Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

ludic.mataroa.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 482 posts

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#151

Post by ralferoo »

jodrellblank wrote: post #51
addicted wrote: post #16

> My current organization has 8000 staff members, and I used to glance over the usage metrics of the dashboards my old team produced. I believe three dashboards were used, out of somewhere around 50 - 100. Of those being visited, it usually turned out they were being visited by members of our team checking to see if the data had refreshed for the day. I'd estimate the cost of maintaining our team was approximately $1…

Can anyone here look at " identify a change which improved employee efficiency by $125 annually " and think it isn't going to be complete bullshit? That's in the region of 50c/day. "I told employees to reuse paperclips which I predict will save the company $1M per year"[1] PR/marketing/self-promotion - surely nobody believes it?. And that saving 50 cents per day is supposed to come from a manager who can influence al…

EDIT: actually, re-reading the parent post after posting this, I'm now not sure if I'm agreeing with him in arguing with the GP or disagreeing with him. But either way, I'll leave my comment here to try to explain the thinking behind $1m being insignificant to a company.

The point isn't whether $1m is significant to an individual employee. It would make a massive difference to almost any employee on a personal level (except maybe for C level in massive companies), but in a company with 8000 employees, $1m is a rounding error. Even looking at the example you quoted for the average UK income (currently £33400), for 8000 employees that's £267m or $323m just in salaries. When you consider all the other costs of running a business on top of that like buildings, light, heating, expenses (generally accepted wisdom is that a salary is about 50% of the overall cost for each employee), then factor in the material costs for whatever the company is doing, that $1m really is insignificant in the grand scheme of things from the company's perspective.

Average US salaries are higher than the UK at around $59k, and tech salaries are obviously higher, and in the US even more disproportionately so, making this $1m saving even less significant to the company.

The middle section of your post "If, in the lifetime of the specialist team like the kernel team, a single person found something that persistently reduced TCO by 0.5%, that would pay for the team in perpetuity" seems to be arguing a different point. It's not about whether saving the company $1m a year is worth bothering with or not, it's whether paying for a team that might cost $500k per year and can produce $1m per year in savings and/or revenue is worthwhile. Obviously, it is worth keeping the team as the ROI on their work is 100%. However the decision on whether to create that team in the first place is harder to justify because there is probably a more lucrative opportunity for the company to find - if the company is currently making e.g. 7% profit doing what it's doing, it probably makes far more sense to expand production capacity to increase total revenue as that will be be more significant to the bottom line than a small project that saves $1m.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#152

Post by achenet »

lordnacho wrote: post #140
pdimitar wrote: post #7

That article was a very nice surprise and apart from how crushingly accurate it is (before somebody jumps in to defend all the corporate chaos, of course) it also had me giggling several times while reading it. 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 t…

This is why I'm thinking we need a new system. Not capitalism, not communism, not anything that's already been talked about for 200 years. 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 happ…

uh iPhones aren't just made by well dressed Stanford educated designers and engineers in California, you know. The number of people needed to mine the metal/silicon for them, to make the circuits (and to build the factories which make the circuits), and to actually assemble them (for example [0]), the global supply chain of container ships and port personnel and police forces to fight piracy... it's a lot of people. I think they outnumber the bullshit KPR middle managers that get demonized here.

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".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn#Mainland_China

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#153

Post by marcosdumay »

depr wrote: post #145
pixelfarmer wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is systemic fault. It starts with hierarchical structuring. It doesn't mean that hierarchies are inherently bad, but there are consequences from that and the additional things that people usually imply that come with it. This can seriously hamper productivity, for example, even in the small scale. Once you start to think that through you will also see how far reaching the agile manifesto truly is and that the c…

If you have no explicit hierarchy then an implicit hierarchy will start to form in most cases, which can be even worse. In many cases you have both.

Those things become inevitable when a 3rd layer of management appears (for a total of 4 layers).

I'm not sure how far you can push a 3-layered organization, but it's absolutely something that exists on some scale, without a phantom organization appearing.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#155

Post by achenet »

isthispermanent wrote: post #124
astrange wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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... 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.

David Graeber, the author of Debt, is a moron?

I'm personally a big fan of his books, but I've read on various internet sources that some people will accuse him of not being academically rigorous enough. I honestly don't have enough expertise or energy to really judge.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#156

Post by achenet »

depr wrote: post #145
pixelfarmer wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is systemic fault. It starts with hierarchical structuring. It doesn't mean that hierarchies are inherently bad, but there are consequences from that and the additional things that people usually imply that come with it. This can seriously hamper productivity, for example, even in the small scale. Once you start to think that through you will also see how far reaching the agile manifesto truly is and that the c…

If you have no explicit hierarchy then an implicit hierarchy will start to form in most cases, which can be even worse. In many cases you have both.

yep.

