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Comment by goindeep | Hacker News Reader

I used to work with a very smart man that I'm sure was some kind of secret genius. He's was that sort of tech gofer. Hardware, software, didn't matter, if there was a problem he'd solve it. Sort of guy you'd see carrying a thick ass SQL book around because he 'needed to learn it' to solve just one little problem. He built whole entire solutions for the company I worked at in his spare time that the company once tried to sell for 500k and at a previous company I heard he figured out a way for the pain mixing machines to save on paint or recycle it or something saving them 1.3 Mil a year. When Raspberry Pis first came out he was one of the first people I saw tinkering with them and he was in his 50's doing it just for fun, I think he ended up using it to open and close his garage door from work or something just to scare his wife.

That sort of guy. Well he once told me something about executives and upper managers working for corporations that I have never forgotten. He said to me, and of course I am paraphrasing:

"Change gives the illusion of progress". I asked him what he meant and he responded with something to the effect of "They have the habit of changing big things every 5-10 years on purpose to make it look like they are productive, and to justify their own roles, one guy will come in and 'cut costs', the new guy after him will 'invest'".

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"A new CEO was hired to take over a struggling company. The CEO who was stepping down met with him privately and presented him with three numbered envelopes. “Open these if you run into serious trouble,” he said.

Well, six months later sales and profits were still way down and the new CEO was catching a lot of heat. He began to panic but then he remembered the envelopes. He went to his drawer and took out the first envelope. The message read, “Blame your predecessor.” The new CEO called a press conference and explained that the previous CEO had left him with a real mess and it was taking a bit longer to clean it up than expected, but everything was on the right track. Satisfied with his comments, the press – and Wall Street – responded positively.

Another year went by and the company continued to struggle. Having learned from his previous experience, the CEO quickly opened the second envelope. The message read, “Reorganize.” So he fired key people, consolidated divisions and cut costs everywhere he could. This he did and Wall Street, and the press, applauded his efforts.

Another year passed and the company was still short on sales and profits. The CEO would have to figure out how to get through another tough earnings call. The CEO went to his office, closed the door and opened the third envelope. The message began, “Prepare three envelopes...” "

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=the+three+envelopes&ia=web

Is this a quine where the processor is a CEO?

I think it's more like malware. A virus that spreads from CEO to CEO.

CEO is the virus that spreads from one organisation to another

This is how governments run too, but they add a few more envelopes as they have more avenues to peruse. War, plague, etc.

I'm 53, and I've worked for 3 Fortune 250's. Can confirm. I've seen this happen over and over again. Senior management makes some broad pronouncements, and the mid-level lieutenants have meetings with consultants, and then implement new, expensive projects that "will surely fix 'it' this time." Five to ten years later, after the dust settles, and we figure out that we've strapped YET ANOTHER LAYER of technical debt on top of everything else, and things are worse than ever. But at the height of the project, when everything is still rosy, the managers in charge update their resumes, and hit the bricks.

IN PARTICULAR, at one Fortune 250 (which no longer exists), we implemented OneWorld to replace the mainframe. After 7 years, we still had the mainframe, AND a badly-implemented version of OneWorld. Then the company got bought by another Fortune 250, moves were made to "commonize" the IT systems, and then the parent company sold everything. But I'm positive that everyone involved in the project to retire the mainframe made the project look very successful on their resumes.

8-10 years is as long as senior executives last, if they don't make a big change then thee is no way to take credit for their vision. Even if the company had a "perfect" org chart (as if such a thing is possible), they need to make changes otherwise someone will say that they old org chart is the cause of success and they as a leader were not worth anything.

I don't know if the above fear would actually play out, nobody is willing to not make changes to find out.

I think we are giving these people too much credit. Being the head of the organization is like inheriting someone elses filing system. the only way for them to actually understand wtf is going on at the company is to reorganize some things in a way that makes sense to them.

