Although I also like to remind my co-workers that what you're doing is way more important than just going fast.
If you have work that requires something to exist in more or less its present form for years or decades at a time it would be a disaster if one of your key vendors pivoted or went bankrupt halfway through.
... which is why our medical intitutions would rather manage chronic conditions than cure or prevent them
... and also why our "defense" institutions would rather manage chronic, unwinnable conflicts rather than see any side achieve victory (Ukraine, Syria, Gaza, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan) ... and also why our weapons / aid keep appearing on both sides of various conflicts
Because that's where the profit is.
Huh? Citation needed. I've never heard of American weapons/aid appearing on "both sides" of any of these conflicts. Generally, these kinds of conflicts come down to Western weapons being used against Russian and/or Iranian weapons. Ukraine is quite obviously a proxy war between the West and Russia.
The reason the Ukraine war isn't being fought to win is because of the spectre of nuclear weapons use by Russia. Broadening the conflict carries that real risk. In Gaza, it is being fought to win, by Israel, but the cost is that they're losing the information war, as many countries accuse them of genocide. Afghanistan was a clear win by US forces, but then turned into the US propping up the civilian government they tried to institute with 20 years of military assistance against the domestic insurgency, and that failed when the US finally pulled out and the government collapsed to the Taliban. (Basically, the US wasn't willing to resort to the brutality needed to completely eliminate the enemy and change the local culture, so the whole project was doomed.) Iraq was a success; Saddam's government was destroyed and a new civilian government instituted, though it was at a huge cost and under false pretenses, but that government still stands today and many Iraqis (everyone who was oppressed by Saddam) are happier with the current situation.
This is also somewhat tied to the issue that if you work in a salaried job and do overtime when there's a lot to do, you don't get to do undertime when there's nothing to do.
The 9-5 job schedule is a holdover from industrialization where time at work is directly proportional to work output.
For knowledge workers to be the most efficient they need some downtime, if you're going to ask them to do way too much in crunch time. But we don't give it to them. Instead if there's nothing to do for a while there will be layoffs.
So instead everybody needs to appear busy and important.
I used to view them with disdain but at some point I had the idea that social and organizational engineering is also engineering and that wielding the system for one’s benefit is actually a skill.
I am not good at it but I need to call mastery where I see it.
Conway's Law is not a code smell to be avoided. Avoiding it is sisyphean, a band-aid, and nearly impossible.
Instead, Conway's Law is a way, indeed the only sustainable way, to choose the software structure.
These however exist and function, with or without my consent, and are less black and white than the weapons dealing metaphor. For example, a single mother in such an organization, if able to operate with influence, creates opportunities for her family and for her children’s futures. Nothing to do with the morality of arm dealing.
Character is what you are in the dark.
Unless you were solving world hunger or fast homomorphic encryption, this guy's promotable event sounds like it's way more impressive than whatever technical desiderata you were helping them to solve efficiently.
Seriously, the guy sounds like some kind of corporate Robinhood.
Surely people engaging in unproductive labour is a net loss to the economy? Do you have some odd definition of "value to the economy" that is not the sum of the efficient market price of the goods and services?
A dollar returned to investors and re-invested in a new technology that ends up saving everyone two dollars seems like a pretty effective use of that dollar, much more than putting that dollar in an employee's pocket who intentionally didn't do the most efficient thing.
Now, I'm not sure of the odds of that outcome. Maybe most of the time that dollar ends up getting wasted on funding Theranos or buying Twitter.
Regardless, I wouldn't fault an employee for doing something that's maximizes their own interest over the company's. Just means the company is bad at setting incentives properly. Not saying it's easy to do that, but none of us should value a company's welfare over our own. Sometimes the company's welfare aligns with ours, but not always.
Having more and more money in the coffers of a tiny group of billionaires is actually deeply anticapitalistic because it prevents market forces from working.
