The Most Mindnumbing of Office Tasks Made One Man $360M

Our healthcare costs are not high because six people are redundant.

The health insurance business was almost a $900 B market in 2017, that's enough to pay 12,000,000 people $75,000/yr. Adding six, or six thousand, or 600,000 redundant employees affects that market very little.

Is careless inefficiency of for-profit corporations in a somewhat competitive market ever a root cause of high prices? I think it's more of a sign that they're raking in so much dough it wouldn't be worth their organizational overhead to pay attention to such crumbs. They aren't making a trillion dollars a year by missing things they'd know how to fix if they hung around HN.

as if the reduced inefficiencies would actually go to reducing costs rather than further padding executives pockets

>If it made economic sense to pay people to dig holes and refill them all day, we would. But that's pointless - it provides no value.

Actually we do it, and it helps. In fact a large part of current jobs is like that, BS busywork jobs.

The reason it helps is, as I see it:

1) Productivity/automation is well up...

2) More people than required are available to work

3) -- On-demand re-education of the kind needed to fit actual needs (e.g. for programmers), can't / ain't gonna happen, it's a pipe dream at the speeds required and for the populations concern

4) -- and even if it was possible, it would just cover a small fraction. Even with all job needs covered, many people are not needed to work anywhere, period.

5) BS jobs hence serve as a distribution / welfare system / kindergarten for adults

6) -- but allow us to not call it "welfare" and to include more than the poor, and have them keep their dignity (since we sneer on welfare recipients)

7) -- and keep from having a huge unemployed mass revolting or making society Mad Max

I am not kidding. We don’t even need to replace them, the commit logs are there for exactly this purpose. They can just disappear and nothing would change!

They’re a legacy team, I am sure their time is up soon. What enterprise companies do is gather all the people they want to lay-off and then do it in one shot whenever they need to bump their stock price.

I'll be blunt: That is moronic.

If your employees are busy doing garbage work, they'll only be good at doing garbage work. And the idea of keeping them busy so they're present for later "real" work, you won't perceive your staff as being capable of doing the real work or you actually won't be able to do it.

1) Perception: You'll perceive your staff as too busy to take on the work, and hire more people. You've lost the benefit of that capacity reserve.

2) Actuality: The garbage work will still need to be done. It can't be skipped, and you won't have the ability to do it in 5 minutes (how long it actually takes), it'll still take you weeks to get it done and you'll have no capacity for the "real" work.

If you don't have work for all your staff, that's 100% fine. Find them useful work until the billable hours become available. Send them to training classes so they're a hair better when the work comes in. Have them do maintenance work on your infrastructure (test systems, servers, build systems) so that when the real work comes in everything around them is working smoothly and efficiently.

But under absolutely no circumstances should you ever give them garbage work to keep them busy. It's the dumbest thing a manager can do.

I had this happen to me. I was hired as a contractor for a big company and was shown to a cubicle I was to share with another developer. Only, I had nothing to do. I was told what I'd be doing when I interviewed but that project got put on hold by the time I started. After about a week of not being assigned anything I started to kind-of freak out. My cube-mate assured me that everything was fine and he explained that the department head was given the OK to hire someone and he took advantage of that opportunity so that he had me available when he needed me.

I was a contractor there for almost a year and was never really given anything of importance (that I could see, anyway) to work on. But, I guess I was still providing value somehow... I hope?

Why not just let them go home and pay them for what you're really paying them for: being available when needed.

> If you someday become a boss, you’ll understand a big part of your job is finding work to keep your employees busy, so that when the “real” work comes along you’ll have the staff to do what’s necessary.

Are you an engineering manager? This doesn't match my experiences at all.

There's mechanistic work that this was true for. With the Advent of Fiverr and Upwork you no longer need to do this unless you have some sort of sensitivity on the data (it's personal, or health, or something secret). These companies are the cloud computing of drudge work. You can burst capacity in half an hour.

Matches my experience very much.

That's what I meant :)