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Comment by thr0way120 | Hacker News Reader

I had same experience at a large company.

Guy had a very simple project. He came to me and asked for "help." I found an external vendor who specialized in solving that problem (building a basic product extension) and got it done in two weeks.

When I gave him the solution, he immediately stopped talking to me and wanted nothing to do with me.

It turned out he had gone to a VP, cleared a 50 person team to work on this problem. He had a weekly call with like 10 people (tiger team he called it) to do nothing but this and nine months later they released the solution and had a giant party.

Everyone got credit, high fives all around.

AT that point I realized that work is a huge scam at large corporations. He was optimizaing for a "promotable event" that "spreads the credit far and wide."

Nothing to do with solving the problem efficiently.

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I have a similar story while working at a large well-known tech company many years ago. A major project in my group had a critical dependency on an important project owned by a VP in another group, who had several engineers working on it for many months with no delivery date in sight.

Me and another guy replaced that external dependency with our own complete implementation, created over a two-week marathon coding session. It worked great, met all the acceptance criteria, and we shipped it. My VP was quite pleased, as it was a big win for the company.

This precipitated one of the ugliest and most out-in-the-open political battles I have ever witnessed in a large company. When the dust settled, we were allowed to use our own implementation, begrudingingly, but no one else was. I did not stick around long enough to know if the other VP ever actually managed to ship anything. It was quite the farce.

I decided I NEVER wanted to manage anyone at a large or even medium sized tech company.

Politically there is no winning:

- Your peer competitors (other VPs) are after you - Your direct reports are after you (or you are accountable for them) - The direct reports of other VPs are after you - Your CEO is after you

You only have ways to lose. I dont know why anyoner would ever want one of those jobs, they are horrible.

Yes I was going to say something similar because articles like this make it seem like a mysterious problem. In reality the reason this happens is because people want profit and the most profitable thing to do is unfortunately to drag a problem out. This literally happens even with individuals, you can give someone a task and he will try to explain to his teamlead that he has to research this all day even though he already knows the answer and he might do another hour on it. In general we have a problem that solving things quickly and permanently is not profitable for the individual/company.

>In general we have a problem that solving things quickly and permanently is not profitable for the individual/company.

This is also somewhat tied to the issue that if you work in a salaried job and do overtime when there's a lot to do, you don't get to do undertime when there's nothing to do.

The 9-5 job schedule is a holdover from industrialization where time at work is directly proportional to work output.

For knowledge workers to be the most efficient they need some downtime, if you're going to ask them to do way too much in crunch time. But we don't give it to them. Instead if there's nothing to do for a while there will be layoffs.

So instead everybody needs to appear busy and important.

Thankfully there do exist situations closer to reality. When at an early stage startup it's either fast or die.

Although I also like to remind my co-workers that what you're doing is way more important than just going fast.

The institutional preservation instinct can cause perverse incentives but it is useful and allows large organizations to be trusted to do things that can't be addressed by startups.

If you have work that requires something to exist in more or less its present form for years or decades at a time it would be a disaster if one of your key vendors pivoted or went bankrupt halfway through.

> the most profitable thing to do is unfortunately to drag a problem out

... which is why our medical intitutions would rather manage chronic conditions than cure or prevent them

... and also why our "defense" institutions would rather manage chronic, unwinnable conflicts rather than see any side achieve victory (Ukraine, Syria, Gaza, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan) ... and also why our weapons / aid keep appearing on both sides of various conflicts

Because that's where the profit is.

It is also why nothing ever gets built (trains etc)

>and also why our "defense" institutions would rather manage chronic, unwinnable conflicts rather than see any side achieve victory (Ukraine, Syria, Gaza, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan) ... and also why our weapons / aid keep appearing on both sides of various conflicts

Huh? Citation needed. I've never heard of American weapons/aid appearing on "both sides" of any of these conflicts. Generally, these kinds of conflicts come down to Western weapons being used against Russian and/or Iranian weapons. Ukraine is quite obviously a proxy war between the West and Russia.

The reason the Ukraine war isn't being fought to win is because of the spectre of nuclear weapons use by Russia. Broadening the conflict carries that real risk. In Gaza, it is being fought to win, by Israel, but the cost is that they're losing the information war, as many countries accuse them of genocide. Afghanistan was a clear win by US forces, but then turned into the US propping up the civilian government they tried to institute with 20 years of military assistance against the domestic insurgency, and that failed when the US finally pulled out and the government collapsed to the Taliban. (Basically, the US wasn't willing to resort to the brutality needed to completely eliminate the enemy and change the local culture, so the whole project was doomed.) Iraq was a success; Saddam's government was destroyed and a new civilian government instituted, though it was at a huge cost and under false pretenses, but that government still stands today and many Iraqis (everyone who was oppressed by Saddam) are happier with the current situation.

