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

421–430 of 482 posts

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#421

Post by johnnyanmac »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #404
johnnyanmac wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest it vastly depends on what you expect to need in retirement. Based on my current salary and estimated retirement payment (which some online calculator calculated at ~2/3rds my income) I'm still slightly below what I should be saving for that. But by then I will both need more money to take care of family (hopefully) and less money since I should have long paid off my house and car by then. My salary is mu…

You only expect to need one car from now through the end of your retirement?

Ha, okay fair. But I'm hoping any subsequent cars can be bought outright instead of under a plan. But who knows with inflation?

Post retirement I should definitely have the finances to get some pretty nice sports car.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#422

Post by Loughla »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #403
Loughla wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For context outside of tech. I have a super flexible job with amazing benefits. I haven't missed a single thing my kids have done, unless I chose to. And I'll work until I'm 75. I say this not out of being bitter, but for the context that many (probably most) people who do what they love to do don't get the massive paychecks even mid-tier tech jobs get. Context is everything.

>And I'll work until I'm 75 If you’re lucky. Modern medicine still has yet to solve most major disabilities for people in their sixties. It will be hard to work if you’re suffering any of the innumerable disabling diseases. What will you do then?

[flagged]

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#423

Post by Retric »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #405
Retric wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why on earth would a single person buy a 490k house? Everyone I know either had roommates, an inheritance, or make enough it’s a trivial expense. Also don’t forget about the home mortgage tax deduction, that plus inflation really impacts the cost of home ownership.

>Why on earth would a single person buy a 490k house? I'm in California, so that's pretty much the bare minimum. Maybe if I go way out to the high desert area (we're talking 70+ miles from downtown LA), I see more 300-400k houses for 2 bed/bath. In my area (which is still pretty far from Downtown) it's 600k minimum.

70 miles from the downtown of a major city is still generally considered part of that city’s metropolitan area and prices reflect that. Still though getting a 1br condo in LA for 150-300k is more reflective of what it actually costs to get an affordable place as a single person in that area. Yes you have condo fees, but maintain a house comes with serious costs as well.

That’s the thing, if it’s a trivial expense then who cares, but when there’s more affordable options it’s hard to imagine why stretching yourself buying a house at that price would be a good idea.

255k for a 1,952 square foot place in Harrisonburg, VA 22802 is far more representative of most of the US’s housing prices. It’s a modest 50k population university town 130 miles from DC so not in the middle of nowhere but still cheap. https://www.redfin.com/VA/Harrisonburg/1036-Meadowlark-Dr-22... Plenty of places listed for less than that or far more, but in general there’s still a lot of options under 300k.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#424

Post by tuatoru »

sixstringtheory wrote: post #378
campbel wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, an effective CEO / Executive is going to be developing systems of accountability that align with company goals. It can't be based entirely on a set of gameable metrics. However this starts at the top. An incompetent board / CEO is going to create misaligned incentives which will cascade through the organization.

It seems to me that if you want to be a CEO that wants to stay connected at the ground level, then you have to actually do that: you have to know each engineer, and understand the work they’re doing on any given day. Naturally, this tightly constrains the possible size of the company. If you want to grow beyond that size you must accept that you will become disconnected and out of touch and all of the bs being discus…

Long ago I worked in places where the CEO did exactly that. "Management by walking around" (it even had the abbreviation MBWA) has fallen out of favor, though. People just don't walk any more.

This was about 1000 people.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#425

Post by johnnyanmac »

opportune wrote: post #73

The most jarring thing about entering the workforce to me, and it seems to the author as well, is the nigh-pathological lack of pride (or “passion”, which I think is a loathsome term) most people put into their jobs. I don’t accept that all of those people intrinsically are lazy morons - maybe some or even most are, but a lot of people get that attitude metaphorically beaten into them by lazy and disengaged coworkers…

If you want "passion" look no farther than the game industry. that "passion" lets them pay workers less and work more, despite being overall more engaged and working across multiple disciplines to ship a product.

