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Comment by ineptech | Hacker News Reader

This is seductively true-sounding but I don't think it's true.

Imagine a business person saying, "Oh, programmers protect their work by making it needlessly complex. Every few years they invent new tools and insist that the old ones are broken, so that they can re-implement the same features over and over. Today they say it's vitally important to switch to the new thing, jquery or docker or react or whatever it is this month, and five years from now they'll say it's just as important to get rid of it. That's how they make sure they'll always have a job."

That's the mirror image of what you're saying. Perhaps some of those "layers and layers" really are useless but most of them are probably to satisfy auditors or something similarly opaque.

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> Imagine a business person saying, "Oh, programmers protect their work by making it needlessly complex. Every few years they invent new tools and insist that the old ones are broken, so that they can re-implement the same features over and over. Today they say it's vitally important to switch to the new thing, jquery or docker or react or whatever it is this month, and five years from now they'll say it's just as important to get rid of it. That's how they make sure they'll always have a job."

Would they be so wrong? The state of the art is advancing, and these re-implementations can be huge improvements...but aren't always. The tools/techniques often seem to be used outside the domain where they're important (e.g. Big Data tooling used on data sets that can be processed on a nice laptop) or are so short-lived the switching cost is never reclaimed (e.g. always using the trendiest Javascript framework/tooling). This hypothetical business person certainly wouldn't be alone in wondering if the reason isn't sometimes job security, resume building, and/or to make a boring problem interesting rather than an attempt to find the most straightforward way of solving the business problem.

I can easily see the same applying to these business ideas. They sometimes make sense but often (usually?) don't.

Sure, but I don't believe anyone advocated switching to jquery (or, a few years later, getting rid of it) consciously thinking it was a useless thing to do; and similarly I don't believe any biz person introduces a process thinking, "haha this will help widen the bureaucratic moat around my team".

The truth is, a lot of those people spend a lot of time trying to streamline processes and remove bureaucracy, and if they didn't, it'd be even worse.

I returned to an office that I'd worked at, in the exact same role, 15 years earlier.

It's interesting to see the differences. The work is the same, the same people do it, but there's much more of it, there's slightly better tech, and they have correspondingly less time to do the work. There's much more middle management, but ostensibly the systems are all doing very close to the same thing.

The thing is they've been through 3 complete reorganisations of the ~1200 people. If they'd left it exactly the same structurally then it would seem to be in the same shape as it is now.

They've been through 2 renamings, 3 rebrandings, they definitely did nothing; the placement of the business is entirely unrelated to the brand image but each new CEO came from outside of the company seemingly used it, rebranding, to make the organisation "their own".

One of the experiences early on in my second tenure was a group doing a Myers-Briggs type activity, just like they would have been 15 years earlier, just with a slight difference twist. People there in the interim described a third-style of the same process they'd been through.

Maybe you're not wrong.

> each new CEO came from outside of the company seemingly used it, rebranding, to make the organisation "their own"

This is the hacker equivalent of wanting to do a greenfield refactor of the code base. There's an erroneous assumption all the problems that exist within the current code base will be avoided when rebuilding. These efforts are occasionally successful, but mostly end up being just sound and fury with little measurable results.

You're absolutely correct. Of course this phenomenon applies to exactly the framework and platform musical chairs that the industry plays. Politics is human and exists in all areas of life. Many things on the technical side have absolute reason to exist, because it would be impossible to build a complex system without them. Some things are BS. On the flip side, some things on the management side are absolutely essential to the profitable functioning of a company, but there is also a huge amount of room for BS to thrive. It's possible for profitable companies to exist basically due to the law of large numbers, but this is not possible on the technical side unless you are training ML models.

It is true. What your imaginary businessperson is saying is also true.

It's bullshit jobs all the way down.

That businessperson would be correct too.

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