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Comment by whoknowsidont | Hacker News Reader

Corporations are mostly just job programs. Most companies do not actually need anywhere near the number of people they have employed to function.

The reasons why small teams work is because the number of communication channels go down, and you spend less time simply talking about the work and actually doing the work.

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Or perhaps corporations grow large because they serve diverse needs. Much like users only need 10% of Microsoft Word, yet many cohorts often need a different 10% slice.

Or we lack anti-trust controls, so rent seekers are soaking up markets.

Maybe a combination of all three.

>Maybe a combination of all three.

Likely. How big each "slice" is would be good to know. I wish someone would study it in depth, if it's even possible to fairly analyze.

I don't necessarily think your analogy with MS word is a fair or correct one, FWIW, only because once you build something the functionality is able to be distributed and replicated.

Employees require active up keep in a way that software really doesn't.

This is not true. If the people weren’t providing some positive ROI then the execs would be drooling over the money saved from cutting them.

I don’t think so. Unless you get super high up, your pay increases proportionally to people under you. The next problem is that once you start cutting, you actually have to organize and manage. That’s way more difficult than saying “ I have hired x people”. I have been in countless discussions where management offered more people but whenever I told them the real problem is the process or another department not doing their job, I got silence.

'i need more people' or 'i people with this specific skill' is also a really good blanket excuse for dysfunction. and if you dont get the slots you can just say 'i told you', and if you do get the slots and dont feel like actually executing, its pretty trivial to find all the candidates wanting. or blame the hiring market. or the low salaries. its a hugely effective dodge, and you can even convince yourself that you're doing all you can to address the problems in your organization - you just cant because of factors completely outside your control.

It’s well known that middle managers love to grow headcount. That doesn’t matter.

If teams aren’t resulting in profit, they’re gonna get pressured to make cuts or will have RIFs imposed on them. I’ve seen this happen at every company, even big seemingly inept monsters like Oracle and IBM.

Those political middle and upper managers who are good at growing headcount are also good at shifting blame. They explain their lack of profit by either not enough headcount or else some other part of the company is letting the down (and they should take over that function so they can succeed next time) etc

>If the people weren’t providing some positive ROI then the execs

The majority, the vast majority, of executives are not capable of measuring this any way you slice it.

Most people actually don't like firing people. Management, as weird as it may seem, actually is made up of people.

That's why layoffs don't happen until the market starts to get tight, but yeah, when the market's tight.

Where do you think all the heads to chop came from for all the publicized layoffs in tech these past couple of years?

Expected ROI.

Do you know what a jobs program is? I think a lot of confusion comes from people not understanding that a role that currently costs more than in brings in is absolutely not the same thing as a jobs program.

A jobs program is designed to just keep people employed at a loss by design. No expectation of a path to ever making money. The TSA is an example of a jobs program.

There are some roles like that in tech. For example, "charitable" positions like full-time OSS devs.

Another one that is questionable are tech evangelists or dev rel. Sometimes those positions can be connected to revenue, but usually it's "mindshare" accounting.

OSS dev might be a bad example. OSS is often an internal product that is opened up to gain free OSS labor. Most often, the position would exist within the company if it were OSS or not. In other words, it is something the company is working on regardless of OSS or private codebase

Not all paid OSS development is the company's product/project. Many of the largest open source projects are dependent on corporate "charity".

You are totally correct basis my observations. However, companies can not be smaller as past a certain scale a company resembles a communist economy. Having read the book "Red Plenty", I saw so many similarities with the big techs I have worked at. Internal teams have a top given monopoly and have no incentive to improve their products unless there is some external competition. Most companies are now led by people who have much less skin in the game (up to the CEO level in most) and every small org resembles a factory in the soviet union. The incentives of everyone working at the company is to keep growing bigger.

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