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Executives are day traders. I've known day traders to argue that they make more money trading in the first and last 30 minutes of the day than they do if they'r

Executives are day traders. I've known day traders to argue that they make more money trading in the first and last 30 minutes of the day than they do if they're trading all day, because they end up getting involved in "boredom trading" that is break-even at best (and blows out their variance) and quite possibly losing. As for executives, they're disciplined, they can enjoy their easy jobs and high compensation and accept the boredom associated with rarely being needed, because if things are running well, they aren't operationally necessary. Unfortunately, they're rarely content to work 2 hours per day at their cushy jobs. They become forces of nature due to a combination of (a) a need to feel active and important, and (b) a theater in which it's hard for them to have real positive impact (because performance assessment of executives is impossible and most just don't have the talent). "Trading boredom" sets in. The executive's job is to Make Decisions and to gamble with the company culture and operations. In order to feel useful, executives pull this shit. Like "saving money" by gutting the IT organization. What's worst about this is that the executives who do this sort of thing rarely suffer any consequences. They shift blame to subordinates whom they can fire, and if the heat is turned up on them, they move on to other jobs. The employees and the owners get fucked, but executives get to flit about from one cushy job to another on account of building a web of connections that makes them effectively invincible.

Foy 14y ago
I hear nightmarish stories of micro-managers all the time. They feel that in order to do their jobs they have to tweak EVERYTHING that crosses their desk. One memorable anecdote I came across was about an animation artist who was in charge of animating the queen for a 3d chess game. Because he knew his manager's weakness he threw in a duck... Yes, a duck. Fully animated with sound effects and everything. Sure enough, when he showed his work to his manager he said "It's perfect, but get rid of the duck." So maybe the moral of this lesson is that when things are running 100% smoothly, it's wise to toss your micro-manager a bone by doing something intentionally a little wrong to give them something to meddle with. ;-)
- cperciva 14y ago
  I've heard the same advice applied to PhD theses: Examiners always want to change something, so leave something in which you won't mind having them tell you to change.
  - praptak 14y ago
    I have witnessed this advice applied to contract drafts. Lawyers from the other company were routinely given some bullshit clauses to prove their usefulness in vetting the contract.
    - lancewiggs 14y ago
      The really entertaining part is when they don't catch them. Every clause is negotiable - don't leave it to your lawyers alone to negotiate.
- Dobbs 14y ago
  The duck story is battle chess: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?title=Talk:Battle_Chess#The_duck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?title=Talk:Battle_Chess#The_duc... I've often had the opposite problem: companies where the CEO is so disconnected from the company (usually by working remotely 80% of the time) that the company doesn't have direction and languishes.
  - Foy 14y ago
    Oh thanks! I was wondering where exactly I had heard that.
  - Dylan16807 14y ago
    Aww, so there never was a duck.
  - rmc 14y ago
    Speaking of managers ignoring things, I'm reminded of the last episode of the 90s sci-fi tv show 'Sliders', apparently the producers thought the network exec werent reading the scripts, so they deliberately broke a rule, and wrote a scene where someone was shot in the head and it wasn't picked up on. cf. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliders#section_2 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliders#section_2
praptak 14y ago
> they move on to other jobs. ... with their CVs exposing the fuckups as accomplishments: "Successfully managed a cost cutting campaign, sparing the company 2 bazillions in IT costs". The previous company won't admit it was actually a disaster.
- protomyth 14y ago
  Its even funner at companies that cycle managers through business units to get them experience with the whole company. Leads to a "must make changes that are short-term budget wins but long term negatives" attitude.
  - praptak 14y ago
    It's called "a bungee boss": http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1994-09-07/ http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1994-09-07/
zcvosdfdgj 14y ago
No need to generalize based on your work experience. There are good AND bad managers. The fact that IT gets cut does not mean the manager is bad. You work in IT, so I'm sorry I have to break this to you, but sometimes the universe does not revolve around IT. Sometimes there are more important divisions, and sometimes IT expenses have to be cut. There's not enough detail in the article to know if the manager was good or bad.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  Things were running well. The executive thought that IT was bloated and made cuts. Things were no longer running well. Far more money was lost in the company's dysfunction than saved by the cuts. Sounds like a bad executive to me. I never implied that there aren't good managers and executives, but only that most of them aren't, because most of them get caught up in "boredom trading" that doesn't solve problems, but is just managerial action for action's sake.
  - zcvosdfdgj 14y ago
