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Comment by p1necone | Hacker News Reader

> In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. So you just hurry through your tasks.

This has been my exact experience. Absolutely everything is tracked as a work item with estimates. Anything you think should be done needs to be justified and tracked the same way. If anything ever takes longer than the estimate that was invariably just pulled out of someones ass (because it's impossible to accurately estimate development unless you're already ~75% of the way through doing it, and even then it's a crapshoot) you need to justify that in a morning standup too.

The end result of all of this is every project getting bogged down by being stuck on the first version of whatever architecture was thought up right at the beginning and there being piles of tech debt that never gets fixed because nobody who actually understands what needs to be done has the political capital to get past the aforementioned justification filter.

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Also this push to measure everything means that anything that can’t be measured isn’t valued.

One of your teammates consistently helps unblock everyone on the team when they get stuck? They aren’t closing as many tickets as others so they get overlooked on promotions or canned.

One of your teammates takes a bit longer to complete work, but it’s always rock solid and produces fewer outages? Totally invisible. Plus they don’t get to look like a hero when they save the company from the consequences of their own shoddy work.

The phenomenon being discussed here is a type of overfitting:

https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....

The last 50 years or so of managerial practice has been a recipe for overfitting with a brutal emphasis on measuring, optimizing, and stack ranking everything.

I think an argument can be made that this is an age of overfitting everywhere.

Interesting that something similar came up recently where an AI being trained might fake alignment with training goals.

It's even got a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

It's got a name and we know that it's happening yet the overpaid overeducated c-suite demands it? What gives?

There's chance that maybe there exists a revenue stream that increases by further applying that policy across a system that you don't have access to?

The problem is that this miserable state of affairs works at scale.

Yes, on problems that exist at the scale of one or intelligent, educated, experienced, and dedicated human (or maybe up to 3-5), an individual or small team will run circles around a business. You can have a top-notch CEO and COO and HR manager and six program managers (each with zero domain experience other than running a Jira board) and four dozen junior consultants who memorized just enough to pass the interviews and an art department and sales and finance and IT. For some problems, that whole $50M enterprise will be utterly demolished by a couple of determined engineers.

Likewise, a monarchy with a wise, benevolent, and just king can flourish, whereas a corrupted and bureaucratically entangled democracy is woefully inefficient.

But if you want your kingdom to last more than two generations before succumbing to a greedy monarch, or want your enterprise to solve bigger problems that don't decompose nicely to small ones, to vertically integrate huge manufacturing systems and scale out to billions of units, the only method that works is the inefficient one. And it does work!

The question is if the Kingdom would then still be worth surviving if life for everyone there ends up being miserable.

What if it doesn't survive and 70% of the people who were in the Kingdom end up in worse, arbitrarily-ruled, small despotic fiefdoms instead? And only 10% end up being better off by being lucky enough to have landed in the high-trust+high-competence small group?

Or, switching to consumer products vs company revenue/profit or kingdoms, and grounding in a specific example: people love to hate Windows, but how many of them would actually be better off if the options were just Mac (still expensive, still niche) or Linux? And "well they could just learn how to [code or configure text files or whatever]" for these purposes counts as worse off, IMO - more time spent on something that used to kinda-sorta-at-least-work-predictably for them.

> people love to hate Windows, but how many of them would actually be better off if the options were just Mac (still expensive, still niche) or Linux?

I don't know, but Windows has becoming increasingly worse at everyday usage. I swear Linux has better suspend/sleep functionality now, doesn't sneaky restart randomly (yeah, just because you reopen an explorer window but none of my other, actually important programs will definitely make people notice), doesn't take a minute to react to an unlock attempt several times a day for no reason on even very performant hardware..

So yeah, I think many would be better off with Linux.

Your comparison isn't very good as Microsoft Windows undergoes perpetual change and churn for the sake of doing it. This breaks existing workflows along the way. As a product it was effectively complete by the time Windows 2000 was released, having successfully integrated what was then considered state of the art technology to develop a practical operating system based on the principals known at the time. All it ever needed from there forward was maintenance updates and kernel updates to enable new hardware level technology to be harnessed by software.

> The problem is that this miserable state of affairs works at scale.

It "works" in the sense that it can be kept going by patching the damage it causes by throwing more money at it.

What it mostly does at scale is appear to work, to those high enough above it that they can't see any of the details: only the metrics that are being optimized for.

