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Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

That article was a very nice surprise and apart from how crushingly accurate it is (before somebody jumps in to defend all the corporate chaos, of course) it also had me giggling several times while reading it.

The answer of course is financial incentives. It is the answer 99% of the time, I know quite a few high-profile managers at this point and they are all very smart and get stuff done people and yet they allow themselves be dragged into endless meetings and they know the script (that the OP author is referring to several times) and they recite it by heart. Because if they don't, their manager is going to think they are useless and will inevitably fire them.

People find a cushy place to work in with a good salary, then just work their way up the economical ladder (or the organizational) and will do anything that's needed to achieve that goal. It's as simple as that, and I am convinced that a good chunk of these people (probably 20%-30%) are very well aware they are bullshitters but they think they have no choice.

At the same time, I've known a few company owners long time ago who were just BEGGING their managers to tell them the problems exactly as they are, swore on their lives they will not fire the managers for bringing them bad news (and made contracts that made sure of it in no uncertain terms)... and yet all of the managers below those people were sycophant yes-men.

Quite tragic really. All of this is a collective delusion.

I keep remembering this old article -- "Bullshit Jobs" -- and yep, it still rings true to this day, and will likely do so for decades more, likely centuries even because our societal changes are slower than glaciers...

View on HN

Part of the problem has to be that as an individual in an organization it seems like a better ROI for your effort to grow your share of the pie than the entire pie itself.

Individual incentives are naturally going to be aligned by advancement and "being difficult" is something everyone wants to avoid. Easier to shed blame and avoid accountability than try to fix the social and political structure of your organization. Mostly because even if you succeed, the organization wouldn't be sophisticated enough to understand and credit you for the work.

Your reward for growing the pie is one (1) pizza pie.

When the moonshot hits the sky

You score a bonus pizza pie!

That's amore...

I work for a company that employs 100k people.

The effects of my work strategy and behavior on the company's revenue, profit, vision, products are zero.

On the contrary, the effects of my work strategy and behavior on my salary and position can be quite pronounced.

My company can fire me tomorrow, they will forget my name in 5 days. To "fire" my company, I need to find another job, maybe in another city, working with colleagues I don't know who may eat food at lunch break I don't like the smell of.

It is not hard to guess where I spend most of my efforts and thinking.

> My company can fire me tomorrow, they will forget my name in 5 days. To "fire" my company, I need to find another job, maybe in another city, working with colleagues I don't know who may eat food at lunch break I don't like the smell of.

I don't think is very good comparison, generally. Some other company could offer you a job and you can leave any time. Depending on your tasks, the company might have very difficult time finding replacement personnel. This could be very significant (relative) cost for the company.

Personally I have always lived in countries where employee protection laws are very employee-friendly. Companies can't just fire people at will, they need good reasons. There might be significant fines for misfiring for wrong reasons.

It is a very good comparison (I work in California, at-will contracts).

The effect of me leaving my company and the effect of my company leaving me, for the one who is getting dropped, are not even remotely comparable.

The negative effects of my leaving or being laid off/fired on the company of 100k people are, more often than not, not distinguishable from zero. Many folks left my group and other groups I worked in and, invariably, the escapees were barely remembered a few weeks after leaving. The cemetery is full of indispensable people, and I was never told that I was indispensable.

The negative effects of my dismissal by the company on me range from almost zero (I wanted to leave anyway, I have ten other jobs lined up, they offer me more money) to very substantial (I didn't want to leave, I can't pay my mortgage, my partner sees me as a failure).

I respect the company I work for and my colleagues. But if I have to choose between advancing my cause and advancing the cause of the company (assuming the two causes are somewhat misaligned and assuming I am not doing anything considered "wrong"), I choose myself every day of the week and twice on Sunday

> The negative effects of my leaving or being laid off/fired on the company of 100k people are, more often than not, not distinguishable from zero. Many folks left my group and other groups I worked in and, invariably, the escapees were barely remembered a few weeks after leaving. The cemetery is full of indispensable people, and I was never told that I was indispensable.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say that having "indispensable people" at all is a management failure. Large corporations that have been around for decades have survived because they don't have indispensable people.

This is why you don't get more money even if you outcode everyone on your team. The company doesn't want a rockstar developer, it much prefers having 4 average devs (where "average" obviously varies a lot based on the company and how much they pay etc.) It's simple risk management: the company knows it can recruit another average dev if it needs to.

You are right that it makes perfect business sense to not have indispensable people. At the same time, trying to make everyone inter-replaceable has never worked and never will.