By that standard nuclear blackmail is successful 100% of the time.

I have seen similar forces at play in different organizations.

I used to view them with disdain but at some point I had the idea that social and organizational engineering is also engineering and that wielding the system for one’s benefit is actually a skill.

I am not good at it but I need to call mastery where I see it.

Exactly. I have the same thought about Conway's Law aka "the software structure will end up matching the company's org chart".

Conway's Law is not a code smell to be avoided. Avoiding it is sisyphean, a band-aid, and nearly impossible.

Instead, Conway's Law is a way, indeed the only sustainable way, to choose the software structure.

Applying the intended software architecture to the org chart is often known as the Inverse Conway Manoeuvre.

Weapons engineering is also engineering but I don't want to work for arms dealers like Anduril.

I do have a sense of morality and know where I stand in terms of power dynamics.

These however exist and function, with or without my consent, and are less black and white than the weapons dealing metaphor. For example, a single mother in such an organization, if able to operate with influence, creates opportunities for her family and for her children’s futures. Nothing to do with the morality of arm dealing.

On the contrary; it's the essence of ethics.

Character is what you are in the dark.

I got invited to an enterprise architecture brainstorming session and they wanted to know my opinion about the multi-cloud, multi-repo, ETL-pipeline-driven reporting solution they had cooked up.. with two separate Kubernetes clusters included.

I suggested that a column store index and a PowerBI report is literally all they needed.

Didn't get invited to the next meeting, all further communications were silently ignored.

Engineers. Penny-wise and pound-foolish.

I don't think this is really the issue at play here. Rather the engineers wanting to work with Kubernetes, cloud, and other stuff that's hyped, instead of a boring solution that works.

What’s old is new again: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

We can change the language but human biology is tethered to meat space and has not evolved beyond the same old obfuscation. We raise functional illiterates who can only relate to the world through learned helplessness and pandering to supply side to solve their last mile problems.

Large scale infra projects, internet, sure, I get that. Making every fruity drink and sandwich for us? Come on what is this, high school? This cultures economy is rooted in infantilizing Disney vibes. Mush some berries and strain them; assembly lines for drinks is a huge resource wasting low effort economic idea. Sell plain seltzer and let people figure it out.

We’re way over industrialized and coddled to insulate brand investors. Pseudoreligious belief in unreal things to arbitrarily compute values from. None of this is divine mandate. Just the result of propaganda.

"On the count of three, I want everybody to take care of their own damn kids!"

It would be nice. I'd love to make my own kombucha, but I have no idea where I'd get a SCOBY. Someone else might not have the space - too much stuff, in this consumer-driven economy, or not enough dwelling, starved of missing-middle as we are - or time (working those 2 jobs to afford rent, or private school, or insurance of one form or another). These are fixable issues, of course. I would really like to fix them. We have to convince people to buy less stuff, let people live near them without paying exorbitant housing costs, reverse the giving-up-on public institutions, abolish private insurance for universal risks, etc., etc.

I would like that. The problem is that so many people will fight tooth and nail for the devil they know. They've even convinced themselves that this is the best of all possible worlds (that propaganda).

For the kombucha, you can grab a bottle of your favorite brand and use a bit of it to start your own culture. You'll also need some tea for flavor, sugar to feed it, and some cups to ferment in IIRC. It's been years since I've done it, but it is pretty straitforward and low effort. Go for it!

I understand everything you wrote.

Best comment I have read in a while. Thank you

Oh he's "solving the problem efficiently", just not the problem he purports to be solving. It's all about misaligned incentives in large orgs: people act out of their own self interest, and if the incentive mechanisms are designed incorrectly (or evolved over time into a misaligned framework), you get situations like these. The higher-levels in big orgs typically do play an outright zero-sum game for positions of power, with the object-level problem/domain being mostly a nuisance.

> work is a huge scam at large corporations.

I think it might depend to some degree on what the corporation does. Engineering companies that produce actually necessary hardware (transformers, generators, transmission lines, large machines, etc.) seem to me to be less susceptible to quite this sort of boondoggle in their core operations.

No less susceptible to bribery and corruption though and their ancillary operations like IT do seem to suffer as you describe.

I am one of those external vendors who did solve a big problem in a now billion-dollar company (though it was a tenth that size when I got involved).

The "proper solution" which uses a "proper" development stack (not MySQL/Delphi) has been in planning for the past 5 years, in fact they have had two other development teams on it and have changed the stack they are going to use twice. The solution to date has been to erode the product carving off the easy parts into other systems while leaving the complicated bits as is.

The new team are quite good however and I am really hoping the guys will get some traction soon as I am hoping to retire next year. And before anyone asks, Yes, they have known my retirement intentions for the last 3 years

>I found an external vendor who specialized in solving that problem (building a basic product extension) and got it done in two weeks.

