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Your pencil to draw the diagrams will be managed by a completely different person, you are not allowed to sharpen it yourself. However that person may not be available as they will be sharpening everyone else's pencils, as well as adjusting desks.

They are all from Blue Pants, so won't work the same time shifts as you

My last job was almost this. My question is how does it get to that point?

My best explanation is that some people believe that project management can be completely oblivious to the nature of the work to be done, and still be useful.

To them, maximizing their ability to make choices about the way work will be done means they have more ability to take the good decisions that will lead the project to a successful end.

People whose only knowledge of management stopped at factory work in the 1920s.

Someone up top found a cheaper supplier of pencils. Unfortunately these are cheap pencils, so the graphite keeps breaking.

People are spending too much time sharpening their pencils, besides a good pencil sharpener is expensive. The solution is to get a sharpener person to move the sharpener about to save everyone time.

However they are expensive to employ so we are going to outsource it because sharpening pencils are not our core business.

It always starts as cheaping out on the free soda.

Unless, as was also mentioned, someone is a project/product manager without actually understanding the business.

Was your last job a place with more focus on quarterly business cycle and less if any on longer term?

It might even be that there's seemingly a lot of long term goals/objectives/focus. If it's mostly strategic level plans/talks/etc, while day to day things are still planned, executed and evaluated on half-year and even just quarterly period - it seemingly ends same as not having longer term plans.

It was focused around quarterly cycles but they also had a lot of long term goals.

> My question is how does it get to that point?

Putting salespeople in between engineers and clients, and giving them perverse incentives to say "yes" to everything the client asks, and no incentive at all to try to understand what it takes to actually get any of that stuff accomplished. It produces clients that live in fantasyland.

Microsoft Excel.

Someone spends hours torturing numbers in a spreadsheet until they give up and yield the desired answer. Pivot tables are created and used to make a slide deck using Microsoft Power Point. A decision is made, another round of golf played, and someone checks on the value of their non-salary compensation.

That the spreadsheet does not reflect your experienced reality is of little consequence because at that level, the spreadsheet is the reality. If your number doesn't reflect what's in Excel, you can be easily replaced with another number.

This is such a great comment.

> the spreadsheet is the reality.

This nails an entire culture, from healthcare, to education, to policing...

But we cannot blame software itself, right? Something went deeply, horribly wrong in our own societal script. Something way beyond Max Weber or Franz Kafka's takes on bureaucracy. SOmething that made us bow down before computers as new gods.

I'm becoming a techo-athiest.

scale of complexity

That's a tempting answer. I see why you proffer it. But I have to say no.

Complexity is neither an immanent feature nor inevitability. Behind unruly complexity is our failure to manage it. And indeed, a love of complexity, a fetish for it that seduces us into ever more.

To defeat complexity we have to embrace, and engage with it. We have to see what parts of technology that got us to where we are, must now be justifiably rejected.

All I see right now, especially with regards to "AI" and the new wave of techno-populism, is a retreat from complexity and more embrace of "magic".

My dad worked for a major railroad from the late 70s through the tail end of the 90s.

He worked his way up middling-high in the management structure. High school diploma only.

The company got bought at some point. He says nearly all the management up to the C-suite had done actual work at the company, at some point. They promoted from within.

After the acquisition, a bunch of MBAs who’d never done actual railroad work took over. Says everything became endless, pointless meetings, a lot involving travel. Impossible to get any actual work done. The old-timers had to keep stopping them from doing dumb shit that couldn’t work.

The old timers got “encouraged” to take early retirement. And that was the end of that.

The take-over by professional managers and finance bros, rather than having professional (at the thing you actually do) managers running things, is behind it. The easy quips about MBAs ruining everything are more or less correct.

They would say your father was the victim of "progress and modernisation".

Yesterday there was this post [0] on Ivy League's wanting to separate ideology from teaching. As if that were possible.

We can read plenty regarding the decline of academia under leftist ideology. The long march of postmodernism is supposed to have corroded everything, decolonising curricula, celebrating diversity etc, etc.

