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Why We Hate Working for Big Companies (2018)

91 points by Vinnl 3y ago

stavros 3y ago
The "why" in the title was important to keep, in my opinion.
- Vinnl 3y ago
  Looks like it's back now. IIRC HN automatically removes "Why" at the start of a title - at least I didn't consciously remove it.
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kman82 3y ago
Who is “we”? I love my big company job
- ang_cire 3y ago
  I love my big company job, while still hating the company itself.
  - glimshe 3y ago
    Some of the best jobs are in remote corners of large companies, in particular something that is very needed but nobody can or want to do, and thus people will leave you alone enjoying freedom and a big company paycheck. Like dealing with the legacy system that actually keeps the lights on while MBAs are drafting strategies to build one failed system after another.
    - deleted 3y ago
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- gwd 3y ago
  The parts I love are where I get to make my own decisions locally, with people who are directly affected (which to be fair, is the majority). The parts I hate are those planned centrally; which thankfully right now are mainly limited to IT, budgeting / expenses, etc. You can completely tell that at the CTO level it looks like we're saving gobs of money by planning centrally; but at the local level you can see that in fact what's happening is the costs are being externalized into other areas in ways that are difficult to measure, but probably end up costing the company at least 3x.
mindaslab 3y ago
Because our brainless boss parties while we work
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  This has not been my experience (source: Worked for big companies for most of my career). In my experience, the middle managers were more miserable than the peons. When I became a manager, I hated it. Only the tippy-top managers really seemed to like their job, and they tended to use the company dime for most of their frou-frou. That said, I very much enjoy not working for big companies, anymore.
- wepple 3y ago
  How did someone “brainless” navigate to a position where they get to party, and if you’re so “brainfull”, why don’t you do the same? Is there political corruption and abuse that keeps you there?
pch00 3y ago
Written in 2018 before Puppet was bought by Perforce - would be interesting to read a new update to see if any of Luke's ideas or practices managed to survive the buyout.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  He would probably still agree with everything, but taken the money. He was at the top correct, a founder, and thus in his article, he would have taken the majority of the money. It is possible to know something is wrong, and feel guilt, but still take the money and continue to voice these ideas about change. It is hard to change a system when you are winning it. That doesn't mean he isn't also right that a lot of people are victims of it. ""In other words, they generate profit because they pay their employees less than they’re worth. If everyone could trade their labor for exactly the amount of money it was worth, the corporations that employ them would have a much harder time making money. Instead, in modern corporations the shareholders and the executive team - again, the central planning committee we so despise - make the majority of the money, while the front line does all the work and makes very little.""
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vouaobrasil 3y ago
I agree with a lot in this article. We should have limits on the size and scope of big companies to eliminate global business, which in turn is just about shipping the costs of doing business to poorer countries where that cost is not as large simply because the poor are easier to exploit (e.g. kicking sustenance farmers off their land, dumping electronic waste, etc.). Global capitalism is devastating because it is about creating a world where the end result is everyone in subservience to a highly fragile infrastucture in return for immense short-term wealth for a few (big-tech employees are in this category). The size of business should be limited and corporations should be destroyed!
- deleted 3y ago
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- giantg2 3y ago
  Sometimes that cost isn't exploitation but just taking advantage of lower cost of living - like hiring offshore devs. This still has negative impacts such as reducing domestic employment and even driving down domestic income. For example (which sometimes includes exploitation), it's easier to buy brand new shoes manufactured in a third world country and shipped halfway around the world than to find a shoe repair shop where a rebuild costs less than the new pair. Now that art is comparatively dead domestically.
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    > lower cost of living Lower standards of living, lower cost would be like the difference between a budget hotel and a 5 star at the beach, lower standards is vacationing in Iowa instead. You'll hear people say things like "culturally they like to live ten to a single room tin shack" but that wouldn't be the case if they had wealth. It's not a choice, they are just paid less and that is being used as a justification for continuing to do so.
    - gosub100 3y ago
      I don't think thats entirely true. Lets pick India. Do you really think the only reason the grandparents stay attached to their adult children is economic?
glimshe 3y ago
Ignoring the anti-Capitalism nonsense, there is one interesting observation: the dictatorship-like nature of most large corporations. I always thought that the top management tiers of large corporations almost invariably attract psychopaths and power-hungry individuals who would be oppressive leaders if they were instead in real-world dictatorships. And the middle tiers attract the kind of people who would be the typical mid-level "do nothing" bureaucrats in such systems.
- arethuza 3y ago
  You may have rediscovered the Sociopath/Clueless/Loser categorisation: 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-...
- CSMastermind 3y ago
  Have you found that to be the case? I'd say that generally speaking I have not. I've made it to a point in my career where I interact with the top management at Fortune 100 companies and I have not at all found them to be psychopathic or power-hungry. Actually generally the opposite: those traits seem to be selected against. There are of course counter examples but I'd argue they're rare. I'd say that you'll find the psychopaths and power-hungry individuals in the middle layer of companies with the "do nothing" bureaucrats at the bottom of the management hierarchy, often without any formal people management titles at all.
  - deathhand 3y ago
