Hacker News Reader

Comment by abraxas | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that workers get Manna in place of the human management - automated surveillance systems that track every moment of their working life and slice and dice this data to figure out who can be fired or harassed and where to tighten the screws on them.

Manna by Marshall Brain is a great short book about this that's available free online.

https://marshallbrain.com/manna

View on HN

Beat me to it. My mind went immediately to Manna. Can't think of a book (or anything else for that matter) that sparked more of my imagination in terms of what can be possible (good and bad) in the near future with our existing tech.

But the biggest short-term takeaway was how middle-management is the most vulnerable to automation. Leadership may be hard to replace with a robot, but a lot of management is pretty straight-forward.

I think a more useful term for that might be "management automation". And it's not something I worry about is because a primary function of American-style management is to adapt too-rigid top-down systems to the complex, ever-changing nature of the work. Companies trying to automate management are even more vulnerable to competition and disruption than the ones automating labor.

Are you a manager? When has american style management made companies more agile? American style management is all about kingdom and silo building.

This is a really bizarre generalization. There are good managers and bad managers, it just depends on the organization and the individual. Bad managers aren't always easy to spot, but it's very obvious who the good ones are because everyone in the organization implicitly looks to them for guidance and support.

Don't get me wrong; I think American-style management is on average terrible. I just don't think it's easily automated, because the point is to take the nonsense from on high and make it somehow work, for some sufficiently lax definition of "work".

Source?

I'm a relatively new engineering manager in an older company in Canada (turning itself into fin/insurance tech), and a big part of my role has been about breaking down silos.

The silos where created at a time when being really efficient at 'your piece' was what the system rewarded, whereas now we want to be efficient at shipping code, which means efficient value streams (from inception to production)...which has basically meant many rounds of silo deconstruction.

But I'd be VERY curious about why silos get built in the first place & what incentives are in place to make this happen...and why this is bad. To be honest, maybe I'm just idealistic, but I see silo building as not desirable.

Not OP, but imo the classic thought is that your managerial influence is directly correlated with the count and quality of employees under you. In this sense, silos get built not quite for specialization, but because your individual managerial incentive is to try to grow you and yours at the expense of (internal) competitors for a fixed budget; interoperation can be a direct threat to your influence and growth.

A famous study of behavior like this might be Kodak, and how internally the film "silo" crushed the digital "silo".

Ah interesting.

I think I might just be idealistic and having thought about it this way. Thanks for the context.

For the background and how things go wrong, you might enjoy the book "Confronting Managerialism" by Spender and Locke. The Lean folks also have a lot of good critiques. A book that sticks in my mind is "Simple Excellence: Organizing and Aligning the Management Team in a Lean Transformation", but there are a bunch. And for software specifically, Mary Poppendieck's work is great, as well as Reinertsen's "Principles of Product Development Flow".

Thanks for the recommendations!

As a category, American companies are the most profitable in the world, so they’re doing something right.

But is that something actually right? IE in the sense we would want more of it in our lives.

Or is the profitability less about agility as per the GP comment and more to do with employee manipulation(for lower wages) and political sway (for lower taxes).

Hell, given where FAANG pay taxes, are they even American?

I'm pretty sure FAANG pays quite a lot in payroll tax, property tax, and they also ensure that FAANG employees pay quite substantial income tax, property tax, and sales tax.

FAANG are notable primarily for employing very few people relative to revenue.

This may change in the case of Amazon with its fulfilment centres, but see above comments re: Manna.

Surely some portion of that can be attributed to agency ("doing") but I'd contend a non-trivial amount is due to being recipients of American hegemony ("being")

I think the Tik-Tok saga has amply demonstrated just how unprepared Americans are to actually compete purely on merit.

Is there a word for waiting-for-a-twist-that-never-comes? I keep thinking that the Australia Project was really a front for Manna "leveling up" and secretly turning the Terraform dwellers into Vites to further keep them easier to control and out of sight.

Yeah the plot isn't that sophisticated, it's just an exploration of hypothetical bad and good outcomes.

I think those firms will likely lose their competitiveness overtime. Unless they are defacto monopoly. Boeing is a prime example.

I think you underestimate the line of future workers willing to work under almost any condition.

People said this about consulting companies when they retracted offers in 2001. People said this about wall street firms when they reigned in party culture in the early 2000s. Yet, the show goes on because fresh graduates and immigrants at all levels need jobs and are willing to bear with it all.

It's not about workers being "willing" - it is about handicapping worker "ability." You surveil me and it will reduce my performance, creativity, etc. It isn't necessarily conscious on the workers part - it's like a virus that infects all that worker does.

Well, I'm not the GP so I can't tell for sure. But "lose competitiveness" without any further said normally refers to a company as a seller, on its products markets.

When referring to the company as a buyer, like in the labor market, people usually qualify it.

What are you talking about? Every large company is jumping aboard the automatic worker surveillance, tracking and scoring. Where are you gonna go work? To a competitor who uses the exact same surveillance system?

This dystopian nightmare is coming for programmers too, soon.

Way past that. "Agile" (i.e. micromanagement) methodologies and tooling are already firmly seated which is basically this same special hell.

I guess we have a generation of technologists that didn't realize when to stop foaming at the mouth at efficiency over humanity or perhaps they were lead here with bags of money and deceit.

I love efficiency and optimisation too (with certain processes), but not at the cost of human happiness. Our current optimizations are ever growingly sacrificing basic happiness for efficiency which is not a tradeoff we should want or agree to.

It's already here in place at my company and many others. PRs, commits, comments and even slack and email activity are being tracked and compared between employees.

How do people react?

Not well. Those that can leave. Those who can't, grin and bear.

It's ravenous.

Name them please. I work for a largish company, this subject was openly addressed in a townhall and stated it's not gonna work by CEO and the board. As for where you gonna go, like everything else, it just creates opportunities for companies that might not paid as much but offer better environment, that's where I'm gonna go.

I have often complained about my employer on here, for their lack of foresight, their lack of empathy from the top, and (right now) their lack of really giving a shit about us as humans during a pandemic.

But. At the end of the day, I stay here for less money than I could make somewhere else for two reasons:

A) I don't like moving; and

B) They leave me the fuck alone. They don't really know what my office does. They don't really know how we do it. But they do know that we provide massive value for the expense. And they let us do it with as little oversight as they can stomach.

That's worth something.

I can't name my employer (too small - less than a thousand egineers) but I can tell you they are tracking using a plugin for Atlassian. We are an Atlassian shop through and through including our source code control. They deployed this plugin last year. What is really sinister is that it's open to all employees so they can see in real time how they rank against their peers ącross the various metrics.

I'm pretty sure Atlassian peddles this product to everyone who uses their suite.

Do you think this rating correlates with reality?

Of course. The best engineer should have the best workaround to inflate the highest artificial metric.

Exactly. We already know that such metrics do not identify the best performers, they identify those who are willing and able to game the system the most.

> I think those firms will likely lose their competitiveness overtime. Unless they are defacto monopoly.

I suspect that's wishful thinking that assumes a greater alignment than actually exists between what we want for society and what the market will lead us to.

Not if those firms sell a commodity product, such as delivery or retail.

I started reading this, got sucked in the first few chapters and lost the link a few years ago and could not find it since. Thank you so much for sharing it!! Now I can finish it.

I've been looking for that story again for years. I read it ages ago and could never find it again however hard I tried. Thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com