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Comment by rippercushions | Hacker News Reader

This post seems kind of naive? A big part of why big tech companies need so many people is because any big company, especially one sitting on piles of money, becomes a target for all sorts of predators and has to defend itself. So it has to have armies of SOX compliance officers (because it's still cheaper than getting sued by the SEC), travel expense auditors (because it's still cheaper than shareholder suits after a VP whoops it up in Vegas and sends the bill to the company), mandatory diversity training educators (because it's still cheaper than getting sued by various minorities), patent litigation departments (because it's still cheaper than losing to patent trolls) etc etc, all of which feel like "bullshit jobs" to the average 3-man startup because the average 3-man startup doesn't face any of these problems.

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Ugh, it’s so much simpler than that.

Everyone’s number one objective in any company is to make their individual life easier. Full stop. The most obvious way to do that, if you have the ability/budget, is to hire people to do your work for you.

Then you can brag about managing higher headcount, you do less work, and you flounder around as a very bad manager with no accountability so long as you keep your workload below the level of your manager (who, remember, hired you just to remove work from their own plate).

Now remember that everyone you hired has the exact same incentive.

It keeps going til the money runs out or until the company buckles under its own organizational complexity.

Equity is supposed to be the counterbalance to this. That is, if you have a very significant stake in a company and every person you hire you need to also give a significant stake, and every person they hire, on and so forth, you would think twice about just trying to throw more people at the problem of creating value. Of course, in reality the early folks just try to get fools to become bagholders of illiquid options that probably don't have a chance of being worth much once you factor in the liquidation preferences of VCs and that they are priced at absurd valuations once the VCs have gotten involved.

Or salaries come down to match the simplified workloads.

Every single thing in your comment rings false to me, as someone who has been both an IC and manager at startups and large corporations.

Most importantly, there are very few managers and business leaders who think "You know what would make my life easier? Having a lot more people to manage!" The usual reason people are hired is because the needs (or anticipated needs, which can often be wildly off as we've seen recently) of the business require it, and without more people there will either be lost business opportunity or risk that existing employees are working at an unsustainable rate.

I'm definitely not saying that businesses can't be inefficient, but when I read your sentence "Everyone’s number one objective in any company is to make their individual life easier" (with a "full stop" no less as if that somehow guarantees its unassailability), I honestly didn't know what you were talking about.

> Most importantly, there are very few managers and business leaders who think "You know what would make my life easier? Having a lot more people to manage!"

If you're talking about good managers, then yes, having more people creates more work.

The lazy middle managers aren't interested in hands-on middle management, though. They cultivate teams of people who can self-manage or be managed through fear. They take the people who need a lot of attention and they transfer them to other roles. They penalize anyone who asks too many questions or requires too much management input.

These aren't good, hands-on managers. They may be great at talking big in meetings and schmoozing around the office, but they're not putting in the work to be hands-on with their employees.

What you’re saying is that some people have realized that hiring more people doesn’t in fact make their life easier. It often makes their lives harder.

I agree, which is why people who do know that tend to be extremely hesitant to hire (they’re trying to preserve their own local quality of life). But as the sibling comment says, this realization only occurs to good managers and even then it takes some time.

> there are very few managers and business leaders who think "You know what would make my life easier? Having a lot more people to manage!"

Sure, but the exceptions do all the hiring!

I agree and disagree. Even competent managers and high performing teams hire people when the amount of work stress exceeds a limit and it’s mentally cheaper to onboard someone into the team.

I think hiring is all about making peoples lives easier (to the extent they’re allowed). However, there’s a cynical way to look at it and there’s a positive way to look at it as well.

Heh a lot of people in this thread also seem to miss that as a company grows you have an accruing amount of vacation time on your team and need enough people to ensure the operation always runs. The operation also needs to be bus proof, over the last 2 years the branch we are in has had 3 people killed in car accidents around the world. And then we also have people leaving and new people being on boarded which means they won't be really useful for a month or more.

We look at people and they generally work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Is it going to be surprising we need a whole lot of people running global operations 24/7?