    I echo your statement and to take it a step further: In corporate politics there is only one thing that 'wins' and that is profitability. That profitability comes from the workforce so the top leaders are usually very motivated, democratic people because the best ideas win and you need people on your side. Thinking about the public sector, there is no KPI for a 'win'. When we try to start using statistics it becomes 'political', skewered, or hand waved away as a complex marcoeconomic force.
    - 3y ago
panick21_ 3y ago
> > Yet, there’s a flaw at the heart of this claim. While the United States operates as a free market economy, the key agent within modern capitalism - the corporation - works more like an authoritarian state Yeah that's why if you try to leave google, a bunch of guys show up with baseball bats and crush your knees to pulp.
- sevagh 3y ago
  I think they show up and threaten to crush your knees to a pulp if you don't write a blog post about "Why I'm leaving Google"
robertlagrant 3y ago
> Yet, there’s a flaw at the heart of this claim. While the United States operates as a free market economy, the key agent within modern capitalism - the corporation - works more like an authoritarian state This isn't particularly true, but where it is, it isn't a flaw. This is as designed. Where it's true: what capitalism wants to avoid is putting "money" in with "power" (i.e. "violence" and "rules") that the state has. Companies don't have violence and only have rules in a limited sense. E.g. a company can't lock you in a box for failing to give it some of your money. Only the state can do that. Having corporations limits the blast radius of what malicious/incompetent employees can do. In a capitalist system, with enough bad decisions, your company might go bankrupt. In a communist one, with enough bad decisions, 50 million people might starve to death[0]. Where it's not true: companies exist through free agreements between people. You might argue that they aren't free enough, although that gets vague fast, but you can't opt out of the state. That's the problem with authoritarian states. You can move job. Or, if you argue that people can't move job, the problem is so much harder for moving state that the point still stands. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
- batty_alex 3y ago
  > Companies don't have violence and only have rules in a limited sense. E.g. a company can't lock you in a box for failing to give it some of your money Companies certainly do "have violence" and certainly have locked people up in the past. The only thing keeping large corporations from doing this now is the state. In the article, the author puts forth the problem with the Great Leap Forward: large central authority being disconnected from those starving workers. That's a problem large, centrally planned, corporations face.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > the author puts forth the problem with the Great Leap Forward: large central authority being disconnected from those starving workers. That's a problem large, centrally planned, corporations face. This is not the whole truth. The problem with the Great Leap Forward was that the state enforced farming techniques, and even what farmers should work on instead of farming, and took food to bring to the centre. It's not just disconnection. Disconnection is far too vague a word to choose. To compare a company not listening to its workers with what the GLF did - it's hard to avoid thinking you picked the one vague word that could technically describe both of those scenarios, despite the vast gulf between them. As I sort of said elsewhere - some companies are bad. That's fine, unless there's no competitor to move to. Then workers' situations are really bad, because they have to choose between retraining, moving, and staying, none of which is a great choice. But if you think that's bad, think how much worse it is that a state bureaucrat can lock you in jail, and your only option is to flee the country. Companies aren't perfect, but they limit the blast radius of the damage an incompetent or malicious employee can achieve.
solatic 3y ago
> companies today hire workers to make money from their labor. In other words, they generate profit because they pay their employees less than they’re worth. If everyone could trade their labor for exactly the amount of money it was worth, the corporations that employ them would have a much harder time making money. Instead, in modern corporations the shareholders and the executive team - again, the central planning committee we so despise - make the majority of the money This is normal and natural. In a corporation, some stakeholders contribute cash, and other stakeholders contribute labor. Both are forms of capital. It is the combination of both that allows them to become more than the sum of their parts, and in doing so, generate wealth. There's plenty of room for criticism about just how much of the generated wealth should flow to those who invested cash compared to those who invested labor, and reforming the tax code so that it is easier to compensate with shareholdership those who invest with labor. But corporations should earn more from the labor than the labor is worth. That forming a corporation begins a positive-sum game, and not a zero-sum game, shouldn't be controversial. > I know the solution is not more freelancing and contract work, which America’s corporations are addicted to. That’s the worst of both worlds: The exploitative nature of capitalism with the inefficient bureaucracies of communism. Transactions on the free market work because they’re good for both sides, but most people only accept part-time contract relationships today when they have no other real choices. I think the author is holding up very specific contractual relationships as a scapegoat here; e.g. "gig economy" work a la Uber drivers, or the "contractors" who are fleecing the state of California out of billions of dollars for the high-speed rail project. And fair enough. But buried in both of those scapegoats is a clue: the "solution" is not individuals accepting take-it-or-leave-it short contracts presented by a robot taskmaster, nor is it BigConsulting agglomerating tens of thousands of warm bodies sold out by the hour, any more than the solution is sole proprietorships sewing dresses in their living rooms or the massive bureaucracies of Fortune 100 companies. Rather, it is in small and medium businesses, and giving contracts to other small and medium businesses; every one running small enough to keep executives in touch with line workers. Don't grow headcount further than (Dunbar's number - friends and family =) 100. If you feel tempted to do so, see what you can spin off and become their initial primary customer. Look to the Mittelstand as a model.
- CaptainFever 3y ago
imgabe 3y ago
People always conflate capitalism with a free market. They're different things. Capitalism just means that capital (the means of production) is privately owned, rather than being owned by a collective of workers (socialism) or the state (communism). Controlled markets can still exist under capitalism, such as by monopoly. Standard Oil controlled the market for oil in its heyday and regulated the supply to keep the price stable to avoid the boom/bust cycles that happened before they consolidated the market. The government can still regulate the market, as it does extensively in the US, without changing the fundamental fact that the means of production are privately owned.