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#157

Post by darkwater »

uoaei wrote: post #94
jiggawatts wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations from the perspective of most employees are communists dictatorships. 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.

I guess misconceptions like these are why theorists abandoned the term 'communism' in favor of 'communalism' to explain what they meant. 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.

Just read your sibling comment, talking about gulags or it is not communism...

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#158

Post by achenet »

zmgsabst wrote: post #118
stinkytaco wrote: post #41

I'd like to see a post like this on HN where someone revisits their organization 10 years later and decides if they were right or not. It's not that all organizations don't have disfunction, but as a younger person I was very fixated on everything I saw that was wrong and ignored either the problems I myself was introducing which were (and probably still are) numerous or the systems and programs that made the organiz…

What happens when you were right? Eg, as an SDE in 2017 you worked on Amazon Device’s econometrics team and were screaming the entire org was in trouble — but the PhD economists and directors ignored you. We’re at 5 years, a gutted department, billions in losses, etc. Now what? Or you warned WarnerMedia executives about their internal corporate misandry just before they fired Johnny Depp for being a male victim — and…

maybe I've read too many Taleb books, but can you put yourself in a position to bet against the stupidity? For example, take a short position on WarnerMedia/Amazon stock?

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#159

Post by Niksko »

ornornor wrote: post #147
Niksko wrote: post #146

Thanks for writing this, it's incredibly cathartic to know that I'm not alone in feeling this way. Question for the audience: are there places where it isn't like this? Can anyone attest to having worked in places like the one that the author describes, and then escaping to somewhere that isn't like that? If so, are you hiring? Or should I just be content with spending 2 or so years somewhere and then moving on? (2 y…

I feel the same way, been in that occupation for over a decade now, have worked with over a dozen companies in that timeframe (consulting or full time)… I have never experienced a sane environment where a psychopath isn’t in charge. I sincerely don’t think it exists. I haven’t found the solution you’re looking for. I’ve refused to go back to the grindstone for about two years now. Exploring other avenues such as bizd…

> I don’t think I’m physically capable of remaining healthy and being an employee software engineer anymore

I'm sorry to hear that, and that makes me worry about my future in this industry.

However

> If you can’t do that (I can’t), pick another occupation and keep the programming as a side gig thing because it’ll drive you insane and shave years off your life.

Won't this just apply to any career? Or do you think there's something unique about software that leads to this?

> Exploring other avenues such as bizdev

I don't think I fully understand what this entails, can you elaborate?

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#160

Post by scaramanga »

jalapenos wrote: post #89

This is feelgood venting, but without addressing the root of the problem. All these managers are paid to do this BS. By the company. And that company is owned by people, who ultimately have the final say how it will be run, and who are paying the price. There needs to be a lot more discussion around corporate governance with regards to this topic. I.e. how is it allowed to happen. Why aren't companies adequently trai…

It reminds me of every layoff ever. It's a remarkable feature of layoffs that the people organizing them never have to lay themselves off. Think of the awkward conversations they would have had to have with their family...

"Honey, I did a cost/benefit analysis and found that my role was parasitic value extraction. To maximise the goals of the organisation I have decided to make myself redundant. Further I have decided to give myself 0 days of notice and 0 compensation so that the organisation can use that money to further it's important goals. I'm afraid Christmas is cancelled this year. However, think of the shareholder value I have created."

The mistake OP makes is to assume that the objective of the business is to be a an efficient and productive enterprise.

But that ignores the fact that the business is composed of individuals drawn of the population of human beings who have more prosaic biological needs. From the perspective of management, the enterprise is simply a thing that exists for the purpose of letting them be in charge of it.

This explains several other "paradoxes" such as why wages are low, or why the social security safety net isn't great. Happy, healthy, productive workers, who can speak their minds freely when it comes to problems, even problems created by their superiors, might lead to more efficiency and higher profits. But they also rob management of their social position and the daily experience of being surrounded by people who hold them in very high regard, and treat them with respect and deference. We don't need to do a randomized controlled trial to figure out which of these two alternate universes we're currently residing in.

That is why any political treaty or consensus between management and workers, such as the new-deal or post-war consensus, will eventually be attacked and destroyed by the managers and owners even if it tanks the entire economy with it. The last 40 (and especially the last 10-15) years of US/european history and the destruction of the post-war consensus appears to have borne this theory out.

Post reply on HN