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Comment by adrianmsmith | Hacker News Reader

> One of the primary metrics for leadership success at Google is how many people you have under you.

Yeah this is definitely one of those things that sounds good on paper but has unintended "consequences" shall we say.

I worked for one company about a decade ago where the task was to redesign the corporate homepage. The "about us" pages on the homepage, not the actual product the company was selling. These pages got a few hundred hits a month. The decision was made to create two sub-teams, one would create a custom CMS, the other would "render" the data entered into the CMS to the website visitors. So that was about 10-20 people in total. The project took over a year. All completely unnecessary.

I didn't understand why this was happening. Who gained from this? I couldn't figure it out. I supposed it was just a lack of controls on how long things took, and this was the result, but that didn't really feel right to me. It felt like someone had to really gain from this, but I couldn't work it out.

Anyway, during my leaving drinks, after a few pints, my boss told me "yeah I think I'm going to get promoted, the other managers who are applying for this job manage far fewer people so I think I'm well positioned to get it".

The penny dropped. The purpose of this project was to occupy people, so that more people could get hired, so his headcount increased, so he could get a promotion, and a payrise.

View on HN

Google has Search and Ads, which generate vastly more money than they need to operate. Google Search is one of the Great Inventions in human history, so I think the money is well deserved.

But this creates an environment where the natural empire building among managers isn't tempered by the need for their units to produce revenue covering their costs. So the organization tends to grow to where it consumes all the billions raining from the sky.

Disclaimer: Just a loose thought from a cynical ex Googler.

Google could give it to schools with no heat or AC and outdated textbooks. Or help solve homelessness. Or fund fixing the country's bridges. "Sorry we really don't have the funds for more heads or ridiculous raises we're busy not being evil."

Google is a public company. The money either goes to shareholders or to employing people. There is no conceivable world in which this money would have gone to any of those causes.

There's a conceivable world where we restructure incentives around our current form of capitalism and tax codes to encourage extra money going into humanitarian causes, instead of being spent on arbitrary capital maneuvers like stock buybacks.

Conceivable, but we probably won't get there anytime soon.

It’s very simple, that’s what the government should fund. That’s what our tax should pay for. If you really want to manifesto, then just read about land value taxes, don’t tax anything except what we want to disincentivize and land, which doesn’t distort the market. But this is entirely off-topic for this thread.

It sounds to me like you're explaining Tax Deductions through Charity which is already a thing.

I know that you probably meant to express that Google is the opposite to a public (= governmental) entity, but "private company" is not the term to express that. Google is a public company (= listed on the stock market for anyone to buy and sell), so the opposite of a private(ly owned) company.

Probably mixed up private entity and public company. Fixed.

For-profit companies do philanthropy all the time. There is no requirement to divert money to shareholders (further, Google's not payingany dividends right now)

Google does stock buybacks instead. The last yearly buyback authorisation was for $70b, so the "yield" is around 4-5%. It's very much in the blue-chip, return-cash-to-investors phase of its corporate life.

Well there's certainly a conceivable one, and it's one probably many would agree would be much nicer one to live in. But accepted, not a realistic one any time soon.

No conceivable world you say?

That is indeed what I say

Google has a large charitable arm called google.org, but your point is mostly correct, although the money they pay to employees (and to the government in the form of payroll taxes) isn't being destroyed. It's just cycling around the economy, and many employees donate decent amounts of their paychecks to charity (Google does 1:1 matching and encourages this)

CEO would get outsed if the shareholders feel he’s not acting in the best interest to make returns.

Capitalism is a best that needs insatiable ever growing revenue and profits.

Vote-holding shareholders in a two-class share company, ie, Schmidt, Brin, or Page. Pichai just has to avoid annoying Sergey and Larry, really.

That's not true. Google makes money for stockholders, and they do whatever they want with that money. Some of them also certainly give money to charity, etc.

I don't know if we prefer a world in which Google itself made these kinds of contributions and not the people who own Google.

> Or help solve homelessness

Google has tried building housing in Mountain View, but they can't permits easier than anyone else.

Too bad that's the only spot in the world

If only Google had an arm of the company dedicated to convincing politicians to do things it wants to see done legislatively.

There are 500k homeless people in the US alone [0]. Let's compare that to Google's net income (money gained after all expenses including taxes, etc.) for a quarter (quarter is 3 months with $70m on a good quarter and $30m on a bad one [1]). If we were to give every cent of Google's earnings to each homeless person in the USA then each homeless person could get a $46 pay check ((net_income_per_quarter / homeless_population) / 3 [2]) per month from Google on a good quarter and a $20 paycheck per month on a bad quarter [3]. But, you have to ask yourself what this sort of wild and crazy idea would cost to Google's bottom line. I'm no expert on that, but I assume it would not be good. This is just some simple back of the napkin math, but it shows how simply infeasible solving homelessness or poverty is even for a company as big as Google. This is why I usually believe solving homelessness can not be achieved by money alone, and just the scale of the problem makes it so intractable.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...