High level management is fundamentally hard to stay on top of over time. It's about as easy as thinking chess is easy because you can theoretically know every move your opponent might make. There are so many moving parts to an organization that having visibility to them isnt enough to perform well. They have to influence most of the business pretty indirectly. If changing things gives you the confidence necessary to keep things running.. that's what you're going to do. Everything is a gamble, so doing nothing is kind of unacceptable leadership behavior unless they are actively taking up the mantle left by previous management and understand it very well already.

I would compare this to asking a dev team to support a big code base without embarking on a major redesign or re-engineering.

It's hard to keep a good (confident, ambitious) team from re-engineering. All the same dynamics apply: In your mind the disadvantages of change are small because you don't know them, but the advantages are large because you planned them. Making change gives you more control over your fate because you are executing your own plan as opposed to staying the course. Finally, how do you keep people motivated to show up every morning if you don't have a vision for change in the future?

I don't think its that different for managers and engineers. There's a lot pushing people to try something, even if the objective odds of success aren't great.

That’s not the only way but “come in and change things to establish dominance” is a commonly taught business school chant.

Management are contemporary clergy, spewing high minded ephemera, only to go home unable to point at anything net new left behind by their effort.

I grew up in farm land; we had no middle managers. Somehow food still got grown, harvested, and sold; somehow a Linux kernel and other wildly popular open source exists without them.

Post-WW industrialism needs to wind down. Militant minded people came home and forced their PTSD on workers. We spend a lot of resources equipping people to output nothing in deference to traditional economic memes. America of recent decades necessarily built itself into a production powerhouse to resupply a destroyed world. Such memes are outdated given automation and unsustainable given real material costs.

Yes but they ultimately live materially better lives because of their position, so you can't hand wave away criticism of the value or lack thereof their actions take, especially when those actions can have a negative effect on those below them and even to the external environment.

criticism is fair game. it just usually doesnt account for the reality of what they are doing, and puts them to blame for not directly controlling things that in reality were outside their control. Taking responsibility for the failings of the company i part of the job description, so by all means hold them responsible. I am just saying all of that is tangential to the root of the problem - which is that no matter how much someone gets paid, they are still human.

It's an area that is pretty tough to make meaningful criticism. its kind of a show dont tell type situation imo. If upper management seems under-qualified and overpaid to you, then maybe you have a calling to go perform better and get paid more.

Company management is in underdeveloped game-theory territory. Sure we can isolate one part of their job and describe how they are failing on it, but we dont know the trade-offs being made on a daily basis with their time and focus. a lot of which is going to be company secrets, if it even leaves their personal thoughts. Any criticism that comes down to saying "they should have done more" is likely out-of-touch, for example. Unless you can prove they were actually being lazy.. which is usually not the case, since they are often workaholics (ime). But we usually cant tell if something is a good move or not until it plays out on the market. So making criticisms based on hindsight is weak, as is making criticism that lack the full picture of the organizations goals and the time / energy they actually have on hand to accomplish them

What parts of these generalized arguments have anything to do with CEOs? As a mental experiment, put them into the mouth someone making excuses for why a crew of expensive painters did a horrible job painting your apartment.

So true. Reading their over generalized screed left me thinking if CEOs are really that useless anyone could be a CEO and their position isn't special, which sort of torpedoes the entire point.

My point is that properly criticizing a CEO is exhausting so it is rarely done properly.

CEO is a very general job role. I dont understand your point with the painters. That would be an operations issue, so I actually wouldnt criticize the CEO of the painting company at all for it. thanks to him/her, I was able to contact a painting company, they showed up, they painted the apartment, and left. I would think the operations team (the painters) deserve to be fired and held accountable for claiming they know how to paint a room when they clearly didn't. Nothing about their job is general or consists of trade-offs. If I said "you only have 10 minutes to paint the room and then leave" then yeah, it might come out like shit and the "excuses" would be valid. which is the kind of time pressure CEO's are often under with respect to things they are actually doing on a day-to-day basis.

i would hold the CEO responsible with respect to resolving the issue and refunding me, etc, since the CEO role is to be responsible for the outcomes of the company.. but he's not the one painting the room. Just like with any company, the CEO does not literally run the company. If service is poor, it is usually because people are finding their way past hiring filters to get jobs they aren't qualified for. Let's not forget that people everywhere are often advised to lie their way into employment, fake it till you make it, baffle them with bullshit, reword your resume to sound more impressive, etc. These people line the mechanisms that CEO's use to accomplish anything at any company.

