4 ms·

Ye it is strange that such anti-intuitive management style pays off. I have no clue why. I got this feeling that what's most important for a Big Bad Company is

Ye it is strange that such anti-intuitive management style pays off. I have no clue why. I got this feeling that what's most important for a Big Bad Company is to be able to get well of with management of other Big Bad Companies to be able to land contracts.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>Ye it is strange that such anti-intuitive management style pays off. I have no clue why. It works because it prays and exploits several flaws in our society and in human psychology like greed, wealth inequality, conformity of the masses to cultural norms, fear of missing out/of being left out, and the crabs in the bucket mentality, which leads to a rat race to the bottom form which it's difficult to check yourself out as an individual if the majority does it and is heavily vested in it. This isn't something big bad corporations have created, it s just something that has existed for hundreds of years, they're just exploiting. The same mechanism and behaviors were in place during the communist rule in my home country 35+ years ago, when people were fighting to climb up the party ranks, because that's what gave you the best QoL. Now it's climbing the corporate ranks.
tpm 3y ago
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-...
ethbr1 3y ago
> I have no clue why. Because it's cheaper to compensate one manager 10x average (and get the best candidate) than pay more to hire an entire team of more skilled ICs. FAANG gets away with it because they amortize their engineering costs over an extremely customer base. Which also multiplies the value in output quality difference. Most companies are not building EC2 or BigTable. And so... it makes more sense to hire minimal cost engineers, then corral them with a single high-cost manager.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  > Because it's cheaper to compensate one manager 10x average (and get the best candidate) than pay more to hire an entire team of more skilled ICs. I don't think you get better managers by paying them more though, over some threshold. You'd probably just get more "competetive" managers in the meta game of becoming a manager. Like engineers at Google are not some elite just becouse they are paid more. Only athletics actually can be evaluated in an accurate enough manner I believe.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    I'm also suspicious it actually transfers to engineering orgs, especially with managers who don't have architect senses (or intuition). But it's likely a direct transfer from sales or retail orgs, where it's very much measurable and true.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

>Ye it is strange that such anti-intuitive management style pays off. I have no clue why. It works because it prays and exploits several flaws in our society and in human psychology like greed, wealth inequality, conformity of the masses to cultural norms, fear of missing out/of being left out, and the crabs in the bucket mentality, which leads to a rat race to the bottom form which it's difficult to check yourself out as an individual if the majority does it and is heavily vested in it. This isn't something big bad corporations have created, it s just something that has existed for hundreds of years, they're just exploiting. The same mechanism and behaviors were in place during the communist rule in my home country 35+ years ago, when people were fighting to climb up the party ranks, because that's what gave you the best QoL. Now it's climbing the corporate ranks.

tpm 3y ago

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-...

ethbr1 3y ago

> I have no clue why. Because it's cheaper to compensate one manager 10x average (and get the best candidate) than pay more to hire an entire team of more skilled ICs. FAANG gets away with it because they amortize their engineering costs over an extremely customer base. Which also multiplies the value in output quality difference. Most companies are not building EC2 or BigTable. And so... it makes more sense to hire minimal cost engineers, then corral them with a single high-cost manager.

rightbyte 3y ago
> Because it's cheaper to compensate one manager 10x average (and get the best candidate) than pay more to hire an entire team of more skilled ICs. I don't think you get better managers by paying them more though, over some threshold. You'd probably just get more "competetive" managers in the meta game of becoming a manager. Like engineers at Google are not some elite just becouse they are paid more. Only athletics actually can be evaluated in an accurate enough manner I believe.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  I'm also suspicious it actually transfers to engineering orgs, especially with managers who don't have architect senses (or intuition). But it's likely a direct transfer from sales or retail orgs, where it's very much measurable and true.