I am convinced that a good chunk of these people (probably 20%-30%) are very well aware they are bullshitters but they think they have no choice. At the same time, I've known a few company owners long time ago who were just BEGGING their managers to tell them the problems exactly as they are, swore on their lives they will not fire the managers for bringing them bad news (and made contracts that made sure of it in no uncertain terms)... and yet all of the managers below those people were sycophant yes-men. Quite tragic really. All of this is a collective delusion. I keep remembering this old article -- "Bullshit Jobs" -- and yep, it still rings true to this day, and will likely do so for decades more, likely centuries even because our societal changes are slower than glaciers...

88913527 3y ago
You can make improvements, but it ends up being small things that you can showcase to leaders to demonstrate that progress is happening, but it's nothing of actual material value. It's a lot like public political discourse where a policy solution is touted, all the ooh's and ahh's, but then nothing really changes.
- pdimitar 3y ago
  Yep, I have found the same over my career. It's better than nothing, I agree on that, but it still ends up being infuriating because it's so damned slow. Truth is, everyone just wants to clock out and go home. CEOs included.
campbel 3y ago
Part of the problem has to be that as an individual in an organization it seems like a better ROI for your effort to grow your share of the pie than the entire pie itself. Individual incentives are naturally going to be aligned by advancement and "being difficult" is something everyone wants to avoid. Easier to shed blame and avoid accountability than try to fix the social and political structure of your organization. Mostly because even if you succeed, the organization wouldn't be sophisticated enough to understand and credit you for the work.
- hooverd 3y ago
  Your reward for growing the pie is one (1) pizza pie.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - disqard 3y ago
    When the moonshot hits the sky You score a bonus pizza pie! That's amore...
- borroka 3y ago
  I work for a company that employs 100k people. The effects of my work strategy and behavior on the company's revenue, profit, vision, products are zero. On the contrary, the effects of my work strategy and behavior on my salary and position can be quite pronounced. My company can fire me tomorrow, they will forget my name in 5 days. To "fire" my company, I need to find another job, maybe in another city, working with colleagues I don't know who may eat food at lunch break I don't like the smell of. It is not hard to guess where I spend most of my efforts and thinking.
  - repomies69 3y ago
    > My company can fire me tomorrow, they will forget my name in 5 days. To "fire" my company, I need to find another job, maybe in another city, working with colleagues I don't know who may eat food at lunch break I don't like the smell of. I don't think is very good comparison, generally. Some other company could offer you a job and you can leave any time. Depending on your tasks, the company might have very difficult time finding replacement personnel. This could be very significant (relative) cost for the company. Personally I have always lived in countries where employee protection laws are very employee-friendly. Companies can't just fire people at will, they need good reasons. There might be significant fines for misfiring for wrong reasons.
Loggias 3y ago
I’m curious now which article you’re referring to at the end of your comment. I know “Bullshit Jobs” only from the book by David Graeber, which is definitely worth a read for anyone interested in the topic.
mdekkers 3y ago
What you are describing is also known as “The Peter Principle” which holds that everyone will eventually be promoted to their level of incompetence. Smart companies know this and make sure it doesn’t cripple their business.
- pdimitar 3y ago
  If they were so smart they would cut some cruft. Or most of it.
fallingfrog 3y ago
Yeah perverse financial incentives describe 99% of the stupidity we put up with daily. Like, why when you look at the labeling of a bottle of Tylenol do you find a description of the trademarks, a non-discrimination clause, and several paragraphs regarding liability in imaginary scenarios written in impenetrable legalese? But, it’s impossible to find the actual dosage chart? Which one will kill you if you get it wrong? Which one does the manufacturer think is important? Why are those never the same?
- astrange 3y ago
  I'm 100% sure my Tylenol bottles have dosage charts on them, not only because it's so easy to fatally overdose on it but also because manufacturing it is extremely regulated and nobody cares what the manufacturers think about anything.
  - throw9away6 3y ago
    It’s there but not easy to find
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      They used to be easy to find, but some years back they redesigned seemingly all pill bottles to hide the instructions. It’s a frustration and makes me wish ill on whoever is behind it, every single time I need to use such a medicine.
      - throw9away6 3y ago
        Sometimes it’s not even on the bottle but on the panthlet that comes with it
tuatoru 3y ago
> I've known a few company owners long time ago who ... swore on their lives they will not fire the managers for bringing them bad news It needs to go further. Fire everyone who says there are no problems. If there are no problems, why is an under-manager needed? Also fire everyone who makes up bullshit problems. If you're going to agree with me all the time, why do I need you?
- l0b0 3y ago
  Too easy to game: People are just going to gauge for themselves what management considers "not a bullshit problem" and report that, making sure that the blame rests on unpopular people or third parties. Too prone to false positives: Any project which is genuinely going really well results in everyone getting fired, and the company absolutely tanks as a result.
  - campbel 3y ago
