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Comment by pdntspa | Hacker News Reader

When I was in b-school, it was like they were trying to train us to have contempt for employees, especially the jobs where wages were low. They wanted us to treat them as fungible, replaceable cogs in the machine, not unlike this whole stupid pets-vs-cattle debate with servers.

I got my degree but left utterly disgusted with management and MBA types. I am of the opinion that business degrees and business school are a toxic influence on most companies and that, with a few exceptions, they would be better served by hiring management types from other parts of the business and giving them some light compliance training instead.

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That reminds me of a Pratchett quote, an exchange between a respected local witch and a visiting priest:

> "[...] And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."

> "It's a lot more complicated than that--"

> "No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."

> "Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--"

> "But they starts with thinking about people as things..."

-- Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett

This is just classical first order thinking gone wrong. It seems "obvious" that if all things equal, you reduce costs (by reducing wages, your highest cost) that you should get more profit. This is true. But the premise is false that affecting this one variable will allow "all things equal."

What I've noticed is that the standard businessman MBA type believes the first order thinking and gloats about how "obvious" things are (always be wary of those that claim common sense). But the really effective ones understand the coupled nature of many elements and the complexities involved. Which there's some irony because the standard MBA types also talk about Google and companies that make their employees happy with high salaries and free food. Working with humans is a complicated solution space and should be treated as such. There are certainly no universal answers and no solution works forever because the environment is constantly changing.

It is very evident that most MBA “managers” don’t understand a fundamental concept that just reducing cost doesn’t necessarily mean profitability. You have people requesting small, reasonable increments to their wages as their tenure grows. Instead of giving them that, most managers would instead prefer letting them go, spend time and money hiring someone new, who most likely will be paid the same or even more (because usually your wages stay lower if you stay in a job than if you jump around), spend time training them and still not get the same level of productivity as the person who left.

Ultimately they may end up reducing wages or saving some money on paper, but it comes at a huge cost to the company in terms of productivity and profitability.

Most managers I know just want to grow their headcount and are not too critical of their hires.

Yeah, I don't understand why wage renormalization is such a "radical" idea. Retraining people (even if it is just to your style of work) takes time and is expensive. It is far cheaper to renormalize a current worker than to have them leave and train someone new (assuming the worker is competent). Experience, especially experience in your work's framework and culture, is valuable. Wage renormalization is also an essential practice if one wants to avoid wage discrimination.

What's odd though is that it seems MBA types understand that people leave jobs because of managers and not money, but don't see how the two correlate. Wage differentials between old hires and new hires are always seen as personal attacks from managers and I think this is perfectly reasonable. It is a signal of how you are valued. Employees are also not naive and do understand an (average) inflation of 2-3% per year and that a matching raise is equivalent to a wage reduction (more so in times like these). Wage renormalization (especially with back pay) is often a relatively cheap means of garnering employee satisfaction and increasing productivity. It can turn burned out low productive workers into hard workers. Asymmetric pay information surprisingly can (not always) cause employees to think they are being treated unfairly. Especially if they find this to be true.

But I think there is so much more and really what it comes down to is "humans are complicated. There is no universal solution within all businesses, a single type of business, a single department, or even a single team. If nuance is not actively demonstrated then malice/naivety is." The "simple solution" is that you need to recognize there is no simple solution.

Not that I disagree with the complicated nature, but there is a discernible difference between the amount of business value google can extract from an employee, versus someone changing a tire. I'm sure there has been analysis done that shows the extravagant benefits gets google more ROI from their employee hires. That would most likely not be true for other types of labor

When/Where did you go to school?

When I did my MBA at Fisher (Ohio State 2018-2020) this definitely wasn't the case. We actually spent considerable time talking about how to get the most out of your team and how dumb of an idea it was/is to treat employees poorly. Many of our in-class discussions that revolved around this topic focused much more on treating employees well and how dangerous bad corporate culture and out of touch leadership was. Many of my classmates came from prior working backgrounds in various fields, however, so perhaps that leads to a different culture at the b-school.

I went to a state school with a highly-regarded (at least locally) business program, graduated 2013

If you learnt about cost centers, you know what OP is talking about.

Knowing what parts of your operation are cost centers vs profit centers does not require you to treat employees in any particular way.

If you’re confused about how your company sustains itself, that might even lead you to treat your employees worse over time.

Obviously it helps to know where are your costs and your profits, but every company i worked for that used these terms operationally was a bad place to work. Heavy hierarchy and excessive focus on management. Call it how you want but I prefer to not work for people with this mindset.

Then you have idiots who think the team making the product is a cost center and sales is a profit center, so they gut the team making stuff, and profits skyrocket right up until the company goes out of business for lack of having anything to sell.

