Fake Work is Destroying America | Hacker News Reader

Fake Work is Destroying America

lifestyleignition.com

47 pointslifestyleigni34 comments

I see where the author is coming from but I think there’s a much more insidious problem that’s “destroying America”.

“Fake Work” managers are incompetent. But in my time consulting I much preferred the “fake work” manager who was just trying to hide the fact that he was doing nothing to the manager who was just as incompetent but who thought he was a genius and wanted a say in every decision. I’ve dealt with…

= Managers who insisted they needed a $30,000 accounting package because they “only wanted the best” and ended up foisting layers of complexity onto a company that would have gotten by on Peachtree.

= Managers who arbitrarily decided to upend a project because of a positive article they read in the NY Times or WSJ.

= Managers who insisted I get all my info from them and not their underlings (even though it was clear they had no idea what was actually going on and their underlings did).

And so on…Much of this behavior ended up putting money in my pocket as a consultant but it was unquestionably destructive to the companies that employed these people.

When I worked at Oracle I saw a good amount of this -- people whose jobs seemed to be nothing but stirring up trouble and looking busy while accomplishing little or nothing. Oracle could afford that, but no company should afford it.

That's why I prefer somewhat smaller companies and startups -- you cannot get away with it. I'm not a "thou must work hard for its own sake" Puritan-ethic kind of guy, not at all. But I like actually accomplishing things, like many others here, and so the "corporate welfare" types bother me, and tend to get in the way.

[edit]: During my tenure at Oracle, I once caught wind of a Blue Ribbon Panel whose mission it was to appoint members to a Task Force, and the mission of the Task Force was to appoint members of a Tiger Team. Sounds like it's right out of Office Space, but it was real life.

This is sadly hilarious, my time working at a fortune 500 company has allowed me to see this. Looking back it seemed like of the people who were on top they got to where they were by making it SEEM like they added tremendous value to the company, when it was more of an illusion. The people who ended up making those projects work ended up lower in the ladder (i guess spending too much time being productive?)

I like the way you analyzed and broke down the specifics for the causes behind fake work. This puts a lot on the managers but I think it is a systematic problem from the top down and bottom up. BTW this was featured today on Lifehacker.com

http://lifehacker.com/5694502/do-you-feel-like-youre-doing-f...

This article completely fails to demonstrate that Fake Work exists in any meaningful quantity. I could just as easily have written an article titled "Phlogiston is Destroying America".

How do you distinguish Fake Work from Real Work? There are some plausible tests presented, but they all concern a lack of understanding about the nature of the work on the worker's part. This lack of understanding is lamentable, but it does not mean that the work is Fake. For all of these questions below, it's easy to imagine a ditch-digger asking them, even assuming the ditch-digger is doing Real Work:

> How is this even productive?

> Is this really what they are having me do?

> What is the purpose of this?

> I can’t believe how inefficient this is! There has to be a better way.

A lot of work sucks. If it were pleasant, you probably wouldn't require a salary to do it. Also, there are a lot of tasks that are easily questioned at a micro- or individual level, but that make sense as policy at an organizational level.

This article is pure fluff, offering feel-good "insight" but nothing concrete in terms of identifying real problems or solutions. I can certainly acknowledge that "busywork" or "Fake Work" exists, but I am not convinced it is a major problem at a national level.

The real flaw is that he focuses on fake work involved in servicing the bureaucracy itself (useless reports, etc.) when in actually the end product is just as likely to be fake work, due to positional externalities. Many (perhaps the majority of) products beyond basic subsistence are (in whole or in part) meant to provide status. Increasing the status of one person roughly proportionately decreases the status of another, rendering that product more or less useless from a societal point of view.

The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen puts forth a compelling argument along these lines.

I had the same response.

The way the article is written stinks of vagueness, imprecision, and general overgenerality. Meaning evaporates under the intense heat of simplification and excessive abstraction.

The author does nothing more than suggest that wasted time is a bad thing--which is obviously tautological.

It certainly makes us and the writer, who are external to "fake work" and clearly superior, feel good about ourselves. We can see this evil that most of the inferior idiots/sheeple/morons/minions/lackeys/middle-managers/people-from-the-wrong-country are outrageously blind to. There's not much going on aside from ego-stroking in the article.

(And yes, you could probably say the same about THIS post if you really wanted to get into it. I think it's important, though, to isolate articles trying to say concretely meaningful things from articles that are just here to make us feel good about ourselves at the expense of some indistinct others.)

Right now I'm working for a small startup, and we've been interacting a lot with big companies. I feel like a significant percentage of my time is made up of doing "fake work." There are a lot of conference calls with like 15 people on them, and only about 2 or 3 are actually doing anything useful. The other 12 or 13 are making sure that they aren't missing anything important, because if they do, they won't ever be able to make it up.

I guess the problem is that some of it actually needs to get done. It's just the coordination penalty of trying to interface two totally different companies together.

I think the primary cause of fake work is inefficient communication, requiring people to do extra work to cope for that. It seems like the solution is better communication systems that allow things to be documented.

To get rid of the Fake Work, we would have to be honest about our current work. but upper management doesn't want honesty. They want to see consistent numbers always increasing. If you have 3 great quarters then 1 bad one they will be pissed, but not if you have 4 OK quarters

So, the thing to do about it is to help expose it by determining and implementing accurate methods of work quantification as it relates to productivity and exposing the results to the administration.

What if the results of what are exposed show that there is only enough real work for 25% of the current staff? Would the administration implement the layoffs? Classic agency problem.

