Hacker News Reader

Comment by _1qd4 | Hacker News Reader

What do you consider actual work?

I work for a bank, and internally, we refer to ourselves as the worst run software company possible. You could remove 80% of our staff and our clients would not notice at all - the remaining 20% are all that's needed to support the services and make quality updates.

I spend a lot of time keeping that 80% away from the 20% so that stuff actually gets done. I don't really do any work per se, but if I didn't do my job, nobody else would be able to do theirs. It's hard to quantify.

View on HN

While I've absolutely seen this, I've also seen many technical people not really understanding what the 80% do and assuming they don't do anything. You might be right for your own company/job, but I always take comments like this with a grain of salt.

Many roles are needed to counter-balance others and implement good governance, although they look like they are just getting in the way. As I've gained more experience in senior roles, this becomes more and more obvious and choices that would have been baffling to me when I started out as a dev make total sense now. So... quantifying usefulness is not a numbers game and any opinion here is subjective and biased.

I definitely thought about my comment a lot, since I am in a technical role. I recognize it's arrogant, but let me provide some insights.

We are currently facing threats from "online only" banks, where you can sign up and use a bank account without ever talking to a person or stepping foot in a building. This is a threat because banks make their money on transactions and if everyone goes to the cool smartphone app bank, what will our bank have left?

We'll be left cashing cheques for blue collar workers. We'll be left doing phone support for geriatrics. We'll be left giving loans to refugees. We'll be left with safety deposit boxes. We'll be left with all of the unprofitable parts of the banking market that the online only banks say NO to.

And that's where that 80% of our staff comes from. Branches and call centers to manage the small, unprofitable sector of the consumer banking market. To my point, our bank has a long running project to shut down branches across the country. We realized that profitable customers only come to the bank to sign papers, and unprofitable ones come to harass the bank staff.

There are staff needed for good governance and to manage regulations, but those staff do not make up the bulk of our labour.

>unprofitable ones come to harass the bank staff.

And banks wonder why credit unions and the like are growing.

You’d need to hear stories from the trenches to understand my comment. My brother works in a branch, most of his day to day activities are explaining to people why they don’t have enough money in their accounts.

“Well Jim, you spent $100 at McDonald’s yesterday and the day before that you spent $500 at a shopping mall. That’s probably where your pay cheque went!”

“My wife and I just can’t understand how we’re in debt, we make 10k a month.” “Well you spent 15k on your 6 credit cards last month, that’ll do it!” “Oh”.

I’ve done credit union product marketing and IT — it’s exactly the same situation over there. Many credit unions are terminally infected with bad board members that prevent them from making hard decisions that will result in better customer service in the long term.

And actual harassment of staff in banking is a real thing, as is occasional criminal activity like keying employee cars. This must be dealt with on top of robbery training (varying your commute, etc.)

Prices law holds true in most professional settings, though - sales, academia, investing, law, even elite fields like sports and brain surgery.

It's not that the other 80-95% of the people in the firm or league or field don't have value, it's that they're 100% fungible.

It's like that anecdote about great automation - all you need is a dog and a human.

The dog to keep the the human away from the automation.

The human to feed the dog.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com