The managerial class is the cancer of our time
Edit: I regret using the word cancer, but they are still bad
Edit: I regret using the word cancer, but they are still bad
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
- 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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
The entrepreneur did that. Entrepreneurs create jobs. Managers just manage, and shuffle around value, they don't create it like entrepreneurs do.
I have also worked with those "just manage" managers too. But one shoe does not fit all
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
“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.
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.
> 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...
(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.
I would not have guessed that -- Whole Foods's website indicates 105k+ employees. Am I missing a whole other order of magnitude?