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Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

ludic.mataroa.blog

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Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#241

Post by archiewood »

skrebbel wrote: post #192

Blog posts like these are a staple on HN and I’m always mildly offended by them. It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, spend their evenings writing ranty blog posts about how terrible it all is, culminating in the inevitable “I quit” article, only subsequently to accept a job at a different terrible BigCo. At no point does this article, or most articles…

> This is because Power BI tracks usage metrics and almost all dashboards are completely unused.

This is what I term the “dirty secret of BI” - for most organisations, most dashboards are unused, except by the teams creating them.

This is because reports need to be useful to be used, and most are not. In my opinion useful means one of:

1) Aiding people with actual decision making power to make decisions

2) Improving the ability of “front line” staff to complete their day to day tasks better

PowerBI and similar tools are poorly suited to the above because 1) requires mgmt to understand the data they are looking at, which is difficult without context in a grid of charts, and 2) requires a thoughtfully designed, fast UX that is basically impossible to deliver in a dashboard.

I’m now working on an open source BI tool, Evidence.dev (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence) which is targeted at these two use cases. It enables you to add context to data inline, design the UX for the use case, and is just fast.

Previous discussions on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 (97 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 (91 comments)

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#242

Post by pdimitar »

mdekkers wrote: post #62
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…

What you are describing is also known as “The Peter Principle” which holds that everyone will eventually be promoted to their level of incompetence. Smart companies know this and make sure it doesn’t cripple their business.

If they were so smart they would cut some cruft. Or most of it.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#243

Post by lapcat »

Draiken wrote: post #218
skrebbel wrote: post #192

Blog posts like these are a staple on HN and I’m always mildly offended by them. It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, spend their evenings writing ranty blog posts about how terrible it all is, culminating in the inevitable “I quit” article, only subsequently to accept a job at a different terrible BigCo. At no point does this article, or most articles…

If we lived in a world where money wasn't so important I would fully agree with you. But it is. I can't earn the same as you all can because I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want to work forever. So I agree with some other comments here. No it's not really a choice. Choosing to earn less and hope for a lottery ticket win l…

> I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want to work forever.

> So I agree with some other comments here. No it's not really a choice.

Literally hundreds of millions of Americans retire on much less than than BigCo compensation.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#244

Post by pdimitar »

astrange wrote: post #117
mijoharas wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't Graeber speak with people who self-reported their jobs being "bullshit"? Doesn't really sound like: > look at other people's work and conclude that it's useless just because you don't personally watch them all day.

Those people were harmlessly bullshitting (or maybe demonstrating the concept of revealed preferences), but you're still doing it when you take them too seriously and proclaim it's a society wide trend. (Not you personally I mean.)

I dunno man, a manager taking home $500K a year when all they ever did was draw charts that NOBODY looked at (not even the CEO or the CFO, not once, I asked them; and not any of the other managers too) and just to ask us every now and then how are things going, seems quite opposite to harmless bullshitting.

That guy could have been fired and we would have just elected one of us to keep track of several tickets once a week and we'd have been better off.

People get assigned to high-paid bullshit jobs all the time, and most of them are aware of it and do their best to hold on to them. Nothing really complex, it's all perverse incentives all the way down.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#245

Post by Draiken »

lapcat wrote: post #243
Draiken wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we lived in a world where money wasn't so important I would fully agree with you. But it is. I can't earn the same as you all can because I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want to work forever. So I agree with some other comments here. No it's not really a choice. Choosing to earn less and hope for a lottery ticket win l…

> I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want to work forever. > So I agree with some other comments here. No it's not really a choice. Literally hundreds of millions of Americans retire on much less than than BigCo compensation.

Are they retiring with the same standard of living they had before?

Can they sustain a medical emergency?

Can they pay for their kids college?

I'm sure some can do all this. But I'm pretty sure most can't.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#246

Post by harimau777 »

Jensson wrote: post #113
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.

Communism builds walls to prevent you from leaving and put you in labor camps if you refuse to do the work assigned to you. So they are not very comparable at all, consent makes a huge difference.

Leaving is often quite difficult because it means losing benefits and there are often not better alternatives.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#247

Post by FrustratedMonky »

Draiken wrote: post #218
skrebbel wrote: post #192

Blog posts like these are a staple on HN and I’m always mildly offended by them. It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, spend their evenings writing ranty blog posts about how terrible it all is, culminating in the inevitable “I quit” article, only subsequently to accept a job at a different terrible BigCo. At no point does this article, or most articles…

If we lived in a world where money wasn't so important I would fully agree with you. But it is. I can't earn the same as you all can because I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want to work forever. So I agree with some other comments here. No it's not really a choice. Choosing to earn less and hope for a lottery ticket win l…

Even in the US.

It isn't like these opportunities are everywhere.

As much as people pretend, it is in fact not easy to just uproot your family and move across the country to work at a challenging startup. So there are good engineers that get stuck in BigCorp Jobs that do suck your soul, just like these online rants depict.

Even stepping back and forgetting the ranting. All big human organizations, eventually become bureaucratic, and locked into hierarchies, and have a difficult time making decisions. And all of these things make IT and writing software very difficult. And, because of individual constraints on geography, family, etc.. good engineers do get stuck in these big organizations, and tend to suffer.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#248

Post by lapcat »

Draiken wrote: post #245
lapcat wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want to work forever. > So I agree with some other comments here. No it's not really a choice. Literally hundreds of millions of Americans retire on much less than than BigCo compensation.

Are they retiring with the same standard of living they had before? Can they sustain a medical emergency? Can they pay for their kids college? I'm sure some can do all this. But I'm pretty sure most can't.

> Are they retiring with the same standard of living they had before?

This is a strong indicator that choice is a factor, despite your protests to the contrary. But what exactly do you mean by "standard of living"? For example, when you're employed, you have to live where the jobs are, no matter how expensive, unless you can get remote work. Whereas when you're retired you can live anywhere, perhaps a place that is both less expensive and warmer.

Retired people seem less obsessed with collecting more material goods (which are often "labor saving" devices, of little relevance to those who aren't laboring) and focused more on enjoying life, traveling, spending time with family, etc. Is that a "worse" standard of living? And the children are presumably living on their own, so there's less need for bigger homes. (Who wants to spend a bunch of time, effort, and money maintaining a big house when you're older and also traveling quite a bit?)

> Can they sustain a medical emergency?

Have you heard of Medicare?

> But I'm pretty sure most can't.

Based on what? Do you have economic statistics to back up your belief?

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#249

Post by Rayhem »

pixelfarmer wrote: post #197
depr wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Question is then, why do you have both? Where does this implicit "hierarchy" come from? It is simple: As soon as you have multiple people working on a problem there are communication requirements. You can organize things in a way that they support these requirements or you can just let them figure out how to adapt their needs around some existing hierarchy. Now which one do you think is more efficient? Hierarchies ar…

> You can organize things in a way that they support these requirements or you can just let them figure out how to adapt their needs around some existing hierarchy. Now which one do you think is more efficient?

I think this is a pretty great statement of the converse of Conway's Law[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#250

Post by harimau777 »

tilne wrote: post #142
uoaei wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What should come to mind when communism comes up then?

A rule of thumb that makes sense to me is that communism generally differs from socialism in that it advocates one or more of the following:

- People actually living and working in communes.

- Abolition of private property (note: this is not the same as personal property).

- Extreme redistribution and/or equality in wealth/income.

I'm sure that this isn't a perfect heuristic; however, I think it's often useful for detecting when someone is trying to describe something as communism in order to make it look bad.

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