Sure. That may well be true.

But equally true, through ferociously ignored is the parallel march of the ideological right in universities.

Just as there are some liberal arts degrees that teach Marxist feminism, Foucault and Derrida we have MBA's, which are equally ideological. They're steeped in the values of the Thatcher-Reagan era and right-wing economic theories. Their totems - Hayek, Strauss, Schmitt, Mises, Friedman are less well known than those on the left.

Nonetheless these often discredited ideologies are presented with the rigour of Maxwell's equations.

Off they confidently stride into the world, to run amok doing harm every bit as egregious as their left-leaning counterparts.

I've taught some of these kids in a business school, and honestly by year 3 they are utterly lost - all the hallmarks of cult-like brainwashing are fully in effect. Where the sceptics win over the strident zealots, is at least with the lefties there remains chink of openness to new ideas. An MBA is an MBA for life.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39444092

I don't think you can paint MBA-ification as a leftist phenomenon.

That's probably why they didn't.

I don't think you read their comment.

You're right, I skimmed and realized my error when I came back to it. My fault.

Have you posted this before?

I don’t think so, but there are a whole bunch of similar stories from folks of that generation.

why is every mirror ugly

Except the black mirror maybe. That only shows us what we want to see.

Sounds like you'd enjoy All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace:

"Curtis argues that computers have failed to liberate humanity, and instead have 'distorted and simplified our view of the world around us.'"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_o...

> But we cannot blame software itself, right?

If we can blame easy access to guns for the rise in mass shootings then we absolutely can and should blame easy access to Excel for the rise in MBA's completely fucking up companies.

Ban Assault Spreadsheets

If you ban spreadsheets then only managers will use spreadsheets. Spreadsheet bans actually increase rouge accountancy if you disarm law-abiding spreadsheet users. The only thing that stops an MBA with a spreadsheet is a nerd with a spreadsheet.

We need to limit the row and column capacity of the spreadsheets we let people own, and also mandate that they must press a key for every cell that needs to be (re-)calculated.

It's just common sense.

Although that's how we ended up with austerity.

Wouldn't that violate your $A$2 rights?

One day, the company that owned my apartment sent me a bill out of the blue for a strange amount of money, something like $63.12. After much head scratching, I realized that it was roughly equal to my monthly rent divided by 30.

Someone must have made a new spreadsheet because they insisted I owed them for one extra day of rent. I pulled out my copy of the contract, which required one check per month of exactly the same amount.

They said my contract was "wrong" and I entered full WTF mode. Offered them an advance of one day's rent that I'd deduct from the final rent check. Eventually they tired of me and "credited" me the amount in question instead of fixing their spreadsheet.

Your firm’s partners have hired BCG to streamline the home building process. Your home and every other one in the neighborhood that your coworkers have been designing will be left to rot and most of you will be let go. Some of you will be reassigned to design horse stables and indoor pools for a more profitable market segment.

Your neighborhood was sold to an HOA. All houses must conform to new rules, reporting, and ever increasing fees until all revenue is squeezed from the premises. Violators will be fined Fibonacci derived value amounts or forfeit their property to the HOA.

If you are still around by this time. Your equity is worthless.

Fibonacci derived values is wayyy too un-arbitrary

> you must atomize your anticipated work into individual bite-sized and estimated tasks

Based on a 2 line description from a product manager, so you actually have no clue on the scope of the task until you start working on it.

This is how at my last company, my team got every estimate wrong and engineers got fired.

Yes the salt is real.

Oh an remember, before you can design a house, you need to build a scaffolding using the same tools one would to build a warehouse, make sure it is earthquake proof, nuclear threat proof, hurricane category 7 proof, forest fire proof etc regardless of whether there are forests, earthquake geology, or hurricanes nearby. After all, you can be proud that you followed the same principles that unicorn architects who build warehouses used successfully to _their_ needs.

There isn’t a more accurate description of “corporate agile” than exactly this. It’s a joke, and the joke’s on us.

