Truth is, everyone just wants to clock out and go home. CEOs included.
Individual incentives are naturally going to be aligned by advancement and "being difficult" is something everyone wants to avoid. Easier to shed blame and avoid accountability than try to fix the social and political structure of your organization. Mostly because even if you succeed, the organization wouldn't be sophisticated enough to understand and credit you for the work.
You score a bonus pizza pie!
That's amore...
The effects of my work strategy and behavior on the company's revenue, profit, vision, products are zero.
On the contrary, the effects of my work strategy and behavior on my salary and position can be quite pronounced.
My company can fire me tomorrow, they will forget my name in 5 days. To "fire" my company, I need to find another job, maybe in another city, working with colleagues I don't know who may eat food at lunch break I don't like the smell of.
It is not hard to guess where I spend most of my efforts and thinking.
I don't think is very good comparison, generally. Some other company could offer you a job and you can leave any time. Depending on your tasks, the company might have very difficult time finding replacement personnel. This could be very significant (relative) cost for the company.
Personally I have always lived in countries where employee protection laws are very employee-friendly. Companies can't just fire people at will, they need good reasons. There might be significant fines for misfiring for wrong reasons.
The effect of me leaving my company and the effect of my company leaving me, for the one who is getting dropped, are not even remotely comparable.
The negative effects of my leaving or being laid off/fired on the company of 100k people are, more often than not, not distinguishable from zero. Many folks left my group and other groups I worked in and, invariably, the escapees were barely remembered a few weeks after leaving. The cemetery is full of indispensable people, and I was never told that I was indispensable.
The negative effects of my dismissal by the company on me range from almost zero (I wanted to leave anyway, I have ten other jobs lined up, they offer me more money) to very substantial (I didn't want to leave, I can't pay my mortgage, my partner sees me as a failure).
I respect the company I work for and my colleagues. But if I have to choose between advancing my cause and advancing the cause of the company (assuming the two causes are somewhat misaligned and assuming I am not doing anything considered "wrong"), I choose myself every day of the week and twice on Sunday
In fact, I'd go as far as to say that having "indispensable people" at all is a management failure. Large corporations that have been around for decades have survived because they don't have indispensable people.
This is why you don't get more money even if you outcode everyone on your team. The company doesn't want a rockstar developer, it much prefers having 4 average devs (where "average" obviously varies a lot based on the company and how much they pay etc.) It's simple risk management: the company knows it can recruit another average dev if it needs to.
It is important to recognize that some people are heavier hitter than others.
Their risk management goes too far is what I am saying. They should relax it a little bit and they'll get better results.
Don't hate the player, etc.
But damn, if it isn't depressing to go to work every day and not caring about impact, just impression.
Let's say that certain choices, strongly supported by my boss, who is ultimately responsible for my career in the short term (and the short term career consequences of my actions then inform my career even further down the line), are seen by me as not particularly brilliant, maybe even "dumb." If I say nothing and nothing happens, the product we are developing may not work as well as it could, perhaps the company's revenue will drop by a 50th of a percent. But should I risk my career to tell my boss that their ideas are not brilliant?
Years ago, when I was younger and more idealistic, I would have expressed my opinion on the choices made, even forcefully so. After I got fired at one of my previous jobs, I tend to side with the boss, strategically.
And before anyone, legitimately, thinks I am a coward or a "bloodsucker," let me make it clear that I was not the one who put my boss in the position they are in, the company is not mine, and the company can fire me tomorrow for any reason, even for no reason. Then, maybe at some point it will be too much to handle and I will decide to leave, but as I wrote, it is not black and white.
I'm convinced there do need to be big companies, therefore I'm glad so many people can work in them and I appreciate the difficulty of it. This is not meant as a criticism in any way.
It just helped me understand why my career has consisted largely of startup-hopping every couple years as the companies finally reach a point where I have more than three layers of management, a majority of whom have no idea how to do my job effectively, but have to prove they're "doing something" by telling me what to do.
