Efficiency Is the Enemy

yes and there is also often departmental budget arb going on here

Devs in engineering org now have to spend more time on self-service portals & chasing tickets because the manager of the infrastructure org laid off a bunch of sysadmins.

I once worked at a bank where even replacing a physical disk in a US datacenter involved a ticketing system which dispatched tickets to India. The remote guys would then, presumably, raise some sort of internal ticket so the guy physically in US could you know.. replace a bad disk.

Turnaround on bad disk swaps went from hours to weeks. As the hardware aged, we started to have enough disk failures pile up on RAID arrays that data losses occurred.

Somewhere someone in infra cut his budget though!

I’m saying those programmers should have secretaries to help them with all of the admin etc. They shouldn’t be booking their own flights, or making dinner reservations, or running expenses (or a lot of other manual work)

> Who exactly is the target audience of this article?

If I had to guess, it would probably be most useful for those companies that have not yet reached the stage where they can serve as the venue for the executive-musical-chairs stage of management you describe.

My assumption is that when the company is small enough, that which "makes me look the best" and that which "is in the long term interests of the company" are probably mostly aligned due to the higher visibility of those early executives and managers. Not that this stops the ladder-climbers, of course - it's just more obvious when they personally contribute to wrecking a company if the company is small, which presumably the personal-brand-conscious executive would try to avoid.

> Eating up all available slack is one of the more mundane ways to cannibalize the company for your own benefit.

Otherwise known as "maximizing shareholder value."

And the same happened to everyone else too, just with smaller dollar amounts.

During my high school and early university years, I was in love with the concept of being able to run errands over the Internet. Why go to the bank when I can order a transfer on-line? Why make orders over the phone when I can choose what I want on a webpage with few clicks? Why ask anyone to do anything, when I could just click or type my way through?

As an adult with a bit more years behind me, I now feel the exact opposite way. Why on Earth am I doing these errands, when I could ask or pay someone else to do them? Why do I waste my time clicking on this bloated, user-hostile page full of upselling garbage, when I could just phone the company and tell them what I need? Alas, companies jumped at the opportunity to outsource the effort to customers, so increasingly I can't phone anyone. Self-service becomes the only option.

I suppose the shift in perspective comes from the fact that back then, I had no money and a lot of time; these days, I have some disposable income, but very little time to spare.

I think everyone needs different block of time to slack, to remove burn-outs and reserve more energy for next step. Some people such as John Carmack probably doesn't need that much of time to slack (he seems to use "researching how to do difficult things" and programming retreats as a way to slack from daily programming jobs) but most of us need it.