It is important to recognize that some people are heavier hitters than others.

Their risk management goes too far is what I am saying. They should relax it a little bit and they'll get better results.

I respect that you probably have loved ones to take care of, and that what you are doing is probably a responsible choice.

Don't hate the player, etc.

But damn, if it isn't depressing to go to work every day and not caring about impact, just impression.

It is not black and white, both morally and in terms of the way I work.

Let's say that certain choices, strongly supported by my boss, who is ultimately responsible for my career in the short term (and the short term career consequences of my actions then inform my career even further down the line), are seen by me as not particularly brilliant, maybe even "dumb." If I say nothing and nothing happens, the product we are developing may not work as well as it could, perhaps the company's revenue will drop by a 50th of a percent. But should I risk my career to tell my boss that their ideas are not brilliant?

Years ago, when I was younger and more idealistic, I would have expressed my opinion on the choices made, even forcefully so. After I got fired at one of my previous jobs, I tend to side with the boss, strategically.

And before anyone, legitimately, thinks I am a coward or a "bloodsucker," let me make it clear that I was not the one who put my boss in the position they are in, the company is not mine, and the company can fire me tomorrow for any reason, even for no reason. Then, maybe at some point it will be too much to handle and I will decide to leave, but as I wrote, it is not black and white.

I think you just gave words to something I'd noticed about myself but had never been able to articulate, which is the reason I can't operate in large companies. Every time a company gets past its first thousand employees, I have to find another job, because it starts to become as you describe and it feels like it grinds my soul to dust.

I'm convinced there do need to be big companies, therefore I'm glad so many people can work in them and I appreciate the difficulty of it. This is not meant as a criticism in any way.

It just helped me understand why my career has consisted largely of startup-hopping every couple years as the companies finally reach a point where I have more than three layers of management, a majority of whom have no idea how to do my job effectively, but have to prove they're "doing something" by telling me what to do.

It's not that I'm "flaky" or "have commitment issues." It's that there's something that happens to companies when they get large that turns a work environment I enjoyed into one that's really (intolerably) unpleasant for me.

If I were interested in doing the work I am able to do, and if my life satisfaction depended on this fulfillment, I would never work where I work. That would be intolerably frustrating.

But I see my work as a means to other ends, and I am fine with my current situation.

This actually corresponds to another thing I've only recently admitted to myself, namely that I put a lot more pressure on my job for meaning and satisfaction because I'm compensating for perceived deficits in other areas of my life, like not having a spouse or children, even though those are important to me (not just a societal pressure).

I do have friends and activities that are important to me, but nothing within an order of magnitude the time devoted to my job.

If I had another important full-time role that applied whether or not I was working, I think I would have an easier time seeing my job as a means to that end, and I have a lot of respect for people whose lives are ordered that way.

Years ago, when I was doing academic research, I was working for more than 60 hours a week, often on weekends. On the whole it was enjoyable, but then I realized that I was spending an enormous amount of time writing papers that ten people, if I was lucky, would cite, for a far-from-guaranteed professional future in academia, setting aside my romantic and social life because, in the end, overcoming the inertia there seemed more challenging and tiresome than simply occupying my time trying to develop a fairly useless but potentially-perceived-as-novel algorithm.

Then, gradually at first, and then suddenly, my life made a critical and abrupt transition, and now my professional life has to fit into my life full of interests, occasional romance, family, sports, and all the other things that can make life more interesting.

And I make very good money.

> I put a lot more pressure on my job for meaning and satisfaction because I'm compensating for perceived deficits in other areas of my life

Yeah, I did that for a long time before I understood I was doing the same.

That's how the employers get you. :(

> Years ago, when I was younger and more idealistic, I would have expressed my opinion on the choices made, even forcefully so. After I got fired at one of my previous jobs, I tend to side with the boss, strategically.

Perhaps I'm a natural-born sycophant, but I always understood that my primary role in the company is to serve/help my boss, and, most notably, making him look good in from of his boss.

Incidentally, I'm already financially independent and retired at 42 yo.

It is mostly a matter of personality. I consider myself very competent, after decades of study, and brilliant, and silencing my competence in order to achieve "labor peace" has been a tough sandwich to swallow.

Today, I see my competence as a tool that has allowed me to be in the position I am in, which is enough.

The endless search of The Meaning and the general futility of it with never ending doubts are depressing too.

Or you just do some work that you enjoy and don’t worry too much about meaning.