Even if its exposed, the administration is part of the bureaucracy that furthered fake work along in the first place. ie created fake groups and projects and "moats" in order to make it look like management was doing a great job and that a lot of "work" was getting done

What if the results of what are exposed show that there is only enough real work for 25% of the current staff? Would the administration implement the layoffs?

What I've learned is that if you think like you do (and I do), you should not work with people that think like this. The best way to avoid this sort of bureaucratic thinking by the administration is to work for a small business. However, the trade-off is much too hard for many of us; if you work with people that value business more than family, you might be working for some real assholes.

So, it requires a careful balance. Enough people in the business so that the companies led by assholes are limited, but small enough so bureaucrats like the ones you mention can't flourish.

Sounds like something that needs a manager appointed to hire a team to determine the appropriate process. Don't forget the Project Manager to keep track of scope, the Business Analyst to prioritize according to company needs, and the Integration Engineers to ensure that other groups will be able to properly implement the solutions. Of course, the everything will need to go before the Change Management Committee and assigned a risk score before it can be implemented.

:) That's one way.

The other way is to remove the overhead and determine at a basic level what the company's goals are and how you are going to gather and use metrics simply to determine how well those goals are being met. Outsource it or use existing resources, but get it done. The problem is how to determine metrics for things not easily quantified, but usually "software development" is not the company goal- rather it is "making the customer happy" and "making money". But, the goals can't be that generic. And, it has to be a low-overhead feedback loop, where progress must be seen quickly, otherwise it is not practical. The KISS principle also applies. Too much process is bad. But this is just a lot of talk. You should just do something simple to measure productivity and then keep iterating until you have something great. That is how great companies are born, whether they know it or not.

YOU ARE A GENIUS!! Thanks "notmyname" So well said :) of course all those people are necessary for business continuity

It's cheating to create an id just to applaud yourself, only when you're not trying to make humor by injecting a yes man into context of apparent disdain of work bureaucracy.

(sili889q user created one hour ago by notmyname to coincide with his post)

It's not me

I think notmyname's comment is great. It's so true the parallel to office space. The reason office space was such a successful movie was because of the real world experiences in corporate america that the audience has itself experienced. Thanks for sharing the comical real world example of office space like life

but your username is notmyname...

oh, we could be here for hours, like Abbott and Costello

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sShMA85pv8M

My personal view is that if you don't have people paying attention to the details, no amount of automation will help all that much.

Example: one company I was at, made us send in an Excel spreadsheet of our hours each week so they could track which projects were being worked on.

Everyone just saved a copy of last week's , then changed a few numbers around, double-checking that it added up to at least 40 hours (just select the cells in a row or column and Excel sums them for you); then sent it in after changing the week number at the top.

Good point that metrics can often be collected inappropriately. My point was more that you could:

- do a survey of customer satisfaction on different points (but make it wide-open so they can express other concerns) and see how well ranking increases or decreases

- do an anonymous survey of employee happiness and self-assessments of productivity (but make it wide-open so they can express other concerns) and see how well ranking increases or decreases

- look at number of requests being served and from where, response times, repeat customers, support requests, errors, etc. (things that people won't hopefully make up)

- look at financials for important parts of the company and how they go up and down

- work hard to put money into R&D, tools, training, maintenance, etc. and take away from parts of the company that are draining money

a former manager of mine stayed home and played xbox for a year, and was awarded a trophy and jacket as the #1 billing consultant in the entire organization.

sounds nice, but it drives you insane after a while. you can actually hear your skills evaporating in such a situation.

Reading the article, it made thing think about "cargo cults". Namely, people do work not because they know why they need to do it. It feels to me that Fake Work is just management's way of trying to figure out how competitors process is working or limited.

Fake Work doesn't make progress, but actually make money. If I spent 7-9 hours discussing or writing an email explaining to my client things (or simply talking more about the project), this probably won't change anything in my progress, but will make the client feel on-line with the work I do, thus knows that I do real work and will be happy to pay more. (Or at least happy with the work I have done).

I found myself sometimes spending time talking about things more than I actually spent doing them, but after all I do that for money!

Without fake work how much unemployment would there be?

Isn't everyone reading this doing fake work right now?

It's marginally productive to read articles about recognizing when you're unproductive.

Also, "fake work" is not not-work.

Of course, the productivity of reading an article is directly correlated to how someone interprets the article and what they learn from it.

Productivity itself is difficult to discuss, because usefulness operates on many axes (axis plural, not sharp metal on the end of a stick). Ex. I find that having a few big projects to mentally plan and chew over with friends or alone has a net positive effect on my happiness, even though such projects will almost certainly never get done. In some ways, thought about such projects is unproductive, but in terms of generating happiness for myself, I find it quite rewarding and, in a certain way, productive.

That was a pretty lightweight "article", from a website that doesn't get any better.

Awesome self-link, though, lifestylegni!

In grade school we used to call this "busy work". As in, work given to you so that you would look busy, even though it served no functional purpose whatsoever. I was surprised and dismayed to realize that corporate life was more of the same (and hence I no longer participate in corporate life and work for myself).

Coffee is destroying America.

Coffee has a long history in the USA - So, blame the Tea drinkers

http://www.teagarden.com/library/tea_library_05.php (bottom story)

Caffeine in general, I feel, may be a cause of "fake work." I quit last week and this week have found my mind much more full of thought, calmer, the days last longer, and I feel more passionate about things.

I don't know if "fake work" is anything new. I would imagine that fake work has always been around. That would go to show how little real work is necessary to keep things running.

Job advice: never be the guy who spends his day writing 'documents'.

'Write-only media' is not just a clever pun.

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