Every company I've worked for has had some core group of people who cared about doing good work and doing the right thing.

No company can maintain that dynamic at scale, though. As you grow, you accumulate people who are good at presenting an image of doing the good work, but they're actually operating adversarially in a way that collects the most rewards with the least effort.

It's not just managers. A lot of ICs treat the workplace like a min-max game, where they are trying to maximize their compensation and minimize the work they do. Every time I mention this, there are comments about how that's actually a good thing because companies have the same strategy, but the people who do this usually screw their teammates more than the company. Big companies don't suffer if random people are slacking off and refusing to do their work, but their teammates who want to get a promotion or build their skillsets are going to suffer the consequences of deadbeat coworkers.

Small companies aren't immune from these problems, but it's so much easier to identify and remove the dead weight in a small company. When you have 20 people in a company, it's clearly obvious when someone isn't pulling their weight. But when you have 100,000 people in a company, a large number of people are going to find ways to settle into obscure roles where their output is hard to measure and they'll coast as much as they can.

Doing the right things tends to also not align with promotions either. The thing that helps your team mates us ignoring the business needs and min/maxing the promotion game.

That's less fun than doing the right things, and more work than min/maxing your quality of life

That also means being willing to take risks for the sake of innovation, and bigger companies are less tolerant or accepting of their employees failing at an effort intended to benefit the business.

That is one big reason why i stopped caring about the employees taking the clandestine adversarial approach to their relationship with employers. It's one thing to put in low effort at a scrappy startup, but another when the company discourages excellence.

What now?

People are supposed to choose their career strategy and on the job behaviour so that their teammates(not friends, teammates) can optimize their own career strategy ?

It's complicated, because by slacking off you're indirectly pulling your teammates down (as explained by the OP), which means less work-related opportunities for them, which can mean lots of not ok things: less money to send their kids to college, less money for retirement, less money for lots of other things.

A similar thing, but with much higher stakes, happens on the front-lines during a war. Confronted with a much superior enemy your individual optimal decision would be to desert, or, at least, to retreat, no matter what the high-command located at the back of the front has to say about it. They're not the ones who are going to die.

But, in doing that, you're weakening the flanks of the other brigades/platoon from your side with which you're sharing the front-line, and in so doing you're drastically decreasing the chances for them to see their kids and their wives back home.

Dunno. You also make people that are doing more work look good by "slacking off".

That is why I dislike it when people are working free overtime. They are wage dumping me.

I agree, ideally the entire workforce should "advance" under an united front (for lack of a better metaphor). I guess that's why lots of former military people get lucrative jobs in corporate consulting after they get out of the Armed Forces.

>I agree, ideally the entire workforce should "advance" under an united front (for lack of a better metaphor)

Ya know, they have a word for that...

What would that word be?

Unionize?

Not even close to what’s being talked about here. Unions allow for collective bargaining they don’t ensure all people are working as one giant team towards the companies goals.

This isn't war. It's a totally different situation with totally different ways of behaving effectively.

I totally understand the point you're making about team cohesion.

This is the thing about the HN crowd and the remote only dogma that is constantly thrown around that is perplexing. The HN demo loudly proclaims that the workplace is not the place for you to build friendships and personal relationships and to go do it on your own time.

The natural effect of this is ambitious employees are going to min-max their career trajectory for their benefit and maybe the company's. Why would anyone truly care about faceless Zoom rectangle team members that they're never going to see after x months/years? In this case, they're not fighting a war, so the stakes are drastically low and payoff substantially better. And yet HN looks down on this as bad behavior. This is just the emergent property of the current tech culture that we've established.

So replacing “Zoom rectangle team members” with retinal image team members makes that much of a difference? Magically they become actual people once you see them with your own eyes, resulting in increased effectiveness and no resentment from wasted time commuting and forced interpersonal relationships with people they find annoying.

> So replacing “Zoom rectangle team members” with retinal image team members makes that much of a difference?

Are you actually unironically asking this? If so, we have live in very different social spectrum and there's absolutely nothing I can tell you that will convince you otherwise. You should, however, try interacting with everyone in your life (loved ones, family, friends, etc.) via zoom, since it's all the same anyway. Probably saves a lot on commute and travel expenses!