- spit2wind 3y ago
  +1 came here to point out what should be obvious: the US is not, and has never has been, a free market. There is, and always has been, "rules and regulations" beyond the "natural" which dictate the behavior of the market. The closest thing I'm aware of to a free market was the cryptocurrency driven markets of the "Dark Web" somewhere between the rise and fall of Silk Road. Yet even that market was embedded within, and ultimately governed by, the jurisdictions the network was hosted.
  - gilbetron 3y ago
    There is no such thing as a free market without rules and regulations, rules and regulations are what allow a free market to exist.
    - chrstphrknwtn 3y ago
      This sounds an awful lot like doublethink. What is so free about a central bank setting interest rates?
  - _w1tm 3y ago
    The “natural” rule of a “free market” without artificial rules is that he who owns the guns takes your stuff.
    - 3y ago
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
""I know the solution is not more freelancing and contract work, which America’s corporations are addicted to. That’s the worst of both worlds: The exploitative nature of capitalism with the inefficient bureaucracies of communism."" ""... but most people only accept part-time contract relationships today when they have no other real choices."" Great to point out. Free-Market would require people to be free. But if you work for the company in the company town, you're not free.
vitus 3y ago
An interesting exercise I went through while reading this article was taking these observations about centrally-managed top-down organizations and considering them in the context of centrally-controlled distributed systems. A couple of snippets: > One of the core principles of the free market is that central planning committees can never be as efficient or as effective as the people doing the work. By definition a free market economy lacks a decision-making hierarchy; the ‘free’ means every agent (individual or corporation) can decide for themselves, without needing permission from a manager above. > ... > It should be immediately obvious why this fails miserably: The distance between the central planning committee and the farmer is so great that good decisions are nearly impossible. It’s nearly impossible for critical feedback to make it from the edge, where the farmers are working, to the central planning committee in time to affect decisions, and then for those decisions to make it back to the edge in time to be useful. One of the core arguments for using a centralized control plane (versus a distributed one) is the ability to perform a single global optimization, which can yield better results compared to local optimizations. I find it interesting that the free market principles dictate the opposing conclusion that this global optimization is infeasible, although it may come down to my next point: If you're not careful, and your centralized system injects dozens of minutes of delay due to the additional complexity of performing the global optimization, you end up with the globally optimal decision from 20 minutes ago, which in the context of, say, load balancing is an eternity. Or in the bureaucracy of government (or hardware planning cycles, etc), you may see months to years of lag between the inputs your model accepts, and the outputs your model produces. And all the while, you have a full pipeline of decisions coming down the line, based on stale data. (There are other reasons for centralized control, such as orchestration of distributed computation being difficult to do correctly, and it being easier to reason about a single node rather than the complex system-wide interactions.)
- pvdoom 3y ago
  While I see where you are coming from, I don't think the free market has much to do with it, as "free market" to the extend that such thing exists outside the fantasies of ancap weirdos, is just one of many types of distributed decision making systems, and as such shares a lot of traits with them. So it's a question of organising big systems and how best to do that. Nothing says that we can't have organisations structured around this decentralised decision making, and quite the opposite - we both have the evidence this works, and it has been so thoroughly studied there are tons upon tons of pages written going back all the way to the 20s ...
mschuster91 3y ago
> Instead, in modern corporations the shareholders and the executive team - again, the central planning committee we so despise - make the majority of the money, while the front line does all the work and makes very little. The answer to that one is unionization. Unfortunately, unions are rather looked down upon in tech, for fears that "high performers" would not be able to set themselves apart financially from "low performers". And as a result, everyone loses out.
jwoq9118 3y ago
> The biggest problem is that we have no idea how to value most of the work people do. I mean, we might know that what a developer should get paid for a year’s work, but how much is that work worth? The majority of the work done in modern corporations is incredibly hard to value, which is partially why companies are so inefficient and make so many bad decisions. > That brings up an even bigger problem - companies today hire workers to make money from their labor. In other words, they generate profit because they pay their employees less than they’re worth. If everyone could trade their labor for exactly the amount of money it was worth, the corporations that employ them would have a much harder time making money. Anyone else see an issue with this comment? We don’t know how to value the work of a corporate employee but we’re simultaneously all being paid less than we’re worth. I like this article but I do feel the author leans too much into theory and what I hope is hyperbole. What I do love though is the admission at the end that we’re in a tough spot with modern capitalism and there’s no easy way to fix things by some “just do xyz” solution.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Since he is a founder that built the business, I'd say he is someone that has a lot of practical knowledge beyond theory. He saw both sides, and sees the flaws in both. How many times to do talk about the sales guy that earns too much, or so-and-so, that got promoted for being nice. Everyone is always complaining about others getting paid more, and that wouldn't happen if the pay was equal to value. Or, how about in Software, there are a lot of teams adding features, which one was worth more? It is hard to tell, but everyone seems to agree the guys at the top didn't contribute much. So, it seems like the math would work, the guys at the top don't produce much value, but get more money than the teams adding value. Even if how to calculate each individual value is difficult.