Of course, the CEO position is no exception to this and I am not saying it is literally impossible to build a case against a CEO. I am saying it needs to fully encompass the position or else you're likely assigning criticism to the CEO for some culmination of lower level operational incompetence that they simply failed to overcome. If a director over-promises to the CEO and the CEO signs off on the basis of trust with the director, then when the bar is not met later of course the CEO will be held responsible but the reality of fault sits with the director, or maybe a subordinate to the director who convinced the director that the over-promise was doable. You then have to get into the weeds of whether or not there were signs the CEO should have seen as to not trust the director, or if they had reason to overrule the directors approach, etc. you then have to do similar things across all areas of the company to derive a valid criticism that the CEO is the common denominator in it all.

Leadership is significantly harder to criticize appropriately than operations. Personally, I would like to stop reading meaningless criticisms from people who want to complain and be heard but dont want to do the work necessary to make a valid complaint.

I think you misunderstood the previous commenter a bit. They were not saying look at the painting example from the standpoint of the CEO, they were saying "Put the excuses" in the mouths of some painters. Also, there's quite a bit of depth and generalization in painting. There are many different types of paint that are better for certain tasks, eg eggshell vs satin finish. Painting walls is different then painting ceilings, then you add in moving furniture, some walls have edging, some walls will be multiple colors, plaster vs drywall vs wood, etc. That's just painting, lets say the company they work for has a CEO/manager that is demanding more jobs completed, now they have to deal with someone telling them "Do it in one day" and all the compromises that must be made to do so. Almost all fields have a lot of depth and generalizations.

So if had a horribly painted room that you just paid extremely well to have completed, and the painters came up to you and gave you a laundry list of reasons that they failed... Would you hold off on criticizing them until you had a complete understanding of what it takes to be a painter?

yes, if I claim that the painters did a bad job and they gave me a laundry list of professional reasons for it.. I would consider those reasons before criticizing. would you not?

trying to use painting as an analogous situation like that isnt transferable to the point i am making though. Putting the excuses in their mouth doesnt even make sense. We are presupposing that the painters did a horrible job.. while discussing how to decide whether or not a CEO did a horrible job. The only reason you know the painters did a bad job is because we are saying they did. the only reason we can use painting as an example is because most people can imagine a terrible paint job. i.e. we do have a full scope understanding of what it takes to be a painter. I am saying it is much harder to imagine the role of a CEO and what good results would look like than it is a painter.

Maybe my wording was fuzzy, but I am not saying you need a complete understanding of the CEO's role, but it does need to be of full scope. I see that reads near synonymous, so in other words it may be infeasible to account for the total depth of their role, but at the very least the entire breadth of the role should be looked at. If you default to "i gave you a lot of money to make it happen so it should be perfect" type logic; you're just being a "karen". the cost of something has nothing to do with the results, directly. Money needs to be converted into something that helps the work, and in that process we are all still limited by reality; diminishing returns, supply chains, quality of communication, availability of resources, etc. A CEO is at the focal point of all of this, and is human. Whether they get paid nothing or everything doesnt change how effective they can reasonably be.

But they do deserve criticism. it just needs a lot of work to do it right. you have to provide some sort of evidence that across all scopes of work the trade-offs do not make sense. maybe the CEO sacrifices on every front in order to provide the fastest service in the business and is successful in that. If you leave speed of delivery out of your criticism it becomes a meaningless criticism. "They charge a lot for poor quality". "These painters did a terrible job.. (even though I called them this morning, and they were done by lunch which allowed me to do a walk through with a potential tenant)".

