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My personal theory is that this is the result of an incompetent management class where no self corrections are happening. In my work experience I've realized e

by nisa 2y ago

My personal theory is that this is the result of an incompetent management class where no self corrections are happening. In my work experience I've realized everybody fears honesty in their organization be it big or small. Customers can't admit the project is failing, so it churns on. Workers/developers want to keep their job and either burn out or adapt and avoid talking about obvious deficits. Management is preoccupied with softening words and avoiding decisions because they lack knowledge of the problem or process. Additionally there has been a growing pipeline of people that switch directly from university where they've been told to only manage other people and not care about the subject to positions of power where they are helpless and can't admit it. Even in university, working for the administration I've watched people self congratulation on doing design thinking seminars every other week and working on preserving their job instead of doing useful things while the money for teaching assistants or technical personnel is not there. I've seen that so often that I think it's almost universal. The result is mediocre broken stuff where everyone pretends everything is fine. Everyone wants to manage, nobody wants to do the work or god forbid improve processes and solve real problems. I've got some serious ADHD symptoms and as a sysadmin when you fail to deliver it's pretty obvious and I messed up big time more than once and it was always sweet talked, excused, bullshitted away from higher ups. Something is really off and everyone is telling similar stories about broken processes. Feels like a collective passivity that captures everything and nobody is willing to admit that something doesn't work. And a huge missallocation of resources. Not sure how it used to be but I'm pessimistic how this will end.