[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/financials

[2]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2870000000+%2F+500000%...

[3]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2830000000+%2F+500000%...

Homelessness is mainly caused by the physical reality of there being too few homes for the number of people.

The good way to change that is to add more housing (let's ignore the option of removing people).

Giving homeless people money doesn't end the physical reality at all. It can make some homeless people able to afford housing, but an equal number of housed people will replace them as homeless.

I might be misunderstanding what you are saying, but if there are less than 600k homeless people in America and over 15 million vacant homes, it doesn't seem to be "caused by the physical reality of there being too few homes for the number of people".

That 15m number may be true, but it doesn't mean what it seems.

It's mostly homes that are between occupants. A tenant or owner moves out, and it takes a few weeks or months for someone new to move in.

It's also homes in depopulated town where there are not enough jobs anymore.

Neither is a practical source of housing for the homeless in SF.

>It's mostly homes that are between occupants.

Citation strongly needed.

>It's also homes in depopulated town where there are not enough jobs anymore.

I'm not sure I need to explain what happens when people move to a depopulated area?

Google’s quarterly net income is in the $10 to $20Bn range. Take another whack at that math?

Okay I was wrong about that I was also wrong about the quarterly part the numbers were not per quarter but per year. Again back of the napkin and I’m glad to have people point out the flaws in my argument.

The yahoo link you reference in [1] notes “All numbers in thousands”

I think you might be off by 3 orders of magnitude and google could “afford” to pay every homeless person a thousand times more than you’re suggesting.

I further think that undermines your argument about the problem being fundamentally intractable due to the scale.

That is true it says all numbers in thousands also I noticed I accidentally was on years and not quarters. So 11k a month for example is the new number for a good year [1] and 5k a month is the example for a bad year [2]. So yes now it seems more tractable than it was before, but my argument was just supposed to show one reason why it was intractable there could be many other reasons, though my argument fell flat for that one reason there are still many other reasons it could be intractable.

So the question still remains is it tractable? The answer given my above argument is still up in the air, because the honest truth is there are many underlying assumptions in my argument so again it doesn’t really say much about it being tractable. It was only trying to say it was intractable which again it fell short of doing. For example in the per month. After Google dumps all or even some of their profit into that for even one month it is somehow going to still reach the same profit margins the next month the proof for that is up to someone trying to prove it’s tractable. There are too many other variables like this that exist and it really needs a much bigger burden to show that something like that is tractable.

[1]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2870+billion+%2F+12%29... [2]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2830+billion+%2F+12%29...

> Google Search is one of the Great Inventions in human history

I don't know about that...

Compared to the alternatives at the time (and really now) it absolutely is. Without decent search the web is a mess, it's just mountains of information with no logic or organisation and the best content and information is nothing if you can't locate it.

These days their search is starting to turn. Too many sponsored results, no way to avoid the AI takeover or copycat sites. In short the search doesn't actually find you the best results. But still it's hard to avoid it. There's no better way to find what you are looking for wherever it is on the web.

People too young to know life before Google can probably not comprehend how deeply uninformed we were before Larry & Sergey made knowledge searchable.

I feel about the same amount of uninformed as I was pre- Google, maybe more so being that there are now whole categories of information that I know are pointless trying to memorise.

What's really changed for me is that now we don't have conversations that peter out because nobody has access to basic facts, i.e. whose population is greater, France or Germany. Now we just look it up, end the argument and move on.

Of course this was possible with other search engines. Google's utility comes conflated with the rise of the smart phone and mobile internet, all of which happened around the same time. Everybody having access to the answer to every question in their pocket is the real game changer.

We who remember altavista and having to ask librarians for information do know.

Google search specifically transformed society in a way comparable with railroads. Impossible became easy. Days of planning turned into minutes or seconds of googling. It really changed the world.

> We who remember altavista and having to ask librarians for information do know.

I do, and this is a wild exaggeration. Altavista was excellent, and there were always databases online to look up books. Google was far better than Altavista for a short time because of Pagerank, and after Pagerank was gamed was only better than the alternatives because the alternatives had shut down their crawlers.

I miss Altavista. It would be nice to be able to grep the web for things that I want to find, rather than to beg search engines to suggest something for me that they claim their research shows that I might like, but is probably just profitable for them.

> Google was far better than Altavista for a short time because of Pagerank

Well yes. That was one of the Great Inventions in Human History.

(Obviously not just page rank but also everything else that made it a working product, but that was the key innovation.)

Compared to the invention of the Internet and/or the WWW, I'm of the opinion that calling Google (the search engine) or PageRank (the algorithm) one of the Great Inventions in Human History (and capitalizing it) is too far-fetched. The first is an indexer for the former, and the latter is not so different from eigenvector centrality, with the added spice of directed random walks.

I do believe that the Internet/WWW is one of our greatest inventions, though, so this is just nit-picking. :)

"the latter is not so different from eigenvector centrality, with the added spice of directed random walk" - I think the parent's point was the impact not that the algorithm itself is unprecedented. You could argue in the same way that the wheel is just a solid symmetric disk connected to a hub in the center that helps vehicles move around on a sufficiently even surface. Note that I don't imply that PageRank is as significant an invention as the wheel.

