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Comment by throwaway2847 | Hacker News Reader

My company did a big round of layoffs and it was pretty revealing that not a single director or above were laid off. Despite reduced headcount, the org chart got DEEPER in some cases. For all the talk of bloat in the tech world, nobody wants to point fingers at directors who have little to do but schedule very expensive meetings with the directors under them.

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Reminds me of a company I worked for where we up staffed to sixty people plus five managers in my department. Then a recession hit and after two rounds of layoffs, there were fifteen workers left and still five managers. Not only did those of us left have an increased workload, but now had to deal with endless bike shedding by the managers, all of whom wanted to be able to put their name on whatever we were working on, probably because they were scared of what would happen if there was a round three of layoffs. Round three never came and eventually hiring freezes were lifted, but it was really annoying dealing with all the useless petty changes that were pushed on our work during that time so the management layer could look like they were doing something.

The managerial class looting public companies for outsized compensation while taking near-zero risk, is a huge problem in the modern economy.

Being a steward of an already-giant company...one that has product-market fit, reliable sales/distribution channels, household brand awareness, and a position of gravity in the markets...is infinitely easier than building something from scratch.

Nobody who was employee #1567 should ever be granted $10M+ of equity in a business they didn't build.

It's quite literally stealing from public investors, and boards only enable this because they're incestuously composed of fellow managerial-club members.

> The managerial class looting public companies for outsized compensation while taking near-zero risk, is a huge problem in the modern economy.

Has it ever not been a problem? In any type of economy? In any type of company? Seems like this a human nature problem and not a "modern economy" problem.

I think it is a fairly new thing yes. I could be wrong but the distinction between owner and manager seems like a fairly recent development. The people in charge have always reaped the bulk of the profits but also bore most of the risk. Now we have "managers" who take no more risk than an employee but receive excess rewards.

> The managerial class looting public companies for outsized compensation while taking near-zero risk, is a huge problem in the modern economy.

From the public’s point-of-view, the “software class” are looting the public: outsized compensation for a risk of say 2% (20% fired over ten years).

Nobody who was employee #13370 should ever be granted $100k+ of equity in a business they didn't build.

I’m being sarcastic: but so many arguments against the “managerial class” can equally be made against the wealthy privileged software engineers earning $X00k (including stock options/RSUs etcetera).

Non-sarcastically I actually agree. The whole equity compensation seems like cheating other taxpayers.

The difference is the software engineers are creating wealth with that paycheck. Managers are extracting it.

The pay of a rank-and-file engineer is commoditized with pay-bands and kept in check by market forces (we're talking millions of people -- hard to prop up inefficient pay at that scale). Certainly there might some geographic inefficiencies but those are slowly being arbitraged away (there's zero reason a European developer should be making 1/4th of what an American developer would).

On the other hand, the talent market for Director at Public Company is much less efficient and opaque. You're talking about a club of a few thousand people globally who restrict entry via irrational signaling values like "was on the rowing team at Harvard" or "created PowerPoints for a year at McKinsey."

I'm certain we could 5X the amount of people we let into the "public company management" talent pool with near zero effect on outcomes at a macro level--while having the benefit of saving investors money on comp.

You can't 5X the amount of people you let into the engineering talent pool without making things much worse. That market is much more efficient.

FANG employee developers can earn more than directors, and as you go up the pay scale, more of a software developers pay is equity compensation.

Directors of the S&P500 earn median $300k per directorship including equity compensation: “The combination of cash and equity changes has pushed pay levels to a new milestone in the history of GECAT’s annual study, and median total direct compensation (TDC) now rests at $300,000” https://www.wtwco.com/en-US/Insights/2022/12/2022-director-c...

And your point is kind of irrelevant to what I was saying. I am arguing relatively, many software engineers at FANG earn what most people would call “obscene salaries”.

If you want to argue executives or directors are overpaid, you also need to consider why (a) highly paid software developers are not overpaid, and (b) why your solution shouldn’t be applied to everybody in the USA as a whole (given the USA is extracting money from poor people and poor countries worldwide).

Edit: actually, on rereading your 5X argument, I realise I just won’t try to understand your point. I need more objective numbers to work with when trying to understand an argument. I won’t be adding to this thread.

Agree. I guess it's self preservation - managers decide who is laid off and are more likely to believe it's the ICs who are unproductive, not the many tiers of middle management who do nothing quantifiable.

Quite hilariously engineers are going to be measured by "productive commits" soon, but I saw no guidance created to measure how managers are providing value

Meta seems to be flattenning the org and mark has publicly clamied that he doesn't doesn't managers of managers and will lay them off next round.

How many levels of management is the target? It somewhat caps organization size unless you want someone to have a comical number of direct reports

Seems like something specific to your company. A lot of large companies have flattened their org structures in this round of layoffs.

> directors who have little to do

That's not the director's problem, so why would anyone point the finger at them? Competent directors have a lot to do, albeit mostly behind the scenes to the average employee. If they don't have a lot to do, then the problem is up the chain.

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