baazaa 2y ago
While I suspect the root cause is managerial dysfunction ultimately the disease spreads everywhere. I've stopped honing my technical skills because I don't expect to ever work in an organisation sufficiently well-managed for it to matter. So then you end up with the loss of genuine technical expertise from generation to generation as well.
fijiaarone 2y ago
The cause of an incompetent management class is a subservient worker class. Now a subservient worker class is either that they are incompetent or they don’t have access to capital, meaning that they can’t strike out on their own and leave management to suffer the consequences of their incompetence.
- Buttons840 2y ago
  Disconnecting most benefits from employment would be a good start, especially healthcare. Imagine if small companies could focus on their product and customers instead of on being the entire social safety net for their employees.
fungiblecog 2y ago
this is exactly my experience
idra 2y ago
Sounds like hypernormalisation has now hit the West https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
- no_wizard 2y ago
  Holy moly. This lead me down a quick read to this gem[0]: > Aladdin (Asset, Liability and Debt and Derivative Investment Network)[1] is an electronic system built by BlackRock Solutions, the risk management division of the largest investment management corporation, BlackRock, Inc. In 2013, it handled about $11 trillion in assets (including BlackRock's $4.1 trillion assets), which was about 7% of the world's financial assets, and kept track of about 30,000 investment portfolios. For any one firm to have this much director and/or indirect assertion over the world’s financial assets is ripe for problems of all sorts. Seems rather indicative of the general consolidation of power and decline of social equality across the west [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin_(BlackRock) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin_(BlackRock)
  - simpaticoder 2y ago
    BlackRock is the ultimate moral hazard.
roenxi 2y ago
> Something is really off and everyone is telling similar stories about broken processes. There are people out there who are pretty conflict-avoidant by nature, and any group tends to pretty significant levels of cohesion because of it. There are some classic stories out there about when it goes particularly bad and spirals into a bad case of groupthink. In the economy there are supposed to be some slightly cruel feedback mechanisms where companies (effectively big groups) that get off track are defunded and their resources reallocated to someone more competent. The west has been on a campaign to disable all those feedback mechanisms and let companies just keep trudging on. We've pretty much disabled recessions by this point. A bunch of known-incompetent management teams have been bailed out so they can just keep plodding along destroying value. There is not so much advantage in being honest about competence in this environment, if anything it is a bad thing because it makes it harder to take bailout money with a straight face. I cite the Silicon Valley Bank collapse as an interesting case study. A looot of companies should have gone bust with that one because they were imprudent with their money. They didn't.
- jimnotgym 2y ago
  I think one issue that exacerbates this is concentration of wealth. This has created such a demand for financial assets that their price is ridiculous, no matter how bad the management of those companies is.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    It's basically the other way around. The companies that are enabled to grow without bound are the cause of concentration of wealth, not the result of it. Who are the billionaires? The early shareholders in megacorps.
- bix6 2y ago
  Companies should go bankrupt because a trusted bank had a bank run thrust on it by competitors? I don’t agree with that.
  - zahlman 2y ago
forgotoldacc 2y ago
One big problem is becoming a manager is seen as the end goal, and pay often reflects that. Being a great engineer or researcher doesn't pay. You won't get your name known for your work. All your achievements will be attributed to whoever manages you at best, or attributed to the corporation above you with not a single human name at worst. People like being recognized for their work. Every great achiever wants to have their name remembered long after they leave this world. Everyone wants to be the next Isaac Newton. The next Bill Gates. The next Steve Jobs. The next Elon Musk. It's a constant downhill path from being known for using your brain and busting your ass to discover or create something, to being known for managing someone who created something, to being known as someone who bought the company that managed people who created something. Motivations are all fucked up. No matter what you discover or create these days, there's a feeling that you're not going to have your name written in history books. Your best options are join a grift or manage someone who's doing the hard work.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Maybe… I dunno, there’s something in the fact that Isaac Newton the imaginary cultural figure was hit on the head by an apple, and then invented calculus. Meanwhile Isaac Newton the actual guy (recalling from memory so feel free to correct) was a bit eccentric (dabbled in alchemy and other mystic arts), had some academic posts, some government jobs, and built Calculus on work that was ongoing in the academic community… The imaginary Isaac Newton and the imaginary Elon Musk look sort of similar. Because we ignore the boring work that Newton did and the fact that Musk just bought his way around it—their real versions look very different of course! But if you want the actual day to day experience of being Isaac Newton, you can, just go be a professor and make some quirky friends.
  - scryers_bloom 2y ago
    This is actually a very interesting point and highlights the fact that most of the famous polymaths only started being talked about long after they were dead (good example is Maupertuis and his work on action in physics).
somenameforme 2y ago
I think a way to sum this up is simply metric optimizing. As organizations and companies grow larger the need to evaluate people at scale becomes necessary. And so metrics are used, and people then naturally start to optimize around those metrics. But it seems to invariably turns out that any sort of metric you create will not effectively measure progress towards a goal you want to achieve, when that metric ends up being optimized for. The traditional term for this is cobra effect. [1] When the Brits were occupying India they wanted to reduce the cobra population, so they simply created a bounty on cobra heads. Sounds reasonable, but you need to have foresight to think about what comes next. This now created a major incentive for entrepreneurial Indians to start mass breeding cobras to then turn in their heads. After this was discovered, the bounty program was canceled, and the now surging cobra farm industry mostly just let their cobras go wild. I think the fundamental problem is that things just don't work so well at scale, after a point. This is made even worse by the fact that things work really well at scale before they start to break down. So we need a large economy that remains relatively decentralized. But that's not so easy, because the easiest way to make more money is to just start assimilating other companies/competitors with your excess revenue. Anti-trust is the knee jerk answer but even there, are we even going to pretend there's a single person alive who e.g. Google (or any other mega corp) doesn't have the resources to 'sway'? [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
- Seattle3503 2y ago
  I think there is something to the idea that there are roo many too large firms doing abstract work. People have become detached from their impact.