    First, he said the savings almost certainly less than the cost of the waste. This sounds like a guess. He gives no numbers, and doesn't appear to have quantified anything. Second, maybe IT was running so smoothly previously because it was bloated, and was a huge drain on company resources. Maybe it was running smoothly because a bad manager refused to put a limit on anything, leading to a division whos costs were completely out of control. We have no idea, because there are no details in the article about the company, or about the IT spending before OR after the cuts.
    - rosstafarian 14y ago
      The exact quote is: "Of course, it all went to shit. New employees would go a week before they had machines, phones, passwords, and ACLs. Printers ran out of paper, projectors ran out of lightbulbs, servers ran out of storage, networks got misconfigured, and so forth. The total time lost and wasted across the whole company was most certainly greater than the savings of laying off the expensive and skilled IT staff." The guy might be a bit biased but it's completely clear from his article that even though he might not have exact numbers the company was much better off(not only in terms of total profit) with the old IT department. Are you a manager?
temphn 14y ago
Unfortunately, they're rarely content to work 2 hours per day at their cushy jobs. These are not the characteristics of executives at successful companies. Have you ever started a successful business? If so, did you work two hours per day? I doubt many YC founders would see themselves in this assessment.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  I doubt many YC founders would cut IT because things are working well. Startup founders are in a different class because there's actually 8+ (sometimes 14+) hours of work to be done in a day in a company that's fighting its way into existence.
- zobzu 14y ago
  YC founders and startups have nothing to do with the story IMO. They're generally engineers that make their own companies. Executives as depicted are however the general standard for most companies. They generally have never created any company from scratch.
- ubernostrum 14y ago
  Yes, yes, I see. A person struggling mightily to build a brand-new company from scratch is obviously a perfect analogy for a person who's placed in a high-level position at a strong, established company. I bet that their tasks and workloads are practically identical, even!
kooshball 14y ago
This kind of generalization is toxic. The engineering community as a whole should not accept this mindset of Engineering vs Executives.
- rayiner 14y ago
  The executive community is quite on board with the mindset of "engineers are fungible cost-centers to be reduced as much as possible" so why should engineers not be wary themselves? Engineers being culturally complacent and not willing to make a fuss is precisely why companies like Google, who have revenues per employee twice as high as say Goldman Sachs, get away with paying their engineers a fraction of what financial professionals at Goldman get paid.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  It's not that. Good executives are worth far more than the compensation that they get; but as a class, their net impact is neutral at best and probably negative. As with stock traders (where a lot of them just lose money) most of them aren't very competent. That doesn't invalidate every single one of them or what they're trying to do. It's the CEO-pay debate all over again. No one who actually understands large companies would argue against the notion that it's worth $10 million per year (several times that, actually) for a company to have a good CEO over a bad one. On the other hand, shitty CEOs are paid highly just for belonging to the class of people considered eligible to be CEOs, and increasing executive compensation has paradoxically reduced quality of service: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2010/11/22/pay-more-get-less/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2010/11/22/pay-more-get-... Also, I think lightweight management is generally better and I don't see why people find my insinuation that most executives should be working 2 hours per day to be an insult to what they do. If I were at a point in my career where I could legitimately justify the kind of compensation that I make now with a 2-hour workday, that would be awesome. I could go back to school, or volunteer, or take another job. I don't know why people in our culture equate working long hours with being productive. I equate it with being so unproductive that people have to make monstrous sacrifices just to reach par (although the reality is that most people are plenty capable of being productive, and the long hours come from social expectations).
robomartin 14y ago
> As for executives, they're disciplined, they can enjoy their easy jobs and high compensation and accept the boredom associated with rarely being needed, because if things are running well, they aren't operationally necessary I'm sorry but you have zero clue as to what running a business is like. Zero. There really isn't much more I can say other than to quote Twain: "He who holds a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way". Go hold a cat by the tail. Then come back and re-read your post.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- rapala 14y ago
  In a firm the size depicted in the post business is run by the marketing division. In these firms most of the divisions have executives to sign purchases and attend meetings.
- bgilroy26 14y ago
  I don't understand the reaction here in the comments. Do the people talking about the uselessness of management think the same of sysadmins whose systems are running smoothly?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
jusben1369 14y ago
There are bad executives like their are bad programmers. You should narrow it down vs being so broad.

