Ask HN: Why incompetent people get paid more at big companies and continue? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why incompetent people get paid more at big companies and continue?

24 pointsuuidnotdefined19 comments

Over last 4 years I have worked for 2 most talked companies these days ( hint stock is down for both).

I felt that amount of incompetent people at these companies are as large as it can get.

There are managers, analysts who are sitting on their job for 3 or 4 years yet hardly know business functionalities, programming and other stuff that's making news everywhere. Both companies sucked a lot when it came to speed. Amount of approval, mediocre mountainous tasks I had to go through was un-parallel.

I have seen employees at both of these companies playing video games at work hours , people getting drunk during work hour, calling names, closed groups , politics and much more.

There are managers and directors who simply don't know what the fuck is going on. They exist to draw salaries. Most of these managers, directors and people with 3 to 4 years have form closed circles that refuse to let any person ( even acquihires ) to mix with them. All acquihires I know have left company ( including me ).

Another trend I have seen is fake engineers coming out of training academies such as HackBright and many more. In 3 months they claim to know stuff that have taken 4 years of engineering and numbers of years to master for others. I have conducted number of interviews and our suggestions were turned down by hiring committee at both companies for political correctness. I have seen people spending 8+ months on a product launch only to discover that it is not working as it intends to.

Now, worst part of all is these people are getting paid 150K+ to 200K+ per year. Heck, even hackbright graduates are getting paid more than hard working engineers. Why is that US companies are openly axing their own future ? I feel bad for what is going on.

The managers and analysts that you are labelling as incompetent may be not incompetent. It will be naivety to say that those people are just sitting and playing video games for hours at work. Have you delved into their past careers/performances etc? What you are seeing is just tip of iceberg and if you are not aware of that then all your prediction and calculation can go wrong.

I agree some managers and directors can be clueless as in large companies there are frequent shuffles among departments and projects but that can't be their fault in entirety. If it is a large ship then there will be some people who can relax and still the ship will move with few other's contributions. Large organizations are like that. Do not expect all employees to contribute evenly and that is 8 hours of diligent work. That does not happen. I guess not even in at G or Y or A or F. But if you are in a canoe(startup) with one or two other guys then you have to paddle.

I feel you. Most of the world today is fake. Fake people, fake news, fake products.

I recently saw a company sell a product for over USD15,000 that was just Joomla ecommerce that I could do in a day. What makes things even worse is that 5 people were working on it. At least that is what "sales person" told the client. It made me sick. They had 2 months for this and it should be up by New Year. It's still in "development phase" because they don't know how to redirect from Paypal to shop once the payment is made. That's those fake engineers you are talking about. They took money from small business and sold them a solution that will never work properly and for big money. Fake people, fake engineers, fake product.

I had the same thought but after closely working and observing what they do on day to day basis, here I have come up with few reasons:

1. They understand the day to day Operations of the company better.

2. Non-IT people find it easier to deal with them.

3. They're easy going, less demanding in terms of the Company culture and technologies used.

4. They tend to stay for long time in the company - that means Loyalty. Most companies appreciate and reward Loyalty.

5. They aren't Incompetent. They are just good at what they do, for long time, which new comers might dispute as being lazy, not passionate about technology.

Lastly, most of the jobs don't require you to be genius.

> 5. They aren't Incompetent. They are just good at what they do, for long time, which new comers might dispute as being lazy, not passionate about technology.

I'm fairly sure I would fall in OP's "incompetent" bucket, but this point of yours nailed it. I'm not among the oldest people around and I haven't been that long at the company I work at, but I definitely don't have the passion and drive of the single, early 20s guys in my team.

Give me a task and I'll do it well. But don't expect me to be 100% of the time on social media promoting the product, and don't expect to see me voluntarily working nights and weekends just because the product is really cool (which it really is, but it's still work). I have 1) a family and 2) multiple other interests outside of work.

You seem to be describing at least 2 things:

Rising to a level of ineffectiveness: Employees rise through an organisation until they're ineffective at their job, but just enough effective to keep/justify it. This is career peak and moving stops. I'm sure there's a Dilbert on it, or perhaps that is the whole of Dilbert. This is not bad people, just people that have found comfort on a decent salary.

>fake engineers Not sure what you mean about "our suggestions were turned down by hiring committee" best not to have a hiring committee, sounds like avoiding accountability for hiring. Have the hiring manager make the decision for who they want.

>There are managers and directors who simply don't know what the fuck is going on. They exist to draw salaries.

Yes. And staff manipulate them. Like a small child tests parents, seeing what's possible and what's not. Often not incompetent, but competent enough.

"Employees rise through an organisation until they're ineffective at their job"

That is the Peter principle (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle), not the related Dilbert principle (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle) "leadership is nature's way of removing morons from the productive flow".

An observation after working in big and small companies.

Speed is slower in larger companies, usually nothing to do with ability or red tape, but because you have users or paying customers already. To push something out that isn't functioning has an impact either with reputation or cash.

As a result you need to make sure quality is extra high and nothing else is impacted.

Something with few or 0 customers does not have this issue by nature.

couple things to consider: 1) Most people prefer comfort to challenge.

2) Most organizations suffer from varying degrees of misaligned incentives. Especially in publicly owned companies where even the c level execs don't have much stake in the outcome of the company.

Combine 1 and 2 and you get most of what you're observing from rational actors who are competent at maximizing their own outcomes. Good luck trying to solve these problems.

Now consider this:

As corrupt/incompetent/lazy as the US system is, it's still several orders of magnitude better than anywhere else in the world. And those 2 companies you worked for are better than most US companies.

Imagine a 3rd tier company in Europe/Asia/wherever, ie. where the majority of the world's population works, and you'll start to get an idea of how deep the rabbit hole goes.

I feel your view is rather narrow and missing something (or a lot).

Clearly these companies are making money somehow?

I believe Scott Adams wrote a book, "The Dilbert Effect" about this.

>hard working engineers

How exactly do you measure that? Sisyphus obviously works very hard.

It's called corruption. As engineers we can see real work that each person is doing. When someone who is a diversity hire hasn't written any code for months after starting it is obvious but management will look the other way. People want money and tech pays more than almost every other job. Once a bad seed criminal type gets into management they can do a lot of damage. They will slaughter anyone who might expose them in order to stay employed. When you read about companies with one year average tenure and can't understand it, this is why. They want people just smart enough to do a little bit of work but not smart enough to expose the corruption. The company will just get sold or go out of business like thousands have before. Some would say it's even part of the dying process of a company.

> When someone who is a diversity hire

What are you trying to imply here?

I'm not implying anything. It means what is says.

indeed sir there is implication here with the added adjective of "diversity"

That's what one part of the original post was about.

That "diversity" you put there is really snarky. You seem to be implying that non-diversity (which you're very likely thinking of as white males) hires all perform well and only diversity hires underperform.

Nope. The original post is about fake engineers hired due to political correctness against recommendations, i.e. diversity hires. I made no statement or implications about non-diversity hires.

I second this comment

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