All i'm really trying to emphasize is that we absolutely can criticize a CEO, but if you dont do it properly it is very easily washed away by the many unknowns of the position. however, if it is done right - it would be very damning as they cant default to company policy or directives from above as a scapegoat since they are the ones creating such things.

> they ultimately live materially better lives because of their position

This is a bullshit reason based on jealousy, not reason.

> when those actions can have a negative effect on those below them and even to the external environment

This is the real reason it’s fair to be very critical of their maneuvers.

>This is a bullshit reason based on jealousy, not reason.

Reality is not zero sum, but neither are resources infinite. Is it really bullshit to critique more thoroughly that to which more of the finite resources are dedicated?

>Is it really bullshit to critique more thoroughly that to which more of the finite resources are dedicated?

this kind of aligns with my point tbh. We give $10 critiques to million dollar positions as if they hold weight.

> This is a bullshit reason based on jealousy, not reason.

If this is trully BS, then allow lead developers to write checks for their whole team using the company's bank account.

they hold power in organisation, they can increase their own renumeration in a way that's rank and file staff cannot. Executive compensation has skyrocketed in the past 20 years.

If their management is ineffective, then they don't deserve top comopensation.

I would expect it is just as much a hedge in case things go wrong. When your job is to steer the course of a company, it won’t look good if you crash and your hands weren’t even on the wheel

counter-examples: all of FANG/MAGA, even when you exclude founders

Satya: 1992, CEO in in 2014 Tim: 1998, CEO in ~2009 Sundar: 2004, CEO in 2015 Andy: 1997, CEO in 2021 Ted: 2000, CEO in 2020

They were all senior executives well before assuming their CEO roles.

Oh man...Dell is terrible about this. Not sure what the policy is anymore (esp since they went private), but to get promoted you had implement a significant cost savings project, which ironically lead to multiple implementations and reversals of policies...they all showed a cost savings but it depended on your perspective.

I don't know anything about Dell's promotion criteria, but their consumer ordering process has to be one of the most hostile ever — I'm guessing anywhere between 50-75% of their orders get auto-cancelled by some overzealous anti-fraud and anti-reseller algorithm.

In SOFTWAR Ellison called it a sort of fashion cycle.

> "Change gives the illusion of progress". I asked him what he meant and he responded with something to the effect of "They have the habit of changing big things every 5-10 years on purpose to make it look like they are productive, and to justify their own roles, one guy will come in and 'cut costs', the new guy after him will 'invest'".

That's a very succinct way to put it. I think that observation also applies to consumer technology (e.g. regularly re-doing UIs to "improve" them when the changes are either in fact regressions or just different but not better). We've had it drilled in our heads throughout the modern era that new == better (e.g. the ubiquitous "new and improved!" marketing language), but that's not actually always true. Change for change's sake justifies itself through that misunderstanding.

In the recent past, we had a really high rate of genuine technological progress. But at some point we'll have picked most of low hanging fruit and will enter a period of slower progress, where faking progress will become more an more tempting for producers than the real thing.

right now, they can't retain the people or afford the people to do this work. When you can go work elsewhere for more money you move. And, running a main frame isn't just having it, it's keeping the people running it, plus paying for the electricity and space.

Depending where, the real-estate and energy prices are nuts in most places. And, the engineers are expensive right now, and the services are cheaper.

It's not about giving it up, or change for the sake of change, it's about seeing the writing on the wall. These managers see the larger trends, rising energy costs, maintenance costs rising, hiring difficult, and retention of existing engineers impossible. Once you see those trends and a department is underwater and it's getting worse, you have to move. At another point in the market, when you may find engineers are less expensive, easier to hiring, technologies and space are less costly and easy to deploy. You move back.

> These managers see the larger trends, rising energy costs, maintenance costs rising, hiring difficult, and retention of existing engineers impossible.