It's not that I'm "flaky" or "have commitment issues." It's that there's something that happens to companies when they get large that turns a work environment I enjoyed into one that's really (intolerably) unpleasant for me.
But I see my work as a means to other ends, and I am fine with my current situation.
I do have friends and activities that are important to me, but nothing within an order of magnitude the time devoted to my job.
If I had another important full-time role that applied whether or not I was working, I think I would have an easier time seeing my job as a means to that end, and I have a lot of respect for people whose lives are ordered that way.
Then, gradually at first, and then suddenly, my life made a critical and abrupt transition, and now my professional life has to fit into my life full of interests, occasional romance, family, sports, and all the other things that can make life more interesting.
And I make very good money.
Yeah, I did that for a long time before I understood I was doing the same.
That's how the employers get you. :(
Perhaps I'm a natural-born sycophant, but I always understood that my primary role in the company is to serve/help my boss, and, most notably, making him look good in from of his boss.
Incidentally, I'm already financially indepdent and retired at 42 yo.
Today, I see my competence as a tool that has allowed me to be in the position I am in, which is enough.
Thinking about how I look to my boss is not work that I enjoy.
The choice is not between licking the boots of your boss or instead doing meaningful work; it is not between earning a lot of money and doing boring work or instead earning not as much and doing entertaining work; not between eating like a pig or maniacally counting calories and macros.
Most of the time, the choice is between not saying something to your team or boss that will probably not be in your favor when you submit your promo package, or being one of those heroes who metaphorically dies in a battle that no one actually cares about.
It is between skipping the pack of Oreos for today in favor of some chicken and rice, not between being full or starving.
Hope it's in a savings buffer. Everyone should have "fuck you" money[1] for this exact reason, but the next best thing is 3-6 months in immediate savings for rainy days. coporate shutting you down shouldn't be the immediate end of the world, especially not at the salaries tech is paid at.
[1] https://www.steveglaveski.com/blog/you-dont-need-f-ck-you-mo...
I am a professional well aware that I am the most important person in my life and a cog in the machine when I have my badge around my neck or on my belt like the gunslingers once carried their Colts.
I think you vastly overestimate the impact you can have on your career at a company of that size.
"Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io fossimo presi per incantamento e messi in un vasel, ch’ad ogni vento per mare andasse al voler vostro e mio"
"Guido, I would like that you and Lapo and I Were taken by enchantment And put in a vessel, which to every wind By sea would go to your will and mine".
There is much one can do to advance their career. There are winds that are favorable. One of those wind calls to support your boss and make them want to promote you.
As for "being difficult", yeah, that's a huge culture problem of many Westerners. It's also a very nasty problem because everyone believes in it; I too had managers who literally told me to "stop being difficult" when all I did was asking, twice over the course of an entire month, about why aren't we given just a little more bandwidth to deal with a problem that slows down half the company.
But as we know, culture problems are extremely slow to be solved and that's why I don't blame people for coasting on salary and doing the bare minimum.
Tragedy of the commons, Prisoner's dilemma, Peter's principle, we can call it whatever, it's still very sad though.
Which one will kill you if you get it wrong?
Which one does the manufacturer think is important?
Why are those never the same?
It needs to go further. Fire everyone who says there are no problems. If there are no problems, why is an under-manager needed? Also fire everyone who makes up bullshit problems.
If you're going to agree with me all the time, why do I need you?
Too prone to false positives: Any project which is genuinely going really well results in everyone getting fired, and the company absolutely tanks as a result.
This was about 1000 people.
I think everyone would agree that yes-people are useless for a team, but if you find yourself surrounded by them you have to ask why. Either you hired poorly, or more likely the way you treat you team and/or company creates a culture of fear and dishonesty.
My comment from much above, to which many people replied, was from the point of view of a working programmer.
Think about it: you use a communal means of production, distribute profits centrally, and you don’t get to vote for who gets to be your manager.
