This sounds like academia. People writing papers with the only purpose to be cited (not read) and improve the currently fashionable index (h-index, whatever). People presenting in conferences that are organized so everyone can add a conference in their CV. Projects that organize stakeholder meetings, which are a wast of time for everyone, because nowadays projects must organize stakeholder meetings in order to be funded.

This is why in other threads I have often observed people asking for a more holistic approach to evaluate scientific output.

The problem, of course, is the establishment of true independence for the evaluating entity. Ideally a "score" or index should incorporate reproducibility way way way over which journal is publishing the research. Include funding sources, track record, institutions, and also reviewers!

In bioinformatics, I tried reproducing models from Cell papers and others, noticing that it's pretty much impossible to get the same results with the same data (!) according to described methods. Things like arbitrarily configured sets of R-scripts look more like someone tried to push certain results over actually investigating natural phenomena with the help of software.

The paramount experience is convincing authors to reveal their source code. Most are suspiciously reserved because they know they published "pretty" bullshit that journals like Cell were glad to publish, because the biology part of the paper has some "big names" on it.

>> This is why in other threads I have often observed people asking for a more holistic approach to evaluate scientific output.

In many cases engineers evaluate scientific output by making things. Some results are too theoretical to be useful in the near term and that's fine, but if all the science is that abstract we have a problem. We're at the point where science is feeding into science rather than into the real world.

While we have Resume Driven Development to contend with, I'm sure there are similar practices in almost any other field.

I have an anecdote from a good friend of mine who interned at an investment bank. After 2 days and nights preparing a presentation with other interns they observed the meeting where those hundreds of slides were flipped through in 10min. Asking why they had to expend so much effort if no one is even interested in the details the senior banker said. It is not about what you do, it is about showing the client we can do it.

There's a column from Matt Levine where he explains the real purpose of useless busywork for ibanking associates. He gives an example of a guy making a PowerPoint who messes up one trivial formatting detail and his boss makes him redo the entire thing. On the surface this seems dumb and pointless, but the idea is that when that when that associate is a senior banker and working on a multi billion dollar deal, making some trivial mistake can potentially cost millions of dollars. The busywork as an associate is training to not make those mistakes in the future. Made a lot more sense to me explained this way. Not that I necessarily agree with it, and if I worked in that industry I would hate it, but a lot more reasonable than they just make you do it for no reason

It's not for not reason, it's for status, that it's the oldest reason in social primates.

The most people you have reporting to you the more status you have in the organization. What do you make all those people do? Statistics and power points that you can show in meetings with other important people.

Still makes no sense to me whatsoever. Punishing non-mistakes like that doesn't magically make future mistakes disappear.

Training an activity will probably reduce the error rate in that particular activity, but it doesn't do anything for contract negotiation or whatever the senior banker later does where mistakes can be costly.

There are two employees. One rarely presents a piece of work with any errors in. One regularly makes errors which need fixing.

Which employee best demonstrates the ability to thoroughly review their own work? Which would you want as a senior reviewing other peoples work before sending/presenting it to clients?

They're not training a specific activity, they're training an attitude towards mistakes in all cases.

Yeah, it's the military model. A lot of the stuff they make you do in basic is to train you to follow orders without question. So that when something critical depends on you following orders without question, you do it.

That's a bug not a feature in my book (I'm german, we did that order following thing very very well...)

Sure, that vaguely makes sense and doing this is better than doing nothing. Maybe it's just the first step in training those juniors to one day work on the big fat deals.

The brown M&Ms of the corporate world?

I was thinking more along the lines of Mr Miyagi in a Canali suit.

I can understand that explanation, but equally it would be a lot more healthy all around if there was better toleration of these trivial mistakes. People are people, not perfect content robots.

He doesn't want a perfect robot. He wants someone who can thoroughly review his own work. He is training the employee to be fastidious on something trivial so when it's not trivial, he can do it on his own.

> It is not about what you do, it is about showing the client we can do it.

This somehow reminds me of the "proof of work" in cryptocurrencies. You are not doing any useful work, you are just showing that you have the power to do it (by burning that power).