But how will the cloud providers avoid these trends? They won't. They will have to do the same thing as anyone else: pay more. And therefore charge more. There are economies of scale, but those savings are logarithmic and a company like FedEx is already pretty far out on the X axis.

> a company like FedEx is already pretty far out on the X axis

AWS and Azure probably run hundreds of Fedex-sized clouds and it's their core business. I don't think Fedex is very far compared to them.

> But how will the cloud providers avoid these trends?

Innovations are more likely to happen if it is someones priority to fix a certain thing. I think they hope that savings from innovation and better methods at what ever company they hire out to are passed onto them. It is naive if they are unable to change clouds though that they will see these savings and as long as one relies on vendor specific features on is in that position.

They aren't playing the same game. Facebook designed its own servers, they were chassis-less, didn't have a mains power input so no switch-mode power supplies, instead they had a 12V DC feed, they had no rack-wide large UPS instead each server had a small battery in it, they were not built for massive redundancy like a Dell server with dual PSUs and redunant networking, because they were disposable nodes in a larger software cluster, e.g. [1] [2]

Things that aren't Fedex's core competency.

Or, Microsoft's roofless datacenters[3], or locating datacenters in remote and colder climates, things the big players can do with economies of scale beyond buying things cheaply, they can customise the entire datacenter. Microsoft has experimented with underwater datacenters[4] and modular containerised datacenter extensions[5] which could be datacenters no human needs to be near to work on, or which could be dropped off somewhere with cheap land and power and internet, and picked up three years later and retired from use, or etc. Ideas which are not FedEx's core competency and need large scale and software clustering on top.

While FedEx would be hiring ordinary IT employees to work in a standard datacenter in cheap business park - not very enticing - Amazon could be hiring datacenter workers to work with Amazon's undersea cabling connecting their worldwide datacenters; more enticing work for skilled employees.

Google has been known/rumoured to migrate heavy batch processing workloads around the planet, following the day/night cycles to take advantage of regional cheaper night-rate electricity all the time. Something which reduces their energy costs but which FedEx may not be big enough to do.

[1] https://engineering.fb.com/2016/03/09/data-center-engineerin...

[2] https://engineering.fb.com/2019/03/14/data-center-engineerin...

[3] http://www.500eco.com/exhibits/microsoft-roofless-datacenter...

[4] https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/project-natick...

[5] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-develop...

When The Facebook started designing their own servers (which, by the way, have lots of switch-mode power supplies in them, and always have) the game they were playing was "be a better MySpace". They were running a bunch of PHP pages. At the time you could have made the same argument about The Facebook vs. Rackspace: "While Facebook would be hiring ordinary IT employees to work in a standard datacenter in a cheap business park, Rackspace could be hiring datacenter workers to work with Rackspace's BGP peering connecting their worldwide datacenters."

But The Facebook decided to make informatics their core competency, to the point of building their own servers with 12 volts running to the rack, same as Google before them.

There were surely industrial companies in 01922 who decided that management wasn't their core competency (though they used different words), and if they needed help with management they'd contract out to management specialists like Taylor or Gilbreth. They met the same fate that will meet companies today that decide that informatics isn't their core competency.

it's called economies of scale

"retention of existing engineers impossible"

So where are all these mainframe engineers going to go work? Our company has 3 admins for our two mainframes, and these guys while expert level admins for a mainframe, have trouble with Linux and Windows. Same with the developers writing code for the systems. When all you've worked on is a mainframe, then everything looks like a batch cycle...

Retiring?

In this sense, Oscar Wilde was the executive's executive: "I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out."

""Change gives the illusion of progress". I asked him what he meant and he responded with something to the effect of "They have the habit of changing big things every 5-10 years on purpose to make it look like they are productive, and to justify their own roles, one guy will come in and 'cut costs', the new guy after him will 'invest'". "

That's deep and 100% makes sense, I can see how the cloud is both of these "things."

