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Comment by ein0p | Hacker News Reader

Google is the only company I’ve seen over my 25 years in the industry in which I had a director reporting to a director _and_ a VP reporting to a VP in my chain of command at the same time. So IDK about half of everyone, but half of management could be let go and things would only improve. Thing is, though, they’re the ones laying people off.

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The management class has grown fat in the US. Layoffs at my company haven’t impacted management AT ALL.

Because as someone wrote me here, the management is the business and the employees are only enforcing the goals of the management.

Sorry, I'm from Germany and when I read that I have to shake my head how short sighted that is.

There is something to be said there about power in society, ruling classes, interests and that German dude with the beard

Yes, Hitler was socialist but he taught that hierarchies were inevitable since they are found everywhere in nature. It was called natural law.

You are thinking of the dude with the mustache.

Oops, thanks. I guess Marx was being referenced? I had thought Marx was English but apparently he was German-Jewish[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx

What is this revision of history? Fascism and socialism are incompatible and one of the first persecuted were the communists. Pretty sure the only relation with socialism was the party name. Calling yourself a good person doesn’t make you one

> one of the first persecuted were the communists

Yeah, because communists never get into factionalism and infighting /s

Have you worked for another company of similar size? I had this situation at a company with under 25k employees.

Several. In fact I currently work in such a company. When I left “hierarchical” Microsoft for “flat” Google many years ago, there were 6 layers of management between me and Ballmer, and 7 between me and Schmidt. Back then it didn’t really matter because the company was bottom up and management did not interfere much with what was going on (“controlled chaos”), but now during my more recent stint there there seemed to be a lot more gatekeepers on everything “aligning” with one another without fully understanding wtf is going on. As someone very technical and very senior at the same time that was kind of frightening to watch, like a slo-mo trainwreck when you’re within the blast radius

I'm in management (still technical, so low level of management) and the whole alignment thing is massively stupid. Language is inherently imprecise. When some group is saying they are doing X and another group is doing Y, which has the same words to describe it, doesn't mean X=Y.

Used to be that higher level management at Google was technical too, BTW. You could discuss deeply technical matters with them like you would with a very capable engineer, and they’d also chime in with design feedback a lot of which was extremely insightful. That’s long gone now.

So not a director reporting to a senior director and a VP reporting to a SVP?

Hey that sounds a lot like where I work.

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