Foy 14y ago

I hear nightmarish stories of micro-managers all the time. They feel that in order to do their jobs they have to tweak EVERYTHING that crosses their desk. One memorable anecdote I came across was about an animation artist who was in charge of animating the queen for a 3d chess game. Because he knew his manager's weakness he threw in a duck... Yes, a duck. Fully animated with sound effects and everything. Sure enough, when he showed his work to his manager he said "It's perfect, but get rid of the duck." So maybe the moral of this lesson is that when things are running 100% smoothly, it's wise to toss your micro-manager a bone by doing something intentionally a little wrong to give them something to meddle with. ;-)

cperciva 14y ago
I've heard the same advice applied to PhD theses: Examiners always want to change something, so leave something in which you won't mind having them tell you to change.
- praptak 14y ago
  I have witnessed this advice applied to contract drafts. Lawyers from the other company were routinely given some bullshit clauses to prove their usefulness in vetting the contract.
  - lancewiggs 14y ago
    The really entertaining part is when they don't catch them. Every clause is negotiable - don't leave it to your lawyers alone to negotiate.
Dobbs 14y ago
The duck story is battle chess: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?title=Talk:Battle_Chess#The_duck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?title=Talk:Battle_Chess#The_duc... I've often had the opposite problem: companies where the CEO is so disconnected from the company (usually by working remotely 80% of the time) that the company doesn't have direction and languishes.
- Foy 14y ago
  Oh thanks! I was wondering where exactly I had heard that.
- Dylan16807 14y ago
  Aww, so there never was a duck.
- rmc 14y ago
  Speaking of managers ignoring things, I'm reminded of the last episode of the 90s sci-fi tv show 'Sliders', apparently the producers thought the network exec werent reading the scripts, so they deliberately broke a rule, and wrote a scene where someone was shot in the head and it wasn't picked up on. cf. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliders#section_2 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliders#section_2

praptak 14y ago

> they move on to other jobs. ... with their CVs exposing the fuckups as accomplishments: "Successfully managed a cost cutting campaign, sparing the company 2 bazillions in IT costs". The previous company won't admit it was actually a disaster.

protomyth 14y ago
Its even funner at companies that cycle managers through business units to get them experience with the whole company. Leads to a "must make changes that are short-term budget wins but long term negatives" attitude.
- praptak 14y ago
  It's called "a bungee boss": http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1994-09-07/ http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1994-09-07/

zcvosdfdgj 14y ago

No need to generalize based on your work experience. There are good AND bad managers. The fact that IT gets cut does not mean the manager is bad. You work in IT, so I'm sorry I have to break this to you, but sometimes the universe does not revolve around IT. Sometimes there are more important divisions, and sometimes IT expenses have to be cut. There's not enough detail in the article to know if the manager was good or bad.