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

I work in a bank. This is literally what upper management does every 4-5 years. Always some new "initiative" that was preached to them at a conference somewhere, and will now presumably change everyone's lifes.

That’s definitely how the IT department at my company works (I bet a lot of other roles too). Every few years a new exec comes in, sets a new strategy, claims tons of savings, creates “excellence” initiatives (everything that has “excellence” in its name triggers my BS detector). This lasts for a few years until the next guy comes in and goes through the same process but different direction.

Never confuse movement for action :-)

As everybody who saw people, and orgs, rotating in place at incredible speeds can confirm.

This isn't always easy to determine, especially if you are part of the movement. Often, we move by dead reckoning and only after some amount of time can we determine if what we did was "movement" or "progress".

Good anecdote!

In exchange I offer two relevant quotes from my quote file:

> The empire long united must divide, long divided must unite; this is how it has always been. (Luo Guanzhong)

> When cuffs disappeared from men’s trousers, fashion designers gave interviews explaining that the cuff was archaic and ill-suited to contemporary living. It collected dust, contributed nothing. When the trouser cuff returned, did it collect less dust and begin at last to make a contribution? Probably no fashion designer would argue the point; but the question never came up. Designers got rid of the cuff because there aren’t many options for making trousers different. They restored it for the same reason. (Ralph Caplan)

Other formulations of this I’ve heard are “movement doesn’t mean progress” and “fire and motion”, the latter offers by Joel Spolsky in one of his better blog entries.

A better analogy is a ship sailing against the wind: "To reach its target, sailors that intend to travel windward to a point in line with the exact wind direction will need to zig-zag in order to reach its destination. This technique is tacking." https://www.lifeofsailing.com/post/how-to-sail-against-the-w...

> the pain mixing machines

That sounds ... dystopian.

The pain is mixed, then applied in the pain booth.

Obviously he's been working with javascript recently.

definitely sounds like webpack to me

This is what grabbed me to kee pop reading his story

So what's the moral of the story?

Do you think it's "don't change"? Cause that gives right up on progress anyway. So good luck on getting large shareholders to give you the reins with that message. They're looking for ROI, not the status quo - if you don't evolve, your competitor will, barring monopolies and such. And even there... Microsoft of today is much less dominant than the MS of 25 years ago, and arguably could be worth a lot more had they made better moves. If that's not a compelling example, maybe check out Sears...

Maybe most people in these positions know that change doesn't guarantee improvement, but they know that sitting still is the same as just waiting to be defeated. So maybe there's something less-than-stupid about these "short-sighted" "illusory" changes.

But maybe if you want to be a wise executive, the key is to recognize that change might not just fail to improve your position - it might actually actively harm it. So the good executive is the one who chooses to try to change things according to reasonable calculations about both potential upside benefit and downside risk...

>"Change gives the illusion of progress".

This is one of the biggest reasons many jobs are so miserable. You want to be in the job at the beginning of the"invest" decision. Unfortunately most people get little say in when they join because the information about this is kept internally to the company.

> "Change gives the illusion of progress".

That itself is based on the belief that (historical) progress is an improvement.

Mostly true over the last few centuries - aspirin is nice - except for those occasions where it was mass murder.

First "pain mixing machines," and now "asp(i)rin is nice."

So? People can't spell and typos are a common phenomena.

Just noting humorously related typos, that's all. I'll add smilies here so you can comprehend. :-) :)

there used to be an allegory of how to identify a bad, new CIO... if your current system was massive, networked printers that were shared amongst floors.. the new CIO would come in and give everyone individual printers... or vice versa .. because 'change'

It sounds a bit like the bodybuilding method of bulking and cutting.

Bodybuilders make progress though :)

Isn't there a ceiling? Or if we lived as long as those turtles, would you go to the gym and see spheres of muscle?

Some of the extreme pictures I've seen look like people that can't move, let alone lift, but I guess it works.

The returns are diminishing each cycle.

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