Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?

Assigning single purpose to things is not necessary. "Systems are what they do" is a quote for a reason.

I think in addition to rules survival and admin self-concern, people genuinely underestimate how much maintenance and effort go into accomplishing goals in an organized, communicable, trustable way. It is also why AI is not as successful as people thought it was going to be at taking over jobs.

If you think the only value add to a business is the business output, you are taking admin work for granted.

Unfortunately, real-world bureaucratic orgs of any meaningful size or age always include a third type of person - dedicated neither to the org's goals, nor to the org itself.

In general, one should speak more circumspectly about that third type.

There’s quite a bit of this but the big orgs have created a machine where they can capture (1+x) times the value of what they pay someone. If you’ve made such a machine, the best way to make more money is to put as much input into the machine as possible.

And all things that scale have this property. We spend a large percentage (almost half) of our human body on the sum of blood vessels, interstitial fluid, and other such stuff that is entirely internal waste/nutrient scaffold while the “organs and limbs that actually do the stuff” are the other half. A fifth of San Francisco is roads- just sits there not doing stuff most of the time. Some half of the brain is not “thinking stuff” but networking. A fifth of a datacenter is just networking.

Similarly a large amount of organizations is often dedicated to the motion of information flow and so on. “I take the specs from the customers and give them to the engineers. I’m a people person.”

It is a property of any large bureaucracy that a large proportion of the bureaucracy exists to serve itself. And it's not BS, it's a natural consequence of growth. Imagine you start in the mode of "moving fast and breaking stuff". Eventually, you break enough stuff that someone says "enough". So you develop some launch standards and guidelines. Then hire a team to enforce them. Then someone to build a launch tool. Then you realize you also need to manage legal risks, have standardized UIs, make sure that production services have backups and redundancy, and all of sudden, you have ten review processes. And then, it gets so difficult to navigate the process that teams hire PMs just to coordinate. And on, and on.

And then, someone needs to build cafeteria menus. And the tool to manage health care enrollment. And badging. And ultimately, you have a product that could probably be operated by a lean team of 100 people, but you have 5,000 employees to take care of all the auxiliary functions, from legal compliance to providing benefits. You need slack in that org structure too, because you don't want everything to grind to a halt when one important person leaves or takes a week off.

I don't understand why you find this objectionable. Would Google or Facebook be more fun if you were on a very small team with zero slack and constant grind, and there was no one to call if the printer is broken? Yes, it's a jobs program funded by the revenue from core services, but it ultimately makes life better for everyone?

The "true work" is sporadic. A business will need an engineer to work hard for long hours for a few weeks, then they won't need him at all for weeks more except to be on hand if something goes wrong. Then maybe some more work, and even longer lulls.

But if you paid them hourly, they'd starve or fuck off to another job during a lull, and then where would you be when you needed them again 3 or 4 months later? Similarly, salaries don't really work any better either, because there's this psychological expectation that there will be regular duties to perform for that weekly paycheck. Psychological expectations for all parties involved. These systems have evolved and adapted to cater to those psychological needs. They keep the extra engineers on hand, cosplaying, in case there is work for them, so that they could in theory start working immediately (the hiring cycle is brutal, but the learning curve to make them useful is worse).

Even those involved aren't typically aware that this is what's going on, if they became aware of it they'd be forced by convention to try to come up with a new system that was more efficient in one way or another, but that's impossible on practical grounds (disincentivizes key personnel such that businesses which attempt it tend to fail). When this does happen, quite often there are lots of comical stories that come out of it (for instance, believing that because these people tend to do little in the way of constant work that they can be replaced by people who are wholly unqualified, because unqualified people can screw off just as easily as the qualified).