- CPLX 3y ago
  Those two observations are not inconsistent. We can have essentially no idea what each contribution to the whole is worth while being certain that the whole must, over the long term, be less than value X.
- vitus 3y ago
  There's definitely some aspect of hyperbole, just from the wording there: "the biggest problem is [...], but wait, there's an even bigger problem [than the biggest one]!" Comparatives overriding superlatives aside, I don't necessarily see these two issues as at odds with each other. We are bad at assigning dollar amounts to units of work, or even the productive output of a specific individual, but in aggregate companies can know how much revenue they bring in, and how much they spend (on labor, among other things), and in order to be profitable, revenue must exceed costs by definition. So taken in aggregate, companies are still able to exploit the gap between cost and value of labor. A highly productive individual might be significantly underpaid, but on the flip side, a less productive individual might be overpaid at the same company.
bencelaszlo 3y ago
> And these companies, they use the same kind of central planning that we so despise in communist systems. I know. I’ve done it. The work of János Kornai made us realize that it is impossible to find an exact solution for economic planning, so a completely centrally planned economy is destined to have major inefficiencies (he was also a notable inspiration for the Chinese reformers). It also seems like some kind of planning is inevitable in market economies to achieve long term goals as market prioritizes short term gains.
boxed 3y ago
> Modern capitalism raises the flag of the free market while pitting centrally planned organizations against each other That sounds like it's a gotcha, but it just isn't. Markets is about limiting the blast radius of bad dictatorships WAY DOWN. That's also why big corporations should be something that scares everyone. Maybe this isn't what the theoreticians think it's about, but that just makes the theory wrong, not the system. > Millions starved during the Great Leap Forward because the central organization was trying something impossible: Managing the productive output of an entire country. That's just one part of the problem and not even the biggest. They also: - moved all big farms from the "capitalists" who knew how to run them to random people who didn't (this has been done in several countries without planned economies and the disaster was just as big) - decided to kill all birds in the fields because they thought they ate the grain (they ate the insects that ate the grains) - ordered planting too close because of political ideas (even though the Soviet experts told them not to do this since the USSR had already tried this and had famines to prove it)... on and on it goes... In short the central planning is just the tip of the iceberg of Chinese communist mismanagement. > today’s most vaunted tech leader, Steve Jobs, was famously disrespectful of the opinions of others, yet made a lot of world-changing decisions Not even close. He didn't accept people opinions and he didn't ignore them politely: he challenged them. If you convinced him he changed his mind super fast. "Strong opinions, loosely held". This is what actually respecting others opinion looks like. It's just that most of us has never existed in a social situation where respect for opinions/ideas exists. We life in a world of pseudo-respect where we basically nod when people talk and ignore them.
hi-v-rocknroll 3y ago
This text is confusing and muddled. We hate working for or with i. assholes, ii. pointless endeavors, and iii. unreasonable boundaries imposed on our autonomy and pride of work. See also: RSA ANIMATE: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us (2010) https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc
JohnFen 3y ago
I hate working for big companies for two reasons: 1) Big companies have an enormous amount of friction and hassle that must be overcome to get things done. This is by necessity -- workers have to be coordinated with each other, and the more of them there are, the more overhead is required to accomplish that. 2) Big companies are boring to work for. Even when they're doing interesting things in the big picture, you're not likely to be working on the interesting bits. And when you are, it will be done in a way that makes it as tedious as possible. I know many people with sensibilities similar to mine. I also know many people who strongly prefer to work for big companies. Big companies are just a different sort of beast, and if you enjoy riding it then more power to you. It's just not for everyone.
- mcbrit 3y ago
  It is important to realize that big companies are friction free to a small set of folks; you will note marked tiers of less friction at some earlier point. You appear to have had a full-friction experience. This mostly has to do with top-down control and trust and should you get to do what you want to do because it’s maybe probably locally optimal but you didn’t notice the 5 semi trailers that will crush you on your current trajectory. Your last two sentences are fair enough, but perhaps this adds some context.
haburka 3y ago
I liked this article a lot and got excited because the issue resonated with me, and I wanted to see what the solution was. Then the article ended! Haha. Well apparently this is an unsolved problem in society. It would be interesting to run a company like it’s the free market, where you give out money based off how effective the individual parts of it are. But that’s basically done already, the issue is that work done by humans is not quantifiable and comparable at scale. Hopefully LLMs when given the reasoning upgrade can perfectly measure all of our contributions and then we can get rid of the central planning group (since they’re so costly) and replace it with some AI
- Viliam1234 3y ago
  > the issue is that work done by humans is not quantifiable and comparable at scale. If the company as a whole can buy human work per hour, perhaps so could the intra-company free market. Imagine a company that hires people for "minimum wage + bonus". Internally, the company consists of projects; each of them can 'hire' any willing employee currently not assigned on a project; and if an employee is not 'hired' by any project for 6 months in a row, the employee gets fired by the company. Maybe even more interesting would be a system where for each N months worked on a project you gain 1 month outside projects, and if you accumulate enough such months, you could try starting a new project within the company.
  - randysalami 3y ago
    This is the basis of a startup I’m working on.
- Ingaz 3y ago
  Ithink it's a good thing that this problem is unsolvable. Otherwise: we(humans)'ll just become automotons without any meaning to live

