Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

nonrandomstring

I'm sure we can all add plenty of fresh examples of bad organisational dynamics. Other than texts like Gall's "Systemantics" is there an equivalent to Acemoglu and Robinson's "Why Nations Fail" but for companies and projects?

Here's some of mine:

Put "security" before all else. Pointlessly surveil and monitor your staff for feelgood security theatre. Mandate MFA for every trivial login so that simply checking your email becomes a tedious schlep.

Spam your employees. Send out daily self-congratulatory ego-trips as "newsletters" celebrating how well the company is doing. Sap morale by reminding every lowly engineer just how insignificant they are, what huge profits the company is making and how much senior salaries are. For bonus points use a "no-reply" internal address and make it impossible to block them.

"Team build" by putting on mandatory "social" events, and various awareness and training. Shame employees to do not "participate" because that have actual work to do.

Keep zombie projects alive. Even though clients have cancelled and everyone knows it will never be delivered, keep projects running for the sake of appearances and to keep managers close to retirement in a job for another year.

Actually, stop me! This could go on all day. Someone really should write a book "How to kill a company".

The book would be an anthropological study. Having worked as a freelancer for more than 15 years, seen many companies from startups to large finance I see these patterns over and over again, it's like human nature.

Totally unrelated companies have these exact same flaws. Clueless middle management driven by money and ego making these destructive decisions. At the same time, a group of engineers at a startup without much management can go rogue and burn millions on fancy tech and frameworks without making anything useful.

The only successful projects I have seen is with a capable senior engineer in the team, who can listen and understand what a tradeoff is. If this senior is trusted by both the team and the manger the team can be effective.

Yes, I think it would. Anthropology.

Way too late in life I discovered what anthropologists actually do after stumbling upon Alan McFarlane's lectures about "The origins of Modernity" [1]. Nobody ever made history seem so interesting and clear why What's Past Is Prologue. A big shout-out to all anthropologists!

https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2013/07/anthropology-empire-...

Gerald Weinberg has a bit of an anthropological take (due to his wife being an anthropologist, IIRC) in his Quality Software Management series.

I argue it's democracy. (That can save Nations and presumably companies)

Imagine voting for the CEO. Imagine voting to allocate budgets. Yes there will be a lot of pork barrel- but it might just work.

I mean the idea that companies are like single cells / autonoma so they don't have to be democratic leads us to silly ideas like trying to put in place rules for not abusing the electorate.

I mean if a boss is sexually harassing all the female staff and then asks for their vote at the next manager election, you won't need HR intervention to get rid of him.

I have no idea truly how this might work, but I do think that if the employees of a company voted how to run it you might find some unusual outcomes.

You vote by changing jobs. I think “real governments” make it clear that this isn’t sufficient to thwart harassment though.

> You vote by changing jobs.

Like you vote by moving country.

Maybe but that can also stifle innovation. If Netflix had been a democracy they likely wouldn’t have voted to switch to the unproven online streaming business, etc.

Really?

I mean that was what 2000? 2002? Peak dotcom time.

I don't agree with the decisions all these humans sometimes make (cough Brexit cough), but that's not the point - as long as we don't vote away democracy, as long as we trust the other side has everyone's best interests at heart, then we can manage

Don't forget management having engineers stop what they're doing to build elaborate dashboards to track OKRs, satisfaction metrics, whatever else, only to never look at it and only parade it around to other managers as a show of how in-tune with the product they're supposed to be.

Your list is more likely to contain your personal pet peeves - reasons you personally wouldn’t want to work in a company. There are plenty of people who’d say the absence of those things would be bad.

That highlights the real problem. Growing a company is very hard.

Security above output is a big deal. Put email behind the unreliable VPN on the magic corporate laptop of extra slow booting when we used to read it through an arbitrary web browser and revel in the increase in tail latency on replies. From minutes to days.

Is there a story behind all this bitterness?

MFA for every login is a very good idea. If you're having to log in to the same service over and over again within a short amount of time, someone is doing something very wrong.

Sending out company newsletters seems like a nice way to let everyone know what the company is up to. Not sure how you go from that to reminding lowly engineers of their "insignificance".

Social events are a great way to get to know your coworkers and to improve cooperation. Awareness training (I'm imagining you mean things like Security Awareness and such) also seem like an overwhelmingly good thing.

Everyone has actual work to do. All the stuff you perceive as meta comes with the territory of working anywhere with a non-trivial number of people.

> Is there a story behind all this bitterness?

Does it even need saying? Of course there is. Many stories. Over many decades. It's sad watching great people quit and wonderful projects die because of a poor working environment and the selfishness of others who inflict their narrow values in others. If you're one of the people who see these as good things then naturally you'd frame criticism as "bitterness". But as another commenter said, these are personal stories. Your own subjective peeves might strike me as strange. Do please open your mind to a world that contains different people with different values.

> Sending out company newsletters seems like a nice way to let everyone know what the company is up to. Not sure how you go from that to reminding lowly engineers of their "insignificance".

Speaking as someone working in a small company that was acquired by a much larger corporation that shows all the signs being discussed here, it's not just newsletters. Those are useful. It's being sent dozens of spammy emails a week about initiatives that are clearly some VP's ego project and have no relevance you other than clogging your inbox and taking away some of your time and attention.

One recent example I got was three days of emails telling me to 'get ready' for an internal initiative but mentioning nothing else except a name. No links to click, no calls to action, no useful information at all. Only for the final email to reveal it was about a non-strategic initiative that applied to some other site only, despite all the emails being sent to the global company. All attempts at getting that sort of thing off the all-hands mailing list have been rejected.

A place that thinks that's okay does not respect the time or attention of its employees, and it does tend to make you feel reminded of your insignificance.

> Sending out company newsletters seems like a nice way to let everyone know what the company is up to. Not sure how you go from that to reminding lowly engineers of their "insignificance".

I agree with both you and parent.

I've enjoyed getting a monthly newsletter by email in past jobs, letting me know "hey so we just signed a contract with a client that is twice as big as the biggest one we've had so far". Makes sense - I'm not the one to be greatly inspired by something like that, but it's good for perspective.

I've also worked at a company where every single salesperson was allowed and encouraged to email all@company.com whenever they closed a sale. This was around 3 times a week.

Not terrible - however, everyone in the company was also officially encouraged to "congratulate" any such "successful sales" emails with "encouraging words" such as simply adding "Congrats!" and hitting "Reply All".

The head count at this company was around 400.

I wish I was kidding.

I think I lasted 3 days before I created a filter rule in my email client.

I hope the filter rule auto-replied "Congrats!" and archived the thread :)

Thankfully, I was not part of sales.

But looking back (I have left this company since then), I believe your strategy would have genuinely had a positive effect on any employee's career path.

MFA is ideally combined with SSO so you auth at most once a workday.

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