> Magically they become actual people once you see them with your own eyes, resulting in increased effectiveness and no resentment from wasted time commuting and forced interpersonal relationships with people they find annoying.

Commuting, daycare, housing, etc. are side effects of a larger systemic problem that isn't the scope of what is discussed here.

Calling it a “forced interpersonal relationships with people they find annoying” is such an immature take. This is just literally interacting with people in a society. Most people learn how to deal with others in school. The ones who don’t end up socially clueless and wonder why everyone else keeps getting promoted instead of them, the “10x” engineer who totally isn’t the annoying one.

The issue has nothing to do with seeing people as actual people or not. Without a common ground for camaraderie and fellowship, there’s no need to pretend it exists besides being generally a cordial person. Using the OP’s analogy of War, employees are no longer soldier’s fighting for a cause, just mercenaries making sure they’re getting their dues.

It is unkind to slack off if it means your teammate has to swoop in and do more work. Whether or not you care about being kind to your teammates is a personal decision, I suppose, but it is something I would always encourage people do, even if it doesn't make you more money.

> Every company I've worked for has had some core group of people who cared about doing good work and doing the right thing... but they're actually operating adversarially in a way that collects the most rewards with the least effort.

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy! The people who game the system eventually move to further enforce the system (for their own benefit), at the expense of the purpose the for which the system was first put in place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_la...

I wonder if this correlates to when the OG founders leave or are kicked out

Great find!

It seems like this is related to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

And this:

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

It's almost as if you mix those two things together, you get Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

Let’s talk about teams with where you have one person doing everything. They are creating deadbeats. Does it never cross anyone’s mind that the way to fix this is to move that person off of the team? Often they are sucking the oxygen out of the room with a strong personality or dogmatism for some personal ideal of quality. The manager lets them run with it because the work is getting done but that manager is bad because his team is languishing. I’ve seen this so many times where engineers get pushed out of the way by a new lead engineer and their workloads drop significantly. These leads who want to run everything don’t have the energy to convince people well, instead they just write so much complicated code as fast as possible to beat anyone else to the space. It’s not just ego it’s a matter of avoiding a hostile work environment being hostage to this one persons gatekeeping. They dedicate their lives to work and spend insane hours so that no one else has the fitness to compete with them. They see that their team is getting left behind and continue full steam ahead. It’s sad for everyone involved.

> I’ve seen this so many times where engineers get pushed out of the way by a new lead engineer and their workloads drop significantly

From my experience whenever this happens the people who get "pushed out of the way" were useless to begin with

> were useless to begin with

Or useless with office politics, and didn’t manage to market themselves well with the new lead. It’s never been clean-cut in my experience.

Looks like we found the guy that pushes everyone away. Who else would excuse this behavior from a “lead” developer? A lead developer should be working (or at least trying) with their team to empower the team as a whole, not blazing ahead on point leaving the squad in the dark, no matter how “brilliant” they are.

I had a guy like that did something like this. He jumped on any new project and did all the interesting pieces as quickly as possible. He also built it with very non-idiomatic code. Despised working with his stuff, even though if he was the only person on the project it was fine, he was very productive.

> but the people who do this usually screw their teammates more than the company

They screw themselves more than anyone else by spurning opportunities for bettering themselves

Did it occur to you that they're getting paid and possibly "bettering themselves" and enjoying family/friends in ways that have nothing to do with the company?

>The people who do this usually screw their teammates more than the company. Big companies don't suffer if random people are slacking off and refusing to do their work, but their teammates who want to get a promotion or build their skillsets are going to suffer the consequences of deadbeat coworkers.

??? You've got it exactly reversed. Slacking coworkers are the company's problem, not yours.

I've never seen any company decide not to give a promotion to somebody because their coworker was useless. Hell, sometimes the useless coworker helps because it makes them look better by comparison.

I’ve worked at such a company.

> I've never seen any company decide not to give a promotion to somebody because their coworker was useless.

