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The managerial class is the cancer of our time Edit: I regret using the word cancer, but they are still bad

• miroljub 3y ago
  You call a person who brought work and salaries to 20 people for the whole year a cancer? Would those 20 people have enough to do and feed their families if not for that man? If he did it differently, the shareholders would be a bit richer, those (or other 20) hard-working people without income, and their families would be starving. And your and my taxes would rise to support those people not to die homeless and hungry. Do you still want to call that manager cancer, or you may reconsider and call him a hero he really is?
  • logicchains 3y ago
    >You call a person who brought work and salaries to 20 people for the whole year a cancer? The entrepreneur did that. Entrepreneurs create jobs. Managers just manage, and shuffle around value, they don't create it like entrepreneurs do.
    • throwoutway 3y ago
      I've worked with plenty of managers who are entrepreneurial within large companies. Every year we have to propose new ideas and then (when approved) go deliver on them. That's not "just manage, and shuffle around value" I have also worked with those "just manage" managers too. But one shoe does not fit all
    • _heimdall 3y ago
      There are some good managers out there. The problem is that the system of most large companies isn't designed for entrepreneurial or innovative managers, both the culture and incentive system means those managers are always swimming up stream and risk burnout and even being punished for making waves.
    • nativeit 3y ago
      Or, more likely, the entrepreneur is (perhaps negligently) allowing their managers to spend investors’ money. Only the profoundly lucky entrepreneurs generate enough positive cash flow to cover the more likely losing investments and help pad out ~15% profit to make the VC funds worth maintaining. The idea that businesses are inherently efficient is hysterical.
  • Ekaros 3y ago
    Or they might be doing something productive instead. Or at least not making some resource inefficient system.
  • toldyouso2022 3y ago
    It's not the person, it's the class and its position in society, its powers and its incentives.
  • Reviving1514 3y ago
    I feel what they did was essentially break windows https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
  • gv83 3y ago
    Or maybe those 20 people feel insecure about their abilities after 1 year fiddling thumbs and will have to fight a battle against themselves to get in a place where they use their skills better. You know, not all of us like the idea of doing nothing for years but getting paid for that
    • deebosong 3y ago
      Banksy (I'm neither for nor against him) said something similar (or is said to have said something similar): “The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.” All that is to say, it ain't only in tech! And I take this kind of waste – of vainglorious pursuits via manipulation of image-maintenance and resource-mongering for purposes of self-aggrandizing optics (rather than actual collective advancement and good) – is not unique to just advertising and tech, but is prevalent everywhere, throughout history, etc. And only rarely do we see managers & bosses & leaders & corporations & workers come together for actual good.
  • brigadier132 3y ago
    Phrased another way, these managers are getting our best and brightest and putting them in positions where they create and contribute nothing to the betterment of humanity.
  • IggleSniggle 3y ago
    Some of us want to contribute something to the world we live in, to make it a nicer place to be. I think it's great he's found a way to get all those people organized together; it's a shame he didn't give them something to do that created true value; it's waste. Not just waste of the company's money and time, but a waste of the labor of the individuals who could have done something great given real leadership. To be fair, we don't know if the manager was using that headcount to do something impactful outside of the mandated work. Based on the story, however, it seems doubtful that the manager was thinking of anything other than their career trajectory.
  • Heyso 3y ago
    Work and salaries ? Like from their own pocket ? No. That is the business money. Wasted. Time, attention, of peoples wasted. That is the same absurd logic as for not to replace low qualified human physical work by machines (self checkout in supermarket). Having less jobs due to technology or less stupid work should be seen as good for humanity. Perhaps, instead, of imagining some stupid jobs and occupation, so peoples can be paid and survive. We coul reduce the total workhours of working people, so that senseful work would employ more peoples. And with no changes to the salary ofc. I am not so good with english, so let me rephrase it. What would happen to humanity if 90 % went jobless because -let's imagine- robots and IA would efficientely replace us. Would 90 % be condemned to die in the cold when there is abondance ? Because they have no job and a 0.00001 % "owns" the robots ? Our current system cannot work with abondance.
    • PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      > Work and salaries ? Like from their own pocket ? No. That is the business money. Wasted. Time, attention, of peoples wasted. It actually blows me away sometimes the willingness people w/i companies have to just spend money that isn't theirs. It's not even the calculation of build vs buy, they'll spend exorbitant amounts of money for nothing in particular. It makes me understand the stereotypical budget constraints, because without them people would just waste money left and right.
      • shadowgovt 3y ago
        Eventually, one comes to realize that everyone's spending money that isn't theirs. Including the CEO and the owners, who are spending the money invested by people who expect returns.
        • PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
          sure, but there's a lack of responsibility there that amazes me.
        • fnordpiglet 3y ago
          Depends on if you ever took outside money I guess :-)
  • fnordpiglet 3y ago
    To add to the other replies, the issue isn’t the manager wasted some corporation or billionaires money. The issue is that if the manager had grown the team in a way that grew revenues and value they manager could have created more than 20 roles in the entire organization. Sometimes the manager with 5 engineers and a strong vision can create enough value to hire hundreds or thousands of people throughout the company. The manager who empire builds often creates negative value. So they create jobs for 20 people. But these jobs contribute nothing. Someone’s work in the org went to pay for those 20 jobs, and they got sucked into a black hole. Worse they require support, interact throughout the company, distract from real valuable work. In the end they contribute negative value, and the manager employed 20 people at the cost of 3 people’s jobs that could have been created but never were, their employment cost -23 people’s worth of value and contributed zero. Now in many organizations this leads to a promotion because they seem important for having so many employees. They create a role model for other less effective leaders. As they hire managers to work for them, they hire those that add people as fast as possible regardless of value production. Now they’ve created 200 jobs, at a cost of 30. But their emergent doppelgängers have formed 10 of them with 20 people, contributing -30 jobs as well. Now there are 400 created jobs, but -60 net jobs. Eventually the company is overrun with empire builders. It’s a big company. There are a few highly profitable cash cow teams that are extremely competitive to get into and are largely left alone. The profits though of the entire enterprise are flat and inline with peers of similar size. Headcount makes the comping look like a giant of industry. But it’s half the size it could be if there had been focus on creating new and better value. In my experience this is why Amazon employs nearly 2 million people and is hyperbolic in its growth over such a long time. While empire building certainly exists there is a lot of process to control for it. Hiring (generally) is well metered, and leaders (sometimes) are rewarded for their dynamism in business growth (not always, YMMV). It adds new businesses constantly and a lot (not all!) businesses do pretty well and if they don’t get shut down and people reassigned. Google, well, listen. It’s got great benefits and the managers have some impressive empires with high salaries and a stable of smart people to tally up for their biography. But there are only a few successful businesses and god bless you if you can name one that’s launched in the last 10 years. But it is killing them. Many companies don’t have the luxury of a wildly profitable cash cow like Google. They get overrun and whither away, sometimes really fast. That’s how it’s like cancer. Not literal cancer, and cancer is a horrible disease not to make light of, but empire building represses job growth over the long term in exchange for rapid short term growth that ultimately kills the host entirely.
  • nativeit 3y ago
    Management has entered the chat.
• marcosdumay 3y ago
  Nah, they grow and spread until they consume all the resources. It's a very good analogy.
• shadowgovt 3y ago
  Unfortunately, I've seen an alternative that isn't much better. Google has separate management and SWE tracks, but tries to promote SWEs to management. It's pretty disastrous: people who fundamentally just want to be writing code burn their day on performance reviews and people issues (resolving a database latency issue is not nearly as fun as figuring out who's going to resolve it because the database guy's mom just died, and he'll be out... Shit, we don't know, his mom just died, it's on a spectrum of "he'll be back in a week" to "he'll be changing careers," it's not up to the manager). The end result is that people who want to do good work are managed by people who are ill-trained and ill-temperamented to enable them to do good work, and it can make for a pretty miserable experience. There are exceptions, but the exceptions usually come from the process finding the rare superhuman who's extremely competent in (and fulfilled by) both arenas. The best managers at Google cared deeply about systems and deeply about their teams, and they were rare to find (and usually ended up at the top of an org chart where they could do the most good, so rarely were the direct boss for a SWE II or SWE III).
  • sheepscreek 3y ago
    > resolving a database latency issue is not nearly as fun as figuring out who's going to resolve it because the database guy's mom just died, and he'll be out... Shit, we don't know, his mom just died, it's on a spectrum of "he'll be back in a week" to "he'll be changing careers," it's not up to the manager This is real life for most managers. It is also true some can’t handle the stress and find toxic ways of dealing with it (inappropriate comments, focusing more on the promotion than improving the lives of their team members). > The end result is that people who want to do good work are managed by people who are ill-trained and ill-temperamented to enable them to do good work, and it can make for a pretty miserable experience. Sort of true. The reality is somewhere in between. Most managers want to go good. Few are truly evil who get off on making others suffer - or take pleasure in uprooting lives. Incentives and personal motivations play a very big part in how they manage.
• deleted 3y ago
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