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Comment by bluefishinit | Hacker News Reader

People hire because they want large teams and people to lord over. It has nothing to do with the business, you just need a business model that spins off enough money to cover the empire building. Look at Google, all of their revenue comes from ads but they have a huge team of people who aren't working on that but are supported by the ad business.

Most businesses become bloated like this because the kind of people who become managers have been waiting their whole lives to build the biggest team possible.

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You think most companies are comparable to Google, one of the worlds most profitable companies? The large large majority of jobs aren't mostly doing nothing and almost no businesses do what you are describing and survive long-term.

I've worked in many different types of companies. Every one that wasn't a tiny startup was full to the brim of people not doing anything meaningful. Entire roles and workflows are invented to create work. No, the scrum master isn't needed and you only need that project manager because the product manager is fighting for turf with the program manager and they want to show the director a burn down chart so he can pretend to know what's going on to the vp who's out on retreat with the ceo. Doesn't matter though because HR set a hard limit of 2% raises this year, but line managers still make sure to have your reports do their 360 degree evaluations!

I wish that were some sort of hyperbole or exaggeration, but it's reality.

> Every one that wasn't a tiny startup was full to the brim of people not doing anything meaningful.

That's an entirely different thing. You're moving the goalposts far away from how "lazy girl job" is defined above. People who aren't doing anything meaningful can also be working very hard at it.

The "send a couple quickie emails a day and make $100k" remote job is a fantasy. They may exist for a time, but unless the employer is printing money, the ride will usually stop as soon as someone bothers to look. Also I think it's very unlikely to get hired into one, especially as an inexperienced person.

The only area where I think one could be even remotely stable is in some critical area with lots of domain knowledge and experience is necessary. Once you've you've put in your time you can switch towards leaning on your experience to provide sufficient value to stay employed than your hard work.

This is such nonsense. “You actually only need engineers who will always perfectly prioritize their workflow and will always precisely identify the right strategy for the product independently and any management at any level whatsoever is unnecessary and none of those people actually work anyway” is entry-level noise. I get that it’s popular to think that the entire organization is worthless and that you are the only hero anyone needs, but come on.

That you don’t understand or can’t comprehend what someone is doing does not, at all, mean that they aren’t doing anything or that they have no value.

Paraphrasing someone so badly, as you have done above, is not good faith. And the GP is basically talking about 'Bullshit jobs', the subject of which David Graeber wrote a well regarded, well received book on [1], [2].

[1] https://www.penguin.com.au/books/bullshit-jobs-9780141983479

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

> you just need a business model that spins off enough money to cover the empire building.

Maybe so. But those business models don't just grow on trees. And once you have one, they don't maintain themselves, either. Someone competent has to keep that business model spinning off that kind of money.

In other words, even in that kind of company, competence actually matters for at least a subset of the employees.

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