Ah, but have you ever seen a company give raises promotions to the people on projects that were successfully delivered?

If one rushes through, decisions and implementation that are most likely to become a debt on the company don’t become apparent until later. Their endevour immediately renders everybody else as slackers too but most likely than not they’re no longer there when the debt comes to roost.

I think I'm on number four...

> Posting this just never gets old... > > It must have been a couple of months because... > >> I keep this link sitting around and enjoy dusting it off every couple of > >> months or so > >> https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Make things simpler? That’s news to me.

If anything the more we have grown the more over engineering and obnoxious processes we have.

All because late stage people just don’t really get it imo. When you start needing to have meetings so people can “feel like they belong” which translates to weeks of wasted cycles trying to find “what works for us” it’s ludicrous.

You’re hired to do a job, maybe you’re a Java or Go engineer hired to work on services or infra. Or you’re hired to build UIs. You aren’t hired to waste time on setting up slack bots that become annoying af 2 sprints later and removed, or trying experiments instead of shipping.

I can understand having technical processes to make our codebase better, but this side organizational engineering bullshit is just annoying.

Idk it’s just stupid. Imo companies need to be leaner and have less people who actually just do their job. You know, the thing they’re paid 300k plus TC for. I’ve personally been picking up the slack on a bunch of people on my team along with a couple of OGs and new hires who are actually really good. It’s getting annoying now when people just literally are not doing their job and writing 20 page documents on process improvements. did we hire a consulting firm jokers or software engineers?

You’re exactly the sort of person I’d hire, you’d do all my work for me!!

> If anything the more we have grown the more over engineering and obnoxious processes we have.

That is because all the managers who have outsourced all their work to their direct reports now has to still produce evidence that the manager is still needed. So they ask you for reports and data, that they can hand to their managers. And those managers also try to come up with that sort of evidence, so middle managers asks for lots of reports and data from line managers that they can hand directly as is to their superiors etc.

Too much work compiling all those reports etc? Hire a manager to do it for you, then hire more, try to ensure that their tasks produce the artifacts you need to hand to your manager. This isn't efficient for the company, but very efficient for your career. And that is the hardest part about being a manager, that the other managers acts like this and try to push all the real work onto you while taking all the credit.

Maybe instead of hiring a manager to compile reports we could take an LLM and a bunch of specially trained AI and hook them up big brother style, monitoring every possible source of data that the business produces (including server access logs and financials!) and it could tell us the metrics of who is doing their job or not.

Until people figure out the metrics and start gaming them and produce crap to satisfy the metrics. I’ve seen that movie twice already, though LLMs weren’t the savior tool du jour yet.

We also try to run mini Manhattan Projects with Oppenheimer not knowing much about physics and just being a "people person".

Should be no surprise that is a stupid idea.

i've seen this before, people get obsessed with process. Then designing the process to do the job starts to become the job for them. You have to snap them out of it. It's not easy and sometimes they have to be shown the door.

Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber is about exactly this phenomenon. Everyone should read it.

I feel like you tried to describe it as a negative but that is called delegation and the trait of a good manager. Of course it's a spectrum and there are negatives and positives but the concept itself is not bad.

It's not intrinsically negative, but IMO it's a far more powerful and far more prevalent force than the countervailing forces in most tech orgs.

It is simpler, but not for the reasons you describe.

The issue is that once you have layers of middle managers - as in managers managing managers, a snake pit ensues. Nobody gets into middle management and says “ahh at last, I’ve arrived”. The goal is to amass influence and push up as quickly as possible to try and reach the executive level.

From here, it becomes a very political situation, rife with corporate climbers try to push each other down into the mud to reach upward. One way to appear influential is to manage a large team of people. Your main goal is to pull headcount for your org chart, while your peers are also trying to do the same. So you invent ridiculous “strategies” with inflated headcount requirements and promise astronomical results.

It all stems from the personal ambitions of the people in the middle. And of course, they’re usually the most out of touch with the real operations of the company because they’re only peripherally connected to any actual work as a distant connection in the telephone game.

