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Comment by mdaniel | Hacker News Reader

This is a horrifically cynical take and I wish it would stop. I doubt very seriously there is any meaningfully sized collection of engineers who introduce things "just to keep themselves employed," to say nothing of having to now advance that perspective into a full blown conspiracy because code review is also a thing

What is far more likely is the proverbial "JS framework problem:" gah, this technology that I read about (or encounter) is too complex, I just want 1/10th that I understand from casually reading about it, so we should replace it with this simple thing. Oh, right, plus this one other thing that solves a problem. Oh, plus this other thing that solves this other problem. Gah, this thing is too complex!

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I think engineers like to create things. And they will tend, on the whole, to create new things when they have a chance, not because they want to justify their employment, but because they like to do it. And so, if you employ a lot of software engineers, you're going to have a lot of code. Combine that with an incentive structure (likely also created by engineers that like to make new things) which rewards making new things but doesn't particularly reward maintaining old things, and you'll have a lot of new things made, whether it's useful on the scale of the whole organization (something which is very hard to get a good perspective on as an individual contributer, anyway), or not.

I don’t agree with the phrasing, but there is certainly a ton of complexity introduced because of engineers who are trying to be promoted or otherwise maintain their image of being capable of solving complex problems (through complex solutions).

It’s not the same as introducing complexity to keep yourself employed, but the result is the same and so is the cause - incentive structures aren’t aligned at most companies to solve problems simply and move on.

I realized that I should have asked for an example of "too complex" because I may not be following the arguments because my definition of a thing that is "too complex" almost certainly doesn't align with someone else's. In fact, I'd bet that if you rounded up 10 users from this site and polled them for something they thought was "too complex" the intersection would be a very, very small set of things

I'd recommend reading bullshit jobs by David graeber. Most jobs in most organisations have an incentive structure for an individual to keep themselves employed rather than to actually solve problems.

I'm with you that the world in general is filled with bullshit jobs, but I do not subscribe to the perspective of wholesale bullshit jobs in the cited "big tech," since in general I do not think that jobs which have meaningful ways to measure them easily fall into bullshit. Maybe middle managers?

Do you reckon the KPI's and performance indicators used in big tech count as meaningful ways to measure performance? Wouldn't someone implementing a complex resume-driven project score highly on these measurements, despite a simpler solution being correct? I am not sure that job-hopping every 18 months to maximise TC (ie optimise against your incentives) is a great way to learn about long-term design and organisational implications.

I'm not saying that these jobs are bullshit in the same way that a VP of box-ticking is, just that it's not a conspiracy that a cathedral based on 'design-doc culture' might produce incentives that result in people who focus on maximising their performance on these fiscally rewarding dot points, rather than actualising their innate belief in performant and maintainable systems.

I work at a start-up so if my code doesn't run we don't get paid. This motivates me to write it well.

He's an anarchist so it's not a surprise that he's grinding out the same old tropes about organizations

I think Graeber misses the mark quite substantially, in that I think to the extent that BS jobs exist, they are rarely perceived as such by the people who are doing them (in fact, the data suggests the opposite correlation: people doing important but 'shit' jobs are more likely to report that their work is bullshit than people doing work that Graeber would view as 'bullshit', like management consulting and marketing).

Possibly, I mean in the book there's a hard number survey that says 37% of their sample described their job as not making a meaningful difference. It's a great book.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/capitalism-job-bullshit-dav...

I'm not saying it's a conscious impulse! But I've seen this happen more times than I can count.

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