  - a_bonobo 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation >Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the separation and estrangement of people from their work, their wider world, their human nature, and their selves. Alienation is a consequence of the division of labour in a capitalist society, wherein a human being's life is lived as a mechanistic part of a social class.[1]
whatever1 2y ago
This started when companies decided that labor is fungible. The moment you admit failure as an employee, you are out of the company. And no for most people it is not easy to find a job that will not disrupt their lives (aka move cities, change financial planning, even health insurance). So employees do what they have to do. They will lie till the last moment and pretend that the initiatives they are working on are huge value add for the company. In the past you knew you would retire from your company, also the compensation differential was not that huge across levels, so there was little incentive to BS. Today everything is optimized with a horizon of a financial quarter. Then a pandemic hits, and we realize that we don't even know how to make freaking masks and don’t even have supplies of things for more than a week.
- hansmayer 2y ago
  Great points. I was also shocked to see on an example recently that even basic computer literacy is gone. We visited a couple of friends of ours recently. And as things go, at some point they (non-tech folks) asked me to help them with some printer settings on their new laptop - I am sure we all had experienced this many times over. So they pass me the notebook, not connected to power source. I noticed the battery was low and ask for the adapter to connect it. I proceed to tell them it was not a good idea to let the notebook battery go so low and that they should operate it on battery only when they don't really have access to power supply. The response - they had thought, they way you use a notebook was analogous to the mobile phone, i.e. you charge it up then use it all the way until the battery drops low, then rinse and repeat, etc. The smartphones have ruined our society in more ways than one.
  - corimaith 2y ago
    To be fair, charging your notebook at 100 all day is going to degrade the battery pretty quick. Using it unplugged until it's low is actually the correct procedure.
    - hansmayer 2y ago
      Well, no. It seems to be something that spilled over from the smartphone usage patterns. Because for notebooks which are plugged in, the notebook is supplied from the power network and the battery gets charged only if necessary, by applying intelligent logic. For example my Legion notebook only charges the battery when it's below a certain threshold. Think this is by now the case even with the most low-end notebooks. Plus the non-linear nature of consumption on a developer notebook makes the battery as power supply for serious work un-reliable. Try running a few database containers in your local environment while sitting in a one-hour conference pair-programming with video on and tell me how far you get with that 100% charged battery ;)
choeger 2y ago
I can confirm nearly everything you say, and I'd like to add that it's a cultural phenomenon. We don't seem to value competence anymore. I cannot recall when I've heard someone say something positive about another person's competence. Be it a craftsman, industry worker, knowledge worker, or even a teacher. There doesn't seem to be any value in doing a good job.
- MaKey 2y ago
  I do it. This week I congratulated a dentist on his great job at a gum transplant. I love it when people are highly competent at their profession.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Is your dentist competent or good at making you think he is? you shouldn't see your dentist enough to know.
    - MaKey 2y ago
      He's a periodontist, I've only seen him for the two gum transplants I had. It's a delicate procedure and the results were great both times, so to me he is competent.
bsenftner 2y ago
This crisis, which it is, is caused by the unrecognized necessity for effective communications within science and technology and business, which is not taught. Not really, only a lite "presentation skill" is taught. Fact of the matter: communications is everything for humans, including dealing with one's own self. Communications are how our internal self conversation mired in bias encourages or discourages behavior, communications are how peers lead, mislead, inform, misinform, and omit key information - including that critical problem information that people are too often afraid to relate. An effective communicator can talk to anyone, regardless of stature, and convey understanding. If the information is damningly negative, the effective communicator is thanked for their insight and not punished nor ignored. Effective communications is everything in our complex society, and this critical skill is simply ignored.
- stuartjohnson12 2y ago
  I read Moral Mazes recently and what it describes is not a lack of communications skill, to the contrary, the incentives created by managerial social hierarchies place very high praise on difficult communications skills such as the ability to fluidly support contradictory positions on different issues, the ability to manipulate symbols and euphemism to justify necessary actions, the understanding of what makes others in their management circles feel good.
  - bsenftner 2y ago
    What you're describing is the opposite end of the spectrum, those that do understand communications and language to the degree they can appear to fluidly support contradictory positions, but they are in fact operating at a higher communications level and spinning circles around those less adept in communications. They are masterful language and perception manipulators, in a strategic game of corporate dominance.
    - mlyle 2y ago
      But, there's a hyperparameter here; we culturally and organizationally get to choose how much of this game exists and how effective it is. And certainly some of these games are useful; abilities of this kind are highly correlated with other abilities, and having masterful language and perception manipulators act for the interest of your company or nation is valuable. But it's not the only useful skill at the upper tier of organizations, and emphasizing it over all else is costly. So are internal political games-- when your organization plays too many of them, the benefits one gets from selecting these people and efforts are dwarfed by the infighting and wasted effort. It can also result in severe misalignment between individual and organizational incentives.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> My personal theory is that this is the result of an incompetent management class where no self corrections are happening. This is really a cultural problem that has infected management along with everyone else. It used to be that you were expected to be able to fix your own car or washing machine, and moreover that one you couldn't fix would be rejected by the customers. It was expected to come with documentation and be made of modular parts you could actually obtain for less than three quarters of the price of the entire machine. Now everything is a black box you're expected to never open and if it breaks and the manufacturer doesn't deign to fix it you go to the store and buy another one. The problem with this is that it poisons the well. Paying money to make the problem go away instead of learning how to fix it yourself means that, at scale, you lose the ability to fix it yourself. The knowledge and infrastructure to choose differently decays, so that you have to pay someone else to fix the problem, even if that's not what you would have chosen. The result is a helplessness that stems from a lack of agency. Once the ability to do something yourself has atrophied, you can no longer even tell whether the person you're having do it for you is doing it well. Which, of course, causes them to not. And in turn to defend the opacity so they can continue to not. Which brings us back to management. The C suite doesn't actually know how the company works. If something bad happens, they may not even find out about it, or if they do it's through a layer of middle management that has put whatever spin on it necessary to make sure the blame falls on the designated scapegoat. Actually fixing the cause of the problem is intractable because the cause is never identified. But to fix that you'd need an economy with smaller companies, like a machine with modular parts and documented interfaces, instead of an opaque monolith that can't be cured because it can't be penetrated by understanding.