Thinking about how I look to my boss is not work that I enjoy.

easy peasy, similar vibes like "just don't be poor"

I fully understand if you have no other choice or prioritise providing for others.

It is very rarely a "black or white" decision.

The choice is not between licking the boots of your boss or instead doing meaningful work; it is not between earning a lot of money and doing boring work or instead earning not as much and doing entertaining work; not between eating like a pig or maniacally counting calories and macros.

Most of the time, the choice is between not saying something to your team or boss that will probably not be in your favor when you submit your promo package, or being one of those heroes who metaphorically dies in a battle that no one actually cares about.

It is between skipping the pack of Oreos for today in favor of some chicken and rice, not between being full or starving.

>It is not hard to guess where I spend most of my efforts and thinking.

Hope it's in a savings buffer. Everyone should have "fuck you" money[1] for this exact reason, but the next best thing is 3-6 months in immediate savings for rainy days. coporate shutting you down shouldn't be the immediate end of the world, especially not at the salaries tech is paid at.

[1] https://www.steveglaveski.com/blog/you-dont-need-f-ck-you-mo...

Yes, I have plenty of savings. But in any case, having a lot of savings does not make me lean toward starting crusades at work to use Julia instead of Python or a random forest instead of a neural network. When you see the corporate world for what it is, there is no turning back.

I am a professional well aware that I am the most important person in my life and a cog in the machine when I have my badge around my neck or on my belt like the gunslingers once carried their Colts.

Sure. It's more to protect you against when work wants to cut your pay, force you back into office, or you simply fall into office politics by someone climbing the corporate ladder. 6 months savings isn't "fuck you" money, and I'm guessing me and you both wouldn't be working for BigCo if. We had that money.

> the effects of my work strategy and behavior on my salary and position can be quite pronounced

I think you vastly overestimate the impact you can have on your career at a company of that size.

After a few decades of life, I dare say I am reasonably calibrated.

Wisdom is realizing that fixing the social and political structure of the org is often against the interests of enough people, or at least troublesome enough, that ultimately a lot of people will fight to maintain a pathological status quo, and actively subvert reform, instead.

So, financial incentives as I said.

As for "being difficult", yeah, that's a huge culture problem of many Westerners. It's also a very nasty problem because everyone believes in it; I too had managers who literally told me to "stop being difficult" when all I did was asking, twice over the course of an entire month, about why aren't we given just a little more bandwidth to deal with a problem that slows down half the company.

But as we know, culture problems are extremely slow to be solved and that's why I don't blame people for coasting on salary and doing the bare minimum.

Tragedy of the commons, Prisoner's dilemma, Peter's principle, we can call it whatever, it's still very sad though.

Yeah perverse financial incentives describe 99% of the stupidity we put up with daily. Like, why when you look at the labeling of a bottle of Tylenol do you find a description of the trademarks, a non-discrimination clause, and several paragraphs regarding liability in imaginary scenarios written in impenetrable legalese? But, it’s impossible to find the actual dosage chart?

Which one will kill you if you get it wrong?

Which one does the manufacturer think is important?

Why are those never the same?

I'm 100% sure my Tylenol bottles have dosage charts on them, not only because it's so easy to fatally overdose on it but also because manufacturing it is extremely regulated and nobody cares what the manufacturers think about anything.

It’s there but not easy to find

They used to be easy to find, but some years back they redesigned seemingly all pill bottles to hide the instructions. It’s a frustration and makes me wish ill on whoever is behind it, every single time I need to use such a medicine.

Sometimes it’s not even on the bottle but on the panthlet that comes with it

> At the same time, I've known a few company owners long time ago who were just BEGGING their managers to tell them the problems exactly as they are, swore on their lives they will not fire the managers for bringing them bad news (and made contracts that made sure of it in no uncertain terms)... and yet all of the managers below those people were sycophant yes-men.

Contracts are insufficient here. A contract doesn't prevent my boss from being unhappy with me and making my life miserable. A contract does not ensure promotion. As an employee, there is no upside for risk, making any risk unacceptable.

Yep, I get that, but what should an open-minded company owner do?

They can't exactly promise "you will all be here for 5 years, guaranteed, no matter what" too, because for most Homo Sapiens that's a signal to immediately become useless.

My point is similar to yours: that the incentives are indeed not aligned, and that this is quite tragic because even when some people make an honest try to break the vicious cycle they still get treated like everyone else.