    Exactly, an effective CEO / Executive is going to be developing systems of accountability that align with company goals. It can't be based entirely on a set of gameable metrics. However this starts at the top. An incompetent board / CEO is going to create misaligned incentives which will cascade through the organization.
    - sixstringtheory 3y ago
      It seems to me that if you want to be a CEO that wants to stay connected at the ground level, then you have to actually do that: you have to know each engineer, and understand the work they’re doing on any given day. Naturally, this tightly constrains the possible size of the company. If you want to grow beyond that size you must accept that you will become disconnected and out of touch and all of the bs being discussed here will inevitably creep in.
      - tuatoru 3y ago
        Long ago I worked in places where the CEO did exactly that. "Management by walking around" (it even had the abbreviation MBWA) has fallen out of favor, though. People just don't walk any more. This was about 1000 people.
js8 3y ago
That's why I am a fan of democracy, even in economic sphere (aka socialism or cooperatives). Giving everybody the same single vote (same power) about the organization (and making it into an unchangeable fact) removes lots of these incentives that prevent improving the organization. But lot of people are blindly accepting capitalism, because.. well it's incidentally also explained in the article, why.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Corporations from the perspective of most employees are communists dictatorships. Think about it: you use a communal means of production, distribute profits centrally, and you don’t get to vote for who gets to be your manager.
  - uoaei 3y ago
    I guess misconceptions like these are why theorists abandoned the term 'communism' in favor of 'communalism' to explain what they meant. This isn't even a no-true-scotsman argument, but if all that comes to mind when communism comes up is Soviet dictatorship, the cold war propaganda worked.
    - tilne 3y ago
      What should come to mind when communism comes up then?
      - coxmi 3y ago
        Something along the lines of: A socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. I guess the point of the poster above is that the word communism just confuses things in the initial statement — it’s just a dictatorship. Socialists and communists fairly uniquely believe in workplace democracy.
      - harimau777 3y ago
        A rule of thumb that makes sense to me is that communism generally differs from socialism in that it advocates one or more of the following: - People actually living and working in communes. - Abolition of private property (note: this is not the same as personal property). - Extreme redistribution and/or equality in wealth/income. I'm sure that this isn't a perfect heuristic; however, I think it's often useful for detecting when someone is trying to describe something as communism in order to make it look bad.
MattGaiser 3y ago
> At the same time, I've known a few company owners long time ago who were just BEGGING their managers to tell them the problems exactly as they are, swore on their lives they will not fire the managers for bringing them bad news (and made contracts that made sure of it in no uncertain terms)... and yet all of the managers below those people were sycophant yes-men. Contracts are insufficient here. A contract doesn't prevent my boss from being unhappy with me and making my life miserable. A contract does not ensure promotion. As an employee, there is no upside for risk, making any risk unacceptable.
- pdimitar 3y ago
  Yep, I get that, but what should an open-minded company owner do? They can't exactly promise "you will all be here for 5 years, guaranteed, no matter what" too, because for most Homo Sapiens that's a signal to immediately become useless. My point is similar to yours: that the incentives are indeed not aligned, and that this is quite tragic because even when some people make an honest try to break the vicious cycle they still get treated like everyone else.
  - MattGaiser 3y ago
    Employee ownership/performance bonuses. Dramatically changes the incentives. I would act enormously differently if I got 10% of savings I identified.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
astrange 3y ago
> I keep remembering this old article -- "Bullshit Jobs" -- and yep, it still rings true to this day, and will likely do so for decades more, likely centuries even because our societal changes are slower than glaciers... That idea is fake, Graeber is a moron, and it's rude to look at other people's work and conclude that it's useless just because you don't personally watch them all day.
- mijoharas 3y ago
  Didn't Graeber speak with people who self-reported their jobs being "bullshit"? Doesn't really sound like: > look at other people's work and conclude that it's useless just because you don't personally watch them all day.
  - astrange 3y ago
    Those people were harmlessly bullshitting (or maybe demonstrating the concept of revealed preferences), but you're still doing it when you take them too seriously and proclaim it's a society wide trend. (Not you personally I mean.)
    - pdimitar 3y ago
      I dunno man, a manager taking home $500K a year when all they ever did was draw charts that NOBODY looked at (not even the CEO or the CFO, not once, I asked them; and not any of the other managers too) and just to ask us every now and then how are things going, seems quite opposite to harmless bullshitting. That guy could have been fired and we would have just elected one of us to keep track of several tickets once a week and we'd have been better off. People get assigned to high-paid bullshit jobs all the time, and most of them are aware of it and do their best to hold on to them. Nothing really complex, it's all perverse incentives all the way down.