- beowulfey 2y ago
  >Paying money to make the problem go away instead of learning how to fix it yourself means that, at scale, you lose the ability to fix it yourself. This is very insightful and, in my mind, a good preview of what is happening with AI right now. We will forget how to use the skills that built these systems in the first place.
  - InDubioProRubio 2y ago
amadeuspagel 2y ago
If only people were allowed to start their own companies.
- johannes1234321 2y ago
  You can start your own company, but in today's world you are immediately in a global competition. Not only in software, but also many forms of production a Chinese 3d printed thing will be shipped cheaply to your customers, for many services one competes with cheap labor ... You got to offer good quality and stand out, which isn't easy without capital.
  - snozolli 2y ago
    You're also competing with multinationals that can exploit tax loopholes and attract tax incentives and grants.
    - eppp 2y ago
      Who have also captured regulators and politicians and use them to cement their advantage by making things too costly and difficult for new startups to compete.
    - Hoasi 2y ago
      Competition is for losers. All you have to do is create value in an entirely new niche category that you will own by offering something that didn’t exist before and that people want.
      - johannes1234321 2y ago
        Till the multinational corporation with deep pockets decides to go after your niche. They don't have to be profitable inside that niche, while you have to.
    - hylaride 2y ago
      > You're also competing with multinationals that can exploit tax loopholes and attract tax incentives and grants. Not only that, but often with whole government backed companies where the government will gladly support them and even participate in espionage to gain competitive advantages. Huawei is the classic example, but is just the tip of the iceberg. Meanwhile in most of the western world, executives are focusing on the next quarterly results...
__oh_es 2y ago
I would caveat with its not affordable to be passionate anymore. The top engineers (mech, chem, civil, etc) I know work in finance or consulting instead of doing things they care about. Closer to tech, I feel we have had a big influx on non-tech joining the tech workforce and the quality has suffered as a result of a lack of fundamentals and passion
- no_wizard 2y ago
  >Closer to tech, I feel we have had a big influx on non-tech joining the tech workforce and the quality has suffered as a result of a lack of fundamentals and passion In the web development community there is a near linear correlation between the number of “influencers” who sell courses that pray on this influx to make money and the influx of such folks. I miss the days where developers generally had a passion for this work vs seeing only a big paycheck, though without artificial barriers we should have expected a lot of influx of people given how well it generally paid for a long time
zosima 2y ago
This is it. There is a mass-hypnosis in the west where reality at best is being completely ignored and at worst actively treated in a very hostile manner.
- mattgreenrocks 2y ago
  The full embrace of anti-reality is now quite obvious, with social media's perceived relevance being a symptom of that. Many can't and don't want to cope with reality because it doesn't bend to their will.
varelse 2y ago
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nostrademons 2y ago
They're responding to incentives. The only user that matters is the marginal user, the person who didn't previously use your product but now does. They even teach this in MBAs and economics classes. And so the only efforts that matter are those that create a customer, and hence management spends a great deal on promotions, marketing, new customer discounts, advertising, gamification, addictive usage mechanics, lock-in, etc but basically zero on making existing customers happy. It's almost better if they aren't happy - an "ideally run" company is one that has users who hate your product but don't hate it quite enough to quit using it (or if they do, they have no alternatives). Enshittification in action.
lenerdenator 2y ago
> My personal theory is that this is the result of an incompetent management class where no self corrections are happening. Close. They're not incompetent; we just redefined competence. It used to be that competence was a mix of a lot of distinct, but interdependent, qualities. The end result was synergy that allowed for people and organizations (including companies) to compete and move society forward. In the 1970s, we started to allow a bunch of psychopaths (I'm saying this in the clinical sense) to redefine competence. Instead of this array of distinct qualities, they just defined it in terms of ability to create monetary value, particularly if that value was then transferred to shareholders. That was it. We also switched to quarterly reporting for for-profit companies, shrinking the window to evaluate this new definition of competence to 90 days. Three months. An end result of this was that you could simply do whatever made the most money in 90 days and be considered competent. Jack Welch was the paragon of this. GE shareholders saw massive gains during the latter half of his tenure at the helm. This wasn't because of groundbreaking new products or services; quite the opposite: Jack realized that selling off divisions and cutting costs by any means necessary was a good way to make money in the 90 day period. Institutional knowledge and good business relationships in the market - two of the elements of the former definition of competence - were lost, while money - the sole element under which competence was judged in the new definition - went up. You also had managers doing a lot of the avoidance of real management, like you speak of. Instead of betting on a new product or trying to enter a new market, they took a Six Sigma course, learned a bunch of jargon, and cut costs at the expense of business past the 90 day period. If you do this enough (and we did, far beyond just GE), that expense is taken at the societal level. Existence extends beyond 90 days. You can't mortgage the future forever. It's now the future, the payment is due, and we have an empty account to draw from. Theoretically, we could go back to a more in-depth evaluation of competence and reward its display over the long term. In practice, there are a bunch of people who got unfathomably wealthy off of the shift to the "new" competence, and now they're in charge and don't want to switch back, so we won't.
- totalkikedeath 2y ago
  [dead]
- nisa 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mitjam 2y ago
It’s the age of thinking instead of doing. Thinking doesn‘t solve doing problems but we can think and talk them away or at least outsource the doing. —- Hmm, what an interesting thought. Let‘s think about it some more.