Employee ownership/performance bonuses. Dramatically changes the incentives. I would act enormously differently if I got 10% of savings I identified.

> I've known a few company owners long time ago who ... swore on their lives they will not fire the managers for bringing them bad news

It needs to go further. Fire everyone who says there are no problems. If there are no problems, why is an under-manager needed? Also fire everyone who makes up bullshit problems.

If you're going to agree with me all the time, why do I need you?

Too easy to game: People are just going to gauge for themselves what management considers "not a bullshit problem" and report that, making sure that the blame rests on unpopular people or third parties.

Too prone to false positives: Any project which is genuinely going really well results in everyone getting fired, and the company absolutely tanks as a result.

Exactly, an effective CEO / Executive is going to be developing systems of accountability that align with company goals. It can't be based entirely on a set of gameable metrics. However this starts at the top. An incompetent board / CEO is going to create misaligned incentives which will cascade through the organization.

It seems to me that if you want to be a CEO that wants to stay connected at the ground level, then you have to actually do that: you have to know each engineer, and understand the work they’re doing on any given day. Naturally, this tightly constrains the possible size of the company. If you want to grow beyond that size you must accept that you will become disconnected and out of touch and all of the bs being discussed here will inevitably creep in.

Long ago I worked in places where the CEO did exactly that. "Management by walking around" (it even had the abbreviation MBWA) has fallen out of favor, though. People just don't walk any more.

This was about 1000 people.

1K is way higher than I would’ve guessed, that’s good to know! Very impressive.

They already do that in some indusries, so I'm down to experiment with literally any other option.

Teams can actually function well and have no problems for periods of time. I those cases you would almost certainly break that by firing the manager.

I think everyone would agree that yes-people are useless for a team, but if you find yourself surrounded by them you have to ask why. Either you hired poorly, or more likely the way you treat you team and/or company creates a culture of fear and dishonesty.

Who is that "you" who hired poorly? I am a programmer, I did not hire anyone.

My comment from much above, to which many people replied, was from the point of view of a working programmer.

I was just assuming you were talking about managers not independent contributors. The "you" would be the person with the authority to fire though, as a working programmer would have absolutely no power to fire anyone saying there are no problems.

If the culture of the company is checked-out people doing some nonsense to get a paycheck, you’re not going to fix that by tough love unless you will actually fire 80% of the company. What really happens is you fire some useless people but who made someone’s life at work easier or more fun and now everyone who is somewhat competent will start looking for a better job.

> People find a cushy place to work in with a good salary, then just work their way up the economical ladder (or the organizational) and will do anything that's needed to achieve that goal. It's as simple as that, and I am convinced that a good chunk of these people (probably 20%-30%) are very well aware they are bullshitters but they think they have no choice.

Look, I don't mind if you write about me, but it didn't have to be so on-the-nose. No chill, these HN people, no chill at all...

It's fine, man, I get it -- family to feed, goals to achieve, house to buy.

I mostly hate the game, and only part of the players.

You can make improvements, but it ends up being small things that you can showcase to leaders to demonstrate that progress is happening, but it's nothing of actual material value. It's a lot like public political discourse where a policy solution is touted, all the ooh's and ahh's, but then nothing really changes.

Yep, I have found the same over my career. It's better than nothing, I agree on that, but it still ends up being infuriating because it's so damned slow.

Truth is, everyone just wants to clock out and go home. CEOs included.

This is why I'm thinking we need a new system. Not capitalism, not communism, not anything that's already been talked about for 200 years.

It seems to me that our real problem is that we are wired to demand everybody contributes. Both righties and lefties actually agree on this, they just have different views on how to get it done theoretically, and in practice have also come up with various schemes to make this happen.

But actually we live in a world of plenty. Yes, there are hungry people. Yes, there are people who don't have an iPhone.

But what do I mean? I mean that in general it appears to me that almost everything is produced by a very small number of people. We're no longer living in a world where you need 9 people to feed 10 people. The same is true for a lot of goods and services. We don't actually need a bunch of people to do many things.

Quite a lot of processes, if you ask someone who works in various industries, are really done by a few people, supported by a cast of extras that outnumbers them. Some of these extras make more money than the people actually doing the useful work. Often these extras are are like you allude to, only there in order to pretend they are part of the process so that they can make a living.

To make things worse, there actually is a class of people who have no job at all, which creates a kind of fear among the hangers-on.