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      There must be bubbles at play. Like some folks just don’t closely know enough people in enough parts of the economy to see what the other bubble sees, so assumes they’re wrong or exaggerating just to have a laugh or something. There are definitely bullshit jobs, and jobs that are mostly bullshit.
oblio 3y ago
Centuries? Try hundreds of thousands of years. We've been social and hierarchical creatures since back when we were great apes.
- pdimitar 3y ago
  At this point, I am mostly preferring what the great apes of our age have in terms of a social structure... At least there is some merit there, not just who screams the loudest and packs the hardest punch.
lordnacho 3y ago
This is why I'm thinking we need a new system. Not capitalism, not communism, not anything that's already been talked about for 200 years. It seems to me that our real problem is that we are wired to demand everybody contributes. Both righties and lefties actually agree on this, they just have different views on how to get it done theoretically, and in practice have also come up with various schemes to make this happen. But actually we live in a world of plenty. Yes, there are hungry people. Yes, there are people who don't have an iPhone. But what do I mean? I mean that in general it appears to me that almost everything is produced by a very small number of people. We're no longer living in a world where you need 9 people to feed 10 people. The same is true for a lot of goods and services. We don't actually need a bunch of people to do many things. Quite a lot of processes, if you ask someone who works in various industries, are really done by a few people, supported by a cast of extras that outnumbers them. Some of these extras make more money than the people actually doing the useful work. Often these extras are are like you allude to, only there in order to pretend they are part of the process so that they can make a living. To make things worse, there actually is a class of people who have no job at all, which creates a kind of fear among the hangers-on. What we actually need is to have productive people unimpeded by people who need to scrape a living. We should change our norms so that if you aren't selected to be one of the people who makes iPhones or grow food, you can just be good friend. If you want to be an iPhone maker, study and try to get in there. If you don't make it, you're not a failure. You just go about living while all the robot designers take care of stuff.
- achenet 3y ago
  uh iPhones aren't just made by well dressed Stanford educated designers and engineers in California, you know. The number of people needed to mine the metal/silicon for them, to make the circuits (and to build the factories which make the circuits), and to actually assemble them (for example [0]), the global supply chain of container ships and port personnel and police forces to fight piracy... it's a lot of people. I think they outnumber the bullshit KPR middle managers that get demonized here. Now just to be clear, I'm not saying that bullshit jobs don't exist - they do. And maybe a world with universal basic income would reduce these bullshit jobs and generally make everything nicer. But the iPhone needs *a lot* of really non-bullshit, totally serious hard work by thousands if not millions of people to exist, many of them getting paid ridiculously low wages and working under what I would consider inhuman conditions (12 hour days, etc... I should mention that I'm French, so perhaps used to slightly cushier worker protections than most people). And I think there are more underpaid, overworked Chinese factory workers than there are are "VPs of corporate happiness". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn#Mainland_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn#Mainland_China
theodric 3y ago
> People find a cushy place to work in with a good salary, then just work their way up the economical ladder (or the organizational) and will do anything that's needed to achieve that goal. It's as simple as that, and I am convinced that a good chunk of these people (probably 20%-30%) are very well aware they are bullshitters but they think they have no choice. Look, I don't mind if you write about me, but it didn't have to be so on-the-nose. No chill, these HN people, no chill at all...
- pdimitar 3y ago
  It's fine, man, I get it -- family to feed, goals to achieve, house to buy. I mostly hate the game, and only part of the players.
RandomLensman 3y ago
The other answer is risk: large, poorly reversible changes can go wrong and there will be blame. Even if there is golden parachute, within the respective social group that matters - and to regulators where applicable.
- pdimitar 3y ago
  Well, thicker skin is one option. I have no problem admitting fault when I thought I can help but ended up harming something. However, that also happened extremely rarely. People are just way too risk-averse. Though I get why the useless managers are like that, they don't want anything shining a light on their team more than absolutely necessary because they know they could be the first ones on the chopping block should an objective analysis ever take place.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    Someone just managing a team isn't really in any way "management". Usually would have very limited power for anything as a team leader. Lower than divisional leadership is often much more administrative than anything of "executive" function. And, btw., things like delayering are fairly typical efficiency drives. So these "management" positions might not be that stable to start with.
    - pdimitar 3y ago
      What you say is true but doesn't help the working programmers, sadly. I have once exclaimed to one team lead / project lead during a call with 20+ other programmers: "Why are we even talking to you if you can't make any difference? I want to talk to somebody who will understand our problems and try to help". Longest awkward silence ever. Needless to say, I left shortly after.
charlie0 3y ago
The good managers very much reminds me of this skit https://youtu.be/DYvhC_RdIwQ?si=Ex-kiOcrnA3PVsgI https://youtu.be/DYvhC_RdIwQ?si=Ex-kiOcrnA3PVsgI