This isn't even a no-true-scotsman argument, but if all that comes to mind when communism comes up is Soviet dictatorship, the cold war propaganda worked.
I guess the point of the poster above is that the word communism just confuses things in the initial statement — it’s just a dictatorship. Socialists and communists fairly uniquely believe in workplace democracy.
- People actually living and working in communes.
- Abolition of private property (note: this is not the same as personal property).
- Extreme redistribution and/or equality in wealth/income.
I'm sure that this isn't a perfect heuristic; however, I think it's often useful for detecting when someone is trying to describe something as communism in order to make it look bad.
I could probably find a few not so great capitalistic systems results (even American flavoured ones) that had tendencies dangerously close to those you describe (ever heard about company stores ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store).
Also, in most studies, co-ops and employee ownership models do actually end up being more profitable and sustainable in the long term.
Still, it’s quite an interesting possibility worth pursuing in my opinion. (Full disclosure, I work for a small nominally employee-owned company, and have mixed thoughts about how it works in practice).
As a concrete example, Mondragon has been operating very successfully for ~70 years, but barely anyone from outside the region registers its existence.
Instead we are almost down to one or two grocery chains and the government is left with the impossible task of regulating the consolidation to mitigate risk and screwed prices.
Contracts are insufficient here. A contract doesn't prevent my boss from being unhappy with me and making my life miserable. A contract does not ensure promotion. As an employee, there is no upside for risk, making any risk unacceptable.
They can't exactly promise "you will all be here for 5 years, guaranteed, no matter what" too, because for most Homo Sapiens that's a signal to immediately become useless.
My point is similar to yours: that the incentives are indeed not aligned, and that this is quite tragic because even when some people make an honest try to break the vicious cycle they still get treated like everyone else.
That idea is fake, Graeber is a moron, and it's rude to look at other people's work and conclude that it's useless just because you don't personally watch them all day.
> look at other people's work and conclude that it's useless just because you don't personally watch them all day.
(Not you personally I mean.)
That guy could have been fired and we would have just elected one of us to keep track of several tickets once a week and we'd have been better off.
People get assigned to high-paid bullshit jobs all the time, and most of them are aware of it and do their best to hold on to them. Nothing really complex, it's all perverse incentives all the way down.
There are definitely bullshit jobs, and jobs that are mostly bullshit.
But the main evidence for this is that he's an anarchist. Graeber is not around to defend this position seeing as he's not alive, but anarchists are all very happy to talk about their philosophy, they will answer any question you give them, and their answers instantly disprove it and show they shouldn't be trusted to implement any of it. Like if you ask where insulin comes from they'll just say doctors will make it in their backyards as a hobby.
Recent example of this is Seattle's CHAZ where the police went away for a few weeks, they posted some anarchist guards, and they instantly shot and killed a black teenager because they thought he was a criminal.
You seem to assume that businesses, markets, and innovation are tied to governments and couldn't exist without the powerful hand of authority making them exist. Governments can help all of these things, but they can also hurt them, and government absolutely didn't invent any of them.
The Chop wasn't any real attempt at anarchy. It was a protest that took a weird turn and a city that let it happen. There was absolutely no plan or expectation that it'd be anything other than a stunt trying to make a point. You don't cut off a handful of blocks in a landlocked and largely residential area and call it a government free zone while being completely dependent on the government-controlled area around you.
You'd expect anarchists to support a business? Not left-anarchists, and I don't think I've ever met a "centrist anarchist". Ancaps maybe, but they're kind of bad for other obvious reasons.
Anyway, it is not, their answer is literally to shrug and say "people will do it".
https://twitter.com/doikaytnik/status/1680004065366011904
Sometimes they say "people will network" or "we'll rob a CVS".
https://twitter.com/RndmStreetMedic/status/16801584027673804...
Either way, nobody has realized that supply chains exist. When they say "people", they don't mean businesses, because they don't believe in management or capital assets.