WWW was a simple layer over HTTP, inspired by many other existing hyper text systems.

Every great invention is just a simple addition to all the accumulated knowledge in human history up to that point.

the web did that not google

The web was a mess.

That hasn’t changed one bit. Google made it possible to find what you’re looking for. That was literally and figuratively revolutionary. This hasn’t changed either.

Altavista was around for quite a while, and I liked its engine better than Google’s for a long time. Also, Yahoo’s directory-style thing was pretty decent if you knew your way around a catalogued library.

Isn't that a good thing? It promotes creating jobs and sharing some of the wealth

No? the purpose of a job is to create value.

Eh. The purpose of a job is to do the job.

Creating value feels more like the purpose of the business. Google is creating value, and I dont see the problem with them creating a bunch of easy jobs for people as a means of distributing that value

It's worse for everyone else (plus it's mentally terrible for the soulless drones taking paychecks). If Google didn't waste money they could offer more value to society.

It's like the government redistributing your money to bullshit initiatives

Are you saying Google is currently trying to offer more value to society and they can't find the funds?

My core stance probably comes down to: I don't see how putting money into payroll can be considered a waste to society. It's distributing money directly into the bank accounts of the working class.

They are in a position to provide value to society. They have as large a team of vetted professionals as they can. A bit cliche, but the horse has been lead to water

the opportunity cost of these people's entire working lives? How is that not a waste to society? Its not like Google is stashing its funds under a matress unless it doles out extra payroll

Imagine what could be done with that infinite money if Google had a real incentive to build more useful things.

Would being tighter with their budgets and reducing headcount give them more incentive to build more useful things?

They built the useful thing already. It prints money. Let them house and feed a bunch of people as employees. Idk maybe I'm missing something

Calling Google Search one of history's great inventions is beyond delusional starting from the fact that Google didn't invent website indexing and searching if anything it had better algos and was less disrupted by the various waves of SEO spammers that killed the likes of Yahoo or Lycos or Altavista, etc.

Like in every organization, "what you measure is what you get".

Goodhart's Law

* unless it’s productivity

You can't measure productivity; only rough proxies for it.

You'll get the proxy that you measure but often not the actual productivity that you were hoping for.

Exactly - what would you measure for engineers? Lines of code, number of PRs, number of closed bugs, time to ship… everything can be gamed. For some of them you get tech debt, others just bring bloat that kind of looks like work but isn’t

I guess I have not worked at organizational scale, but it is unclear why managers can't have their own secret metrics that are flags for qualitative review.

Lines of code is a terrible public metric, but that does not mean you can't quietly monitor it, see outliers and then look at it qualitatively without ever mentioning the triggering metric is lines of code?

Managers can and should watch whatever metrics they can collect passively, and they should absolutely talk to their teams and assess productivity. But it’s not an organizational metric that can be measured without crushing the life out of the team.

An example is the folks that generate enormous lift by enabling others to produce better faster delivery in the code base. They work relentlessly but never change code. They’re the most valuable engineer you have, and are frankly in my experience what a 10x engineer must be. Are they unproductive? How do you measure their contribution?

The only answer is by watching them work and understanding the team dynamic and just letting them do what magic they do.

But this is actually hard work for managers and requires introspection and empathy most managers lack. Most managers are there to monitor widget production, promote people along the level guidance by the metrics, report status to their managers, and give delivery timelines based on all this. These managers strangle engineering by their attempts to measure.

I call this the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of software engineering.

this is not a problem if your managers are senior software people. they understand.

the problem is this ridiculous notion that a software manager shouldn't know anything at all about software. how long do you think a construction foreman would last if they new nothing about construction.

A truly great HN comment. An example of why it’s still worthwhile to be here.

I think I agree entirely with you. I am unclear why this is not the expectation. Using numerous measurable factors, that are a flag for holistic qualitative review.

"Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead."

Individual managers can do that, but it doesn't scale to an organization. Someone is going to spill the beans on what metrics you're looking at.

Managers generally are incentivized for their team to look good on whatever metrics the organization is watching, so they are going to push their team to work to the metric, possibly even to the point of telling what the secret metric is.

Outcomes.

And not for individual engineers, but whole teams.

> So that was about 10-20 people in total. The project took over a year. All completely unnecessary.

What are the bosses above your boss are doing if resources are allocated on useless projects ?

drinking Champagne while bathing in the blood of young virgins, mostly

I can only speculate.

But I think that beyond a certain level management probably doesn't have a clear idea of how long things should take. If they've worked in a company for 20 years, and have always been told that creating a corporate website requires a team of 20 people for 2 years, they'll just assume that's the way it is? I mean you may argue it is their job to know such things, and that might be right, but maybe they're just not competent and their managers aren't competent either?

Or maybe they don't really care as it's not their money?