88913527 3y ago

You can make improvements, but it ends up being small things that you can showcase to leaders to demonstrate that progress is happening, but it's nothing of actual material value. It's a lot like public political discourse where a policy solution is touted, all the ooh's and ahh's, but then nothing really changes.

pdimitar 3y ago
Yep, I have found the same over my career. It's better than nothing, I agree on that, but it still ends up being infuriating because it's so damned slow. Truth is, everyone just wants to clock out and go home. CEOs included.

campbel 3y ago

Part of the problem has to be that as an individual in an organization it seems like a better ROI for your effort to grow your share of the pie than the entire pie itself. Individual incentives are naturally going to be aligned by advancement and "being difficult" is something everyone wants to avoid. Easier to shed blame and avoid accountability than try to fix the social and political structure of your organization. Mostly because even if you succeed, the organization wouldn't be sophisticated enough to understand and credit you for the work.

hooverd 3y ago
Your reward for growing the pie is one (1) pizza pie.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- disqard 3y ago
  When the moonshot hits the sky You score a bonus pizza pie! That's amore...
borroka 3y ago
I work for a company that employs 100k people. The effects of my work strategy and behavior on the company's revenue, profit, vision, products are zero. On the contrary, the effects of my work strategy and behavior on my salary and position can be quite pronounced. My company can fire me tomorrow, they will forget my name in 5 days. To "fire" my company, I need to find another job, maybe in another city, working with colleagues I don't know who may eat food at lunch break I don't like the smell of. It is not hard to guess where I spend most of my efforts and thinking.
- repomies69 3y ago
  > My company can fire me tomorrow, they will forget my name in 5 days. To "fire" my company, I need to find another job, maybe in another city, working with colleagues I don't know who may eat food at lunch break I don't like the smell of. I don't think is very good comparison, generally. Some other company could offer you a job and you can leave any time. Depending on your tasks, the company might have very difficult time finding replacement personnel. This could be very significant (relative) cost for the company. Personally I have always lived in countries where employee protection laws are very employee-friendly. Companies can't just fire people at will, they need good reasons. There might be significant fines for misfiring for wrong reasons.