What we actually need is to have productive people unimpeded by people who need to scrape a living. We should change our norms so that if you aren't selected to be one of the people who makes iPhones or grow food, you can just be good friend. If you want to be an iPhone maker, study and try to get in there. If you don't make it, you're not a failure. You just go about living while all the robot designers take care of stuff.

uh iPhones aren't just made by well dressed Stanford educated designers and engineers in California, you know. The number of people needed to mine the metal/silicon for them, to make the circuits (and to build the factories which make the circuits), and to actually assemble them (for example [0]), the global supply chain of container ships and port personnel and police forces to fight piracy... it's a lot of people. I think they outnumber the bullshit KPR middle managers that get demonized here.

Now just to be clear, I'm not saying that bullshit jobs don't exist - they do. And maybe a world with universal basic income would reduce these bullshit jobs and generally make everything nicer.

But the iPhone needs *a lot* of really non-bullshit, totally serious hard work by thousands if not millions of people to exist, many of them getting paid ridiculously low wages and working under what I would consider inhuman conditions (12 hour days, etc... I should mention that I'm French, so perhaps used to slightly cushier worker protections than most people). And I think there are more underpaid, overworked Chinese factory workers than there are are "VPs of corporate happiness".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn#Mainland_China

The fact that there's a lot of real jobs making iPhones just means there's a lot of BS jobs that will hang onto them.

Of course it's true, you need a LOT of specialists to make iPhones.

I would also wager that a lot of real jobs are lost because there's a tradeoff between gunning for such a job and just settling for a moocher job. Some of those real jobs would consist of automating away the assembly line jobs. It's just that we don't have that society yet, so the manager who doesn't know how to do the automation hires miners and assembly workers, who are obliged to do something in order to make a living.

I'm really skeptical that it's easy to automate those assembly line jobs away, or to automate mining. For one thing, robots are expensive to build. For another, while it's possible to make robots do tasks like that, there's a good chance they'll be less efficient at them than humans. And of course, if you're profit driven, given the choice between paying foreign sweatshop workers starvation wages on a high margin product and blowing billions on a risky R&D project that has a 50% chance of not working and a 50% chance of being copied by all your competitors if it does (assuming you develop something that's actually cheaper than cheap wage slave labor, which is far from a given) is pretty obvious...

that said, if you can actually build an iPhone factory that doesn't need workers, I'm believe there are many big companies willing to pay you a small fortune for that.

Well yeah, it's not easy right now, because we are doing precisely what you are saying, basically short term optimization.

Not saying that hasn't served us well for a long time, but I think there are improvements we could make in our society.

>> I'm really skeptical that it's easy to automate those assembly line jobs away

I think most people here on HN does not see this because they tend to do software related work, but this is happening faster that you may think.

When I last time spoke with middle level manager of building company that specializes in constructing factories in Central Europe he said that change over last 20 years is almost magical - factory built at the start of millenium required hundreds people to operate. Projects finished two decades laters can easily operate with 20 people or less.

And this is East/Central Europe - probably least automated part of developed world.

If you look at Japan you can see things such as fully automated ps 4/5 production lines ( https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/PlayStation-s-sec... )

So "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need"?

I hate to tell you this, but you've very much missed your target of "not something that's already been talked about for 200 years."

Who does the selecting? Who says, "You, there! You shall devote your time to programming robots, so your neighbors can 'be good friends' and have meaningful relationships. Buck up, comrade. Look how good it will be for everyone (...else)!"?

I'll admit this isn't fully fleshed out. I've yet to design the gulags.

But the core of it is a change of focus away from "everyone must contribute as much as they can" which the lefties also support. It's more the recognition that actually we could (maybe!) get more done if we didn't insist on everyone doing something.

What you're trying to create needs to deal with this now simple fact:

Creation of a thing costs a lot of time and resource.

Copying said thing is trivial to the point of free.

(This is the biggest difference between our current culture, and previous years. Copying is effectively free.)

This is only true in IP heavy areas, isn't it? You still need effort to pull ore out of a mountain.

Abolish IP and treat ideas the same way bacteria swap their plasmids.

Doing that means you used to get the medieval and renaissance guild systems.

However, we already have countries that ignore copyright/patent/trademark (China). The new solution is to remove features from devices, and to tie them into some cloudshit.

We get some dog-and-pony show that cloud means we get new features, but in reality, it's just an anti-cloning tactic.

See also: "in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8116796-for-as-soon-as-the-...

Also,

> To make things worse, there actually is a class of people who have no job at all, which creates a kind of fear among the hangers-on.