Or maybe it really doesn't matter and there is higher-impact stuff for that level of manager to focus on? I mean if the company is making $100m a year and they can do something that will drive a 10% increase in that, would foregoing that activity to reduce spending on a website down from $1m be the right call?

> have always been told that creating a corporate website requires a team of 20 people for 2 years, they'll just assume that's the way it is.

I think the older and more experienced I get the more I realise that the suits giving overly large estimates are generally just correct. They're a lot better than the suits that want unrealistically short deadlines, at least!

In academia it's very easy to wander into a field adjacent, see a bunch of maths you feel like you ought to understand but don't, spend a bit of time trying to understand and failing, and then making the leap to thinking that everyone in the field is overcomplicating things and wasting their time. Often in actuality there are a bunch of subtleties to the problem you just don't see without spending time working through it.

It's clearly in principle possible to waste time doing unproductive reinventing, but when people set up complicated projects, you really gotta be sure you understand the self-professed reasons people felt like they had to do it that way before being at all convincing in arguing for another course of action. This will require patience and humility.

> What are the bosses above your boss are doing if resources are allocated on useless projects

You're very clever, young man, very clever. But it's bosses all the way up!

You jest, but once a company goes public, the hierarchy of bosses loops on itself - the company bosses answer to shareholders, many of whom answer to, or themselves are, regular people with regular jobs and regular bosses...

That's not a proper loop, because those the regular people who are shareholders don't answer to their work-bosses about any vote they might do as a shareholder.

(Of course, in practice regular people by and large don't vote their shares.)

I've in fact always been afraid to vote my shares against the recommendations of the board. What if someone finds out and takes it personally? I need the job much more than I need any potential upside of the shares I own, so even if all the proposals amount to "let the executives steal whatever isn't nailed down", I figure I'm better off going along with it or just throwing my proxy card away.

Because of the implication. Yes. It's always better in aggregate if people fight back, in order to prevent the inevitable slide towards power consolidation, but it really requires leadership because it's frequently good for the group but bad for the individual, and it's the first through the wall who gets bloodied.

Are you talking about shares of the company you work for, or shares of random companies you have stocks of?

For the former, if at all possible, you should sell those, and invest in the general market: your job already gives you plenty of excess exposure to the fortunes of your employer, and your career gives you excess exposure to the general industry you are in. No need to concentrate your effective investments even more. Diversify.

For the latter: don't bother picking stocks as an individual investor. Just go with a low cost index fund (and they can vote the shares for you).

I mean shares in the company I work for. I don't /want/ to be heavily invested in it, but I get grants in the form of RSUs periodically, and also we have an ESPP which is essentially free money in that I get to buy shares at a discount. I get a better tax deal if I keep them at least a year after I buy the shares/exercise the RSUs, (long-term capital gains vs short-term capital gains). I absolutely sell them as soon as they are considered long-term but in the meantime I'm a shareholder and I could vote those shares if I wanted to.

I'm not sure why I would care about what the board/management of some /other/ public company (that I don't work for) thinks about my vote. Almost certainly they won't think about it at all.

IIRC voting rules for the company I hold the most equity in are that a board-opposed measure does not pass unless more than half of all voting shares vote in favor. Which is a significantly different measure than half of all votes cast. (Essentially any unvoted shares vote with the board.) Imagine if we needed half of all eligible voters to vote for a new candidate before we could change the president. (U.S.A)

In the US regular voters can't change the president at all, I thought? Once they are in for the term, they are in for the term.

(There's an impeachment process. But that's not available for regular voters.)

Correct, but I'm trying to draw a parallel between regular, scheduled shareholder votes and regular, scheduled votes for elected officials. In the U.S we typically have around 60% of eligible voters participating in presidential elections. My analogy assumes that voting against the incumbent follows the same rules as voting against the board, in which case we would need something like 84% of cast votes to be for the challenger to avoid re-electing the incumbent. (Assuming I haven't gotten my math wrong.) I'll also go so far as to suggest voter participation is low in both cases but it isn't a very effective tool for changing policy. :-)

I regret that I have but one upvote to give.

Most of those bosses have zero technical knowledge, straight out of pure business school, probably the only software they used during their degree was Office or similar.

Then there are those from other backgrounds that somehow landed a position in management as well.

It is like politics, as long as the boat is going forward and not letting them do a bad figure in whatever evaluation meetings are taking place, all is fine.

Worse still, the bosses brought in from the outside who appear to have technical knowledge from their previous political victories at other employers. And they know someone at your company, thus they are “trusted”.

They are also working hard to grow their unit's headcount and budget.

It's turtles all the way up

Financial and HR management is more often than not decoupled from engineering management. So on one hand, yes, you need to allocate your resources to deliver important projects most of all. But also in good times it might be easier to justify your need for more resources to finance, and increase the total number of your subordinates. And don't forget that in the times of plenty public companies might be rewarded for increasing their headcount too.

It's much more lucrative to fake/fail upwards and try to suck the company dry. After all you're working to get paid. Making meaningful contributions to the society at large is at very best secondary.

