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Comment by Justsignedup | Hacker News Reader

Lol, if I wasn't given a raise, I'd agree to everything, and at the start of my presentation say

"hi everyone, I wanted to walk you how we got to a half-a-million dollar savings, basically I spent a day looking at how terrible the original infrastructure was deployed and removed a code test feature that was causing the problems. This was just complete oversight from every aspect of the development, management, testing, and everything. Overall this code is as bad as it can possibly get, and we just launched it. And basically I was told not to say any of this because it makes everyone look bad, so I was to roll this out gradually to make it seem like managers were doing some sort of work."

Then drop the mic and walk off stage.

Honestly the amount of give-a-fucks I would have lost would have been a lot. And this is coming from someone who's done this for almost 2 decades and cares about his job because bills to pay, kids to feed.

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Back in the day I worked at a company that if you came up with some long term cost saving measure, they gave you a bonus of 10% net savings for the first year.

A co-worker in the early 90s (he was a tech writer) told me of a cost savings device he invented in the 80s at Texas Instruments to fix a process where occasionally a mirror on a very expensive piece of military camera gear got scratched (I think it was during field disassembly). It was basically some forceps with more metal welded on to make them longer and that allowed you access via a different route than where the mirror was installed. TI gave cost savings awards as a percentage of money saved and he did very, very well with that little invention.

That's a nice incentive.

Also an incentive to sandbag: ship a costly feature, then next quarter ship the savings.

Cloud services could make this really easy to game nowadays

They sure don't do that anymore... At least not at any of the Dallas factories. Even patents reap little money. You practically sell your soul when you join the company and all your ideas are theirs.

This was in Dallas, I believe. But this was in the 80s before the Peace Dividend when there was a lot of defense money sloshing around. I met him in Chicago in the 90s and he, and a lot of TI folks, had left Texas as the defense related work dried up. The team I was on in Chicago was working on the flight data recorder for the F-22 which still had funding.

Oh... I believe it.. Times have changed though. They cut back on travel, corporate crédit cards, etc. We would have no less than 2 cost marathons per year of all day meetings.

Sounds like standard operating procedures these days.

I would say blanketed bonuses are a bad idea, or I'd make some partnership deals with other engineers. However, this was a pretty clear cut "give this man a medal" situation, in a clearly toxic company. This is why my reaction is what it is.

There was an old thedailywtf post about how a company thought they'd incentivize fidning and fixing bugs. Suddenly every engineer had a QA buddy, and they'd make like 50 spelling errors, which QA will find, and enigneering will quickly resolve. They took down the bounty within a week.

> There was an old thedailywtf post about how a company thought they'd incentivize fidning and fixing bugs.

That might have been this Dilbert comic:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/bQOvF.png

There's a name for this anti-pattern, the Cobra Effect[0]:

The term cobra effect was coined by economist Horst Siebert based on an anecdotal occurrence in India during British rule. The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.

(There may be some question as to whether these events actually occurred or not, but there are similar examples of documented pest-control campaigns (and others) on the Wikipedia page[0] where similar things happened).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origina...

ah yes, thanks for that.

Yeah I've been looking into the cobra effect in the current youtube adblocking thingy... It certainly got me to use primarily adnausium which fixes the problem since ads are served, just... you know... maliciously clicked on.

I have seen higher splits than that. You have to remember this is bottom line cost output saving so the 500K if you look at it on the sales side is like completing a +/- $2M deal in terms of net margin added to the business.

I did save one company enough money to finance my salary for the year I worked there, just by removing dead servers provisioned but no longer used. Seems like my predecessors were blind to both cost and the past.

I felt bad for leaving so soon, but good for not having cost them a dime.

AWS architecting class years ago. Awesome instructor said if you want to save money, start deactivating servers. The ones people use... the admins will contact you right away. The others... people started up and forgot about.

Can work great, but watch the incentives. Don’t overoptimize a business process and later fix it with a 10% bonus.

that NEVER happens anymore. and I've only ever heard stories of it, no one I've ever spoken to has ever gotten anything like this.

when I have made large improvements like the article/blog describes, I am pulled off of that and put on something far worse, immediately, except without the autonomy. "why can't you succeed here?"

I worked for a large telco that operates very, very similarly to the company in the article.