>...idiots who think the team making the product is a cost center and sales is a profit center, so they gut the team making stuff, and profits skyrocket right up until the company goes out of business for lack of having anything to sell.

Very good point. "Tell the truth, shame the devil!"

There are other variations of your observation, but it often comes down to not having a holistic and long term view of where the company is going and the culture is should perpetuate.

> ...long term view of where the company is going...

IBGYBG

I'll Be Gone, You'll Be Gone.

Currently, shareholders of large and even medium companies do not recognize that there is so much embedded capital of all sorts in these organizations that all sorts of business anti-patterns can get away with gaming the incentivization metrics so much and for so long before it becomes apparent at the shareholder level, even if someone were scrutinizing every SEC filing by the organization assuming it is a publicly-held company.

As much as business and engineering types fetishize data-driven decisions (and younger me was definitely guilty of that!), above a certain complexity level it really comes down to a judgement of character. The only reliable formula to find good candidates I have found for that is one-on-one interaction over a long period (7+ years) of time, and knowing yourself really well.

> As much as business and engineering types fetishize data-driven decisions

My counter argument to data driven decisions is Microsoft in 2007.

Microsoft had a large number of user studies, done by Very Professional Firms, that American customers would never pay for phones, everyone in America was too addicted to free phones through 2 year plan lock-ins. Making consumer smart phones was a silly idea!

So anyway iPhone comes out, and internal memos are sent out reminding us all that we have Really Good Data showing how foolish the iPhone is.

Turns out data does an excellent job of repressing innovation. If the data says "don't bother making an amazing product people want to buy", your data might suck. I mean, you may be making the wrong product sure, wrong price point, too small an audience, but if the data just flat out says "don't do cool shit", throw the data away.

> My counter argument...

That is cool to know, thank you for sharing that!

> ...you may be making the wrong product sure, wrong price point, too small an audience...

Interestingly, the original iPhone had various small degrees of those factors. Wrong product: no app store. Wrong price point: debuted at a high-end price point. Too small an audience: function of the high-end positioning. But it was still amazing.

Even amazing products need rapid iteration to stay amazing.

Without the cost centre, there would be no profit. Financialisation is a dangerous rabbit hole to run down whose profit accrues to those that promote and enforce it.

Yep. There is no such thing as a “cost center”. It either is needed to generate a profit or shouldn’t be there at all.

yah, that was my experience at b-school as well, via core courses in leadership and OB (organizational behavior) that taught us how to build effective teams, set up humane incentive structures, effect organizational change (which happens through people, not process or technology), and more. i'm sure a number of my classmates glossed over that part, but it is taught and even emphasized.

the MBA degree simply teaches you the various aspects and phases of managing businesses, and about leadership (but doesn't create leaders). selfishness and greed, the basis of bad management, is in all of us, so it's misplaced to vilify the degree rather than the bad management itself.

I got both. Managing a low complexity worker and a high complexity worker requires vastly different styles. Managing a factory production line is very different (down to Left Hand and Right Hand specific tasks!) than managing infinitely configurable software.

Netflix is not a McDonalds, and a McDonalds isn't a Ford assembly plant.

The problem I see is that morons apply the wrong methodology to a business. Typically former 19 year old McDonald's Managers (TM) apply authoritative control to a scrum shop which should be decentralized and delegated by design.

It's so damn hard to look at someone's resume, see an MBA on there, and have me consider them for hiring. How can I even tell if they went to a school like yours versus something like what OP mentioned? I kind of just see that on a resume instead of a bunch of actual experience managing tech teams and immediately mark it for less consideration.

I can definitely see where the kind of education you got would be an asset, it's just like how can I tell when the whole field is so incredibly polluted with people I want nothing to do with?

I have one friend who I've learned a ton about business from who got his MBA and it kind of sounded like he didn't receive the kind of bad ideas you get from the infamous reputation of MBAs. He runs his own businesses and does incredibly well for himself, though, and isn't trying to manage some highly technical team with that degree (Seems like the wrong thing entirely for that position), which is funny because I don't remember him technically even passing high school back in the day.

I’m biased but look for less known programs from reputable universities or part-time working programs. You’ll typically get down to earth, nice people in my experience.

I went for an MBA because I wanted to continue university education and it worked out well for me. I would have loved to have done in-person night courses for a different degree program too but nobody offers those for stats or engineering courses, unfortunately.

100% agree. every good technical colleague I've ever had who got an MBA completely ignores technical considerations when making technical decisions, and in general, they really seem to be on their own planet afterwards. they are no longer a part of reality.

By their own metrics, are they successful? Do they accomplish their goals?

yes on planet manager they do quite well. they get paid a lot more and they laugh a lot.