Then comes the disruption, the catharsis, the big revenge, the complete destruction of old systems and arrival of techno-utopia where everything is done and done right and done correct, we're all told, or...the "young man" comment is quite apt here.

You work to get paid so that you can use the money to make the world a more pleasant place to live in. The pay is really the secondary thing once the scales fall from your eyes. This holds true at all levels of society.

"Sucking the company dry" is a really shortsighted way to optimize for your own best life. You're going to have a better life if you use your resources to actually accomplish something that contributes.

> After all you're working to get paid. Making meaningful contributions to the society at large is at very best secondary.

I think how true this is varies from person to person.

But it doesn't sound even good on paper, though!

People under you ~= cost of whatever it is you are providing. Equating that to some sort of "value" you create is an insane proposition; the only thing that communicates, at first glance, is that you/your division/what you work on is EXPENSIVE.

Under the rules of the tradition economy, yes.

In tech, however, any company is ~1 good (implemented) idea away from >100X ROI. From the top that looks like bringing in as many good people as possible in order to maximize your chances of one of them having that idea while on your clock.

Once a company is big enough it’s the multiple management layers that make that simple equation almost impossibly complicated.

If you have one leader with a team of two, and another with a team of forty, which one gets promoted to manage five teams with 2-40 people on each team?

Answer: the one that's most familiar to the person making the decision.

Ha - I love this!

Well, we are herd animals...

Wait until you hear about the incentives to use more computing resources

By and large the team doing the work are the technical experts

Nobody higher up really knows more

If you use more resources, then your project looks more impressive

This is a problem in many fields including academia. They need some way to judge work, but the only people qualified are your peers

I saw this happen at Google, too, but in a slightly different (and arguably better... maybe? ... way), where a senior manager (in the cases I saw, a director and an MD) promoted people in their org explicitly so they could become managers of people their own level, which is almost a prerequisite for promotion to more senior levels of management (MD, VP). It worked, too. Doesn't matter that none of the people they promoted to director & managing director are still in their roles, and only one is still at Google, those two people got theirs!

In terms of bad side effects of dumb systems, maybe this is not the worst in the world.

20 people got to keep their paychecks and the company retained them, which means the company held on to their capacity to do work, in case a new project came up.

It turns out they didn’t need that capacity, but we all pay a lot for insurance that we hopefully and typically don’t use.

Actually this has made me wonder what other apparently pathological management tendencies (from the engineer’s point of view) are just inefficiencies introduced via unused “insurance policies”/capacity maintenance/margin for error.

Of course, thinking critically about the error margins is one of the things that engineers are explicitly trained in, so it is somewhat surprising that we get upset about this sort of thing.

This is a really great point! The big tech companies are partly banks of human capital that can be deployed when an investment opportunity arises. Unlike money, the human capital actually cares about whether it's sitting idle or is efficiently deployed.

hardest part of managing groups of people at any scale is aligning incentives. Larger organizations have a harder time with it and the amount of money/power they have makes it a prime target for bad actors looking to exploit them for their own game

The fundamental issue for Google/tech in general is that their culture was designed to work for nerds with good intentions but now it has been taken over by the types of money chasing psychopaths who would have been working for Wall Street or McKinsey 30 years ago.

When you have a money printer like Search it attracts these types of people to try and skim some of the money in various ways by climbing the power structure. Politicians take over while the builders who create value are forced out. Culturally Google is pretty similar to corrupt 3rd world countries with oil money, lots of cash spent on leadership's vanity projects and in deep trouble if the cash cow gets disrupted

This problem is widespread in FAANG.

At the core, organizations want to align individual growth with organizational & business growth.

Because most of these companies run many businesses with wide varying nature of revenue impact, they've decided to use size of organization as a proxy for business impact. From my experience at Amazon, there's a process to acquire additional headcount where business leaders will assess your proposal and approve additional headcount.

However, most mid level managers now purely optimize for headcount with complete disregard for customer value or business impact. I think we're missing 2 things:

- Leaders who can discern whether some work requires X people or 2X people. The margins are not off by 10-20%, they are off by 200-500%.

- Feedback loops. I havent seen this talked about much in the tech circles yet. Once headcount is assigned, there's no further checks on whether original goals have been met. Leaders, managers & teams move on to find even more land to grab. If we had feedback loops around what that additional headcount has achieved, a lot of the empire building behavior could be curtailed.

This person asserts that headcount is a measure of success, but I suspect they are confused about headcount being a proxy for production volume, which would be a closer measure for success. Every healthy team has more work than they have people available, they all want more people because they wanted to get more work done.

Teams that would allow engineers to idle should be the exception and not the norm. I am not sure extrapolating the experience from such a team would produce an accurate image of a large company.

>Yeah this is definitely one of those things that sounds good on paper but has unintended "consequences" shall we say.

Definitely Goodhart's Law in action.

I wish I had ever worked for a company like that. Keeping people employed, and thus their families alive, is a worthwhile goal.

Instead, in my experience, it’s more based on ego and politics whether you or anyone else keeps their job.