by nisa 2y ago

baazaa 2y ago

While I suspect the root cause is managerial dysfunction ultimately the disease spreads everywhere. I've stopped honing my technical skills because I don't expect to ever work in an organisation sufficiently well-managed for it to matter. So then you end up with the loss of genuine technical expertise from generation to generation as well.

fijiaarone 2y ago

The cause of an incompetent management class is a subservient worker class. Now a subservient worker class is either that they are incompetent or they don’t have access to capital, meaning that they can’t strike out on their own and leave management to suffer the consequences of their incompetence.

Buttons840 2y ago
Disconnecting most benefits from employment would be a good start, especially healthcare. Imagine if small companies could focus on their product and customers instead of on being the entire social safety net for their employees.

fungiblecog 2y ago

this is exactly my experience

idra 2y ago

Sounds like hypernormalisation has now hit the West https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

no_wizard 2y ago
Holy moly. This lead me down a quick read to this gem[0]: > Aladdin (Asset, Liability and Debt and Derivative Investment Network)[1] is an electronic system built by BlackRock Solutions, the risk management division of the largest investment management corporation, BlackRock, Inc. In 2013, it handled about $11 trillion in assets (including BlackRock's $4.1 trillion assets), which was about 7% of the world's financial assets, and kept track of about 30,000 investment portfolios. For any one firm to have this much director and/or indirect assertion over the world’s financial assets is ripe for problems of all sorts. Seems rather indicative of the general consolidation of power and decline of social equality across the west [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin_(BlackRock) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin_(BlackRock)
- simpaticoder 2y ago
  BlackRock is the ultimate moral hazard.

roenxi 2y ago

> Something is really off and everyone is telling similar stories about broken processes. There are people out there who are pretty conflict-avoidant by nature, and any group tends to pretty significant levels of cohesion because of it. There are some classic stories out there about when it goes particularly bad and spirals into a bad case of groupthink. In the economy there are supposed to be some slightly cruel feedback mechanisms where companies (effectively big groups) that get off track are defunded and their resources reallocated to someone more competent. The west has been on a campaign to disable all those feedback mechanisms and let companies just keep trudging on. We've pretty much disabled recessions by this point. A bunch of known-incompetent management teams have been bailed out so they can just keep plodding along destroying value. There is not so much advantage in being honest about competence in this environment, if anything it is a bad thing because it makes it harder to take bailout money with a straight face. I cite the Silicon Valley Bank collapse as an interesting case study. A looot of companies should have gone bust with that one because they were imprudent with their money. They didn't.

jimnotgym 2y ago
I think one issue that exacerbates this is concentration of wealth. This has created such a demand for financial assets that their price is ridiculous, no matter how bad the management of those companies is.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  It's basically the other way around. The companies that are enabled to grow without bound are the cause of concentration of wealth, not the result of it. Who are the billionaires? The early shareholders in megacorps.
bix6 2y ago
Companies should go bankrupt because a trusted bank had a bank run thrust on it by competitors? I don’t agree with that.
- zahlman 2y ago

forgotoldacc 2y ago

One big problem is becoming a manager is seen as the end goal, and pay often reflects that. Being a great engineer or researcher doesn't pay. You won't get your name known for your work. All your achievements will be attributed to whoever manages you at best, or attributed to the corporation above you with not a single human name at worst. People like being recognized for their work. Every great achiever wants to have their name remembered long after they leave this world. Everyone wants to be the next Isaac Newton. The next Bill Gates. The next Steve Jobs. The next Elon Musk. It's a constant downhill path from being known for using your brain and busting your ass to discover or create something, to being known for managing someone who created something, to being known as someone who bought the company that managed people who created something. Motivations are all fucked up. No matter what you discover or create these days, there's a feeling that you're not going to have your name written in history books. Your best options are join a grift or manage someone who's doing the hard work.