I wonder if all the waste from bitcoin mining is just an analogy of similar waste in the corporate world... and ironically, now that human work is no longer involved in the loop, people suddenly care more because the old excuses such as "it builds character" no longer make sense.

> you are just showing that you have the power to do it (by burning that power)

This is so true for mate selection in animal kingdom e.g. the gelada baboon male[0] has a bright red spot on its chest and females choose the male with brightest and largest red spot, though it is has no useful biological function. Expending energy to maintain an unnecessary function, hints at superior genes similar to your IB example.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelada#Physical_description

Perhaps if we give baboons another million years to evolve, they will start shooting lasers from their chests. And then it will be useful in the human-baboon wars. :D

More seriously, some people think that by a similar mechanism human intelligence has evolved. That in its first stages it was simply a costly (more difficult childbirth because of larger heads, more precious energy burned by brain function) and mostly useless mate-attracting thing. Until at some moment a critical threshold was crossed, and human culture became possible; and then it became dramatically useful.

So yes, there is a more general mechanism of how value gets burned in signaling competitions. Robin Hanson built his entire blog on finding examples in human society: www.overcomingbias.com

But then there is another general mechanism, where the heaps of waste accumulated by the aforementioned processes suddenly become a new niche to exploit for something useful. Such as people who build huge bitcoin-mining machines in Siberia, where the wasted heat warms their homes. So perhaps on another level there is something good to be gained from the corporate bullshit jobs.

Actually, I suspect what it could be... if your job is bullshit, it is less noticeable if you take some time off to browse a web. It could turn out that bullshit jobs are actually a huge factor driving today's culture. -- If you would remove bullshit jobs, for example by reducing the working time to 20 or 15 hours a week, many popular websites (including Hacker News) would lose most of their traffic. Because most people would spend their free afternoons differently, e.g. with their kids, or doing sports. I am not saying it would be worse... just different, maybe in ways we can't predict.

The stories we tell ourselves are not true just because we tell them. Just because he said it does not mean that's true, it sounds more like post-hoc rationalizing, made up on the spot when he got the question (may not have been the first time, I'm not saying he made it up specifically right then, there might have been an earlier occasion).

I mean he may think it is, I mean "true" as in that it actually works. I doubt it, at least in this specific case. I see two levels: On the intellectual one and on a deeper brain level, system 1 and 2 in Kahneman speak, I fail to be convinced that flipping through a hundred slides impresses either part of anyone's brain.

I think all explanations given here (or, ever) should be viewed under that light. Just because they are given (as explanation) does not actually make them an explanation. After all, one of people's greatest strengths is coming up with convincing stories for anything! That was one of the problems of coming up with the "scientific method" to overcome that very strong tendency, both the one to create stories, but also the one to believe them.

> I fail to be convinced that flipping through a hundred slides impresses either part of anyone's brain.

I think I agree, however.

A hundred slides might not impress anyone, but it means that anyone who wants to attack the presenter has too many targets to pick from. This is especially true if many of the terms in the slides are unfamiliar to the listener.

It goes by too fast. If you have an objection on slide 43, then by the time you get an opportunity to object you're already on slide 76. Maybe you forget all of the details that you were upset about. And the presenter can claim that your specific objection is handle somewhere in the other 99 slides. Somewhere that you're unlikely to fully understand the details and/or terminology.

Nobody likes the guy who gets hung up on one tiny detail and refuses to let it go even though the presenter claims other details resolve the issue. And everybody knows that nobody likes that guy. So everyone is going to be much more reserved about raising objections.

You could alternatively attack the presentation holistically, but this becomes potentially exponentially hard as the length of the presentation increases. Depending on how the details interact.

Sure, he might believe that the clients only want to know that the vendor is able to create all those slides. And this might be because when they present the slides they get the deals. But the reality might be that when they present the slides the result is that the people who would make important objections are intimidated into keeping quite. And that's why the deals are going through.

In some cases it seems to be the equivalent of the Karate Kid wax on, wax off work. Work that's useless in itself, but creates desirable change in the worker.

Sure, the organization chart is full of Mr. Miyagis that care about your personal development.

"Man who catch mistake in power point with chopstick, accomplish anything"

s/personal development/breaking their spirit/g ?