>It turned out he had gone to a VP, cleared a 50 person team to work on this problem. ... nine months later they released the solution and had a giant party.

Was your solution really good enough? Or as good as the in-house solution?

At one big tech company I previously worked at, they frequently expended a lot of resources coming up with new solutions for things, because their new solutions might perform 5% better than something more off-the-shelf, of course at a much greater cost. They started recognizing this after a while and tried to cut down on it.

I've noticed this much more with east coast companies than west coast companies. YMMV and take my anecdote for what it is.

It really depends but there are benefits to homegrown solutions. People do chant nih syndrome and all that but without more details about your situation I can day not every outsourcing is worth it.

That shouldn't really be surprising at all. And in some cases I'm not even sure it's a bad thing.

Not sure what level of management/responsibility this guy was at, but if we wasn't executive level, he probably stands to personally benefit more from engaging in these sorts of shenanigans than if he were to do the thing that's best for the company.

And really, in that situation, why should anyone feel ethically bound to be efficient and do what's best for the company? It's not like the company cares about you. If it's "efficient and best for the company" to kick you to the curb, the company will do that. Why should the rank-and-file show loyalty?

The company executives almost certainly have it in their power to set incentives so doing the most efficient, best-for-the-company thing is what's going to give each employee the biggest reward. If they're not doing that, that's their problem.

But on a higher level, where we have a big societal problem that needs to be fixed, I would agree that optimizing for your own profit, at the expense of solving that problem, is selfish and immoral. I just don't think it's worth any hand-wringing at a low-level company-inefficiency level.

> And really, in that situation, why should anyone feel ethically bound to be efficient and do what's best for the company?

They should do what is best for society. Companies with lower parasite load operate more efficiently, allowing higher production of goods and services for lower price, leading to a wealthier society.

> The company executives almost certainly have it in their power to set incentives so doing the most efficient, best-for-the-company thing is what's going to give each employee the biggest reward.

They do not. This is a ridiculously hard unsolved problem. The alignment problem may actually be the hardest problem we have.

> Companies with lower parasite load operate more efficiently, allowing higher production of goods and services for lower price, leading to a wealthier society.

This may be true. But I think it would be wise to consider an alternative:

Companies with lower parasite load operate more efficiently, allowing higher extraction of wealth from society at large to the owners and leaders of the company, leading to a more unequal and poorer society.

Probably not all companies are in the second way, but to think all are in the first way sounds naive to me.

> The alignment problem may actually be the hardest problem we have.

Hah, reading this makes me think you already understand that your assertion about companies operating efficiently is false. Yet you wrote it...

> Companies with lower parasite load operate more efficiently, allowing higher extraction of wealth from society at large to the owners and leaders of the company, leading to a more unequal and poorer society.

Only in a non-competitive environment where there are substantial barriers to entry. While this may describe many corporations I suspect it describes very few tech companies (Meta, Alphabet, Amazon and a dozen others perhaps).

> Hah, reading this makes me think you already understand that your assertion about companies operating efficiently is false.

I don't recall saying they operate efficiently.

If we take the story at face value I think this is unethical and antisocial behavior. The person was dishonest, claiming to be working on a problem but actually was avoiding the best solution. The person was wasting resources, taking significantly more time and money than what is required to do the job. By wasting them on nothing-work we are robbing the actually big and important problems from access to those resources.

tbf exacerbating effort in order to generate and distribute acknowledgement is probably a low ranking problem with institutions

A more charitable interpretation was that this person had a massive attack of cognitive dissonance when you told them what you found and was not able to reconcile it.

They convinced themselves that “their” solution was actually a better fit/safer/more performant/etc and justified in the expense and effort. And it may have been, in all honesty. But likely not enough better to justify the time and expense.

The empathetic view is that we all suffer from this delusion, but some of us are better and recognizing it and circumventing it than others. Part of it is age/maturity/experience. Part of it is innate.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not excusing this behavior. I abhor it as much as you clearly do. But sometimes it can help with dealing with these types of people to reframe it as less malicious and more incompetence.

> He was optimizaing for a "promotable event" that "spreads the credit far and wide."

See also: Congressional allocation of defense contractor contracts. Spread the jobs far & wide.

You can use open ai to solve your LLM needs (if you legitimately have LLM needs) but an in house solution may be a whole lot more future proof, even if it’s more expensive up front

> Nothing to do with solving the problem efficiently.

Unless you were solving world hunger or fast homomorphic encryption, this guy's promotable event sounds like it's way more impressive than whatever technical desiderata you were helping them to solve efficiently.

Seriously, the guy sounds like some kind of corporate Robinhood.

Causing a net loss to the economy through waste and inefficiency is ultimately the same as contributing to world hunger.

