Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

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The music was new, black polished chrome / And came over the summer like liquid night

The DJ's took pills to stay awake / And play for seven days

Andreesen's 'Software Eats The World,' Mosaic & associated perspectives emerged from the fresh green fields of internet-enabled personal computing in the 90s and 2000s. Everything was young and novel. The software itself. The business models. The cultural impact. The companies and personas. Everything was a disruption.

There was a time when the record industry was fresh & jukeboxes were a disruptive new "channel." With it came new business models, genres of music. Music became imbued with new cultural & artistic significance.

There was a time when gentleman scientists were inventing the institution of science at home. A time before "publish-or-perish," tenure-tracks and grant applications.

Everything was young once. Mechanised farming. Production line manufacturing. The Americas. Nothing stays young, however.

Pondering why & how institutions go from new to old is something we've been doing forever. Ibn Khaldun, father of social science, had his barbarians-vs-civilisations theories in the 1300s.

These theories tend to get ideological. Marxism was a (Khaldun-ish) theory that "late-stage capitalism" was upon us(them). Ayn Rand thought everything had gotten infested with parasitic "looters." Both fantasised about revolutionary moments, where the old world dies and is reborn new & fresh. Today, we like terms like regulatory capture/burden, incumbent effects, path dependencies, low hanging fruit depletion or somesuch. All characterisations of "corruption" infesting mature institutions.

There are lots of examples. NASA's achievements in early decades vs the 90s. How a 3 person startup with 1 month of code can add featureX to their product orders of magnitude more easily than an established company with a mature code base. Twitter once served their product to the whole world with 50 people. It was a similar twitter, but doing it with just 1,000 people today would be a massive challenge.

Everything starts young. Everything gets old.

> It was a similar twitter, but doing it with just 1,000 people today would be a massive challenge.

Is that true though? We know that instagram had less than 100 people running it before Facebook bought it for $19B.

There's a tendency for successful companies to add headcounts and grow - and it's very hard to convince yourself not to - maybe just maybe they would be able to serve the whole world with about 50 people, on a smaller revenue but huge revenue/headcount.

part of the way investors create valuation for companies is based on employees. Thats why its not a wild west of software contractors everywhere.

That's like counting lines of code to create the valuation for software.

Instagram and WhatsApp are anomalies. To try and find general tendencies, we should try and cite the typical story, not a three sigma exception case.

Secondly, headcount is a darling of many HR systems. You might cite exceptions with Google or Stripe but your typical corporate environment will not put much effort into fairly evaluating career advancement (e.g., measuring impacts, outcomes, risk) for anyone.

If you are sales or profit focused, lucky you. But outside of that, most HR systems will use simple metrics like "how many people report to you" or "how much budget do you control" to evaluate your promotions and pay. Some will even have literal formulas (e.g., you need 6 reports to go to Director; you need 6 Director reports to go to Executive Director; etc.)

It is done because it is easy and convenient for HR. Unfortunately, obviously, people then try to game the system and over-hire.

You might have to produce an "impacts report" at EOY but that is often HR-theater. Get down to "why" and you will find it came down to how many direct reports you had. Or how much budget you burned.

If your incentive system rewards hiring over results, expect headcount to grow I urge those in governance positions to ensure their organizations have a real impacts assessment system to evaluate employee progress. There is no better way to kill motivation among workers than tell them that impact has no effect.

Exactly, the typical story is one where politics invariably results in headcounts and not maintaining a small and clear cut vision.

But the question is, can they do it without the bloat? My understanding is yes - and I can probably even tell you how.

>> But the question is, can they do it without the bloat? My understanding is yes - and I can probably even tell you how.

I dont mean to be snarky, but isn't the "how" sort of obvious (though hard to achieve)? You'd have to align reward with value generated per unit of risk and nothing else. The more value you generate (on a risk adjusted basis), the greater your reward and promotion. When companies grow larger, it becomes difficult for them to measure value generated, or too tedious, or politics overpowers governance.

I'd be curious to hear your proposal on a fix.

I'm actually not talking about how to change the politics, but rather the technical aspect of so.

I have no idea how to change the politics of hiring more, I can only hope if I was to ever start a company that I can try to make my own firm so.

> Instagram and WhatsApp are anomalies. To try and find general tendencies, we should try and cite the typical story, not a three sigma exception case.

The Instagram and WhatsApp example keeps coming up like clockwork in various contexts. A recent discussion that I recall: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22471355

> If your incentive system rewards hiring over results, expect headcount to grow...

Goodhart's Law in action? "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17320640

In what company does HR have that kind of power to have any voice in who becomes director or executive director?

In practically every big company. It isn't as much power or voice as much as litmus tests that serve to veto good stewardship.

This doesnt mean big company Directors and Executive Directors are not deserving of their promotions, it just means that they usually have an added hoop to jump thru -- increasing headcount.

I've been in senior ranks of big companies, and spoke to plenty of counterparts at other companies, and it is almost always the story.

Any company that allows HR to veto any promotions is royally screwed.

Instagram was bought for $2B.

You're thinking of WhatsApp.

$1B, but it landed at about $750M because of the FB shares that took a tumble just after.

Yeah but how much did those shares reach before hitting maturity?

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