Loggias 3y ago

I’m curious now which article you’re referring to at the end of your comment. I know “Bullshit Jobs” only from the book by David Graeber, which is definitely worth a read for anyone interested in the topic.

mdekkers 3y ago

What you are describing is also known as “The Peter Principle” which holds that everyone will eventually be promoted to their level of incompetence. Smart companies know this and make sure it doesn’t cripple their business.

pdimitar 3y ago
If they were so smart they would cut some cruft. Or most of it.

fallingfrog 3y ago

Yeah perverse financial incentives describe 99% of the stupidity we put up with daily. Like, why when you look at the labeling of a bottle of Tylenol do you find a description of the trademarks, a non-discrimination clause, and several paragraphs regarding liability in imaginary scenarios written in impenetrable legalese? But, it’s impossible to find the actual dosage chart? Which one will kill you if you get it wrong? Which one does the manufacturer think is important? Why are those never the same?

astrange 3y ago
I'm 100% sure my Tylenol bottles have dosage charts on them, not only because it's so easy to fatally overdose on it but also because manufacturing it is extremely regulated and nobody cares what the manufacturers think about anything.
- throw9away6 3y ago
  It’s there but not easy to find
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    They used to be easy to find, but some years back they redesigned seemingly all pill bottles to hide the instructions. It’s a frustration and makes me wish ill on whoever is behind it, every single time I need to use such a medicine.
    - throw9away6 3y ago
      Sometimes it’s not even on the bottle but on the panthlet that comes with it

tuatoru 3y ago

> I've known a few company owners long time ago who ... swore on their lives they will not fire the managers for bringing them bad news It needs to go further. Fire everyone who says there are no problems. If there are no problems, why is an under-manager needed? Also fire everyone who makes up bullshit problems. If you're going to agree with me all the time, why do I need you?

l0b0 3y ago
Too easy to game: People are just going to gauge for themselves what management considers "not a bullshit problem" and report that, making sure that the blame rests on unpopular people or third parties. Too prone to false positives: Any project which is genuinely going really well results in everyone getting fired, and the company absolutely tanks as a result.
- campbel 3y ago
  Exactly, an effective CEO / Executive is going to be developing systems of accountability that align with company goals. It can't be based entirely on a set of gameable metrics. However this starts at the top. An incompetent board / CEO is going to create misaligned incentives which will cascade through the organization.
  - sixstringtheory 3y ago
    It seems to me that if you want to be a CEO that wants to stay connected at the ground level, then you have to actually do that: you have to know each engineer, and understand the work they’re doing on any given day. Naturally, this tightly constrains the possible size of the company. If you want to grow beyond that size you must accept that you will become disconnected and out of touch and all of the bs being discussed here will inevitably creep in.
    - tuatoru 3y ago
      Long ago I worked in places where the CEO did exactly that. "Management by walking around" (it even had the abbreviation MBWA) has fallen out of favor, though. People just don't walk any more. This was about 1000 people.

js8 3y ago

That's why I am a fan of democracy, even in economic sphere (aka socialism or cooperatives). Giving everybody the same single vote (same power) about the organization (and making it into an unchangeable fact) removes lots of these incentives that prevent improving the organization. But lot of people are blindly accepting capitalism, because.. well it's incidentally also explained in the article, why.