Only revisionist history tell tales of flourishing kingdoms under a just king. In reality, the reason feodality worked for so long was the anarchy and power struggle, the cavalcades (basically raids) and a honour based justice (basically don't kill fellow nobility during war, and avoid killing militantes during cavalcades and you'll be good). The anarchical nature of the system made it particularly susceptible to organised raids, but also extremely 'agile' in it's political responses. Once power was consolidated however, the clergy and the royalty pushed their law and hierarchical order onto the mostly aristocratic feodality, it broke and you get the crusade against Alby, the war between Plantagenet and capetiens, and probably a lot of other misery inflicted to the general population. Then once the hierarchical order is set, you need an administration, which will become inefficient by nature.

This was previously recommended to me on HN, so I’ll pass it along. The book “Seeing Like A State” gives a pretty reasonable explanation for why this happens: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

The basic idea is that the only viable way to administer a complex and heterogenous system like a massive corporation is to simplify by enforcing “legibility” or homogeneity. Without this, central control becomes far too complex to manage. Thus, the simplification becomes a mandate, even at the cost of great inefficiencies.

What makes the book particularly interesting is the many different historical examples of this phenomenon, across a wide array of human endeavors.

I like the book quite a bit, and it's been formative in my politics.

That said, I am not sure if the take-away is that managers need to account for these factors by allowing for illegibility- I am not reading you claim that, but contextually that's how the discussion feels to me.

I do agree with Scott that enforcing perfect legibility is impossible and even attempting to do so can cause immense problems, and I agree with his analysis of these modernist efforts and have found that it's a useful lens for understanding a lot of human enterprise.

I find a lot of hope in that view: nothing actually gets done without some horizontal, anarchist cooperation.

But I also find hope in the fact that it's structurally a issue with authoritarian organizational strategies which can't be accounted for and surmounted.

Thank you for the reply!

I don't want to make any strong claims here, but my gut reaction to your first comment is that what one manager calls “allowance for illegibility”, another might call “trust in my reports”.

Everything rots, everything changes.

Investors want to know how long you're going to keep making them money. They don't like surprises.

Really, I think what we need are new ways for investors to participate and understand and structure their investments that don't have negative downward consequences for the structure of businesses.

Yes, at the end of the day it's necessary to have some amount of "trust" in the people doing the work. Which is good- you can try to avoid that but if it didn't happen very little would get done.

Maybe I would have found the book more impactful if I had read it earlier in life. I felt like it put together various ideas and presented them well in a comprehensible manner. What I feel it omits is that the mechanisms of a state only have to be actionable, not rational. If you ask me how to mow a lawn and I come up with some byzantine process involving multiple steps that don't even contribute to the end goal I'm going to be labeled nuts or maybe "eccentric" if they want to be polite. The same scrutiny doesn't apply to the various bureaucratic processes of a state for whatever reason.

Try to make a thread about unions on HN and read the comments, then it'll make sense.

> overeducated c-suite

Arguably the modern MBA has gotten so insular, with many graduating with an MBA having only the barest modicum of humanities courses and the barest foot out of the door of a business college, that despite supposedly representing a higher University degree it seems increasingly fair to call it "undereducated". MBA programs got too deep into the business of selling as many MBAs as they could as quickly as they could they forgot to check their own curriculum for things like "perverse incentives" and "regulatory capture" and "tribalism".

An MBA is a professional graduate degree, like a JD or MD. Criticizing professional degree programs for lack of humanities coursework rather misses the point. Students are supposed to have got that in undergraduate.

Sure, but a lot of Business undergraduate programs, even at prestigious Universities, are now "pre-MBA" and very MBA-focused, if not "direct to MBA" and allow taking bare minimums of non-Business classes and just about guarantee MBA program entry. For MD this sort of "academic incest" makes sense that you are going to have more because there is too much specialized knowledge to learn during graduate programs. (But also most pre-Med doesn't pre-qualify Med School like "pre-MBA" can.) JDs still seem to expect a variety of candidates of different undergraduate backgrounds, though "Pre-Law" sometimes exists, it often isn't a specific "program" and to my understanding can be several different options from very different undergraduate college options; "Pre-Law" seems as much about navigating the analysis paralysis of all the possible paths as anything else, without narrowing the number of paths.

I think the MBA programs have built "pre-MBA" programs not because they have so many skills to specialize, and not necessarily because they have so many possible paths to try to navigate, but because the it sells more Business school undergraduate credits.