91 points by Vinnl 3y ago

stavros 3y ago

The "why" in the title was important to keep, in my opinion.

Vinnl 3y ago
Looks like it's back now. IIRC HN automatically removes "Why" at the start of a title - at least I didn't consciously remove it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kman82 3y ago

Who is “we”? I love my big company job

ang_cire 3y ago
I love my big company job, while still hating the company itself.
- glimshe 3y ago
  Some of the best jobs are in remote corners of large companies, in particular something that is very needed but nobody can or want to do, and thus people will leave you alone enjoying freedom and a big company paycheck. Like dealing with the legacy system that actually keeps the lights on while MBAs are drafting strategies to build one failed system after another.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
gwd 3y ago
The parts I love are where I get to make my own decisions locally, with people who are directly affected (which to be fair, is the majority). The parts I hate are those planned centrally; which thankfully right now are mainly limited to IT, budgeting / expenses, etc. You can completely tell that at the CTO level it looks like we're saving gobs of money by planning centrally; but at the local level you can see that in fact what's happening is the costs are being externalized into other areas in ways that are difficult to measure, but probably end up costing the company at least 3x.

mindaslab 3y ago

Because our brainless boss parties while we work

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
This has not been my experience (source: Worked for big companies for most of my career). In my experience, the middle managers were more miserable than the peons. When I became a manager, I hated it. Only the tippy-top managers really seemed to like their job, and they tended to use the company dime for most of their frou-frou. That said, I very much enjoy not working for big companies, anymore.
wepple 3y ago
How did someone “brainless” navigate to a position where they get to party, and if you’re so “brainfull”, why don’t you do the same? Is there political corruption and abuse that keeps you there?

pch00 3y ago

Written in 2018 before Puppet was bought by Perforce - would be interesting to read a new update to see if any of Luke's ideas or practices managed to survive the buyout.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
He would probably still agree with everything, but taken the money. He was at the top correct, a founder, and thus in his article, he would have taken the majority of the money. It is possible to know something is wrong, and feel guilt, but still take the money and continue to voice these ideas about change. It is hard to change a system when you are winning it. That doesn't mean he isn't also right that a lot of people are victims of it. ""In other words, they generate profit because they pay their employees less than they’re worth. If everyone could trade their labor for exactly the amount of money it was worth, the corporations that employ them would have a much harder time making money. Instead, in modern corporations the shareholders and the executive team - again, the central planning committee we so despise - make the majority of the money, while the front line does all the work and makes very little.""

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

vouaobrasil 3y ago

I agree with a lot in this article. We should have limits on the size and scope of big companies to eliminate global business, which in turn is just about shipping the costs of doing business to poorer countries where that cost is not as large simply because the poor are easier to exploit (e.g. kicking sustenance farmers off their land, dumping electronic waste, etc.). Global capitalism is devastating because it is about creating a world where the end result is everyone in subservience to a highly fragile infrastucture in return for immense short-term wealth for a few (big-tech employees are in this category). The size of business should be limited and corporations should be destroyed!

deleted 3y ago
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giantg2 3y ago
Sometimes that cost isn't exploitation but just taking advantage of lower cost of living - like hiring offshore devs. This still has negative impacts such as reducing domestic employment and even driving down domestic income. For example (which sometimes includes exploitation), it's easier to buy brand new shoes manufactured in a third world country and shipped halfway around the world than to find a shoe repair shop where a rebuild costs less than the new pair. Now that art is comparatively dead domestically.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  > lower cost of living Lower standards of living, lower cost would be like the difference between a budget hotel and a 5 star at the beach, lower standards is vacationing in Iowa instead. You'll hear people say things like "culturally they like to live ten to a single room tin shack" but that wouldn't be the case if they had wealth. It's not a choice, they are just paid less and that is being used as a justification for continuing to do so.
  - gosub100 3y ago
    I don't think thats entirely true. Lets pick India. Do you really think the only reason the grandparents stay attached to their adult children is economic?

glimshe 3y ago

Ignoring the anti-Capitalism nonsense, there is one interesting observation: the dictatorship-like nature of most large corporations. I always thought that the top management tiers of large corporations almost invariably attract psychopaths and power-hungry individuals who would be oppressive leaders if they were instead in real-world dictatorships. And the middle tiers attract the kind of people who would be the typical mid-level "do nothing" bureaucrats in such systems.

arethuza 3y ago
You may have rediscovered the Sociopath/Clueless/Loser categorisation: 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-...
CSMastermind 3y ago
Have you found that to be the case? I'd say that generally speaking I have not. I've made it to a point in my career where I interact with the top management at Fortune 100 companies and I have not at all found them to be psychopathic or power-hungry. Actually generally the opposite: those traits seem to be selected against. There are of course counter examples but I'd argue they're rare. I'd say that you'll find the psychopaths and power-hungry individuals in the middle layer of companies with the "do nothing" bureaucrats at the bottom of the management hierarchy, often without any formal people management titles at all.
- deathhand 3y ago
  I echo your statement and to take it a step further: In corporate politics there is only one thing that 'wins' and that is profitability. That profitability comes from the workforce so the top leaders are usually very motivated, democratic people because the best ideas win and you need people on your side. Thinking about the public sector, there is no KPI for a 'win'. When we try to start using statistics it becomes 'political', skewered, or hand waved away as a complex marcoeconomic force.
  - 3y ago

panick21_ 3y ago

> > Yet, there’s a flaw at the heart of this claim. While the United States operates as a free market economy, the key agent within modern capitalism - the corporation - works more like an authoritarian state Yeah that's why if you try to leave google, a bunch of guys show up with baseball bats and crush your knees to pulp.