I’ve seen lots of cases where this isn’t true. People are promoted to management because of their hard work and continue to work absurd hours.

Some of them really do love work and are workaholics… more commonly they’ll always find a reason why they’re “needed”, because there will always be so much more to do. It’s often tough to tell the difference.

However, I rarely see cases where less workload is a motivation for hiring. Often times it’s practically impossible for it to be… and hiring is really the only way they can get work added.

This comment is like a Fox News parody of what tech companies are like.

I've worked for a few and there definitely wasn't 1000s of people in the Legal & Compliance departments constantly getting sued and harassing managers and engineers about travel expenses or diversity training.

Instead, it is the exact same problems you see at every large company i.e. excess of middle managers each trying to grow their own fiefdom and duplicating capabilities across the organisation.

Or it's too many poorly conceived and managed product and R&D adventures.

> excess of middle managers [and/or] too many poorly conceived and managed product and R&D adventures

My OH works for a big multinational, has had a variety of roles, at a variety of locations, and despite the fact that she's not in tech you've still managed to summarise pretty much every single conversation I've had with her about her work over the last 20+ years.

The thing about being a large company in an innovative industry is that the optimal number of “poorly conceived and managed product and R&D adventures” you need to run is not zero.

Certainly it’s possible to run too many of them, but if you are overindexing on perfect vetting and execution of every idea you might not be running enough.

What percentage of a big company do you think falls into these categories? The idea that "mandatory diversity training educators" or "travel expenses audiotrs" are anything but a drop in the bucket is laughable. Also, often roles like these are farmed out to vendors and aren't actually staffed by company employees at all.

Google literally has a C-level Chief Diversity Officer. Her LinkedIn claims an org size of 130+.

And at google's size, that's a drop in the bucket.

And her role is:

Lead the Employee Engagement Organization which is a global team of 130+ googlers who are responsible for driving large-scale impact across Diversity, Equity & Inclusion programs; Employee Relations; and Compliance, Integrity & Governance.

So far more than just specifically diversity all for a company of 200,000+ people.

i.e. 0.065% of the total workforce.

130 × 250k = 32.5 million

I'd be surprised if this "drop in the bucket" was anything more than a sunk cost

There is no way that many or even most of them are getting anywhere near $250k per annum. Even living in the bay area -- which many of them might not be. GOOG has offices in Austin, Calgary, and Nashville, for example.

But that's not what this thread is about, it's about why the companies have so many employees. These 130 jobs that so many people want to complain about don't even begin to have relevance to why there are 190,000 people at Google.

And at the scale of what Google is doing and just how much impact even seemingly trivial changes can have on millions if not billions of people, taking care of diversity is actually important.

Just imagine something as small as a change in color in a website element - 8% of men and so 4% of the global population are color blind. That's 320 million people potentially affected. A copy text that requires more than 4th grade literacy skills in English to grasp? Like half of Americans, 165 million people, potentially affected. An illustration graphic using cows as an example for whatever? A potential offense to a billion of Hindu Indians.

And the list goes on and on and on. With Google holding ~85% of the global market share in search or 2.5 billion MAUs for Youtube, taking care about diversity is not even close to optional - it's foundational to make sure the company doesn't get into any sort of trouble.

The diversity training and other efforts like that are definitely a thing. my referral bonus for getting a POC hired to a peer position is 5 figures ( and it doesn't start with a '1'). It's taken pretty seriously at big companies.

At the same time, those are all reasons large corporations could be vulnerable to a 3 person startup.

Both are equally true: big tech companies have big tech problems and big company problems, both of which tend to require big expenditures to deal with. And let’s not forget all the folks you need for sales, marketing, finance/accounting/treasury, legal and audit, logistics, manufacturing, trust and safety, customer service, civic affairs, shareholder relations … the list goes on and on. Companies are vast empires, and even from 10,000 feet up it’s hard to track everything being done.

Perhaps, but none of the things you mention are engineers' positions; the OP is talking about SWE jobs, not auditors or diversity educators.

Finally! A brave champion for the poor beleaguered corporations!

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