If I'm ever telling stories to my future grand kids, they will definitely hear about the terror regime of an evil king named Agile .

You are assuming that Agile can be killed?

At this point I'm thinking that it has seeped into the very nature of the world - like Morgoth's Ring.

Left an otherwise good job because of this.

I am done with it.

For the next job I take, I will demand to be present in the daily meeting to see how it looks like. Ideally, there isn't one.

It's suddenly not ridiculous at all if you map PM to general contractor and SWE to tradespeople.

Well to be fair, most construction projects are bid on a fixed-price basis with overages, and there's normally a limitation of when stuff can be changed.

Generally, the optimal strategy for a construction company/contractor is to go in with a low fixed price bid and screw them on the extras that your specialists have identified will be necessary, but the general contractor/engineers have missed.

Source: I used to price construction jobs back in the day, and heard a lot of horror/joy stories. I think my college education was partially funded by these kinds of mess-ups, as my dad worked in construction.

You forgot to add, your estimates need to use an artificial, non-agreedu-upon unit that differs per person and that varies (decreases) as you find new work that's simpler than the simplest work you have ever encountered.

And then, you will be held accountable for that number, even if (supposedly), doesn't represent time and even if the interpretation of your estimate must use the unit that the person holding you acciuntable.

Wow as I re-read this statement, it's completely insane

<big tech> the building must make $10b/year in revenue, or else you are all fired.

.... more than last year or you are all fired.

...and if any individual room isn't profitable in any quarter of the year, I need the ability to detach it from the building and dump it. I don't care about any furniture inside, dump it too.

Each room must be constructed of experimental materials so we can claim an R&D tax credit on them before dumping them.

OK, now please build the second floor. We need it fully completed and functional a.s.a.p.

However, do not build the first floor yet, because I am still waiting for some important decisions to be made.

The last part is what constantly destroys me :)

For extra amusement, make it so that you have responsibility without authority.

I.e. you know what is broken and roughly how to fix it and in everyone's view it absolutely is your responsibility to "git'erdone", but you can't since you either don't have access or resources to do what needs doing and you won't get the access or the resources due to office politics or some other equally unfixable issue.

That's a fun little stress-biscuit to eat.

Or you literally aren't allowed to fix it, while it also being your responsibility to fix it.

For example you see are responsible for fixing problem X, so you go to do it, and are told that X isn't on the planning board this month (because problem X hadn't occurred yet when planning happened at the start of the month) therefore you aren't allowed to work on it. But in other meetings, it's your fault it's not fixed, X is your job after all.

Now this is podracing I mean Agile! - Aintworkin Scumwalker

Responsibility without authority is a game of "stop hitting yourself".

> For extra amusement, make it so that you have responsibility without authority.

Ah! The good old recipe for burnout.

This is very real in the context of many locked down, tightly-regulated industries such as DoD manufacturing gigs with poorly-managed webs of IT and Engineering infrastructure. Data governance and security, change and configuration management, are all cross functional teams with their own political priorities, cultures, budgets, and requirements. Sometimes even separate tools anf platforms with zero integration or worse, financial redundancy.

It is pain to work in such an environment.

Nothing is an emergency no matter how much you press, until one day it's a pants on fire, after hours wake-up call emergency. You cannot predict when this will happen.

> For extra amusement, make it so that you have responsibility without authority.

Funny thing, that's basically the job description of a Product Manager, although HN loves to roast them, some of the hilarity comes from the fact you're accountable for outcomes and responsible for a process to get to those outcomes, but have no budget, have no reports, and you're trying to convince completely different management structures in completely different parts of the company that the thing you're working on is the thing they should prioritize or it all falls apart. Getting any significant new feature or new product to launch in any large company is basically a miracle, even if it arrives to launch hollowed out on the inside. This is mostly not a consequence of how well you do your job, it's a consequence of how dysfunctional the organization is, and I'll let you in on a secret.. /all/ large companies are deeply dysfunctional.