> One of the primary metrics for leadership success at Google is how many people you have under you.

that's how bankers used to measure companies (some still do), a sad metric in a wrong place

The managerial class is the cancer of our time

Edit: I regret using the word cancer, but they are still bad

You call a person who brought work and salaries to 20 people for the whole year a cancer?

Would those 20 people have enough to do and feed their families if not for that man? If he did it differently, the shareholders would be a bit richer, those (or other 20) hard-working people without income, and their families would be starving. And your and my taxes would rise to support those people not to die homeless and hungry.

Do you still want to call that manager cancer, or you may reconsider and call him a hero he really is?

>You call a person who brought work and salaries to 20 people for the whole year a cancer?

The entrepreneur did that. Entrepreneurs create jobs. Managers just manage, and shuffle around value, they don't create it like entrepreneurs do.

I've worked with plenty of managers who are entrepreneurial within large companies. Every year we have to propose new ideas and then (when approved) go deliver on them. That's not "just manage, and shuffle around value"

I have also worked with those "just manage" managers too. But one shoe does not fit all

There are some good managers out there. The problem is that the system of most large companies isn't designed for entrepreneurial or innovative managers, both the culture and incentive system means those managers are always swimming up stream and risk burnout and even being punished for making waves.

Or, more likely, the entrepreneur is (perhaps negligently) allowing their managers to spend investors’ money. Only the profoundly lucky entrepreneurs generate enough positive cash flow to cover the more likely losing investments and help pad out ~15% profit to make the VC funds worth maintaining. The idea that businesses are inherently efficient is hysterical.

Or they might be doing something productive instead. Or at least not making some resource inefficient system.

It's not the person, it's the class and its position in society, its powers and its incentives.

I feel what they did was essentially break windows

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Or maybe those 20 people feel insecure about their abilities after 1 year fiddling thumbs and will have to fight a battle against themselves to get in a place where they use their skills better. You know, not all of us like the idea of doing nothing for years but getting paid for that

Banksy (I'm neither for nor against him) said something similar (or is said to have said something similar):

“The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”

All that is to say, it ain't only in tech! And I take this kind of waste – of vainglorious pursuits via manipulation of image-maintenance and resource-mongering for purposes of self-aggrandizing optics (rather than actual collective advancement and good) – is not unique to just advertising and tech, but is prevalent everywhere, throughout history, etc. And only rarely do we see managers & bosses & leaders & corporations & workers come together for actual good.

Phrased another way, these managers are getting our best and brightest and putting them in positions where they create and contribute nothing to the betterment of humanity.

Some of us want to contribute something to the world we live in, to make it a nicer place to be. I think it's great he's found a way to get all those people organized together; it's a shame he didn't give them something to do that created true value; it's waste. Not just waste of the company's money and time, but a waste of the labor of the individuals who could have done something great given real leadership.

To be fair, we don't know if the manager was using that headcount to do something impactful outside of the mandated work. Based on the story, however, it seems doubtful that the manager was thinking of anything other than their career trajectory.

Work and salaries ? Like from their own pocket ? No. That is the business money. Wasted. Time, attention, of peoples wasted.

That is the same absurd logic as for not to replace low qualified human physical work by machines (self checkout in supermarket).

Having less jobs due to technology or less stupid work should be seen as good for humanity.

Perhaps, instead, of imagining some stupid jobs and occupation, so peoples can be paid and survive. We coul reduce the total workhours of working people, so that senseful work would employ more peoples. And with no changes to the salary ofc.

I am not so good with english, so let me rephrase it. What would happen to humanity if 90 % went jobless because -let's imagine- robots and IA would efficientely replace us. Would 90 % be condemned to die in the cold when there is abondance ? Because they have no job and a 0.00001 % "owns" the robots ?

Our current system cannot work with abondance.

> Work and salaries ? Like from their own pocket ? No. That is the business money. Wasted. Time, attention, of peoples wasted.

It actually blows me away sometimes the willingness people w/i companies have to just spend money that isn't theirs.

It's not even the calculation of build vs buy, they'll spend exorbitant amounts of money for nothing in particular. It makes me understand the stereotypical budget constraints, because without them people would just waste money left and right.

Eventually, one comes to realize that everyone's spending money that isn't theirs. Including the CEO and the owners, who are spending the money invested by people who expect returns.

sure, but there's a lack of responsibility there that amazes me.

Depends on if you ever took outside money I guess :-)

The only organization that doesn't take outside money is the federal government, and they take the consent of the people to rule instead (quite a bit more valuable).

Oh that’s not true at all. Hudson River Trading, for instance, has never taken outside money and has no outside investors, yet makes billions in profit every year. There are likewise many fully private companies that have no investors, debt, or unaffiliated shareholders. Goldman Sachs was a partnership until the mid 1990’s. Etc.

Self-checkout is still low qualified human work. It's just done for free by the customers.

The cashier has three jobs:

- Prevent theft

- Keep track of what's specifically been sold, to help determine re-ordering schedules

- Sometimes, put things in bags. Some stores just ask the customer to do this even if they have a cashier.