Anyway, my point was that Musk, Bezos, Gates, etc. can afford to act freely in ways (constructive or destructive) that violate all the behaviors that economics textbooks posit as being universal.
I'm actually curious about HN posts: has the frequency of Twitter submissions changed since Musk's acquisition? Or, probably more usefully, has the average number of points per Twitter submission (or maybe number that make the front page) changed?
You mean unproductive labour like running a casino, producing tobacco, building superyachts, etc?
> In 2017, clothing worth £28.6 million was incinerated by Burberry to maintain their brand’s exclusivity.
There is a term, "Real Economy". playing on the stock market is not real economy, producing steel is. In the last 30 years, a huge change took place - we had something called Financialization, now the 'real economy' is only a small fraction of actually economy, and is dwarfed by financial markets and various bullshit.
I think the real issue is why did that company's culture and reward structure allow this to happen? It should be more "profitable" for an employee to come up with the most efficient solution. The fact that it wasn't is the company's failing.
If somebody steals a plane or burn a building, so what? Insurance will pay.
> I think the real issue is why did that company's culture and reward structure allow this to happen?
It would be a positive outcome (for society) this kind of company (that rewards inefficiency and poor of work ethics) going bankrupt.
But it's complicated because there is a lot we don't see. Companies matter to, they are made of people and people depend on them to provide goods/services or income.
Its definitely very bad though, something like this is much worse for the economy than a few welfare queens.
We can change the language but human biology is tethered to meat space and has not evolved beyond the same old obfuscation. We raise functional illiterates who can only relate to the world through learned helplessness and pandering to supply side to solve their last mile problems.
Large scale infra projects, internet, sure, I get that. Making every fruity drink and sandwich for us? Come on what is this, high school? This cultures economy is rooted in infantilizing Disney vibes. Mush some berries and strain them; assembly lines for drinks is a huge resource wasting low effort economic idea. Sell plain seltzer and let people figure it out.
We’re way over industrialized and coddled to insulate brand investors. Pseudoreligious belief in unreal things to arbitrarily compute values from. None of this is divine mandate. Just the result of propaganda.
It would be nice. I'd love to make my own kombucha, but I have no idea where I'd get a SCOBY. Someone else might not have the space - too much stuff, in this consumer-driven economy, or not enough dwelling, starved of missing-middle as we are - or time (working those 2 jobs to afford rent, or private school, or insurance of one form or another). These are fixable issues, of course. I would really like to fix them. We have to convince people to buy less stuff, let people live near them without paying exorbitant housing costs, reverse the giving-up-on public institutions, abolish private insurance for universal risks, etc., etc.
I would like that. The problem is that so many people will fight tooth and nail for the devil they know. They've even convinced themselves that this is the best of all possible worlds (that propaganda).
Not sure what level of management/responsibility this guy was at, but if we wasn't executive level, he probably stands to personally benefit more from engaging in these sorts of shenanigans than if he were to do the thing that's best for the company.
And really, in that situation, why should anyone feel ethically bound to be efficient and do what's best for the company? It's not like the company cares about you. If it's "efficient and best for the company" to kick you to the curb, the company will do that. Why should the rank-and-file show loyalty?
The company executives almost certainly have it in their power to set incentives so doing the most efficient, best-for-the-company thing is what's going to give each employee the biggest reward. If they're not doing that, that's their problem.
But on a higher level, where we have a big societal problem that needs to be fixed, I would agree that optimizing for your own profit, at the expense of solving that problem, is selfish and immoral. I just don't think it's worth any hand-wringing at a low-level company-inefficiency level.
They should do what is best for society. Companies with lower parasite load operate more efficiently, allowing higher production of goods and services for lower price, leading to a wealthier society.
> The company executives almost certainly have it in their power to set incentives so doing the most efficient, best-for-the-company thing is what's going to give each employee the biggest reward.
They do not. This is a ridiculously hard unsolved problem. The alignment problem may actually be the hardest problem we have.