> The Chop wasn't any real attempt at anarchy. It was a protest that took a weird turn and a city that let it happen.
But that makes it even worse that their murder rate was so much worse than the rest of the country!
Of course, that's not the usual problem with an anarchist collective. The usual problem is what happens when the more charismatic members sexually assault the less charismatic members. (Hint: they get ejected for trying to go to the police and it gets covered up.)
https://libcom.org/article/silent-no-longer-confronting-sexu...
It seems to me that our real problem is that we are wired to demand everybody contributes. Both righties and lefties actually agree on this, they just have different views on how to get it done theoretically, and in practice have also come up with various schemes to make this happen.
But actually we live in a world of plenty. Yes, there are hungry people. Yes, there are people who don't have an iPhone.
But what do I mean? I mean that in general it appears to me that almost everything is produced by a very small number of people. We're no longer living in a world where you need 9 people to feed 10 people. The same is true for a lot of goods and services. We don't actually need a bunch of people to do many things.
Quite a lot of processes, if you ask someone who works in various industries, are really done by a few people, supported by a cast of extras that outnumbers them. Some of these extras make more money than the people actually doing the useful work. Often these extras are are like you allude to, only there in order to pretend they are part of the process so that they can make a living.
To make things worse, there actually is a class of people who have no job at all, which creates a kind of fear among the hangers-on.
What we actually need is to have productive people unimpeded by people who need to scrape a living. We should change our norms so that if you aren't selected to be one of the people who makes iPhones or grow food, you can just be good friend. If you want to be an iPhone maker, study and try to get in there. If you don't make it, you're not a failure. You just go about living while all the robot designers take care of stuff.
Now just to be clear, I'm not saying that bullshit jobs don't exist - they do. And maybe a world with universal basic income would reduce these bullshit jobs and generally make everything nicer.
But the iPhone needs *a lot* of really non-bullshit, totally serious hard work by thousands if not millions of people to exist, many of them getting paid ridiculously low wages and working under what I would consider inhuman conditions (12 hour days, etc... I should mention that I'm French, so perhaps used to slightly cushier worker protections than most people). And I think there are more underpaid, overworked Chinese factory workers than there are are "VPs of corporate happiness".
Of course it's true, you need a LOT of specialists to make iPhones.
I would also wager that a lot of real jobs are lost because there's a tradeoff between gunning for such a job and just settling for a moocher job. Some of those real jobs would consist of automating away the assembly line jobs. It's just that we don't have that society yet, so the manager who doesn't know how to do the automation hires miners and assembly workers, who are obliged to do something in order to make a living.
that said, if you can actually build an iPhone factory that doesn't need workers, I'm believe there are many big companies willing to pay you a small fortune for that.
Not saying that hasn't served us well for a long time, but I think there are improvements we could make in our society.
I think most people here on HN does not see this because they tend to do software related work, but this is happening faster that you may think.
When I last time spoke with middle level manager of building company that specializes in constructing factories in Central Europe he said that change over last 20 years is almost magical - factory built at the start of millenium required hundreds people to operate. Projects finished two decades laters can easily operate with 20 people or less.
And this is East/Central Europe - probably least automated part of developed world.
If you look at Japan you can see things such as fully automated ps 4/5 production lines ( https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/PlayStation-s-sec... )
I hate to tell you this, but you've very much missed your target of "not something that's already been talked about for 200 years."
Who does the selecting? Who says, "You, there! You shall devote your time to programming robots, so your neighbors can 'be good friends' and have meaningful relationships. Buck up, comrade. Look how good it will be for everyone (...else)!"?
But the core of it is a change of focus away from "everyone must contribute as much as they can" which the lefties also support. It's more the recognition that actually we could (maybe!) get more done if we didn't insist on everyone doing something.
Creation of a thing costs a lot of time and resource.
Copying said thing is trivial to the point of free.
(This is the biggest difference between our current culture, and previous years. Copying is effectively free.)