The thing about physically moving products over a barcode scanner is only for those first two purposes. Mostly the first -- if theft weren't an issue, it would be cheaper to just do manual inventory more frequently.

The customer is not preventing theft. They (mostly) aren't stealing, but they also aren't deterring anyone from stealing. The lone employee for the eight self-checkout kiosks is doing that -- with the help of scales, cameras, and (these days) a little bit of AI.

Not free if you "miss" scanning a few items.

Not that I'm endorsing that of course. But if you're going to saddle me with work you don't want to pay people to do, without training and without compensation and I happen to make a mistake... well. Guess that was a bad move on your part.

The obvious benefit to the customer is that they are not stuck in a queue. If you have portable scanners for customers (eg, via an app), all items can already be scanned on the fly, speeding up things even more. Moreover, self-checkout registers take less space - roughly doubling the number of available registers. Which, again, increases throughput and reduces latency.

Less obvious benefits to the customer: you can have one employee oversee multiple registers, instead of only 1. So less employees needed, so prices can go down. Customers can more easily take distancing measures themselves, as long as there isn't a queue for self-checkout.

But sure, some asshat may forget or "forget" to scan something. That happens with regular registers as well, but is more likely to be caught. And if it isn't: lucky for the asshat, less so gor the other customers - they will end up paying for the store's losses.

> The obvious benefit to the customer is that they are not stuck in a queue. If you have portable scanners for customers (eg, via an app), all items can already be scanned on the fly, speeding up things even more.

I have never in my entire life used an arrangement like that. I've only used the ones where they have a computerized terminal with a scale and conveyor belt, basically a checkout with the computer turned backwards, along with a computer-illiterate person manning between 4 and 6 of those resolving all the dumb problems they have.

> increases throughput and reduces latency.

Until the stupid scale stops working and you need to wait for one employee manning six of the things to come over and tell the stupid computer that your stupid eggs are in fact on the stupid scale.

Like, I can't overemphasize how bad these can get. If you're using the scale as a theft-deterrent, it doesn't work. Never in my life has the register person actually looked at what I'm bagging to see if it's correct. They would probably catch it if I ring up a 52" OLED TV as 16 pounds of avocados, but like, if I ring up organic avocados as regular ones? They're never gonna see that, and even if they did I doubt most would even care enough to do something about it given the wage they're making.

If your argument is instead efficiency, the things brutalize that too because so many purchases in an average grocery store are going to cause problems, things like cigarettes need to be kept in cases, things like alcohol require ID verification (which I've also never ever been carded at a self checkout!), some medications do too, and their constant problems and glitches require an attendant to resolve, while adding to customer frustration in general. And I just don't even try to use coupons at them, that's a complete fucking nightmare.

If your argument is instead cost cutting, everything at my grocery store is more expensive than it was 3 years ago, and it's basically all self checkouts now minus the pharmacy counter. So that clearly didn't pan the fuck out. Either that or all the theft it's now trivial to do is eating into their margins, who's to say.

Like I genuinely am fine with these, when they're well maintained and work. The ones at Home Depot come to mind; they don't use the stupid scale at all, they have nice, big displays the attendants seem better trained than most, and they use wireless scanners which makes the whole process a whole lot less of a pain in the ass. But when they're put in by some cut-rate business barely making margins? God damn do they suck.

> I have never in my entire life used an arrangement like that.

It's become the norm around here: pick up a dedicated scanner at the entrance, scan while you go, at cash register, return scanner in a reader that extracts all necessary info. Newest gimmick is you don't need the store's dedicated scanner, but can use an app from your phone.

Bonus I didn't foresee: no more need to ask an employee "how much is this?" - just scan. This also shows you if your personal discount applies (if the store does personal discounts).

> Until the stupid scale stops working I think that's part of why they went with on-the-fly scanning. It's one thing to detect a postcard on an empty scale, quite another on a scale with a few 2L bottles of soda. Your example with eggs is also perfect: not that heavy, all but guaranteed to be last on the scale. Here, I think most stores switched from scales to doing random checks (where they scan 3-5 items).

Much the same as pushing shopping carts.

What will happen is that either the 0.01% will order the robots to kill the 99%, or the 99% will go out and kill the 0.01% and whoever else is near them.

Or we could reform our system so it can cope with abundance. It's perfectly well known how to do it, and it helps creating that abundance too. But the 0.01% seems completely decided to fight against this to their death, so I'm not holding my breath.

To add to the other replies, the issue isn’t the manager wasted some corporation or billionaires money.

The issue is that if the manager had grown the team in a way that grew revenues and value they manager could have created more than 20 roles in the entire organization. Sometimes the manager with 5 engineers and a strong vision can create enough value to hire hundreds or thousands of people throughout the company.

The manager who empire builds often creates negative value. So they create jobs for 20 people. But these jobs contribute nothing. Someone’s work in the org went to pay for those 20 jobs, and they got sucked into a black hole. Worse they require support, interact throughout the company, distract from real valuable work. In the end they contribute negative value, and the manager employed 20 people at the cost of 3 people’s jobs that could have been created but never were, their employment cost -23 people’s worth of value and contributed zero.

