Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

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This is true even within tech companies, but for hourly workers. Hourly folks are treated like trash. I’m talking people who live in the bay, and work side by side with other professionals in SF.

In a position like that you almost have to take a “durrr, I dunno!” attitude to everything, because if you try to talk to salaried people about what you need to do your job, you are looked at like a dog who just started reciting poetry.

Every now and then a salaried person will try to engage, take you seriously, but once it bounces up the chain of command that an hourly person is acting like they have something to contribute, it will be quietly shut down.

Seems like the business model requires hourly people stay out of the “brain space” entirely. Otherwise you’d have to pay them a living wage.

Really despicable way to treat people IMO. I don’t see why you wouldn’t want people to be proactive about solving problems.

The again, I’ve seen similar attitudes from engineering managers towards their direct reports.

What kind of jobs to hourly people hold? I mean, if the company hires consultants then some of the Exalted Developers themselves will be hourly.

Exactly, I thought that in some areas in US was not that that uncommon to get north of 150/200 per hour? And that wouldn’t seem so despicable to me...

None of that is true at my company, in my experience. It is a large company, so I might not have the full picture, but my little corner of it is not like that at all.

Seems pretty common to me. I have worked in smaller companies where everyone was an integral part of the business, and that isn't most large companies I worked at since then. I think it is partly a cargo cult thing. Very successful business can afford to threat people as disposable, be elitist or inflexible. So they end up thinking that is part of what makes them successful, without realizing they are throwing away opportunities. Maybe there are some larger companies that does things differently, but I haven't really seen it.

Good ideas come from all skill levels. But good idea vs bad idea ratio is fundamentally what separates those in or out of brain space. To get your ratio up, you need training and experience in making good ideas more frequently and bad ideas less frequently. And then you get placed in a space where your ideas are your core output. Those people tend to be salaried the most often. And they don't like to spend their time sifting through the bad ideas of untrained people when they could instead be generating more good ideas per unit time. I don't see the problem here

What your casual elitism disregards is that people who actually do the work can have different ideas, especially related to the work they are doing. Put another way, since they have a different perspective than the higher-ups, they are sometimes able to find potential efficiencies and product improvements that wouldn't occur to others.

Additionally, front-line workers can see real problems with how customers experience the product that may not be reflected in the metrics used to evaluate the product, since metrics are inevitably gamed.

The ratio of good to bad ideas doesn't matter if you miss the one good idea you really needed. A company that invests in ways to effectively use the ideas of 'untrained people', as you so delicately put it, can derive a lot of value from those ideas.

I think you're right. The front-line workers often have a certain level of ground-truth about how processes actually work in practice. They may not have all the same information as the higher-ups, but they have a very unique and valuable perspective that can be used to improve strategic decisions.

IMO, this is one of the reasons why distributed command (as opposed to centralized command) models often work better, particularly in a fast moving environment.

A CEO only has to be right 51% of the time to be successful.

That really depends.

Sure, my statement is merely metaphorically true. It's meant to communicate the point that the CEO must optimize for being right enough frequently enough to be successful. Competition surely drives whatever that number is up, and good managers surely listen to the ideas from their line workers. And they must mentally triage ideas to be worth considering more deeply. The best managers credit the line workers and encourage more idea sharing. But the manager must do the triage, and the manager must ignore ideas that don't pass the bar, and the manager must empower only those that have a track record of producing good ideas and not the others.

So do you think Donald Trump has good ideas to improve things for poor people ?

Empirically, it turns out the answer is yes.

But reality is the complete opposite.

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