Is a rephrasing of Marx's idea of the reserve army of labor. They are the lumpen who _could_ be used as replacements but mostly aren't.

I do mostly agree with GP's main point. The skill floor for meaningful work—even before this recent round of AI hullabaloo—has increased to the point where there are many people unemployable at any wage.

> I mean that in general it appears to me that almost everything is produced by a very small number of people. We're no longer living in a world where you need 9 people to feed 10 people.

This is only true for complex positions, where it's almost impossible for management to suss out individual employee's impact. Vast majority of jobs are not like that - they're driving trucks, stocking shelves, processing paperwork in some government job, driving farm equipment, assemblying smartphones, selling retail financial products etc.

Capitalism in theory doesn't support jobs that produce no value. Shareholders would have demanded that waste be optimized out of the company.

And yet everyone can think of someone who has been handsomely paid for producing no value.

The theory is wrong, basically, if that's what it says.

Just because you don’t see the value doesn’t mean there is none.

Granted bad deals get made from time to time.

No, those bad deals are likely at least 50%, maybe even 80%.

I've seen way too many PMs and middle managers twiddling their thumbs and just inventing tasks and reports just so they are busy and are not fired.

How do I know? We had some of them go to a conference once; they were all gone for two weeks.

Work was going faster and smoother.

And that's not a single anecdote, it's supported by many other programmers.

Truth is, nepotism and "we've been buddies at the uni" is happening much more than you are willing to admit.

Yes, the correct observation is that no economic system operates at optimum across every vector.

> Just because you don’t see the value doesn’t mean there is none.

Sometimes it is absolutely true, which is most often seen in nepotism but also in categorically stupid people (re: Bonhoeffer).

That sounds like a lovely version of capitalism, but the one I've experienced is anything but optimized. There can be incentives to keeping around unproductive jobs, the size and stability of an org can often be used as a basic sign of health.

See: AT&T

In theory reality and theory are the same. In reality they are not. In my org there are a lot of pms who don’t do very much and somehow just happen to be friends and former room-mates of the org head.

I am sure shareholders are demanding that in many places but they are demanding it from the people who provide no value themselves and who are perfectly positioned to inflate their importance and perceived value-add.

That's like asking the corrupt politicians to uproot corruption. Obviously it will never work.

So the shareholders get bulshitted exactly by the people who are very likely superfluous.

This is actually a very well known problem in management,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_prob...

The shareholders are uninformed and disorganized. They might take their money out but that will take a long time. Meanwhile, management and the board control the flow of information and can take decisions together.

The concept of a voting shareholder is a myth. Most shares are owned/managed by funds so they are the true voters. They just vote to make sure the that the boat isn’t rocked too much.

Even in those cases, there are eventual beneficial owners which are indeed real natural persons.

The modern system favors executives as opposed to owners. The executive class has figured out how to extract a significant chuck from to owners share for their own coffers.

Those lovely market forces largely stop applying at corporation boundaries.

Besides, information is so wildly far from perfect in all spheres that we rarely see anything particularly close to the extremes of efficient behavior predicted by spherical-cow market fairy tales anyway, even when market forces are fully in-play.

You're describing https://www.thevenusproject.com/

Are you aware of that or you just came up with the same basic idea (a resource-based economy)?

Never heard of it, I'll check it out

Relax, socialism is fine.

That's why I am a fan of democracy, even in economic sphere (aka socialism or cooperatives). Giving everybody the same single vote (same power) about the organization (and making it into an unchangeable fact) removes lots of these incentives that prevent improving the organization. But lot of people are blindly accepting capitalism, because.. well it's incidentally also explained in the article, why.

Corporations from the perspective of most employees are communists dictatorships.

Think about it: you use a communal means of production, distribute profits centrally, and you don’t get to vote for who gets to be your manager.

I guess misconceptions like these are why theorists abandoned the term 'communism' in favor of 'communalism' to explain what they meant.

This isn't even a no-true-scotsman argument, but if all that comes to mind when communism comes up is Soviet dictatorship, the cold war propaganda worked.

What should come to mind when communism comes up then?

Something along the lines of: A socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need.

I guess the point of the poster above is that the word communism just confuses things in the initial statement — it’s just a dictatorship. Socialists and communists fairly uniquely believe in workplace democracy.

A rule of thumb that makes sense to me is that communism generally differs from socialism in that it advocates one or more of the following:

- People actually living and working in communes.

- Abolition of private property (note: this is not the same as personal property).