Yes, but not by "growing the pie"; MBAs increase profits in the sense that they reduce the share of profits going to workers (at least according to this paper; I'm not familiar with the rest of the literature on this subject).

From the abstract of the paper: "...Exploiting exogenous export demand shocks, we show that non-business managers share profits with their workers, whereas business managers do not. But consistent with our first set of results, these business managers show no greater ability to increase sales or profits in response to exporting opportunities..."

This is the way I see academia, which has been thoroughly institutionalized by the industrial era. I know that you only mentioned the technical aspect education (which has been impacted as well), but this is a existential problem with humanity. The system attempts to divorce human beings from true knowledge that is based on experience to create artificial and theoretical constraints on human value. This is done to create a power differential by separating people into classes. This is why studying for specific fields are largely theoretical and not experiential. When we allow ourselves to be removed from experiential knowledge, we become automatons that are easy to control.

(upvote) with caveat .. specialization among advanced training groups is divergent from "whole systems" approach yes, agree.. but careful with undiluted use of the 'control' keyword there.. Discipline among troops/specialists is not exactly the same as extended specialist knowledge, and the means to imbue/acquire specialist knowledge.

This post strikes a nerve here.. considering historical shifts of agrarian or nomadic people being conquered by militaries with advanced supply chains and technology, for example logistics, medicine, personal gear and weapons. Absolutely yes specialization empowered societies to conquer, but also civilian advancements. (the PRC mocks Tibetans as 'stone age people' for example, since they lack most of modern industrial products for transportation and medicine).

Intelligence may rebel against rote indoctrination (paths towards behavioral discipline) yet Intelligence seeks specialist knowledge like a kind of gravity. Lots of patience on this topic, please, its crucial !

> ...to create a power differential by separating people into classes

   Poets, priests, and politicians
   Have words to thank for their positions
   Words that scream for your submission
   And no one's jamming their transmission

   'Cause when their eloquence escapes you
   Their logic ties you up and rapes you

https://genius.com/The-police-de-do-do-do-de-da-da-da-lyrics

but are they making more money now?

Yup, and the entire fractally meta-toxic concept of "labor is fungible, just move it offshore to where labor is cheaper", that nearly destroyed the entire set of advanced societies and still threatens to destroy democracy — that is a strategic blunder of historic proportions. Not only have the US and EU shipped off much (and in some industries effectively all) of the R&D and manufacturing know-how required to lead an industry, but we have put ourselves in a militarily weak position by relying on manufacturing in adversary nations and even subjected to espionage from uncontrolled manufacturing.

The MBA schools focusing solely on short-term optimization to extract greater superficial profits are truly toxic for society.

Worse yet, they are toxic for the businesses that rely on their "expertise". Everything is optimized away, including R&D investmentand market development, and the numbers look better and better. Until they don't. At that point, the company has zero capability to recover, because it has lost all the internal talent that knows how to develop products and markets, and the death spiral begins.

My company was once invited to bid on a large software project for GE, very cool document management system. Later in the process, we were given some astonishing terms — this was developing new-at-the-time technology, and we were to be both paying our software developers something like 3rd-world rates, and exposing all our books to GE, and could not have more than iirc 10% profit on any hour of labor. Basically, they were hiring us only to run a software sweatshop, and showed zero interest in state-of-the art development. I passed and decided that with that attitude, GE was on the road to failure. It took over another decade of the stock rising nearly 10x, and then some before all the chickens came home to roost, but it really was a true sign of MBAs rotting the company from the inside out.

And that is why the “house that Jack (Welch) built” came tumbling down.

Decisions were made on spreadsheets instead of between ears - among other things, they did stack ranking of employees and they seemed to take pride in being oh-so-tough and hard-nosed. It worked great until it didn’t.

> ...that is a strategic blunder of historic proportions...

That's putting it lightly. No one who made these decisions actually understood the sophisticated interlocking nature of technology and interplay of knowledge innovation.

And now that advanced techniques in weaving have to be rebuilt at the operational floor practically from the foundations on up to be re-purposed to advanced laminate manufacturing, do we realize that wholesale offshoring and dismantling our "low-margin" textile industry was perhaps a little premature...

One of but countless examples where Western financialization interests not only shot themselves in the foot, but the shot the EMT's that came to try to help them.

> not unlike this whole stupid pets-vs-cattle debate with servers

What am I missing here? Those are in no way whatsoever related. One is a group of humans and the other is a group of machines, the rules/expectations are 100% different. You should not treat humans are replaceable cogs for moral reasons and the very real reason that they simply aren't. Humans are not 1 to 1 comparable (not that it would be ok to dehumanize them if they weren't) so that way of thinking is not only gross but it's silly/short sighted/wrong. I've seen companies treat employees as cogs then be all surprised when they fire/layoff one of those "cogs" which causes a mass exodus (sometimes resulting in literal decades of experience walking out the door in the span of months).

Servers/computers are a whole different ball game. For all intents and purposes a server is a server is a server (blah, blah, same instance size, disk, etc).

That was the point. You should not treat humans like you treat machines but this happens all the time.

Hmm, I read it as "just they wanted to treat humans as 'fungible, replaceable cogs in the machine' it's stupid that some people want to do the same things with server". I think the "stupid" modifier is what really pushed me to think that was the case as I don't think the pets-vs-cattle debate for servers is stupid, it makes a lot of sense.

I think that both mentalities with regards to servers have their place, but right now it is very fashionable to bash servers as "pets". Like Windows vs Mac or Playstation vs Xbox, the debate itself is stupid. For either humans or servers, everyone wants to commoditize them.

Maybe stupid isnt the best word but I feel strongly in both cases.

If you think "treat servers as cattle" is stupid or has no merit, I question your credentials.

Decoupling config, app state and the app itself has a lot of upside in certain cases.

For some people servers have their individual "servernalities".

Like all metaphors, the pets vs. cattle one started to break down if you poked at it too hard. But it came from a place where individual servers were highly valued and were often at least somewhat unique. Standard operating environments had been around for a while but the "monitor the server's health and nurse it back to health if something's wrong" sentiment was still pretty widespread.

Even redundancy tended to be hardware-based to a significant degree. How much did the IT industry put into things like failover Unix clusters (and VAX/VMS etc. before that) over the years?

The difference is that servers are cogs in a machine. It's often desirable to treat them as fungible and interchangeable, and there are no ethical problems with doing so.

What if the server has AI and a name?

Current AI are cattle, it doesn't matter if you shut it down or put it up on 100 different servers, it behaves the same.

When it starts to have memory, develops a personality and identity - I can see some people might care for certain instances of AI as pets. Like that Japanese guy who married a robot (or was it a hologram), then the company deprecated the software and it stopped working (or disappeared).

The fact that humans can develop emotional bonds with machines and objects is strange and fascinating.

It's not "fashionable", as that would imply it's merely based on subjective taste. It's not like console or distro debates at all, which depend on the situation and user preferences/taste.

A system where you can blow away the server and automatically have a new instance recreated is objectively better than a bespoke server that needs someone to recreate everything. The less time I need to spend manually configuring and tending to systems, the better. This is objectively a better model for software infrastructure and deployment. These are literally machines, not cattle or pets or whatever.

If it were better to the degree you pretend, we'd all use that. That is not the reality, as such we can expect the amount of better to be marginal at best.

Sure, implementation is easier said than done. That doesn’t change that, conceptually, having machines that you can destroy and spin up new ones at will is much better than bespoke “pet” instances. The “pet” stuff is used until someone sets up e.g. Salt, Terraform/Ansible, plain bash scripts etc.

Some things are "obvious", but not or poorly measured and just assumed by everyone to be true.

We engineers are absolutely fantastic at rationalizing subjective tastes.

Stay at this game long enough and you start to see the yada yada about cycles (fashions) repeating themselves. Is this debate one? I don't know, but I suspect it to be so. Personally I don't think all the extra moving parts of having "cattle" are worth it unless you're trying to be like Youtube, and the reality is lots of folks think they are when they shouldn't. I'm also not OK with a pay-for-compute model, but I also understand that the accountants and bean counters love it.

In my homelab and in every organization I've ever been a part of, there is a mix of both pets and cattle (servers) depending on need. (Although, maybe that applies to people too?) But drift too far in one direction or the other and you're going to be pissing a lot of people off that you don't need to be.

In any case I think this tangent is bikeshedding. Which is another thing we engineers are great at. I should have realized how much one word could nerd-snipe

Aren't you just agreeing with the post you're replying to here, or am I missing something? Both of you make the central point that humans and servers are fundamentally different and that descisions that involve humans must invariably have a moral dimaneion as far as I can see.

Maybe I did misinterpret, see my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33122403

I took OP the same way, probably because of the use of the word "stupid" to describe the pets-vs-cattle debate. It felt to me that OP was drawing an analogy between said "stupid" debate and the way MBAs discuss employees, rather than drawing a contrast between the two.

Treating servers as cattle is the same black and white thinking as treating humans as resources. Servers require considered care and if you outsource that you get what you get at some operational expense.

My interpretation was "at least we treat servers like living things, can't say the same for how business managers treat employees"

If someone calls your idiom of choice stupid and this makes you feel any type of way at all it might be time for a breather.

"One is a group of humans and the other is a group of machines, the rules/expectations are 100% different."

This is exactly what they were saying in the comment you are replying to.

Are you arguing or reiterating?

What am I missing here?

When I was in business school for my MBA, the human component was absolutely covered, and I suspect that is the case with many of them. Part of the problem may be though that there are subjects (finance, operations), where I can see the concept of a human resource becomes a bit abstract in order to focus on other concepts. In this regard, schools can certainly do better to connect the people element across disciplines.

For those with a complete disdain for "business types", I'd encourage you to read Peter Drucker. Some of his opinions may feel a bit outdated, but he speaks quite a bit to the knowledge worker and their needs.

It's quite possible that my school wasn't that great. I am glad to hear examples highlighting these issues, but I walked out with a class of over a thousand that year and I don't think any of those folks got the perspective you speak of, and I think it's reasonable to assume lots of other folks around the world aren't getting that perspective either.

It could very well depend on the school, but also the students who enroll. Where I went (top-10, but not top-3), there was nothing in the curriculum about contempt for employees, and I don't think any previously well adjusted student came out of the program with such contempt. We did have our share of "elite" trust fund snobs and Jack Welch cosplayers, but they brought that into the class from somewhere else, probably their previous jobs at investment banks and consultancies.

I think if you go to a MBA to add financial modeling to your toolbox, that's what you'll get out of it. If you go to get your paper stamped so you can move on to banking Associate, that's what you'll get out of it. If you go thinking you're learning how to become Gordon Gecko, well you might get something out of it. Most of my classmates were actually ex-engineers with 5-10 years experience looking to escape from their "senior software engineer" career plateau.

"Human component", "human resource", and "replaceable cogs in the machine" sound the same to me.

I’ve recently been hearing “human capital” thrown around by MBAs

I genuinely hate how MBA-speak has been adopted seemingly everywhere. I truly, truly hate it. I understand and appreciate that we need a concise set of terminology and jargon to have conversations about these things but these words seem specifically chosen to abstract away the human quality of the humans being discussed.

Fake-smart business language is a plague. "Per" (worse: "as per"), "utilize" where "use" is more correct. All sorts of absurd euphemisms for "chat" or "meeting" or "talk". It's gross.

Well let's take this conversation offline and circle back on this topic.

That one has an actual useful definition in economics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital

The term is dehumanising and has no place in adult conversations.

Sure, and it's use should remain academic. If a manager is using "human capital" as a replacement for their actual team, there's a problem.

We've all been using the term "Human Resources" for what, like 20 years now? 30?

It's always rubbed me the wrong way. What was wrong with "Personnel"?

Yeah, to be clear, I have no issue with it’s use in macro-Econ, my issue is a C-Suite calling their employees and their specialized knowledge human capital to their faces.

George Carlin was on it 30 years ago. Read or watch his bit "Euphemisms"

The human component i.e. how to get the human to do what you want them to do? That doesn't seem at odds with OP's point and may even be supporting it.

Basically the entire time I was getting a business degree the word "employee" was never even used! Just different forms of "human resources" or "workers".

Exactly. It seems that the current trend is to dehumanize folks as much as possible. Nevermind the fact that businesses are made of people, and they SERVE people, and not just their shareholders.

In fact, if anything, shareholders need to take a back seat on the list of priorities.

Shareholders literally own the company and thus hold all the strings.

Your point regarding business = people stands though

> Shareholders literally own the company and thus hold all the strings.

This implication doesn't have to be true though - it's a political choice.

There are (well developed) countries in which worker representatives have a significant amount of board vote shares by law, usually applicable to companies beyond a certain size.

As a shareholder, I’d never vote to continue employee-unfriendly policies in a knowledge work company. There are too many shareholders that merely rubberstamp the decisions that come up at AGMs.

My understanding is that in those nations, non-shareholders have board representation, not voting control. I.e. they have people on the board to hear what's discussed and give them a voice in deliberations, but no actual control. Is my understanding incorrect?

The problem is the investors, they don't like companies that has zero growth rate even if it is profitable. Profitable companies that has zero growth rate are used as collateral for loans to buy growing companies with negative profits and this bankrupts the profitable company because of debt burden. It seems greed is too much in the capital markets.

What you described is stupidity, not greed. Stupid investors get their capital taken away.

"Worker" is not exactly a pejorative term. In some circles it would even be considered a mark of pride. Although "human resource" is ironically dehumanizing.

Neither were ever used in a pejorative sense exactly, more with a sense of apathy and an even clinical sense that an employee is thought of the same as a widget or a building or a piece of machinery.

I'd rather be called worker than the currently fashionable "individual contributor", the latter just seems so condescending.

Just call me what I am, don't try to sugarcoat it.

IMO "worker" has some dignity but "human resource" implies I'm on a spreadsheet somewhere alongside the depreciation schedule of the physical plant.

“Human” being an adjective in that phrase, rather than a noun…

We're all on a spreadsheet or database elsewhere.

Absolutely, so "human resource" has at least the benefit of being true even if it is baldly insulting to us.

"Worker" in the economic context is a socialist term. It doesn't sounds dignified to me. Employee is a better word.

At my company they lately talk about hiring “resources”, not “people”. This really bugs me. They really seem to be hellbent taking any humanity out of work.

And it may be technically correct depending on the topic. Not all workers are employees.

Khurana, Rakesh. “From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession.” From Higher Aims to Hired Hands, Princeton Univ. Press, 2007

I’m reading this book which talks about how business schools lost their purpose and shareholder primacy upended attempts to add professionalism to management. The success of shareholder primacy fed back into the business schools and displaced any broader social missions that exist in the professional fields such as engineering, medicine, and law. Instead, fiduciary responsibility blasts through the greater good. It’s very dense and full of jargon so it takes time to unpack, but it appears to be a very well researched book.

| They wanted us to treat them as fungible, replaceable cogs in the machine, not unlike this whole stupid pets-vs-cattle debate with servers.

I have found that when communicating with "business degree" people, I will often use this as a common starting point but then add "but you'll spend far more replacing the knowledge that people take when they leave"

Institutional knowledge isn't in their metrics so it obviously doesn't exist.

I did an MBA and what opened my eyes was the contempt for customers, treating them as an annuity, which maybe works if they come back because of good service, but in practice turns every interaction into a way to extract more money and get more lock-in.

> in practice turns every interaction into a way to extract more money and get more lock-in.

Which we see causing all the major problems of the world right now. I'm glad people are waking up to this. Post-covid, I see many people that work at these jobs choosing not to support institutions that are turning the human part into resource extraction.

I am a senior manager but not an MBA. Years ago a legacy dot com wanted to hire me as a consultant. The guy I was supposed to report to asks a question on the lines of how would you handle such and such scenario. I indicated I would handle it in a collaborative nature and bring the negotiation to closure. He wanted to know if I would start the conversation with my subordinate with a “f you”. I said I can’t and walked out at that moment in the middle of the interview. They call me 2 weeks later if I can come back lol. Long story short most (caveat) MBA types are a scourge.

huh...that's weird. I guess it depends on where one goes to school. This for sure is not what I got out of my business classes.

Most were how to keep employees, even low-wage employees, how to make them happy despite low wages...

I think also, just because a b-school says this, we all have our own minds. There's a lot of other stuff to learn in b-school that is helpful, at least it was to me. The stuff I don't like, I just don't pay attention to it.

Most of the classes that I took in business school were and are invaluable to me. But, I read other stuff other than what is in b-school, there are a ton of books that say how to treat employees right, how to use them as a marketing assist to help what customers want, and all that.

We go to school to hopefully learn how to learn - how to be autodidactical.

Let's all temper our expectations. Get knowledge from multiple places. Reject what you don't want, keep what is useful and ethical to you.

I never understood the hate people have for different majors. Some hate b-schools, some hate computer science majors, some hate art, some hate etc, etc, etc.

Chill, everyone, learn where you can. Accept and reject specific items as you see fit. It's all good.

That’s because bureaucrats are threatened by people who actually know how to make things.

That's a negotiation tactic that wouldn't work so well if the employees realized that a robust economy provides them opportunity to also treat their employer as replaceable.

My opinion is undergraduate MBA's should be banned. And you should need an degree in another field and 5000 hours of management experience to be accepted at business graduate school.

Why do you think this is not a reflection of the macro level system? You make it sound like it’s an aberration to be remedied and set industry back on course

Isn't that the business model with low skill workers though? Figure out how to employ them in a way that they don't need training and all is well.

It's an incredibly shitty model for everyone but shareholders. Why do we have to institutionalize abuse?

My high level analysis is that this is because of institutionalized 'dispersion of responsibility' stemming from the pure capitalistic doctrine we all have supposedly signed up for. Essentially you have individual entities whose responsibility (& only one) to maximize the profit. so anything that is measurable ends up getting projected on one dimension of 'capital'. There is a lot of talk about social responsibility but most 'don't be evil' lasts until a few bad quarters and then its back to same story.

No supposedly the govt/unions are supposed to provide a counterbalance to this but for some incredible reason folks here in America are convinced that any collective action is basically soviet style socialism hence out of question. So what we are left with is this dispersion of responsibility to do social good but no one actually in charge of it. And don't even get me started on the Senate composition/electoral college & institutionalized gerrymandering (so you can actually fix it with simple majority you need a special kind of majority).

> ...any collective action is basically soviet style socialism hence out of question.

Ironically, the set of interlocking directorships, foundation seats, advisorships, consulting arrangements, share holdings, etc. among politicians, C-suite and EVP layers is every bit as collectivist as an old Soviet farm or modern workers' union. I personally model it as the strongest union out there because it doesn't need to operate by open rules relying upon legislation but is instead an acculturated reinforcement mechanism amongst its members that flexibly adapts to its host socioeconomic framework, making it harder than any conventional union to bust up or influence.

I would argue that a "low skill worker" doesn't exist as anything but a pejorative stereotype for large swaths of people who form and perform functions that create the foundation on which an economy runs.

Well I mean c'mon... are you seriously trying to suggest that every job takes the same level of skill as every other job? There are people who don't want to spend years of their lives working math problems to get to the point where they can become highly specialized and are happy being "low skilled" because they get more time to themselves.

How many software developers do you think can work in a kitchen? Or clean houses? Or work on construction?

Probably almost all of them right?

Work in a kitchen: Maybe. Actually do a good job, walking in off the street? Nope. There are dozens of things you need to know and be able to do to work well in a kitchen—and those things change depending on what kind of kitchen it is, but one of them that doesn't change is clear, fast, in-person communication, including doing what you're told instantly. A software developer going into a kitchen job and thinking they're hot shit because they're coming from a "skilled job" and this is an "unskilled job" is going to get themselves or someone else badly injured very quickly.

Clean a house: Yeah, probably. Clean houses well enough to be paid for it: Probably not. Clean houses, well enough to be paid for it, 40 hours a week, for years: Very unlikely. That takes not just the skills to actually get each house professionally clean, but the mindset to be able to handle that sort of work for long periods.

Work construction: Almost certainly not. While not all construction requires heavy lifting, most does, and most software developers are not in good enough physical shape to do that on a regular basis without doing serious damage to their bodies. Not to mention the care and precision required to build things that will both look good and last.

Because "be able to do this job" doesn't just mean "has the basic understanding of how the mechanics of it work." It means understanding the details and nuances, being willing as well as able to do it for long periods of time, and being able to do it to a professional standard, not just "good enough for me".

Low skill is about whether you expect any experience or qualifications when filling positions.

Some businesses are built around the fact that most of their workforce will be composed of untrained people with 0 qualifications and very high turnover. See Amazon warehouse jobs, most fast food places. Lots of retail jobs.

Sure; that's the reasonable way to talk about what "low skill" means.

The problem is that too many people are still stuck in classist, neofeudal mindsets and equate "working in a low skill job" with "being an inferior person, not worthy of respect/dignity/decent wages/a comfortable life/etc".

You are right, but tbh, the first and the third are considered skilled jobs. My sister had a work visa opportunity to the US with her cooking skills (she chose another path in the end), and it was easier for her than it is for most SWE.

> most software developers are not in good enough physical shape to do that on a regular basis without doing serious damage to their bodies

That's reaching a bit. I worked construction for years before starting a software career. There's lots of construction jobs that don't require a whole lot of heavy lifting. In fact, there are probably more of them that don't than do. And you probably overestimate the lack of health of office workers.

Not even in the same city of right.

Absolutely true. This is where the privilege shows. I have helped friends run restaurants, and it's brutal and draining. And there is an enormous amount of pretty unique skills required to succesfully run a restaurant. And I am saying this as a scientist with a Ph.D. and multiple publications - the very definition of today's "skilled worker."

The weird thing that has happened is the "collegification" of skills. Unless the job requires an undergrad or, even better, a graduate degree, it's apparently not skillful.

I don't feel like driving a UPS truck gives me more time to myself. Between driving around all day with no AC and hitting the gym so that I can continue to lift and run around with mystery boxes I just don't see all this extra time materializing.

This is painting it as black and white: either there are jobs that require no skill or all jobs require the same amount of skill.

Neither of these are the case: Some jobs require significantly more skill and training than others, but no job is unskilled.

And, as others note, the idea that jobs that require less training give you more time to yourself is just ludicrously out of touch with reality. Not only are they more likely to be jobs that expect you to work grueling hours, they also pay so little that many people who work them must work more than one every day just to pay the bills.

Music, nursing, game development, animation, art, school teaching are all highly-skilled professions. They aren't particularly highly-paid.

We should maybe talk about high-supply and low-supply skills instead.

Those jobs are paid way higher than low skill jobs though, and nobody calls them low skill, so I don't see the problem.

Because the common rejoinder to the low pay of "low skill" jobs is to tell those people to become "high skill". When in fact, "high" and "low" skill is only one factor, and not even the major one, in whether you're going to be well paid.

Another reply said nurses are "highly paid" because they make an average of $70-100k. That is laughable. I made more than that at my first job, at a no-name tech company, when all I knew was jQuery and 4 HTTP verbs. Or compare the valuation of any medical tech, or biochem, or materials sciences company compared to the latest photo sharing phenomenon slapped together by some hungover Stanford grads. How much do experienced chemical, or mechanical, or civil engineers make compared to new grad software devs? Who's more "skilled"?

Supply and demand is where it's at. It's pretty easy to increase the supply of janitors or line cooks, so their pay sucks, even though demand is always strong and the work isn't particularly easy or pleasant. There are countless musicians and actors in the world, far more than there could ever be demand for. So their pay, on average, also sucks.

In flyover country, 70-100k is a fantastic wage for a software developer.

Source: after 10 years of being a star performer and job hopping I have nearly tripled my salary…to a little more than 100k. New hires are making less than half that at my current company.

70-100k is a fantastic wage in Eastern Europe or Asia too. Not sure why that's germane to this discussion.

And no that's still quite low for a software developer in flyover country. It might be a good wage compared to median wages for everyone, but only because everyone else has lower wages too (to be fair, offset by lower cost of housing too).

> And no that's still quite low for a software developer in flyover country.

If you know at what company I can do better without relocating, I'd be delighted to hear it.

> It might be a good wage compared to median wages for everyone

It's not even really that, it's a normal middle class professional wage, though the high end is good. We've had juniors leave to pursue other careers...one (who'd actually done fairly well, closer to 100k than 50k) left to be a nurse, because he'd make more money. Software isn't really that great a field unless you plan to move somewhere like California.

"Supply and demand" is highly regionally dependent.

Lots of California and East Coast companies are hiring remote these days. You could easily break $150k without moving if you interview well. $200k+ is attainable once you have more of a track record of working for such companies.

My resume is all Silicon Valley/Bay Area tech, so my inbox has more of these opportunities. It might be harder at the beginning but you only need one of those jobs to establish that "pedigree" (it's dumb, I know).

Music / Art - highly paid at the extremes. Probably because music and art are currently infinitely reproducible and so a small number of highly paid, high "talent" content creators can create content for billions of people.

Nursing - highly paid (https://nursinglicensemap.com/resources/nurse-salary/).

Game development - highly paid (https://builtin.com/salaries/dev-engineer/game-developer)

School teaching - low/medium pay - mostly for political reasons (i.e most are state employees).

Yeah no nursing and game development are not "highly paid". They pay a middle-class wage.

Music and art paid like shit even when it wasn't infinitely reproducible.

The newer goal seems to be employing them in a way that doesn't need training, but then claiming that "flipping a burger" is a business secret and making them sign a broad non-compete anyway.

There is (almost) no such thing as unskilled labor. If you've ever tried to move your furniture to a new place and also paid people to move your stuff you'll see that movers are like 5x more efficient, yet it would be considered an "unskilled" job.

McDonald's is considered a low skill job, but in reality it is high skill, but they have done very well into breaking those skills down so that with just half an hour of "class room training" (on a video), and a couple hours with a trainer you can be productive. Repeat this for a new area a few shifts latter, soon you have a lot of skills with minimal investment.

>There is (almost) no such thing as unskilled labor.

That is arguing against a strawman created by an argument that isn't fully specified.

Even walking takes skill. What is meant when people talk about the skill involved in work is how hard is it to train someone to do the job, generally someone with the knowledge and physical skills an adult is expected to have but without any special training beyond that.

Some jobs can be picked up in under a week of training. Other jobs require years of training. Some require physical skills that are quite common among the population even if the average adult doesn't have them (say something like a fitness level 1/3 of adults have).

Discussions of skilled vs. unskilled labor rarely if ever get into where exactly the line is drawn at, but there is a common understanding that jobs can generally be classified as either something an average adult could be taught how to do on the job or not.

Why this matters is that it determines competition for jobs. The more people able to do the job, the less one has to offer to find someone willing to accept. If you can train the average adult to do the job on the job, then you are competing with working adults at large. If you can't, at least reasonably, train someone on the job, then you are competing with far fewer individuals.

I think your point could be rephrased around the business model being to turn jobs into low skill jobs (basically by removing any human agency) so that labor becomes a pure commodity. Uber is the closest I've seen to that I'm practice. I suspect some warehouse jobs are like that too. Most of the time it doesn't work, which is why Uber for X never really caught on, because you can't commodify e.g. a handyman the way you can a car ride

Driving at least in the same universe as competent is something that most adults need to be able to do for other reasons so Uber (sort of) works. And the product is pretty standardized--get me from A to B which is so far/so long.

Most handyman--much less general contractor--tasks are a lot more variable and I even have some issues with my lawn guy once I get beyond the contracted every two week mow.

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