jiggawatts 3y ago
Corporations from the perspective of most employees are communists dictatorships. Think about it: you use a communal means of production, distribute profits centrally, and you don’t get to vote for who gets to be your manager.
- uoaei 3y ago
  I guess misconceptions like these are why theorists abandoned the term 'communism' in favor of 'communalism' to explain what they meant. This isn't even a no-true-scotsman argument, but if all that comes to mind when communism comes up is Soviet dictatorship, the cold war propaganda worked.
  - tilne 3y ago
    What should come to mind when communism comes up then?
    - coxmi 3y ago
      Something along the lines of: A socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. I guess the point of the poster above is that the word communism just confuses things in the initial statement — it’s just a dictatorship. Socialists and communists fairly uniquely believe in workplace democracy.
    - harimau777 3y ago
      A rule of thumb that makes sense to me is that communism generally differs from socialism in that it advocates one or more of the following: - People actually living and working in communes. - Abolition of private property (note: this is not the same as personal property). - Extreme redistribution and/or equality in wealth/income. I'm sure that this isn't a perfect heuristic; however, I think it's often useful for detecting when someone is trying to describe something as communism in order to make it look bad.

MattGaiser 3y ago

> At the same time, I've known a few company owners long time ago who were just BEGGING their managers to tell them the problems exactly as they are, swore on their lives they will not fire the managers for bringing them bad news (and made contracts that made sure of it in no uncertain terms)... and yet all of the managers below those people were sycophant yes-men. Contracts are insufficient here. A contract doesn't prevent my boss from being unhappy with me and making my life miserable. A contract does not ensure promotion. As an employee, there is no upside for risk, making any risk unacceptable.

pdimitar 3y ago
Yep, I get that, but what should an open-minded company owner do? They can't exactly promise "you will all be here for 5 years, guaranteed, no matter what" too, because for most Homo Sapiens that's a signal to immediately become useless. My point is similar to yours: that the incentives are indeed not aligned, and that this is quite tragic because even when some people make an honest try to break the vicious cycle they still get treated like everyone else.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  Employee ownership/performance bonuses. Dramatically changes the incentives. I would act enormously differently if I got 10% of savings I identified.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

astrange 3y ago

> I keep remembering this old article -- "Bullshit Jobs" -- and yep, it still rings true to this day, and will likely do so for decades more, likely centuries even because our societal changes are slower than glaciers... That idea is fake, Graeber is a moron, and it's rude to look at other people's work and conclude that it's useless just because you don't personally watch them all day.

mijoharas 3y ago
Didn't Graeber speak with people who self-reported their jobs being "bullshit"? Doesn't really sound like: > look at other people's work and conclude that it's useless just because you don't personally watch them all day.
- astrange 3y ago
  Those people were harmlessly bullshitting (or maybe demonstrating the concept of revealed preferences), but you're still doing it when you take them too seriously and proclaim it's a society wide trend. (Not you personally I mean.)
  - pdimitar 3y ago
    I dunno man, a manager taking home $500K a year when all they ever did was draw charts that NOBODY looked at (not even the CEO or the CFO, not once, I asked them; and not any of the other managers too) and just to ask us every now and then how are things going, seems quite opposite to harmless bullshitting. That guy could have been fired and we would have just elected one of us to keep track of several tickets once a week and we'd have been better off. People get assigned to high-paid bullshit jobs all the time, and most of them are aware of it and do their best to hold on to them. Nothing really complex, it's all perverse incentives all the way down.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    There must be bubbles at play. Like some folks just don’t closely know enough people in enough parts of the economy to see what the other bubble sees, so assumes they’re wrong or exaggerating just to have a laugh or something. There are definitely bullshit jobs, and jobs that are mostly bullshit.

oblio 3y ago

Centuries? Try hundreds of thousands of years. We've been social and hierarchical creatures since back when we were great apes.

pdimitar 3y ago
At this point, I am mostly preferring what the great apes of our age have in terms of a social structure... At least there is some merit there, not just who screams the loudest and packs the hardest punch.