About once a year or so one of the stand-out engineers that had the weight of the world on their shoulders would get burnt out and frustrated enough to do exactly what you suggest above.

Literally everyone would just look around awkwardly, leave the meeting and never talk about it again. All of middle management already know all of this, the only way they keep their jobs is by never talking about it, and just ignoring anyone that does. The VPs and President only know what those below them feed them.

While this feels good to imagine, the social fallout would be disastrous.

It really depends on your priorities and operating environment, but there are many people who would be leaving anyways if they save the company that much money and were given exactly zero reward, and at that point plenty of people would be happy to burn bridges on the way out. Like I said, it really depends on the environment and your priories.

Tech is a small circle. Unless it's something obviously wrong, you may want to be at least milder :)

The thing about burning bridges is you don't know when you'll need them.

Let's say 5 or 10 years later you're applying to a job where one of these upper-level people now work. How do you want them to remember you? The know-it-all who wasn't a team player and kind of an asshole? Or the engineer who gets things done and has demonstrably shown to land impact and value, an engineer the exec would consider lucky to have?

Some of you will say you wouldn't want to work for one of these executives again. But people change, incentives change, the environment changes. Have you ever made a technical decision you later regretted?

And maybe you don't work for them. Maybe you're applying to a different company where someone knows these previous upper-level management folks and they ask about you. How do you want that recommendation to come across? "That engineer was an asshole.", "That engineer was amazing, I wish we could have kept them. We made a big mistake by not trying to keep them.".

You are -mostly- right but there is also the factor where a specific sort of negative reaction can actually function as a recommendation later.

I've definitely missed out on work sometimes due to having a reputation for being about as subtle as a brick to the face with no lemon, but I've also -got- certain pieces of work as a direct result of being criticised and somebody who heard the criticism thinking "if he annoyed that person that way, he's probably serious about doing the right thing."

I would, however, suggest that probably I would've done better overall if I'd toned it down a bit.

Would it? I mean, the people you're throwing under the bus would hate you, but the top of the company should love because a) you saved them a ton of money, and b) you identified a pile of incompetence in their company.

And who's going to fire you for this?

The people telling you to roll this out slowly are doing so mostly to protect themselves from having their incompetence exposed and to appear useful. Protecting them will help them steal your credit and will get them promoted.

It would, I replied to someone else below to explain why. But in general, it's best for your future career to be remembered well.

That sounds like a very nice and theatrical outcome, but in reality nobody wants to believe they've been horribly wrong about their understanding of things, which means the higher-ups are going to be talking directly to the managers to get their side and figure out how they can show you've misrepresented the situation. They're not going to fire managers en masse because the new guy said "Everyone here is dumb and cowardly," even with evidence.

this assumes that the "top of the company" is a shining tower of competence, blissfully unaware of how incompetent the people below them are.

more likely, the top of the company is just as incompetent but has lucked / gamed their way into promotions anyways.

So this engineer throwing his managers under the bus may be good for the company in theory, but to the senior management this is a red flag. they don't want engineers who do this - they want engineers who give credit to their managers. if they promoted this engineer and fired everyone else, he'd come for them next.

I would assume that the top of the company cares about money, that saving money is a good thing, and that hiring incompetent people is a bad thing.

Of course if everybody quietly agrees that this company is a suitable vehicle for their incompetence, then it's a bad idea to address this. And some companies definitely are.

This is a deep misunderstanding of human psychology.

> the top of the company should love because a) you saved them a ton of money

The top of the company is probably already rich. Being richer is great, but one of the few things rich people generally won't burn to run the money-making engine hotter is their own sense of prestige and entitlement.

> b) you identified a pile of incompetence in their company.

Yes, and you told that fact to people who were already responsible for identifying that, which means you just told them that they are incompetent too. And that transitively works its way all the way up the org chart.

You would make the whole chain of command lose face and do so in front of the rest of the chain of command. It would be career suicide.

Every manager would rather silently waste money than be made to look like a fool. Because the money comes out of the business's bank account, not theirs, but looking stupid affects their personal reputation.

As the common quotation goes, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Your fantasy resonates. Sometimes I really wish I had F.U.-level savings.

I'd consider that if I already have a job offer from another company starting next week. Otherwise it is self destruction.

"Got management material written all over him"

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