Even if there's only three or four soldiers posted outside the armory, it's more persuasive when there are racks and racks of rifles/swords/spears no one will ever use....

No, this hasn't been going on very long at all...

> There are entire levels of people whose only real purpose seems to be putting together PowerPoint presentations for other people. Literally producing entertainment for others who spends most of their time consuming that entertainment.

You haven't been working in corporate america very long if you think powerpoint presentations are entertainment. :-)

There are people who do nothing but put together powerpoint presentations because a) someone has to create easy-to-consume version of technical work for executive consumption and b) its a hell of a lot cheaper and faster to have one low-level designer adapt my sketches than it is for me to stop my work and spend a week tweaking fonts and vector graphics.

Specialization has benefits to the company as a whole even if some of the specialists (in isolation) do not seem to be contributing much from the perspective of an observer. They are force-multipliers for the people who truly do. I have grown to respect the value that executive assistants provide even though it seems like all they do is schedule meetings, its a huge context shift and time suck to do it myself.

> someone has to create easy-to-consume version of technical work for executive consumption

Why? This seems to be true, but I honestly don't fully understand why.

Because ultimately the executives are responsible for all the of decisions made in their area - superiors often need at least a layman’s understanding of the technical bits behind a proposal or an argument to be able to defend it to either A) their superiors or B) the stakeholders/shareholders.

Be careful, small tech companies have lots of bullshit and politics too.

People like you and I should make side companies that make a small amount of money without having a sales or HR or management department.

It's just you, the code, and users. You improve the product, the users enjoy it so much that they pay you directly, and you'll never feel the pressure to hire anyone or do bureaucratic things.

I feel the same, politics in small startups are a thing too, people selling smokeware, the fake until you make it, violating engineering principles to satisfy marketing dreams. Plus everyone is selfish and trying to just be recognized and get more money. I'm thinking on the consultant + indie hackers route but still struggling because I suck at sales.

I'm a professional salesman and I still suck at sales. The only good salespeople are those who either have a strong ivy-league type network (seriously), or have an excellent product with strong PR (aka inbound leads coming in hot all the time).

Sales skill is 90% prospecting and 10% being a trusted adviser.

It can be. I have also worked with those that are naturally good with people and sell as a part of the conversation. I can’t do that, they are rare. I have worked with those with both a network and a good product/marketing team. That works too, I agree. But it is not enough for me, I need the rest too, see other comment.

These days I never start anything new without a good sales person as part of the team.

I'm really curious, how do you define "good"? See my post above.

It's really easy to be a waiter- it's very difficult to herd cats into your funnel.

The last three startups (one is just starting): honest, you can leave the keys to the company with them; not on commission, co-owner of the company; not a big ego; must enjoy the customer contact and the closing of a deal; it is a benefit if they understands the sector well, but not required, depending on complexity of product.

Hell, I worked at NASA for several months and ended up leaving because middle management pushed bullshit work so hard that I couldn't get any real work done.

To be fair, grunt workers have their own category of BS work. For instance, reinventing a wheel in a worse or quirky way.

Of course, good management is supposed to find that energy and channel it into a more constructive collaboration, but if management is in alignment meetings 40 hours a week, there's no time to keep tabs on engineers caught in the rhapsody of dead end innovation.

I've seen this at all large companies that I've worked for. I call it self-preservation mode. People feel like they have to justify why they are important as a cog in the machine so they restrict information to make themselves required. Keep the game going so I get my next bonus. It is hard to convince someone to take risks when their job depends on not rocking the boat. The worst part is that these people have convinced themselves that they are irreplaceable. The issue at its core is that you get what you optimize for.

Yeah. Knowledge siloing is real. That's when you know that people realise their job is bullshit.

'I'm now convinced that the entire finance world is the biggest scam of all time'. I'll buy your book if you write it.

There's already a book on this: "Other People's Money" (2016) by John Kay. It discusses how most of the modern financial industry is self-dealing, provides no real value to the economy, and is actually parasitical. Here's a short official video introduction to the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kOAS0yzUIQ

Thanks for mentioning this. I feel even more sane now. I've ordered his books but in the meantime listened to him talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkhxMdilxJE