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Comment by jupp0r | Hacker News Reader

If you think this point further though: does that make companies overstaffed or just mismanaged? Apparently cash flow supports companies to have these dev teams on staff, what if they worked on something that was a good investment of their time? Being overstaffed would mean that there was no way for companies to create more revenue by investing more in the right areas and I think this is a fallacy. The world is still so mindblowingly analog and inefficient in so many places that I don't think software is done eating the world yet.

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> does that make companies overstaffed or just mismanaged?

Good point. The end result is the same: inefficient allocation of resources that could pass for productivity. Weird incentives at the management level.

The results may look similar, but they call for very different responses.

Firing productive engineers isn't going to fix managers whose vision is not aligned with business needs.

This is the part the really got to me once I started to realize that my contributions started really impact a team in a positive way, but the vast benefit of that impact was bestowed upon the manager. More annoyingly, even when the manager was poor ( and, I do not understand why, there seem to be a lot of those around ), the blame was always that of underlings. I was under clearly deluded impression that leaders gets blame and glory.

In my corporate life, I saw total of two exceptions to that rule ( now and my previous boss ).

That's the exact opposite of what a good manager would do. They'd take the blame for things that go wrong and credit the team for everything good that was accomplished. They'd be an advocate for their team and their reports individually. I've been fortunate to work with a few of those managers and they've been the ones that have been really successful long term. Keep searching or take the management route yourself and show them. It's very rewarding!

Managers gets promoted by getting credit for accomplishments, any manager who got promoted a few times will be good at getting credit for what you do in some way or another. Some deserve the credit, others don't.

An third possibility: Management and/or engineering leadership sees real problems but is investing in them poorly. For example, resourcing multiple teams to rearchitect your backend when the real issues lie in test coverage and observability, or something like that.

> * does that make companies overstaffed or just mismanaged?*

My guess is "undercompeted", though I'd hope there is a better word.

If an organization has a large and secure revenue stream whether is works on improving output or not, it will focus inward, on making life better for the insiders, not the customers.

> what if they worked on something that was a good investment of their time?

It's not always obviously true that there is such a project. Neither companies nor teams are fungible enough to make this necessarily true, at least not to the extent that ROI is expected to be higher than a smaller more focused team.

work expands to fill the person-hours allotted

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