- Extreme redistribution and/or equality in wealth/income.

I'm sure that this isn't a perfect heuristic; however, I think it's often useful for detecting when someone is trying to describe something as communism in order to make it look bad.

Just read your sibling comment, talking about gulags or it is not communism...

For what it's worth, I understood the parent post to specifically be referring to instances like Stalinism, Maoism, etc. since it says specifically "communist dictatorship".

I suspect there was a sneaky edit between the time of my reply and the time you read it.

Communism builds walls to prevent you from leaving and put you in labor camps if you refuse to do the work assigned to you. So they are not very comparable at all, consent makes a huge difference.

Leaving is often quite difficult because it means losing benefits and there are often not better alternatives.

Playing devils advocate here - how this is inherent to communism? I would rather guess that this is emerged behaviour of any human system that is facing collapse and has no preventions build in.

I could probably find a few not so great capitalistic systems results (even American flavoured ones) that had tendencies dangerously close to those you describe (ever heard about company stores ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store).

Walls like health insurance and references?

It's interesting then how cooperatives aren't more popular or more successful. You'd think that if they were significantly more efficient than the typical dictatorship companies then they'd outcompete them, but as far as I'm aware that doesn't happen.

It’s harder to get finance as a co-operative, so it’s hardly a fair competition.

Also, in most studies, co-ops and employee ownership models do actually end up being more profitable and sustainable in the long term [0, 1].

[0] Page 23+ in this UK government review on employee ownership: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

[1] ONS report showing the rate of survival of cooperatives in the UK after five years was 80 percent compared with only 41 percent for all other enterprises https://www.uk.coop/sites/default/files/2020-10/co-operative...

Skimmed the first report and it seems like employee-owned companies perform better up until around 75 employees, after which there's no benefit? That would explain why they aren't outcompeting the larger companies - their advantage disappears when they grow.

I’d wager that’s more to do with raising finance than organisational productivity, but I’m not aware of any actual research on something of that scale or even how to accurately study those effects without it turning into more of a qualitative theory.

Still, it’s quite an interesting possibility worth pursuing in my opinion. (Full disclosure, I work for a small nominally employee-owned company, and have mixed thoughts about how it works in practice).

I think there's often an issue of how you measure success. Co-ops seem to have much lower tendency to try and take over the world than corporations inevitably seem to display at scale - quite content to return comfortable salaries year-after-year to their employee-owners, rather than reap profits at all costs.

As a concrete example, Mondragon has been operating very successfully for ~70 years, but barely anyone from outside the region registers its existence.

Right, and if this was the enforced model there would be a lot better spread of risk and a lot more competition. But it's Socialism!!!!

Instead we are almost down to one or two grocery chains and the government is left with the impossible task of regulating the consolidation to mitigate risk and screwed prices.

The good managers very much reminds me of this skit https://youtu.be/DYvhC_RdIwQ?si=Ex-kiOcrnA3PVsgI

The other answer is risk: large, poorly reversible changes can go wrong and there will be blame. Even if there is golden parachute, within the respective social group that matters - and to regulators where applicable.

Well, thicker skin is one option. I have no problem admitting fault when I thought I can help but ended up harming something. However, that also happened extremely rarely.

People are just way too risk-averse. Though I get why the useless managers are like that, they don't want anything shining a light on their team more than absolutely necessary because they know they could be the first ones on the chopping block should an objective analysis ever take place.

Someone just managing a team isn't really in any way "management". Usually would have very limited power for anything as a team leader. Lower than divisional leadership is often much more administrative than anything of "executive" function.

And, btw., things like delayering are fairly typical efficiency drives. So these "management" positions might not be that stable to start with.

What you say is true but doesn't help the working programmers, sadly.

I have once exclaimed to one team lead / project lead during a call with 20+ other programmers: "Why are we even talking to you if you can't make any difference? I want to talk to somebody who will understand our problems and try to help".

Longest awkward silence ever. Needless to say, I left shortly after.

What you are describing is also known as “The Peter Principle” which holds that everyone will eventually be promoted to their level of incompetence. Smart companies know this and make sure it doesn’t cripple their business.

If they were so smart they would cut some cruft. Or most of it.

Centuries? Try hundreds of thousands of years. We've been social and hierarchical creatures since back when we were great apes.

At this point, I am mostly preferring what the great apes of our age have in terms of a social structure... At least there is some merit there, not just who screams the loudest and packs the hardest punch.