Now in many organizations this leads to a promotion because they seem important for having so many employees. They create a role model for other less effective leaders. As they hire managers to work for them, they hire those that add people as fast as possible regardless of value production. Now they’ve created 200 jobs, at a cost of 30. But their emergent doppelgängers have formed 10 of them with 20 people, contributing -30 jobs as well. Now there are 400 created jobs, but -60 net jobs.

Eventually the company is overrun with empire builders. It’s a big company. There are a few highly profitable cash cow teams that are extremely competitive to get into and are largely left alone. The profits though of the entire enterprise are flat and inline with peers of similar size. Headcount makes the comping look like a giant of industry. But it’s half the size it could be if there had been focus on creating new and better value.

In my experience this is why Amazon employs nearly 2 million people and is hyperbolic in its growth over such a long time. While empire building certainly exists there is a lot of process to control for it. Hiring (generally) is well metered, and leaders (sometimes) are rewarded for their dynamism in business growth (not always, YMMV). It adds new businesses constantly and a lot (not all!) businesses do pretty well and if they don’t get shut down and people reassigned.

Google, well, listen. It’s got great benefits and the managers have some impressive empires with high salaries and a stable of smart people to tally up for their biography. But there are only a few successful businesses and god bless you if you can name one that’s launched in the last 10 years. But it is killing them.

Many companies don’t have the luxury of a wildly profitable cash cow like Google. They get overrun and whither away, sometimes really fast.

That’s how it’s like cancer. Not literal cancer, and cancer is a horrible disease not to make light of, but empire building represses job growth over the long term in exchange for rapid short term growth that ultimately kills the host entirely.

I don't disagree with most of what you've written, but to set the record straight:

> In my experience this is why Amazon employs nearly 2 million people and is hyperbolic in its growth over such a long time.

Amazon employs millions of people to staff their warehouses, not to write software.

From their 2021 report, of their 1.1 million employees, 760 thousand were "laborers & helpers". That doesn't even count the managers for those hundreds of thousands of employees (probably a good chunk of the 62 thousand "first/mid officials & mgrs"), customer service, etc. (Or temps / contractors, if that's fueling the "2 million" figure you cited -- their latest earnings report indicated they had 1.5 million employees.)

https://assets.aboutamazon.com/ff/dc/30bf8e3d41c7b250651f337...

Actually not true - it’s mostly grocery store employees. But that’s my point entirely - not that Amazon would employ 2mm software engineers but that Amazon created enough value that it could scale to millions of employees each of whom are marginally contributing. A person stocking shelves or packaging boxes is a person with a job that creates value. The software engineers being deployed smartly created enough value in a virtuous cycle to allow Amazon to productively employ millions of people.

(And yes my 2mm is net of non full time employees while the I9 population is 1.5mm)

If as a book seller they had built empires they would be struggling against Barnes and noble still.

> Actually not true - it’s mostly grocery store employees.

I would not have guessed that -- Whole Foods's website indicates 105k+ employees. Am I missing a whole other order of magnitude?

https://media.wholefoodsmarket.com/about/

Management has entered the chat.

Nah, they grow and spread until they consume all the resources. It's a very good analogy.

Unfortunately, I've seen an alternative that isn't much better.

Google has separate management and SWE tracks, but tries to promote SWEs to management. It's pretty disastrous: people who fundamentally just want to be writing code burn their day on performance reviews and people issues (resolving a database latency issue is not nearly as fun as figuring out who's going to resolve it because the database guy's mom just died, and he'll be out... Shit, we don't know, his mom just died, it's on a spectrum of "he'll be back in a week" to "he'll be changing careers," it's not up to the manager).

The end result is that people who want to do good work are managed by people who are ill-trained and ill-temperamented to enable them to do good work, and it can make for a pretty miserable experience. There are exceptions, but the exceptions usually come from the process finding the rare superhuman who's extremely competent in (and fulfilled by) both arenas. The best managers at Google cared deeply about systems and deeply about their teams, and they were rare to find (and usually ended up at the top of an org chart where they could do the most good, so rarely were the direct boss for a SWE II or SWE III).

> resolving a database latency issue is not nearly as fun as figuring out who's going to resolve it because the database guy's mom just died, and he'll be out... Shit, we don't know, his mom just died, it's on a spectrum of "he'll be back in a week" to "he'll be changing careers," it's not up to the manager

This is real life for most managers. It is also true some can’t handle the stress and find toxic ways of dealing with it (inappropriate comments, focusing more on the promotion than improving the lives of their team members).

> The end result is that people who want to do good work are managed by people who are ill-trained and ill-temperamented to enable them to do good work, and it can make for a pretty miserable experience.

Sort of true. The reality is somewhere in between. Most managers want to go good. Few are truly evil who get off on making others suffer - or take pleasure in uprooting lives. Incentives and personal motivations play a very big part in how they manage.

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