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Comment by vorhemus | Hacker News Reader

I used to think corporations strive to reduce costs and therefore keep their workforce to the minimum necessary. Now my theory is that managers in a company try to maximize their influence and standing and this is mostly done by making sure they have as many people below them as possible. Therefore they hire consitantly for their teams and create new sub-hierarchies below them.

If this is the case, the obvious side effect is the emergence of bullshit jobs as the purpose of hiring is not primarely to finish work but to increase power of managers in corporations.

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I think they're competing forces.

There is periodic pressure to return to [greater] profitability, at which times companies fire like mad. Either it's a higher level of management realizing one branch of the org chart is stupid and directing its removal, or a directive from the top "figure out how to cull 10% of the workforce".

Between those events, however, managerial accumulation of influence takes over.

Maybe c-suite execs don't rip out excess staffing immediately because, even operationally, it's not all downside:

Within a relatively small branch of the org chart, having more than bare minimum staffing (with some of them doing bullshit jobs) provides a human resource buffer that might be tasked with solving really important problems that crop up sometimes: significant new requirements from a customer, or, if the incentives are right, opportunistically solving non-critical persistent problems (e.g. refactoring more) or automating more. I guess there's not enough pressure from higher management to keep teams to true personnel requirements + a few extra, so the "few extra" grows like mad.

Within a larger branch, occasionally having "excess" staffing for internal corporate competition is good. One of the best strategies for large projects (like larger government contractors) is to run two teams each with half the budget and select the best result. It seems insane from a naive perspective: wouldn't it cost nearly twice as much to have double the headcount? But it doesn't seem to, especially when the vast majority of project costs are labor costs or linearly related to staffing (rather than external resource costs, which are more static—though even for resource-intensive projects, internal competition provides incentive to figure out how to use less resources).

It's a super strong phenomenom, having a lot of people around you, an entourage, a posse. Projects a huge amount of power. And it's done with the whole management chain's approval, the low-level boss has more people then his boss has those same more people too because it's a tree.

Gone are the days of most people being able to appreciate a day of work where they got a lot done and felt good about contributing towards a project.

I think it's important to remember is corporations are just groups of people, and each individual will have a different personality and motivation. Some will be empire builders, others will only hire when push comes to shove.

When it comes to an actual companies personality, it basically boils down to the behaviour you reward, the behaviour you put up with, and when exceptions apply. As an example, how many time does the "no asshole" rule get overrides by someone talent? Suddenly you're full of assholes.

Of course patterns emerge. If the market generally rewards empire builders, then you're going to get people empire building in your organisation. Even if you do not directly reward it, they'll just leverage the title and the reports to land a job elsewhere.

Why do we put up with this? Well quite simply, you tend to be hiring for roles you yourself don't understand. Here me out. If your CEO is a sales guy, which is perfectly fine, he's going to be taking a leap of faith somewhere when he picks a CTO.

I read on linkedin on a regular basis that you shouldn't promote your best developer to CTO. There may be some truth to this, but the reality is that there's a bunch of non-technical people vying for the top technical job. Now from your position as CEO, do you pick the guy who's a bit more salesy and familiar, or the tech you don't understand or empathise with? After all, that CTO with 2 years as a junior programmer in 1993 does articulate a really good argument.

Personally, I think you doom yourself to mediocrity by having a monoculture of bean counters run your business. I might be wrong, but if you hire a person who needs to hire a person to do the job, it's likely they'll want to hire someone a bit like them, and suddenly you'll be hiring a person, to hire a person, that needs to hire a person, for many layers, until one of those people will be a person that does a thing.

Bit like this picture:

https://digitalsynopsis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/funny...

This is pretty much precisely what Parkinson's Law predicts.

Your observation is a good example of the perverse incentive. Fortunately, everyone can win in this particular scenario. If the company can pay its employees on time and doesn't care that much about minimizing costs, and managers can spread the wealth by providing jobs, then it's hardly the worst thing in the world.

Employees can also be seen as insurance against bottlenecks created by other employees. The more employees you have on hand, the less likely that a particular employee going AWOL will cause a noticeable interruption. I've seen companies make the mistake of only hiring a minimal number of engineers, for instance, and end up in a sticky situation when one of them leaves.

This also applies to startups. At least recently. Many startups (specially in the finance market) try to hire and grow like crazy, because it drives investment (or at least so they think).

If you see startup founders as "managers" with investors being their bosses then the parent comment applies too.

A lot of startup founders' goals is to raise more investment and live off that - this gives them the "startup founder" lifestyle & influence without actually having to take on any of the risk & uncertainty of running a self-sustaining business.

Indeed, corporations don't and can't think or make decisions. It's always done by individual people whom all have other priorities.

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