sevagh 3y ago
I think they show up and threaten to crush your knees to a pulp if you don't write a blog post about "Why I'm leaving Google"

robertlagrant 3y ago

> Yet, there’s a flaw at the heart of this claim. While the United States operates as a free market economy, the key agent within modern capitalism - the corporation - works more like an authoritarian state This isn't particularly true, but where it is, it isn't a flaw. This is as designed. Where it's true: what capitalism wants to avoid is putting "money" in with "power" (i.e. "violence" and "rules") that the state has. Companies don't have violence and only have rules in a limited sense. E.g. a company can't lock you in a box for failing to give it some of your money. Only the state can do that. Having corporations limits the blast radius of what malicious/incompetent employees can do. In a capitalist system, with enough bad decisions, your company might go bankrupt. In a communist one, with enough bad decisions, 50 million people might starve to death[0]. Where it's not true: companies exist through free agreements between people. You might argue that they aren't free enough, although that gets vague fast, but you can't opt out of the state. That's the problem with authoritarian states. You can move job. Or, if you argue that people can't move job, the problem is so much harder for moving state that the point still stands. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

batty_alex 3y ago
> Companies don't have violence and only have rules in a limited sense. E.g. a company can't lock you in a box for failing to give it some of your money Companies certainly do "have violence" and certainly have locked people up in the past. The only thing keeping large corporations from doing this now is the state. In the article, the author puts forth the problem with the Great Leap Forward: large central authority being disconnected from those starving workers. That's a problem large, centrally planned, corporations face.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > the author puts forth the problem with the Great Leap Forward: large central authority being disconnected from those starving workers. That's a problem large, centrally planned, corporations face. This is not the whole truth. The problem with the Great Leap Forward was that the state enforced farming techniques, and even what farmers should work on instead of farming, and took food to bring to the centre. It's not just disconnection. Disconnection is far too vague a word to choose. To compare a company not listening to its workers with what the GLF did - it's hard to avoid thinking you picked the one vague word that could technically describe both of those scenarios, despite the vast gulf between them. As I sort of said elsewhere - some companies are bad. That's fine, unless there's no competitor to move to. Then workers' situations are really bad, because they have to choose between retraining, moving, and staying, none of which is a great choice. But if you think that's bad, think how much worse it is that a state bureaucrat can lock you in jail, and your only option is to flee the country. Companies aren't perfect, but they limit the blast radius of the damage an incompetent or malicious employee can achieve.

solatic 3y ago

> companies today hire workers to make money from their labor. In other words, they generate profit because they pay their employees less than they’re worth. If everyone could trade their labor for exactly the amount of money it was worth, the corporations that employ them would have a much harder time making money. Instead, in modern corporations the shareholders and the executive team - again, the central planning committee we so despise - make the majority of the money This is normal and natural. In a corporation, some stakeholders contribute cash, and other stakeholders contribute labor. Both are forms of capital. It is the combination of both that allows them to become more than the sum of their parts, and in doing so, generate wealth. There's plenty of room for criticism about just how much of the generated wealth should flow to those who invested cash compared to those who invested labor, and reforming the tax code so that it is easier to compensate with shareholdership those who invest with labor. But corporations should earn more from the labor than the labor is worth. That forming a corporation begins a positive-sum game, and not a zero-sum game, shouldn't be controversial. > I know the solution is not more freelancing and contract work, which America’s corporations are addicted to. That’s the worst of both worlds: The exploitative nature of capitalism with the inefficient bureaucracies of communism. Transactions on the free market work because they’re good for both sides, but most people only accept part-time contract relationships today when they have no other real choices. I think the author is holding up very specific contractual relationships as a scapegoat here; e.g. "gig economy" work a la Uber drivers, or the "contractors" who are fleecing the state of California out of billions of dollars for the high-speed rail project. And fair enough. But buried in both of those scapegoats is a clue: the "solution" is not individuals accepting take-it-or-leave-it short contracts presented by a robot taskmaster, nor is it BigConsulting agglomerating tens of thousands of warm bodies sold out by the hour, any more than the solution is sole proprietorships sewing dresses in their living rooms or the massive bureaucracies of Fortune 100 companies. Rather, it is in small and medium businesses, and giving contracts to other small and medium businesses; every one running small enough to keep executives in touch with line workers. Don't grow headcount further than (Dunbar's number - friends and family =) 100. If you feel tempted to do so, see what you can spin off and become their initial primary customer. Look to the Mittelstand as a model.