This may be true. But I think it would be wise to consider an alternative:
Companies with lower parasite load operate more efficiently, allowing higher extraction of wealth from society at large to the owners and leaders of the company, leading to a more unequal and poorer society.
Probably not all companies are in the second way, but to think all are in the first way sounds naive to me.
> The alignment problem may actually be the hardest problem we have.
Hah, reading this makes me think you already understand that your assertion about companies operating efficiently is false. Yet you wrote it...
Only in a non-competitive environment where there are substantial barriers to entry. While this may describe many corporations I suspect it describes very few tech companies (Meta, Alphabet, Amazon and a dozen others perhaps).
> Hah, reading this makes me think you already understand that your assertion about companies operating efficiently is false.
I don't recall saying they operate efficiently.
I suggested that a column store index and a PowerBI report is literally all they needed.
Didn't get invited to the next meeting, all further communications were silently ignored.
Me and another guy replaced that external dependency with our own complete implementation, created over a two-week marathon coding session. It worked great, met all the acceptance criteria, and we shipped it. My VP was quite pleased, as it was a big win for the company.
This precipitated one of the ugliest and most out-in-the-open political battles I have ever witnessed in a large company. When the dust settled, we were allowed to use our own implementation, begrudingingly, but no one else was. I did not stick around long enough to know if the other VP ever actually managed to ship anything. It was quite the farce.
Politically there is no winning:
- Your peer competitors (other VPs) are after you - Your direct reports are after you (or you are accountable for them) - The direct reports of other VPs are after you - Your CEO is after you
You only have ways to lose. I dont know why anyoner would ever want one of those jobs, they are horrible.
I think it might depend to some degree on what the corporation does. Engineering companies that produce actually necessary hardware (transformers, generators, transmission lines, large machines, etc.) seem to me to be less susceptible to quite this sort of boondoggle in their core operations.
No less susceptible to bribery and corruption though and their ancillary operations like IT do seem to suffer as you describe.
See also: Congressional allocation of defense contractor contracts. Spread the jobs far & wide.
>It turned out he had gone to a VP, cleared a 50 person team to work on this problem. ... nine months later they released the solution and had a giant party.
Was your solution really good enough? Or as good as the in-house solution?
At one big tech company I previously worked at, they frequently expended a lot of resources coming up with new solutions for things, because their new solutions might perform 5% better than something more off-the-shelf, of course at a much greater cost. They started recognizing this after a while and tried to cut down on it.
They convinced themselves that “their” solution was actually a better fit/safer/more performant/etc and justified in the expense and effort. And it may have been, in all honesty. But likely not enough better to justify the time and expense.
The empathetic view is that we all suffer from this delusion, but some of us are better and recognizing it and circumventing it than others. Part of it is age/maturity/experience. Part of it is innate.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not excusing this behavior. I abhor it as much as you clearly do. But sometimes it can help with dealing with these types of people to reframe it as less malicious and more incompetence.
The "proper solution" which uses a "proper" development stack (not MySQL/Delphi) has been in planning for the past 5 years, in fact they have had two other development teams on it and have changed the stack they are going to use twice. The solution to date has been to erode the product carving off the easy parts into other systems while leaving the complicated bits as is.
The new team are quite good however and I am really hoping the guys will get some traction soon as I am hoping to retire next year. And before anyone asks, Yes, they have known my retirement intentions for the last 3 years
Guy had a very simple project. He came to me and asked for "help." I found an external vendor who specialized in solving that problem (building a basic product extension) and got it done in two weeks.
When I gave him the solution, he immediately stopped talking to me and wanted nothing to do with me.
It turned out he had gone to a VP, cleared a 50 person team to work on this problem. He had a weekly call with like 10 people (tiger team he called it) to do nothing but this and nine months later they released the solution and had a giant party.
Everyone got credit, high fives all around.
AT that point I realized that work is a huge scam at large corporations. He was optimizaing for a "promotable event" that "spreads the credit far and wide."
Nothing to do with solving the problem efficiently.