bee_rider 2y ago
Maybe… I dunno, there’s something in the fact that Isaac Newton the imaginary cultural figure was hit on the head by an apple, and then invented calculus. Meanwhile Isaac Newton the actual guy (recalling from memory so feel free to correct) was a bit eccentric (dabbled in alchemy and other mystic arts), had some academic posts, some government jobs, and built Calculus on work that was ongoing in the academic community… The imaginary Isaac Newton and the imaginary Elon Musk look sort of similar. Because we ignore the boring work that Newton did and the fact that Musk just bought his way around it—their real versions look very different of course! But if you want the actual day to day experience of being Isaac Newton, you can, just go be a professor and make some quirky friends.
- scryers_bloom 2y ago
  This is actually a very interesting point and highlights the fact that most of the famous polymaths only started being talked about long after they were dead (good example is Maupertuis and his work on action in physics).

somenameforme 2y ago

I think a way to sum this up is simply metric optimizing. As organizations and companies grow larger the need to evaluate people at scale becomes necessary. And so metrics are used, and people then naturally start to optimize around those metrics. But it seems to invariably turns out that any sort of metric you create will not effectively measure progress towards a goal you want to achieve, when that metric ends up being optimized for. The traditional term for this is cobra effect. [1] When the Brits were occupying India they wanted to reduce the cobra population, so they simply created a bounty on cobra heads. Sounds reasonable, but you need to have foresight to think about what comes next. This now created a major incentive for entrepreneurial Indians to start mass breeding cobras to then turn in their heads. After this was discovered, the bounty program was canceled, and the now surging cobra farm industry mostly just let their cobras go wild. I think the fundamental problem is that things just don't work so well at scale, after a point. This is made even worse by the fact that things work really well at scale before they start to break down. So we need a large economy that remains relatively decentralized. But that's not so easy, because the easiest way to make more money is to just start assimilating other companies/competitors with your excess revenue. Anti-trust is the knee jerk answer but even there, are we even going to pretend there's a single person alive who e.g. Google (or any other mega corp) doesn't have the resources to 'sway'? [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

Seattle3503 2y ago
I think there is something to the idea that there are roo many too large firms doing abstract work. People have become detached from their impact.
- a_bonobo 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation >Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the separation and estrangement of people from their work, their wider world, their human nature, and their selves. Alienation is a consequence of the division of labour in a capitalist society, wherein a human being's life is lived as a mechanistic part of a social class.[1]

whatever1 2y ago

This started when companies decided that labor is fungible. The moment you admit failure as an employee, you are out of the company. And no for most people it is not easy to find a job that will not disrupt their lives (aka move cities, change financial planning, even health insurance). So employees do what they have to do. They will lie till the last moment and pretend that the initiatives they are working on are huge value add for the company. In the past you knew you would retire from your company, also the compensation differential was not that huge across levels, so there was little incentive to BS. Today everything is optimized with a horizon of a financial quarter. Then a pandemic hits, and we realize that we don't even know how to make freaking masks and don’t even have supplies of things for more than a week.

hansmayer 2y ago
Great points. I was also shocked to see on an example recently that even basic computer literacy is gone. We visited a couple of friends of ours recently. And as things go, at some point they (non-tech folks) asked me to help them with some printer settings on their new laptop - I am sure we all had experienced this many times over. So they pass me the notebook, not connected to power source. I noticed the battery was low and ask for the adapter to connect it. I proceed to tell them it was not a good idea to let the notebook battery go so low and that they should operate it on battery only when they don't really have access to power supply. The response - they had thought, they way you use a notebook was analogous to the mobile phone, i.e. you charge it up then use it all the way until the battery drops low, then rinse and repeat, etc. The smartphones have ruined our society in more ways than one.
- corimaith 2y ago
  To be fair, charging your notebook at 100 all day is going to degrade the battery pretty quick. Using it unplugged until it's low is actually the correct procedure.
  - hansmayer 2y ago
    Well, no. It seems to be something that spilled over from the smartphone usage patterns. Because for notebooks which are plugged in, the notebook is supplied from the power network and the battery gets charged only if necessary, by applying intelligent logic. For example my Legion notebook only charges the battery when it's below a certain threshold. Think this is by now the case even with the most low-end notebooks. Plus the non-linear nature of consumption on a developer notebook makes the battery as power supply for serious work un-reliable. Try running a few database containers in your local environment while sitting in a one-hour conference pair-programming with video on and tell me how far you get with that 100% charged battery ;)

choeger 2y ago

I can confirm nearly everything you say, and I'd like to add that it's a cultural phenomenon. We don't seem to value competence anymore. I cannot recall when I've heard someone say something positive about another person's competence. Be it a craftsman, industry worker, knowledge worker, or even a teacher. There doesn't seem to be any value in doing a good job.