CaptainFever 3y ago

imgabe 3y ago

People always conflate capitalism with a free market. They're different things. Capitalism just means that capital (the means of production) is privately owned, rather than being owned by a collective of workers (socialism) or the state (communism). Controlled markets can still exist under capitalism, such as by monopoly. Standard Oil controlled the market for oil in its heyday and regulated the supply to keep the price stable to avoid the boom/bust cycles that happened before they consolidated the market. The government can still regulate the market, as it does extensively in the US, without changing the fundamental fact that the means of production are privately owned.

spit2wind 3y ago
+1 came here to point out what should be obvious: the US is not, and has never has been, a free market. There is, and always has been, "rules and regulations" beyond the "natural" which dictate the behavior of the market. The closest thing I'm aware of to a free market was the cryptocurrency driven markets of the "Dark Web" somewhere between the rise and fall of Silk Road. Yet even that market was embedded within, and ultimately governed by, the jurisdictions the network was hosted.
- gilbetron 3y ago
  There is no such thing as a free market without rules and regulations, rules and regulations are what allow a free market to exist.
  - chrstphrknwtn 3y ago
    This sounds an awful lot like doublethink. What is so free about a central bank setting interest rates?
- _w1tm 3y ago
  The “natural” rule of a “free market” without artificial rules is that he who owns the guns takes your stuff.
  - 3y ago

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

""I know the solution is not more freelancing and contract work, which America’s corporations are addicted to. That’s the worst of both worlds: The exploitative nature of capitalism with the inefficient bureaucracies of communism."" ""... but most people only accept part-time contract relationships today when they have no other real choices."" Great to point out. Free-Market would require people to be free. But if you work for the company in the company town, you're not free.

vitus 3y ago

An interesting exercise I went through while reading this article was taking these observations about centrally-managed top-down organizations and considering them in the context of centrally-controlled distributed systems. A couple of snippets: > One of the core principles of the free market is that central planning committees can never be as efficient or as effective as the people doing the work. By definition a free market economy lacks a decision-making hierarchy; the ‘free’ means every agent (individual or corporation) can decide for themselves, without needing permission from a manager above. > ... > It should be immediately obvious why this fails miserably: The distance between the central planning committee and the farmer is so great that good decisions are nearly impossible. It’s nearly impossible for critical feedback to make it from the edge, where the farmers are working, to the central planning committee in time to affect decisions, and then for those decisions to make it back to the edge in time to be useful. One of the core arguments for using a centralized control plane (versus a distributed one) is the ability to perform a single global optimization, which can yield better results compared to local optimizations. I find it interesting that the free market principles dictate the opposing conclusion that this global optimization is infeasible, although it may come down to my next point: If you're not careful, and your centralized system injects dozens of minutes of delay due to the additional complexity of performing the global optimization, you end up with the globally optimal decision from 20 minutes ago, which in the context of, say, load balancing is an eternity. Or in the bureaucracy of government (or hardware planning cycles, etc), you may see months to years of lag between the inputs your model accepts, and the outputs your model produces. And all the while, you have a full pipeline of decisions coming down the line, based on stale data. (There are other reasons for centralized control, such as orchestration of distributed computation being difficult to do correctly, and it being easier to reason about a single node rather than the complex system-wide interactions.)

pvdoom 3y ago
While I see where you are coming from, I don't think the free market has much to do with it, as "free market" to the extend that such thing exists outside the fantasies of ancap weirdos, is just one of many types of distributed decision making systems, and as such shares a lot of traits with them. So it's a question of organising big systems and how best to do that. Nothing says that we can't have organisations structured around this decentralised decision making, and quite the opposite - we both have the evidence this works, and it has been so thoroughly studied there are tons upon tons of pages written going back all the way to the 20s ...

mschuster91 3y ago

> Instead, in modern corporations the shareholders and the executive team - again, the central planning committee we so despise - make the majority of the money, while the front line does all the work and makes very little. The answer to that one is unionization. Unfortunately, unions are rather looked down upon in tech, for fears that "high performers" would not be able to set themselves apart financially from "low performers". And as a result, everyone loses out.

jwoq9118 3y ago

> The biggest problem is that we have no idea how to value most of the work people do. I mean, we might know that what a developer should get paid for a year’s work, but how much is that work worth? The majority of the work done in modern corporations is incredibly hard to value, which is partially why companies are so inefficient and make so many bad decisions. > That brings up an even bigger problem - companies today hire workers to make money from their labor. In other words, they generate profit because they pay their employees less than they’re worth. If everyone could trade their labor for exactly the amount of money it was worth, the corporations that employ them would have a much harder time making money. Anyone else see an issue with this comment? We don’t know how to value the work of a corporate employee but we’re simultaneously all being paid less than we’re worth. I like this article but I do feel the author leans too much into theory and what I hope is hyperbole. What I do love though is the admission at the end that we’re in a tough spot with modern capitalism and there’s no easy way to fix things by some “just do xyz” solution.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Since he is a founder that built the business, I'd say he is someone that has a lot of practical knowledge beyond theory. He saw both sides, and sees the flaws in both. How many times to do talk about the sales guy that earns too much, or so-and-so, that got promoted for being nice. Everyone is always complaining about others getting paid more, and that wouldn't happen if the pay was equal to value. Or, how about in Software, there are a lot of teams adding features, which one was worth more? It is hard to tell, but everyone seems to agree the guys at the top didn't contribute much. So, it seems like the math would work, the guys at the top don't produce much value, but get more money than the teams adding value. Even if how to calculate each individual value is difficult.
CPLX 3y ago
Those two observations are not inconsistent. We can have essentially no idea what each contribution to the whole is worth while being certain that the whole must, over the long term, be less than value X.
vitus 3y ago
There's definitely some aspect of hyperbole, just from the wording there: "the biggest problem is [...], but wait, there's an even bigger problem [than the biggest one]!" Comparatives overriding superlatives aside, I don't necessarily see these two issues as at odds with each other. We are bad at assigning dollar amounts to units of work, or even the productive output of a specific individual, but in aggregate companies can know how much revenue they bring in, and how much they spend (on labor, among other things), and in order to be profitable, revenue must exceed costs by definition. So taken in aggregate, companies are still able to exploit the gap between cost and value of labor. A highly productive individual might be significantly underpaid, but on the flip side, a less productive individual might be overpaid at the same company.