And even despite all that engagement, the "passion" doesn't make you save you from layoffs. Even Epic in all its billions made from Fortnite money decided it didn't care. Nothing is sacred. I don't personally mind some inefficiences and the occasional incompetence (though, in games there's rarely IME intentional incompetence. Of course a designer won't understand performance impacts on a game, and a programmer won't necessarily have the best UX for artist tools in a first pass). But companies some 20 years ago at least pretended to have loyalty and reward tenure and that's all but gone now. Why put your heart into something that you know will break it 2-3 years down the line? or 18[1]?

[1]: https://gamerant.com/blizzard-layoffs-18-year-veteran/

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#426

Post by throw9away6 »

anticensor wrote: post #385
throw9away6 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept of a voting shareholder is a myth. Most shares are owned/managed by funds so they are the true voters. They just vote to make sure the that the boat isn’t rocked too much.

Even in those cases, there are eventual beneficial owners which are indeed real natural persons.

The modern system favors executives as opposed to owners. The executive class has figured out how to extract a significant chuck from to owners share for their own coffers.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#427

Post by ludicity »

aeturnum wrote: post #35
ludicity wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's slightly more complicated, and the numbers are somewhat obfuscated to hide my actual employer. You're right that these numbers are not a huge deal - that much is obvious, or we wouldn't be wasting that money. What is more relevant to the average reader is that we have a large department in this space, and almost all (not all) the work is pointless because the numbers just don't matter at this scale. We have a co…

But again - isn't the antithesis of this that the company never does the work to look into any of this and, in doing so, misses a huge but non-obvious problem that these tools might reveal? So you need to build it to do the work and check, and then you need to maintain it (because you already built it and the possibility still exists, etc, etc).... Like, absolutely, there's some impossible to define line below which…

Author here once again. I have the worst possible answer for this - most data teams that I've seen (and my network is large enough through my own socialising + my blog to be reasonably confident on this) are working on dashboards that could not conceivably be acted upon. As in, the nature of the thing they are reporting on is not susceptible to top-down intervention.

You are however totally correct that some places will have actually valid use cases for this kind of reporting. The article is very much not for those people, as they don't have these kinds of concerns for the most part. This is for people that are watching their organization talk about behaving one way, then acting in a totally different way.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#428

Post by ludicity »

zoomablemind wrote: post #56
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…

It only takes someone in management to realize that you increase the revenue by selling more of an existing product or raising its price. You reduce your costs by firing people or renegotiating the prices with suppliers. "Increasing efficiency" is mostly a theater meant to demonstrate effort during low/no growth periods and without viable products in development to validate such dynamic.

I once worked at a place where management kept going on and on about reducing toil, but wouldn't let us use something to automate a bunch of extremely manual workloads.

It eventually occurred to me that we didn't have to, because the team was the mechanism for automating those workloads. They couldn't tell us they weren't that important, so the easiest option was to just talk about automation while paying us a bunch to keep troubleshooting the gross scripts.

Again - that is totally fine, as long as you know what's going on. Then you can make a clear decision around whether you want to stay.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#429

Post by ludicity »

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…

Firstly, I absolutely agree, the argument you're responding to gave me pause for a moment, then I realized it's probably nonsense in most cases and it also isn't disagreeing with me at all.

If the thing I am working on doesn't matter because it's a rounding error to the organization, but they keep telling me that it does matter and we should be driving for perfection, bla bla bla, then the original poster is agreeing with me, I think. I'm not arguing about whether it makes sense for the organization, I'm making an argument against believing the organization.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#430

Post by ludicity »

chris_wot wrote: post #91
jiggawatts wrote: post #82

> “This is because Power BI tracks usage metrics and almost all dashboards are completely unused.” Ha-ha… haaa Yes, I know that feeling all to well: I set up some fancy DevOps thing and then see that the all-time logins are a big fat zero for 70% of the people that should checking the system daily. This is reality: the DevOps team lead, the entire sysops team, and all but one developer literally never even looking at…

I work at a school, and hop boy do the students damage their laptops a lot. When we hit the point where we refused to loan out laptops for stupid shit like the kid punched the laptop screen, we found that the year coordinators actually needed a very simple daily report with the name of the student and how long the laptop has been in for repair. That’s it. And you know what? It was useful . You can make as many fancy…

This is so true. The only dashboard I'm confident was useful eventually became a web app in-house to support the organization's core function.
Post reply on HN