Good MBA programs still exist. Not all MBAs involve "academic incest", and there are still MBA programs that encourage non-Business undergraduate degrees. Not all "academic incest" is bad either. But there's definitely an anecdotal sense that many of the people I see with MBAs spent the least time learning anything that wasn't taught in a Business School classroom, with the least consequences for their non-Business School GPAs, because the Business School wants that graduate degree funnel and the tuition dollars it guarantees, than any other graduate degree program I've seen. (Hence why I mentioned "perverse incentives", especially. The Business School wants you to do well in Business School so you keep paying the Business School. The Business School cares less what you do outside the Business School so that you keep paying the Business School.)

While important, it actually misses a common problem I see: the assumption that every measurement is accurate.

The biggest mistake those employees make on their way to getting overlooked is assuming their boss knows.

Everyone needs to advocate for themselves.

A good boss will be getting feedback from everyone and staying on top of things. A mediocre boss will merely see "obvious" things like "who closed the most tickets." A bad boss may just play favorites and game the system on their own.

If you've got a bad boss who doesn't like you, you're likely screwed regardless. But most bosses are mediocre, not actively bad.

And in that case, the person who consistently helps unblock everyone needs to be advertising that to their manager. The person who's work doesn't need revisiting, who doesn't cause incidents needs to be hammering that home to their manager. You can do that without throwing your teammates under the bus, but you can't assume omnipotence or omniscience. And you can't wait until the performance review cycle to do it, you have to demonstrate it as an ongoing thing.

> The biggest mistake those employees make on their way to getting overlooked is assuming their boss knows.

100%. You ask me to do the near impossible, I'll pull it off. But you will be very well-versed in how hard it is first.

I agree it's a mistake but one thing that's never taken into account in this discussion is that many people find it enough that they are doing their jobs. They don't want to do marketing. A lot of tech people are like that which is a real tragedy.

Your boss can know about it, but if their boss wants data on performance you’re back in the same boat.

Funny you mention engineers needing to market themselves though. That leads to its own consequences. I’ve been at a place where everyone needed to market their own work in order to get promoted, to get raises, and to stay off the chopping block.

The end result? The engineers at the company who get promoted are… good at self-promotion, not necessarily good at engineering. Many of the best engineers at the company—who were hired to do engineering—languish in obscurity while people who can game the system thrive. People get promoted who are only good at cranking out poorly-made deliverables that burden their team with excessive long-term maintenance issues. They fuck off to higher levels of the company, leaving their team to deal with the consequences of their previous work.

Run that script for five or ten years and it doesn’t seem to be working out well for the company.

You made excellent points. As someone looking to solve problems, finish tasks and go home. I just don't feel energized marketing myself if it is not during changing jobs.

And measurement has really taken over now. There is little value in getting task done well as compared to finishing more jira stories.

And that's fine. It's why the lifecycle of most technology companies is fairly short. They grow for a while and eventually stagnate, to be replaced by the next crop of startups when a disruptive innovation comes along. And then the cycle repeats.

When it comes time for layoffs, it generally isn't what your boss knows, it's what your boss's grandboss thinks to throw onto a spreadsheet at the eleventh hour before Quarterly Reports are due.

A good direct boss might keep you on track for a bonus or other "local advancement", maybe even a promotion, but many companies you are only as valued as the ant numbers you look like from the C Suite's mile high club. (Which doesn't protect your good boss, either.)

> Also this push to measure everything means that anything that can’t be measured isn’t valued.

Never thought I'd see an intelligent point made on hackernews, but there it is. You are absolutely correct. This really hit home for me.

You could have made your point better without insulting everyone on the forum.

What you're describing was precisely our culture at the last startup.

One group plans ahead and overall do a solid job, so they're rarely swamped, never pull all-nighters. People are never promoted, they're thought of as slacking and un-startup-like. Top performers leave regularly because of that.

The other group is behind on even the "blocker"-level issues, people are stressed and overworked, weekends are barely a thing. But — they get praised for hard work. The heroes. (And then leave after burning out completely.)

(The company was eventually acquired, but employees got pennies. So it worked out well for the founders, while summarily ratfucking everyone else involved. I'm afraid this is very common.)

The classic one too is that as somebody who puts out the fires, you get all the praise; whereas if you just do the damn job right from the beginning, nobody notices. Corollary: create as many fires as you can, just don't completely burn the whole thing to the ground.