That is some purity test thinking right there. I'll play - posting on HN is diverting your time and attention from helping feed the hungry, ergo posting is ultimately the same as contributing to world hunger.

the time you take solving world hunger means you're spending that time not curing cancer.

Posting on HN may be a vice but what that guy did was akin to a scam (crime). Also posting on HN is not doing good due to inaction where what that guy did was doing bad due to direct action.

I think that's a little harsh. What the guy did was create a lot of value for himself and the team of 50 under him. That was all at the expense of the company, but so what? It's just a company. Companies don't matter, people do.

I think the real issue is why did that company's culture and reward structure allow this to happen? It should be more "profitable" for an employee to come up with the most efficient solution. The fact that it wasn't is the company's failing.

> That was all at the expense of the company, but so what?

If somebody steals a plane or burn a building, so what? Insurance will pay.

> I think the real issue is why did that company's culture and reward structure allow this to happen?

It would be a positive outcome (for society) this kind of company (that rewards inefficiency and poor of work ethics) going bankrupt.

But it's complicated because there is a lot we don't see. Companies matter to, they are made of people and people depend on them to provide goods/services or income.

The company in question could set incentives so the two-week-one-person solution is rewarded much more than the nine-month-fifty-person solution. If they are incapable of doing so, then perhaps the best outcome for the economy is for that company to collapse under the weight of its own inefficiencies and incompetence, and be replaced with companies that can do the job better.

At that point they are already a government supplier of something the government needs (products, jobs, narratives).

There's no net loss to the economy here. If billionaires could own the means of production, fire all the humans, replace them with robots/LLMs, and keep all the money, they would. Paying those funds to workers instead of stock buybacks is one of the only ways those megacorps contribute to the economy.

> There's no net loss to the economy here.

Surely people engaging in unproductive labour is a net loss to the economy? Do you have some odd definition of "value to the economy" that is not the sum of the efficient market price of the goods and services?

A dollar in the stock market is not the same as a dollar spent on goods. Money back to billionaires becomes the former, money paid in workers' wagers predominantly becomes the latter, and is significantly more effective.

I don't wholly disagree with you, but I think it's more nuanced than that.

A dollar returned to investors and re-invested in a new technology that ends up saving everyone two dollars seems like a pretty effective use of that dollar, much more than putting that dollar in an employee's pocket who intentionally didn't do the most efficient thing.

Now, I'm not sure of the odds of that outcome. Maybe most of the time that dollar ends up getting wasted on funding Theranos or buying Twitter.

Regardless, I wouldn't fault an employee for doing something that's maximizes their own interest over the company's. Just means the company is bad at setting incentives properly. Not saying it's easy to do that, but none of us should value a company's welfare over our own. Sometimes the company's welfare aligns with ours, but not always.

> Surely people engaging in unproductive labour is a net loss to the economy?

You mean unproductive labour like running a casino, producing tobacco, building superyachts, etc?

> In 2017, clothing worth £28.6 million was incinerated by Burberry to maintain their brand’s exclusivity.

There is a term, "Real Economy". playing on the stock market is not real economy, producing steel is. In the last 30 years, a huge change took place - we had something called Financialization, now the 'real economy' is only a small fraction of actually economy, and is dwarfed by financial markets and various bullshit.

Depends what the alternative use of that capital is. What “value” led Elon to buy Twitter and flush it down the toilet? When people have enough money, they stop valuing money much when they make decisions.

Having more and more money in the coffers of a tiny group of billionaires is actually deeply anticapitalistic because it prevents market forces from working.

More people I know use Twitter now than ever before… I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting it, but “down the toilet” is not where Twitter went.

Single-handedly taking your stock from 70 down to 30 is not something you can do if you can’t afford it. It’s bumped back to 53 or whatever, and lots of external stuff has happened too…but I think it’s hard to deny that his actions caused a massive dive in the stock price.

Anyway, my point was that Musk, Bezos, Gates, etc. can afford to act freely in ways (constructive or destructive) that violate all the behaviors that economics textbooks posit as being universal.

I'm confused; what stock are you referring to? Twitter doesn't publicly trade anymore, and has no stock price.

You are correct.

My experience is the opposite: while the Big Exodus didn't seem to happen, anecdotally the people in my online chat circles post fewer Twitter links than before.

I'm actually curious about HN posts: has the frequency of Twitter submissions changed since Musk's acquisition? Or, probably more usefully, has the average number of points per Twitter submission (or maybe number that make the front page) changed?

Sorta? Less wealth probably does mean less effective altruists giving half their earnings to AMF and governments giving less in foreign aid, but it's a rather indirect effect with a fairly large divisor.

Its definitely very bad though, something like this is much worse for the economy than a few welfare queens.

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