michaelochurch 14y ago
Things were running well. The executive thought that IT was bloated and made cuts. Things were no longer running well. Far more money was lost in the company's dysfunction than saved by the cuts. Sounds like a bad executive to me. I never implied that there aren't good managers and executives, but only that most of them aren't, because most of them get caught up in "boredom trading" that doesn't solve problems, but is just managerial action for action's sake.
- zcvosdfdgj 14y ago
  First, he said the savings almost certainly less than the cost of the waste. This sounds like a guess. He gives no numbers, and doesn't appear to have quantified anything. Second, maybe IT was running so smoothly previously because it was bloated, and was a huge drain on company resources. Maybe it was running smoothly because a bad manager refused to put a limit on anything, leading to a division whos costs were completely out of control. We have no idea, because there are no details in the article about the company, or about the IT spending before OR after the cuts.
  - rosstafarian 14y ago
    The exact quote is: "Of course, it all went to shit. New employees would go a week before they had machines, phones, passwords, and ACLs. Printers ran out of paper, projectors ran out of lightbulbs, servers ran out of storage, networks got misconfigured, and so forth. The total time lost and wasted across the whole company was most certainly greater than the savings of laying off the expensive and skilled IT staff." The guy might be a bit biased but it's completely clear from his article that even though he might not have exact numbers the company was much better off(not only in terms of total profit) with the old IT department. Are you a manager?

temphn 14y ago

Unfortunately, they're rarely content to work 2 hours per day at their cushy jobs. These are not the characteristics of executives at successful companies. Have you ever started a successful business? If so, did you work two hours per day? I doubt many YC founders would see themselves in this assessment.

michaelochurch 14y ago
I doubt many YC founders would cut IT because things are working well. Startup founders are in a different class because there's actually 8+ (sometimes 14+) hours of work to be done in a day in a company that's fighting its way into existence.
zobzu 14y ago
YC founders and startups have nothing to do with the story IMO. They're generally engineers that make their own companies. Executives as depicted are however the general standard for most companies. They generally have never created any company from scratch.
ubernostrum 14y ago
Yes, yes, I see. A person struggling mightily to build a brand-new company from scratch is obviously a perfect analogy for a person who's placed in a high-level position at a strong, established company. I bet that their tasks and workloads are practically identical, even!

kooshball 14y ago

This kind of generalization is toxic. The engineering community as a whole should not accept this mindset of Engineering vs Executives.

rayiner 14y ago
The executive community is quite on board with the mindset of "engineers are fungible cost-centers to be reduced as much as possible" so why should engineers not be wary themselves? Engineers being culturally complacent and not willing to make a fuss is precisely why companies like Google, who have revenues per employee twice as high as say Goldman Sachs, get away with paying their engineers a fraction of what financial professionals at Goldman get paid.
michaelochurch 14y ago
It's not that. Good executives are worth far more than the compensation that they get; but as a class, their net impact is neutral at best and probably negative. As with stock traders (where a lot of them just lose money) most of them aren't very competent. That doesn't invalidate every single one of them or what they're trying to do. It's the CEO-pay debate all over again. No one who actually understands large companies would argue against the notion that it's worth $10 million per year (several times that, actually) for a company to have a good CEO over a bad one. On the other hand, shitty CEOs are paid highly just for belonging to the class of people considered eligible to be CEOs, and increasing executive compensation has paradoxically reduced quality of service: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2010/11/22/pay-more-get-less/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2010/11/22/pay-more-get-... Also, I think lightweight management is generally better and I don't see why people find my insinuation that most executives should be working 2 hours per day to be an insult to what they do. If I were at a point in my career where I could legitimately justify the kind of compensation that I make now with a 2-hour workday, that would be awesome. I could go back to school, or volunteer, or take another job. I don't know why people in our culture equate working long hours with being productive. I equate it with being so unproductive that people have to make monstrous sacrifices just to reach par (although the reality is that most people are plenty capable of being productive, and the long hours come from social expectations).

robomartin 14y ago

> As for executives, they're disciplined, they can enjoy their easy jobs and high compensation and accept the boredom associated with rarely being needed, because if things are running well, they aren't operationally necessary I'm sorry but you have zero clue as to what running a business is like. Zero. There really isn't much more I can say other than to quote Twain: "He who holds a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way". Go hold a cat by the tail. Then come back and re-read your post.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
rapala 14y ago
In a firm the size depicted in the post business is run by the marketing division. In these firms most of the divisions have executives to sign purchases and attend meetings.
bgilroy26 14y ago
I don't understand the reaction here in the comments. Do the people talking about the uselessness of management think the same of sysadmins whose systems are running smoothly?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

jusben1369 14y ago

There are bad executives like their are bad programmers. You should narrow it down vs being so broad.