It's fascinating that you end up sort of doing the work twice, you build an excel (or jira) model of the work work along with the actual work to be done.

Often this extends to the entire organization, where you have like this parallel dimension of spreadsheets and planning existing on top of everything.

Eats resources like crazy to uphold.

This compounds with each _team_ modeling the work in jira/excel too!

Yes but metrics! How can the CEO look like they know what's happening without understanding anything if they don't have everyone producing numbers?

Jira is already almost like "productivity theater" where engineers chart the work for the benefit of managers, and managers of managers only. Many programmers already really resent having to deal with it. Soon it will be a total farce, as engineers using MCP Jira servers have LLMs chart the "work" and manage the tickets for them, as managers do the same in reverse, instructing LLMs to summarize the work being done in Jira.

It'll be nothing but LLMs talking to other LLMs under the guise of organizational productivity in which the only one deriving any value from this effort is the companies charging for the input and output tokens. Except, they are likely operating at a loss...

Managers (as in PMs, EMs, and C-Suite) don't like JIRA either - there just isn't an alternative.

Customers and investors ask for delivery timelines and amount of resources invested on major features or products, and you need to give an accurate-ish answer, and you as a company will be dealing with hundreds if not thousands of features depending on size.

In that kind of a situation, the only way you can get that visibility is through JIRA (or a JIRA type product), because it acts as a forcing function to get a defensible estimate, and monitor progress.

Furthermore, due to tax laws, we need to track investments into features and initiatives, and JIRA becomes the easiest way to collect that kind of amoratization data.

Once some AI Agent to automate this whole program management/JIRA hygiene process exists, it will make life for everyone so much easier.

This explanation is not incompatible with calling the whole business a "theater".

How is it theater?

When customers give you money, they expect a date.

When investors give you money, they want to see whether or not you are investing in the right initiatives.

When you open a company, the IRS, SEC, and other regulators expect some amount of financial compliance.

Do you want me to come to you and give you an ultimatum to give me an exact date, calculate amortization, and defend existing investments, and if any of those slips you are the fired? And do that with all the hundreds and thousands of initiatives on a daily basis?

That's the alternative.

Welcome to the industry - you're paid to make purchasers happy, not you. Purchasers don't care if you DuckDB or OracleDB - they care if the product they paid for will be delivered on time and meet the needs stipulated in their contract.

If you want to be happy and only deal with engineering problems, you sadly have to deal with the poopshow that JIRA is.

None of this sounds necessary for the human race. Maybe David Graeber was right.

Nothing is necessary to exist besides foraging, yet you are still using an industrially manufactured product (laptop or mobile phone) to reply to someone on a VC-subsidized forum.

So I'm not sure your contention has much merit, unless you wish to return to the woods and stop using HN, otherwise you're just enabling the supposed waste you appear to detest.

Or alternatively, you could hop off the high horse and understand the headaches the people you report to at work deal with, and thus maybe learn some additional context that can help you at your current or future job, and maybe think of a way to remove the drudgery in a process that annoys everyone.

I mean there is an alternative out there for making software that doesn't require profit and can still provide societal value. The alternative isn't to forage in the wilderness, please tell me you are just having a laugh and weren't being serious.

This is the perfect manifestation of the quote: It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

Capitalism has become as much of a thought-terminating argument as 'the gods'. Most '-ism' words I think.

So far none of the imaginary economic systems seem to work as well as capitalism when it comes to raising human living standards. These vague, low-effort criticisms are getting tiresome.

"And yet you partake in society. Curious.

I am very smart "

It's theater because the numbers in JIRA are, for the most part, pulled out of someone's ass, and then multiplied by various coefficients by managers along the chain (based on their pessimism and/or experience). Garbage in, garbage out.

So yes, this is theater, and it only makes someone happy for as long as they aren't aware (or can pretend to not be aware) how the sausage is made.

If you round up great engineering orgs that ship impactful stuff more of them don't use JIRA than do. Linear, Basecamp, Asana, Monday etc.

My experience is by the time an org gets hundreds of priorities and can't effectively delegate to sub orgs they're already fucked and there's no point working there if you want to do anything meaningful.

How do the great engineering orgs that ship impactful stuff organize / run a major project?

Mostly they are using some home grown solution that does pretty much the same stuff as Jira.

Its not _all_ theater. Sometimes something does make it into the box and out the door.