I’m curious now which article you’re referring to at the end of your comment. I know “Bullshit Jobs” only from the book by David Graeber, which is definitely worth a read for anyone interested in the topic.

> I keep remembering this old article -- "Bullshit Jobs" -- and yep, it still rings true to this day, and will likely do so for decades more, likely centuries even because our societal changes are slower than glaciers...

That idea is fake, Graeber is a moron, and it's rude to look at other people's work and conclude that it's useless just because you don't personally watch them all day.

Didn't Graeber speak with people who self-reported their jobs being "bullshit"? Doesn't really sound like:

> look at other people's work and conclude that it's useless just because you don't personally watch them all day.

Those people were harmlessly bullshitting (or maybe demonstrating the concept of revealed preferences), but you're still doing it when you take them too seriously and proclaim it's a society wide trend.

(Not you personally I mean.)

I dunno man, a manager taking home $500K a year when all they ever did was draw charts that NOBODY looked at (not even the CEO or the CFO, not once, I asked them; and not any of the other managers too) and just to ask us every now and then how are things going, seems quite opposite to harmless bullshitting.

That guy could have been fired and we would have just elected one of us to keep track of several tickets once a week and we'd have been better off.

People get assigned to high-paid bullshit jobs all the time, and most of them are aware of it and do their best to hold on to them. Nothing really complex, it's all perverse incentives all the way down.

There must be bubbles at play. Like some folks just don’t closely know enough people in enough parts of the economy to see what the other bubble sees, so assumes they’re wrong or exaggerating just to have a laugh or something.

There are definitely bullshit jobs, and jobs that are mostly bullshit.

David Graeber, the author of Debt, is a moron?

I'm personally a big fan of his books, but I've read on various internet sources that some people will accuse him of not being academically rigorous enough. I honestly don't have enough expertise or energy to really judge.

I’ve yet to see a comprehensive critique of either Debt or Bullshit Jobs that was both damning taken at face value, and demonstrated good reading comprehension.

Just a run-of-the-mil humanities professor aka social activist.

Yes, that one's bad too.

But the main evidence for this is that he's an anarchist. Graeber is not around to defend this position seeing as he's not alive, but anarchists are all very happy to talk about their philosophy, they will answer any question you give them, and their answers instantly disprove it and show they shouldn't be trusted to implement any of it. Like if you ask where insulin comes from they'll just say doctors will make it in their backyards as a hobby.

Recent example of this is Seattle's CHAZ where the police went away for a few weeks, they posted some anarchist guards, and they instantly shot and killed a black teenager because they thought he was a criminal.

That's a pretty big caricature of anarchists. I'd expect an anarchist to say something to the effect of businesses creating insulin if there's enough market demand for it.

You seem to assume that businesses, markets, and innovation are tied to governments and couldn't exist without the powerful hand of authority making them exist. Governments can help all of these things, but they can also hurt them, and government absolutely didn't invent any of them.

The Chop wasn't any real attempt at anarchy. It was a protest that took a weird turn and a city that let it happen. There was absolutely no plan or expectation that it'd be anything other than a stunt trying to make a point. You don't cut off a handful of blocks in a landlocked and largely residential area and call it a government free zone while being completely dependent on the government-controlled area around you.

> That's a pretty big caricature of anarchists. I'd expect an anarchist to say something to the effect of businesses creating insulin if there's enough market demand for it.

You'd expect anarchists to support a business? Not left-anarchists, and I don't think I've ever met a "centrist anarchist". Ancaps maybe, but they're kind of bad for other obvious reasons.

Anyway, it is not, their answer is literally to shrug and say "people will do it".

https://twitter.com/doikaytnik/status/1680004065366011904

Sometimes they say "people will network" or "we'll rob a CVS".

https://twitter.com/RndmStreetMedic/status/16801584027673804...

Either way, nobody has realized that supply chains exist. When they say "people", they don't mean businesses, because they don't believe in management or capital assets.

> The Chop wasn't any real attempt at anarchy. It was a protest that took a weird turn and a city that let it happen.

But that makes it even worse that their murder rate was so much worse than the rest of the country!

Of course, that's not the usual problem with an anarchist collective. The usual problem is what happens when the more charismatic members sexually assault the less charismatic members. (Hint: they get ejected for trying to go to the police and it gets covered up.)

https://libcom.org/article/silent-no-longer-confronting-sexu...

Sad to see you downvoted here because I completely agree. Graeber's book is among if not the worst I've ever read. It saddens me that people here take the idea seriously.

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