bencelaszlo 3y ago

> And these companies, they use the same kind of central planning that we so despise in communist systems. I know. I’ve done it. The work of János Kornai made us realize that it is impossible to find an exact solution for economic planning, so a completely centrally planned economy is destined to have major inefficiencies (he was also a notable inspiration for the Chinese reformers). It also seems like some kind of planning is inevitable in market economies to achieve long term goals as market prioritizes short term gains.

boxed 3y ago

> Modern capitalism raises the flag of the free market while pitting centrally planned organizations against each other That sounds like it's a gotcha, but it just isn't. Markets is about limiting the blast radius of bad dictatorships WAY DOWN. That's also why big corporations should be something that scares everyone. Maybe this isn't what the theoreticians think it's about, but that just makes the theory wrong, not the system. > Millions starved during the Great Leap Forward because the central organization was trying something impossible: Managing the productive output of an entire country. That's just one part of the problem and not even the biggest. They also: - moved all big farms from the "capitalists" who knew how to run them to random people who didn't (this has been done in several countries without planned economies and the disaster was just as big) - decided to kill all birds in the fields because they thought they ate the grain (they ate the insects that ate the grains) - ordered planting too close because of political ideas (even though the Soviet experts told them not to do this since the USSR had already tried this and had famines to prove it)... on and on it goes... In short the central planning is just the tip of the iceberg of Chinese communist mismanagement. > today’s most vaunted tech leader, Steve Jobs, was famously disrespectful of the opinions of others, yet made a lot of world-changing decisions Not even close. He didn't accept people opinions and he didn't ignore them politely: he challenged them. If you convinced him he changed his mind super fast. "Strong opinions, loosely held". This is what actually respecting others opinion looks like. It's just that most of us has never existed in a social situation where respect for opinions/ideas exists. We life in a world of pseudo-respect where we basically nod when people talk and ignore them.

hi-v-rocknroll 3y ago

This text is confusing and muddled. We hate working for or with i. assholes, ii. pointless endeavors, and iii. unreasonable boundaries imposed on our autonomy and pride of work. See also: RSA ANIMATE: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us (2010) https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc

JohnFen 3y ago

I hate working for big companies for two reasons: 1) Big companies have an enormous amount of friction and hassle that must be overcome to get things done. This is by necessity -- workers have to be coordinated with each other, and the more of them there are, the more overhead is required to accomplish that. 2) Big companies are boring to work for. Even when they're doing interesting things in the big picture, you're not likely to be working on the interesting bits. And when you are, it will be done in a way that makes it as tedious as possible. I know many people with sensibilities similar to mine. I also know many people who strongly prefer to work for big companies. Big companies are just a different sort of beast, and if you enjoy riding it then more power to you. It's just not for everyone.

mcbrit 3y ago
It is important to realize that big companies are friction free to a small set of folks; you will note marked tiers of less friction at some earlier point. You appear to have had a full-friction experience. This mostly has to do with top-down control and trust and should you get to do what you want to do because it’s maybe probably locally optimal but you didn’t notice the 5 semi trailers that will crush you on your current trajectory. Your last two sentences are fair enough, but perhaps this adds some context.

haburka 3y ago

I liked this article a lot and got excited because the issue resonated with me, and I wanted to see what the solution was. Then the article ended! Haha. Well apparently this is an unsolved problem in society. It would be interesting to run a company like it’s the free market, where you give out money based off how effective the individual parts of it are. But that’s basically done already, the issue is that work done by humans is not quantifiable and comparable at scale. Hopefully LLMs when given the reasoning upgrade can perfectly measure all of our contributions and then we can get rid of the central planning group (since they’re so costly) and replace it with some AI

Viliam1234 3y ago
> the issue is that work done by humans is not quantifiable and comparable at scale. If the company as a whole can buy human work per hour, perhaps so could the intra-company free market. Imagine a company that hires people for "minimum wage + bonus". Internally, the company consists of projects; each of them can 'hire' any willing employee currently not assigned on a project; and if an employee is not 'hired' by any project for 6 months in a row, the employee gets fired by the company. Maybe even more interesting would be a system where for each N months worked on a project you gain 1 month outside projects, and if you accumulate enough such months, you could try starting a new project within the company.
- randysalami 3y ago
  This is the basis of a startup I’m working on.
Ingaz 3y ago
Ithink it's a good thing that this problem is unsolvable. Otherwise: we(humans)'ll just become automotons without any meaning to live