Absolutely everything is tracked as a work item with estimates. Anything you think should be done needs to be justified and tracked the same way.

My grandpa once said something that seemed ridiculous but makes a lot of sense: that every workplace should have a “heavy” who steals a new worker’s lunch on the first day, just to see if he asserts himself. Why? Not to haze or bully but to filter out the non-fighters so that when management wants to impose quotas or tracking, they remember that they’d be enforcing this on a whole team of fighters… and suddenly they realize that squeezing the workers isn’t worth it.

The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing.

That generation had it more together as citizens, and they held on to power for a long time. Postwar all of the institutions in the US grew quickly, and the WW2 generation moved up quickly as a result. The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone.

Why do you think that is? I’m wondering if the shared sacrifice of WW2 has something to do with it.

That's half of it. The other half is, WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower. So the war also taught lessons on a societal level about organization and cooperation, and the postwar economic boom provided the means to get great things done.

> The other half is, WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower.

The US was the leading industrial power from around 1880 or 1890, and it became the leading military power in the 1910s (by dint of entering WWI so late that it didn't exhaust its manpower fighting it). It may have been a cultural backwater as late as WWI, but its economic status would have been fairly undisputed. And by WWII, the only question anyone would have seriously asked is if the US or the UK held the throne as greatest of the great powers.

I think if you look at how most people lived, worked, travelled, communicated, educated, etc before WW2 - there was a huge improvement after the war that resulted in lots of development and economic opportunities for the average person.

Sure, but that doesn't make the original statement correct.

>WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower.

Labor also has more power when a ton of young newcomers to the working force were just killed before they could ever make it there.

One of the consequences of WWII was that everyone's plans, ideas, and work cultures were turned into direct results very quickly, in the real world. Sometimes fatally.

The people who lived through that had their feet on the ground.

Aside from its many other flaws, post-70s neoliberalism added a bizarre abstraction layer of economic delusion over everything. This suppressed the core truths of physical reality, common sense, and the basic social requirement of sane reciprocal relationships, and did its best to make consequences as indirect and deniable as possible.

Things that really, really matter - like ecological, political, and social stability - were devalued in everyday experience and replaced with economic abstractions that are more mystical than practical.

It's very culty, and the disconnect between how things should be and how they really are is getting more and more obvious to everyone.

"Aside from its many other flaws, post-70s neoliberalism added a bizarre abstraction layer of economic delusion over everything. This suppressed the core truths of physical reality, common sense, and the basic social requirement of sane reciprocal relationships, and did its best to make consequences as indirect and deniable as possible."

I think I need to print that out and put on the wall. However, did you live through it youself? I think it it hard to evaluate stuff like this with 2nd hand experience only.

>The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone.

The boomer types are now in their 70s and even 80s and mostly retired (or dead). It's the generations after them that run many of the anal-retentive, bureaucratically obsessive compulsive managerial postings today, and among those are a good number of gen z turds who are at least as toxic, while being smugly self-righteous about their habits. We'll be blaming boomers for decades after they're dead, for things long since out of their hands.

Boomers is anyone 60 or older right now - not just 70+

That being said, Boomer has evolved to mean anyone older, established and conservative.

Like the counterculture saying from the past, don't trust anyone over 30.

> The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing.

That era also had militant labor organization and real socialist and communist parties in the US. Anticommunism killed all that and brought us to the current state of affairs where employers that respect their employees even a little bit are unicorns.

Why do you need unions for this as opposed to just a tight labor market?

High demand for labor can lead to better conditions, but demand for labor isn't static and without real organization and solidarity it's nearly impossible for workers to punish companies that move jobs to low-cost locales. Economic policy is also controlled by the employer class, which means policies that encourage unemployment and inflation are common.

> steals a new worker’s lunch on the first day, just to see if he asserts himself

> to filter out the non-fighters

This is bullying and hazing.

What if the workers decide the work is imposing on them? Maybe that's a good thing but it could go too far.

Many of the workers in the 1950s were combat veterans who had lived through some shit and weren't as easy to push around. Contrast that to today when a lot of people tend to panic over minor hazards like a respiratory virus with a >99% survival rate. That cowardice puzzled me until I realized that a lot of younger people have led such sheltered lives that they have never experienced any real hardship or serious physical danger so they lack the mental resilience to cope with it. They just want to be coddled and aren't willing to fight for anything.

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