However, we already have countries that ignore copyright/patent/trademark (China). The new solution is to remove features from devices, and to tie them into some cloudshit.
We get some dog-and-pony show that cloud means we get new features, but in reality, it's just an anti-cloning tactic.
> To make things worse, there actually is a class of people who have no job at all, which creates a kind of fear among the hangers-on.
Is a rephrasing of Marx's idea of the reserve army of labor. They are the lumpen who _could_ be used as replacements but mostly aren't.
I do mostly agree with GP's main point. The skill floor for meaningful work—even before this recent round of AI hullabaloo—has increased to the point where there are many people unemployable at any wage.
This is only true for complex positions, where it's almost impossible for management to suss out individual employee's impact. Vast majority of jobs are not like that - they're driving trucks, stocking shelves, processing paperwork in some government job, driving farm equipment, assemblying smartphones, selling retail financial products etc.
The theory is wrong, basically, if that's what it says.
Granted bad deals get made from time to time.
I've seen way too many PMs and middle managers twiddling their thumbs and just inventing tasks and reports just so they are busy and are not fired.
How do I know? We had some of them go to a conference once; they were all gone for two weeks.
Work was going faster and smoother.
And that's not a single anecdote, it's supported by many other programmers.
Truth is, nepotism and "we've been buddies at the uni" is happening much more than you are willing to admit.
> Just because you don’t see the value doesn’t mean there is none.
Sometimes it is absolutely true, which is most often seen in nepotism but also in categorically stupid people (re: Bonhoeffer).
See: AT&T
That's like asking the corrupt politicians to uproot corruption. Obviously it will never work.
So the shareholders get bulshitted exactly by the people who are very likely superfluous.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_prob...
The shareholders are uninformed and disorganized. They might take their money out but that will take a long time. Meanwhile, management and the board control the flow of information and can take decisions together.
Besides, information is so wildly far from perfect in all spheres that we rarely see anything particularly close to the extremes of efficient behavior predicted by spherical-cow market fairy tales anyway, even when market forces are fully in-play.
Are you aware of that or you just came up with the same basic idea (a resource-based economy)?
Look, I don't mind if you write about me, but it didn't have to be so on-the-nose. No chill, these HN people, no chill at all...
I mostly hate the game, and only part of the players.
People are just way too risk-averse. Though I get why the useless managers are like that, they don't want anything shining a light on their team more than absolutely necessary because they know they could be the first ones on the chopping block should an objective analysis ever take place.
And, btw., things like delayering are fairly typical efficiency drives. So these "management" positions might not be that stable to start with.
I have once exclaimed to one team lead / project lead during a call with 20+ other programmers: "Why are we even talking to you if you can't make any difference? I want to talk to somebody who will understand our problems and try to help".
Longest awkward silence ever. Needless to say, I left shortly after.
The answer of course is financial incentives. It is the answer 99% of the time, I know quite a few high-profile managers at this point and they are all very smart and get stuff done people and yet they allow themselves be dragged into endless meetings and they know the script (that the OP author is referring to several times) and they recite it by heart. Because if they don't, their manager is going to think they are useless and will inevitably fire them.
People find a cushy place to work in with a good salary, then just work their way up the economical ladder (or the organizational) and will do anything that's needed to achieve that goal. It's as simple as that, and I am convinced that a good chunk of these people (probably 20%-30%) are very well aware they are bullshitters but they think they have no choice.
At the same time, I've known a few company owners long time ago who were just BEGGING their managers to tell them the problems exactly as they are, swore on their lives they will not fire the managers for bringing them bad news (and made contracts that made sure of it in no uncertain terms)... and yet all of the managers below those people were sycophant yes-men.
Quite tragic really. All of this is a collective delusion.
I keep remembering this old article -- "Bullshit Jobs" -- and yep, it still rings true to this day, and will likely do so for decades more, likely centuries even because our societal changes are slower than glaciers...