Probably very related: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber
https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp...
Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry
101–110 of 249 posts
Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry
#102Even the laziest manager is 10 times more useful and effective than a scrum master.
They are the biggest BS jobs in the tech industry by a mile.
Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of why I left Google was poor leadership at the VP level. The org wasn't set up for success and - as far as I could tell - the vision was myopic and incoherent. VP performance was more or less opaque to me for most of my career there, but eventually I got senior and experienced enough to have a real opinion. Really liked my direct manager, but we were in it together, and there was nothing he could have done abou…
+1 on this. Spent 4 years at Google including spending time as a TLM. Left around 2020 so my impressions may be a bit out of date. I spent time in both the Geo and Search PAs, and IMO Google's biggest problem is listless senior leadership. Google's orgs tend to lack product vision - there's a lot of abdication to front-line teams to ideate, come up with their own ideas, and ship features. My VP-levels were AFAIK only…
This is the exact kind of fantastic, in-depth, objective review of leadership that would fit perfectly on glassdoor, only to be immediately removed.
Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry
#104This kind of finger pointing / blaming is not helpful. Basically, the reason why big organizations are a lot less efficient than smaller ones is the communication overhead; and the resulting miscommunication.
Small groups of people don't even need managers because they can figure out between themselves what needs doing and in what order. Management is introduced when small groups become larger and point to point communication breaks down.
Point to point communication works great with 3 people, a lot less with 30. Forget about it with 300 or 3000. And so on. Big hierarchical organizations get bogged down in management structures and there's a lot of communication that starts happening via multiple hops. So, a lot gets lost in translation. That kind of collective stupidity is very hard to deal with. Add politics to the mix and now you get intentional miscommunication, selective communication, and very biased communication as well where people work against each other. All that result in a lot of wasted effort, unnecessary meetings, and other non productive work. It's not fake. But also not all that valuable.
Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If someone is being paid more, this person has to work more Given the number of new grads out of college working 60+ hr weeks, I am not sure there is much leeway left for managers to 'work more'. With a manager's job, time invested and outcome is even less correlated than a code-monkey (no offense, I am one too) who at least has a slightly-less-than-linear relationship with work/time. Find yourself a good manager.…
Not sure I'd consider someone not pulling their weight on a team a "different lifestyle." I've worked for taskmasters before and it's not fun but if everyone on the team is working a full 40 hour week, and one person is working 25 or 30, it will become apparent over time and should be handled quickly.
Different people have different priorities and bring different things to the team.
Someone who does not want to be promoted, and is happy with average rewards will put in different efforts than someone who puts in a lot more and wants to rise up the ranks quickly. Differences in effort and outcome need to be differently rewarded. Not everyone wants to rise up an infinite corporate ladder.
Someone who knows the product inside out and has a great rapport with the team, is worth keeping around. Just don't reward them disproportionally for their contributions.
Somehow, Tech people find a way to be the most stressed out people on a job, while simultaneously working on the least significant part of human lives. No one cares if social media, ads or TV streaming have an incident that last a few extra hours. No one cares if your feature that makes streaming/ads/social-media 5% better releases 2 weeks late.
Legally, your colleague does not have a direct relationship with you. Both you and your colleague have a relationship with the company through your manager, and that's it. If your colleague has a hand-shake agreement for working 30 hours a week for average returns, and you have negotiated a promotion in return for a feature.......then the colleague does not owe you extra work so you get promoted. If your career progression needs others to work more than they've signed up for, then that's the fault of your manager for misallocating funding.
It's at will employment. If your the company doesn't like them, they fire them. The American employment agreement is deeply transactional. You owe only as much to your company as won't get you fired.
Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry
#106I’m seeing a lot of comments that seem to point to first line management as the problem here. In my own anecdotal experience, I’ve seen a lot more “fake work” come from listless leadership that lacks a true vision for the product. That rolls down to Product Managers that can’t prioritize features and don’t really understand what they’re building or why. Ultimately this leads to engineers and members of the team worki…
Seconded and thirded. Nothing is more soul draining then doing nothing for 8 hours a day, the idea that devs are lazy and don't want to code is like the antithesis of our whole profession. Most of us do it in our free time. When you actually have a real actionable thing to work on that gives the line workers meaningful "wins" the management pyramid flips and they all become "servant managers" trying to direct the exc…
>Laziness is the natural response to the work you're doing not mattering
There's a lot of meaningful tech work out there that pays way less than Google. Why don't the Googlers bored from idling take it?
Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry
#107Just a reminder that lazy managers are the source of burnout for those who are under them. As a manager I can say, there is no easier job than just forwarding requests from directors directly to developers, not planning, and promising crazy deadlines to avoid conflict with higher management. If someone is being paid more, this person has to work more, I have seen so many people becoming managers just to actually avoi…
> If someone is being paid more, this person has to work more Given the number of new grads out of college working 60+ hr weeks, I am not sure there is much leeway left for managers to 'work more'. With a manager's job, time invested and outcome is even less correlated than a code-monkey (no offense, I am one too) who at least has a slightly-less-than-linear relationship with work/time. Find yourself a good manager.…
Working more because you’re paid more is a dumb metric and sounds like a puritan minded threat. It’s working effectively using the skills you are paid to use to help your project/team do well at whatever it is you’re targeting.
Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry
#108Just a reminder that lazy managers are the source of burnout for those who are under them. As a manager I can say, there is no easier job than just forwarding requests from directors directly to developers, not planning, and promising crazy deadlines to avoid conflict with higher management. If someone is being paid more, this person has to work more, I have seen so many people becoming managers just to actually avoi…
"Management" definitely seems easier, than having to do technical work, without proper accountability. But it seems it's hard to hold management accountable. For an IC such as an engineer, if you don't deliver code for the deadline or check-in, it's clear you haven't delivered. But how do you judge the performance of managers? Oh, right, by the size of the "empire"...
As a former engineer and now manager, it's not easier. It's different.
Like, yes I write much less code, but I also have to show much more empathy and be able to communicate with different people differently. Helping every engineer on the team advance their careers is tough, because everyone heard feedback differently.
Combine that with the one on ones where someone tells you about how shitty their life has been recently and how that's impacting their work. It's tough to go from roadmap planning to someone crying at you over a medical diagnosis to jumping directly to status updates to telling your boss no. It's an emotional whiplash not present in the engineer world.
Like I said, not harder or easier. Different.
Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry
#109I’m seeing a lot of comments that seem to point to first line management as the problem here. In my own anecdotal experience, I’ve seen a lot more “fake work” come from listless leadership that lacks a true vision for the product. That rolls down to Product Managers that can’t prioritize features and don’t really understand what they’re building or why. Ultimately this leads to engineers and members of the team worki…
Part of why I left Google was poor leadership at the VP level. The org wasn't set up for success and - as far as I could tell - the vision was myopic and incoherent. VP performance was more or less opaque to me for most of my career there, but eventually I got senior and experienced enough to have a real opinion. Really liked my direct manager, but we were in it together, and there was nothing he could have done abou…
My last employer was/is very much this, with the VP layer imported from Google. They don't even know the area the (tech) company operates in, but in meetings it's a drinking game to count their (almost always inappropriate) mentions of the Ol' Goog.
Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d expect from someone making 300kUSD a year to come up with their own ideas instead of spinning their wheels. Reading the article and some of the comments here, that seems to be an unpopular opinion, at least in tech.
Consider that companies like these can afford to pay $300k USD precisely to just spin their wheels, because they simply don't want them going elsewhere where they might compete...
That’s been my theory for a long time now.
They don’t care what devs do as long as nobody else can hire them