MaKey 2y ago
I do it. This week I congratulated a dentist on his great job at a gum transplant. I love it when people are highly competent at their profession.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Is your dentist competent or good at making you think he is? you shouldn't see your dentist enough to know.
  - MaKey 2y ago
    He's a periodontist, I've only seen him for the two gum transplants I had. It's a delicate procedure and the results were great both times, so to me he is competent.

bsenftner 2y ago

This crisis, which it is, is caused by the unrecognized necessity for effective communications within science and technology and business, which is not taught. Not really, only a lite "presentation skill" is taught. Fact of the matter: communications is everything for humans, including dealing with one's own self. Communications are how our internal self conversation mired in bias encourages or discourages behavior, communications are how peers lead, mislead, inform, misinform, and omit key information - including that critical problem information that people are too often afraid to relate. An effective communicator can talk to anyone, regardless of stature, and convey understanding. If the information is damningly negative, the effective communicator is thanked for their insight and not punished nor ignored. Effective communications is everything in our complex society, and this critical skill is simply ignored.

stuartjohnson12 2y ago
I read Moral Mazes recently and what it describes is not a lack of communications skill, to the contrary, the incentives created by managerial social hierarchies place very high praise on difficult communications skills such as the ability to fluidly support contradictory positions on different issues, the ability to manipulate symbols and euphemism to justify necessary actions, the understanding of what makes others in their management circles feel good.
- bsenftner 2y ago
  What you're describing is the opposite end of the spectrum, those that do understand communications and language to the degree they can appear to fluidly support contradictory positions, but they are in fact operating at a higher communications level and spinning circles around those less adept in communications. They are masterful language and perception manipulators, in a strategic game of corporate dominance.
  - mlyle 2y ago
    But, there's a hyperparameter here; we culturally and organizationally get to choose how much of this game exists and how effective it is. And certainly some of these games are useful; abilities of this kind are highly correlated with other abilities, and having masterful language and perception manipulators act for the interest of your company or nation is valuable. But it's not the only useful skill at the upper tier of organizations, and emphasizing it over all else is costly. So are internal political games-- when your organization plays too many of them, the benefits one gets from selecting these people and efforts are dwarfed by the infighting and wasted effort. It can also result in severe misalignment between individual and organizational incentives.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

> My personal theory is that this is the result of an incompetent management class where no self corrections are happening. This is really a cultural problem that has infected management along with everyone else. It used to be that you were expected to be able to fix your own car or washing machine, and moreover that one you couldn't fix would be rejected by the customers. It was expected to come with documentation and be made of modular parts you could actually obtain for less than three quarters of the price of the entire machine. Now everything is a black box you're expected to never open and if it breaks and the manufacturer doesn't deign to fix it you go to the store and buy another one. The problem with this is that it poisons the well. Paying money to make the problem go away instead of learning how to fix it yourself means that, at scale, you lose the ability to fix it yourself. The knowledge and infrastructure to choose differently decays, so that you have to pay someone else to fix the problem, even if that's not what you would have chosen. The result is a helplessness that stems from a lack of agency. Once the ability to do something yourself has atrophied, you can no longer even tell whether the person you're having do it for you is doing it well. Which, of course, causes them to not. And in turn to defend the opacity so they can continue to not. Which brings us back to management. The C suite doesn't actually know how the company works. If something bad happens, they may not even find out about it, or if they do it's through a layer of middle management that has put whatever spin on it necessary to make sure the blame falls on the designated scapegoat. Actually fixing the cause of the problem is intractable because the cause is never identified. But to fix that you'd need an economy with smaller companies, like a machine with modular parts and documented interfaces, instead of an opaque monolith that can't be cured because it can't be penetrated by understanding.

beowulfey 2y ago
>Paying money to make the problem go away instead of learning how to fix it yourself means that, at scale, you lose the ability to fix it yourself. This is very insightful and, in my mind, a good preview of what is happening with AI right now. We will forget how to use the skills that built these systems in the first place.
- InDubioProRubio 2y ago

amadeuspagel 2y ago

If only people were allowed to start their own companies.