lordnacho 3y ago

This is why I'm thinking we need a new system. Not capitalism, not communism, not anything that's already been talked about for 200 years. It seems to me that our real problem is that we are wired to demand everybody contributes. Both righties and lefties actually agree on this, they just have different views on how to get it done theoretically, and in practice have also come up with various schemes to make this happen. But actually we live in a world of plenty. Yes, there are hungry people. Yes, there are people who don't have an iPhone. But what do I mean? I mean that in general it appears to me that almost everything is produced by a very small number of people. We're no longer living in a world where you need 9 people to feed 10 people. The same is true for a lot of goods and services. We don't actually need a bunch of people to do many things. Quite a lot of processes, if you ask someone who works in various industries, are really done by a few people, supported by a cast of extras that outnumbers them. Some of these extras make more money than the people actually doing the useful work. Often these extras are are like you allude to, only there in order to pretend they are part of the process so that they can make a living. To make things worse, there actually is a class of people who have no job at all, which creates a kind of fear among the hangers-on. What we actually need is to have productive people unimpeded by people who need to scrape a living. We should change our norms so that if you aren't selected to be one of the people who makes iPhones or grow food, you can just be good friend. If you want to be an iPhone maker, study and try to get in there. If you don't make it, you're not a failure. You just go about living while all the robot designers take care of stuff.

achenet 3y ago
uh iPhones aren't just made by well dressed Stanford educated designers and engineers in California, you know. The number of people needed to mine the metal/silicon for them, to make the circuits (and to build the factories which make the circuits), and to actually assemble them (for example [0]), the global supply chain of container ships and port personnel and police forces to fight piracy... it's a lot of people. I think they outnumber the bullshit KPR middle managers that get demonized here. Now just to be clear, I'm not saying that bullshit jobs don't exist - they do. And maybe a world with universal basic income would reduce these bullshit jobs and generally make everything nicer. But the iPhone needs *a lot* of really non-bullshit, totally serious hard work by thousands if not millions of people to exist, many of them getting paid ridiculously low wages and working under what I would consider inhuman conditions (12 hour days, etc... I should mention that I'm French, so perhaps used to slightly cushier worker protections than most people). And I think there are more underpaid, overworked Chinese factory workers than there are are "VPs of corporate happiness". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn#Mainland_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn#Mainland_China

theodric 3y ago

> People find a cushy place to work in with a good salary, then just work their way up the economical ladder (or the organizational) and will do anything that's needed to achieve that goal. It's as simple as that, and I am convinced that a good chunk of these people (probably 20%-30%) are very well aware they are bullshitters but they think they have no choice. Look, I don't mind if you write about me, but it didn't have to be so on-the-nose. No chill, these HN people, no chill at all...

pdimitar 3y ago
It's fine, man, I get it -- family to feed, goals to achieve, house to buy. I mostly hate the game, and only part of the players.

RandomLensman 3y ago

The other answer is risk: large, poorly reversible changes can go wrong and there will be blame. Even if there is golden parachute, within the respective social group that matters - and to regulators where applicable.

pdimitar 3y ago
Well, thicker skin is one option. I have no problem admitting fault when I thought I can help but ended up harming something. However, that also happened extremely rarely. People are just way too risk-averse. Though I get why the useless managers are like that, they don't want anything shining a light on their team more than absolutely necessary because they know they could be the first ones on the chopping block should an objective analysis ever take place.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  Someone just managing a team isn't really in any way "management". Usually would have very limited power for anything as a team leader. Lower than divisional leadership is often much more administrative than anything of "executive" function. And, btw., things like delayering are fairly typical efficiency drives. So these "management" positions might not be that stable to start with.
  - pdimitar 3y ago
    What you say is true but doesn't help the working programmers, sadly. I have once exclaimed to one team lead / project lead during a call with 20+ other programmers: "Why are we even talking to you if you can't make any difference? I want to talk to somebody who will understand our problems and try to help". Longest awkward silence ever. Needless to say, I left shortly after.

charlie0 3y ago

The good managers very much reminds me of this skit https://youtu.be/DYvhC_RdIwQ?si=Ex-kiOcrnA3PVsgI https://youtu.be/DYvhC_RdIwQ?si=Ex-kiOcrnA3PVsgI