331–340 of 366 posts
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When someone is living in the house, the landlord can get the rent. Either voluntarily, or by force through the courts. Even if nobody is employed.
If nobody is employed, then nobody has any money to live in a house, and the landlord doesn't get any rent.
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I know. I work for a mid sized German company in the auto industry, and when our SW project was going to shit due to insufficient resources and mismanagement from the start, what they did to address it was not to add more developers, but add two managers from other projects to our daily standup, which became a 45-60 minute daily, and I'll let you guess if that improved the product deliverables and team morale. German…
“ which became a 45-60 minute daily” I remember at one company I worked they had figured out how to get a project back on track: standups twice daily and justifying everything you did in the few hours before.
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Many large corporations in Europe, especially in sectors of prior consistent growth and profit, are chock full of too many managers. These are people who primarily create work for themselves and each other. I have sat in meetings about meetings for actions that, ultimately, have zero impact, in teams where managers involve outnumber people who actually execute anything three to one. It's staggering. I believe the bes…
>Many large corporations in Europe, especially in sectors of prior consistent growth and profit, are chock full of too many managers. As an engineer who 'jumped' to middle management: yes. 100% yes. It's kinda disheartening and also a little bit insane to sit in a room with 12 people who learned CISSP and ISO27001 by heart but could not explain what SSH is or what a container does. Everything has to first be abstract…
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> Most managers are no longer technical, and just create bloated middle layers that slow everyone else down. > The only managers that are decent are the ones that have kept their technical skills sharp. Alex Ferguson was a terrible footballer when he was managing Manchester United. Yet they won the premiership in 6 of his last 10 years in that role, and have never won it since he left. The skills that make one great…
Not a great example. Football doesn’t change much. You don’t need to actively play football to know how to lead a football team well. Tech is very different… given the pace of change you quickly no longer have any clue what’s happening unless stay technical. Imagine being dropped in to manage an AI team in 2026 when you have no experience with LLMs and the last time you coded was Pascal. 1) Teams some respect you, an…
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But both dividends and stock buybacks are terrible and really shouldn't exist. In a proper market, competition is so fierce that you cannot afford dividends / stock buybacks because your competitors will put all their money towards R&D and retaining & attracting the best personnel. Then again, this has been going on for decades. Businesses used to be about being the best for your customers and personnel. But it's all…
Why would anybody invest in a business that never produces a return?
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If nobody is employed, then nobody has any money to live in a house, and the landlord doesn't get any rent.
The landlord then has the right to make someone homeless, for no benefit to anybody, just out of spite that he isn't getting rent.
There is only one kind of person that I look down upon life, its MBAs with no other qualifications. I would consider a medieval dung hauler a more skilled and important member of modern society than a modern MBA-only holder. I just don't see how anyone can get such a degree and see their skills as valuable, but they all like to build each other up off of everyone else's backs and somehow it works.
Ive never had a good manager that wasn't just another worker in the trenches for a decade or more beforehand.
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Has anyone in the last 10 years praised Google for anything, ever? They've been engaged in enshittification the entire time. Search is getting worse, Youtube is getting worse, Android is getting worse, Chrome is getting worse. They are indeed a hollow shell of the company that originally established themselves, but now that they have such a wide-ranging monopoly they can freely debase the value of their products to e…
Google is still the best search engine. YouTube is still the best video site. Android is still the best operating system. Chrome is still the best browser. And on the side they built the best AI and the best autonomous ride service. Not bad for a "hollow shell" of a company.
And both products are arguably worse than they were ten years ago.
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This. Phillips and ASML share the same regional and cultural heritage. Many ASML employees will have first-hand experience of Phillips' downfall. They certainly do not want to repeat that mistake.
As an engineering manager (and one who's slowly starting a job hunt) these comments don't make for comfortable reading. What we'll never know from a press release like this is whether this is a change that employees wanted, or one which senior leadership wanted. Sure there are companies where management is overly bloated or inefficient. And maybe I'm just flattering myself by thinking that my teams' lives wouldn't be…
1500 managers of 14400 employees sounds a lot more normal to me.