johannes1234321 2y ago
You can start your own company, but in today's world you are immediately in a global competition. Not only in software, but also many forms of production a Chinese 3d printed thing will be shipped cheaply to your customers, for many services one competes with cheap labor ... You got to offer good quality and stand out, which isn't easy without capital.
- snozolli 2y ago
  You're also competing with multinationals that can exploit tax loopholes and attract tax incentives and grants.
  - eppp 2y ago
    Who have also captured regulators and politicians and use them to cement their advantage by making things too costly and difficult for new startups to compete.
  - Hoasi 2y ago
    Competition is for losers. All you have to do is create value in an entirely new niche category that you will own by offering something that didn’t exist before and that people want.
    - johannes1234321 2y ago
      Till the multinational corporation with deep pockets decides to go after your niche. They don't have to be profitable inside that niche, while you have to.
  - hylaride 2y ago
    > You're also competing with multinationals that can exploit tax loopholes and attract tax incentives and grants. Not only that, but often with whole government backed companies where the government will gladly support them and even participate in espionage to gain competitive advantages. Huawei is the classic example, but is just the tip of the iceberg. Meanwhile in most of the western world, executives are focusing on the next quarterly results...

__oh_es 2y ago

I would caveat with its not affordable to be passionate anymore. The top engineers (mech, chem, civil, etc) I know work in finance or consulting instead of doing things they care about. Closer to tech, I feel we have had a big influx on non-tech joining the tech workforce and the quality has suffered as a result of a lack of fundamentals and passion

no_wizard 2y ago
>Closer to tech, I feel we have had a big influx on non-tech joining the tech workforce and the quality has suffered as a result of a lack of fundamentals and passion In the web development community there is a near linear correlation between the number of “influencers” who sell courses that pray on this influx to make money and the influx of such folks. I miss the days where developers generally had a passion for this work vs seeing only a big paycheck, though without artificial barriers we should have expected a lot of influx of people given how well it generally paid for a long time

zosima 2y ago

This is it. There is a mass-hypnosis in the west where reality at best is being completely ignored and at worst actively treated in a very hostile manner.

mattgreenrocks 2y ago
The full embrace of anti-reality is now quite obvious, with social media's perceived relevance being a symptom of that. Many can't and don't want to cope with reality because it doesn't bend to their will.

varelse 2y ago

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nostrademons 2y ago

They're responding to incentives. The only user that matters is the marginal user, the person who didn't previously use your product but now does. They even teach this in MBAs and economics classes. And so the only efforts that matter are those that create a customer, and hence management spends a great deal on promotions, marketing, new customer discounts, advertising, gamification, addictive usage mechanics, lock-in, etc but basically zero on making existing customers happy. It's almost better if they aren't happy - an "ideally run" company is one that has users who hate your product but don't hate it quite enough to quit using it (or if they do, they have no alternatives). Enshittification in action.

lenerdenator 2y ago

> My personal theory is that this is the result of an incompetent management class where no self corrections are happening. Close. They're not incompetent; we just redefined competence. It used to be that competence was a mix of a lot of distinct, but interdependent, qualities. The end result was synergy that allowed for people and organizations (including companies) to compete and move society forward. In the 1970s, we started to allow a bunch of psychopaths (I'm saying this in the clinical sense) to redefine competence. Instead of this array of distinct qualities, they just defined it in terms of ability to create monetary value, particularly if that value was then transferred to shareholders. That was it. We also switched to quarterly reporting for for-profit companies, shrinking the window to evaluate this new definition of competence to 90 days. Three months. An end result of this was that you could simply do whatever made the most money in 90 days and be considered competent. Jack Welch was the paragon of this. GE shareholders saw massive gains during the latter half of his tenure at the helm. This wasn't because of groundbreaking new products or services; quite the opposite: Jack realized that selling off divisions and cutting costs by any means necessary was a good way to make money in the 90 day period. Institutional knowledge and good business relationships in the market - two of the elements of the former definition of competence - were lost, while money - the sole element under which competence was judged in the new definition - went up. You also had managers doing a lot of the avoidance of real management, like you speak of. Instead of betting on a new product or trying to enter a new market, they took a Six Sigma course, learned a bunch of jargon, and cut costs at the expense of business past the 90 day period. If you do this enough (and we did, far beyond just GE), that expense is taken at the societal level. Existence extends beyond 90 days. You can't mortgage the future forever. It's now the future, the payment is due, and we have an empty account to draw from. Theoretically, we could go back to a more in-depth evaluation of competence and reward its display over the long term. In practice, there are a bunch of people who got unfathomably wealthy off of the shift to the "new" competence, and now they're in charge and don't want to switch back, so we won't.

totalkikedeath 2y ago
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nisa 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

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mitjam 2y ago

It’s the age of thinking instead of doing. Thinking doesn‘t solve doing problems but we can think and talk them away or at least outsource the doing. —- Hmm, what an interesting thought. Let‘s think about it some more.