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Comment by Balgair | Hacker News Reader

The manager is responsible for $X but only gets paid their salary.

I'm their day to day, hiring is a pain. They need the extra hands, but they have to go through more work to get that person onboard. The activation energy is high, higher now with AI and automated job applications clogging things up.

Then you have onboarding and the continued costs of management of that person. Honestly, most managers would want the smallest team possible in terms of day to day workload.

This is also why AI is appealing. The promise of no sick days, no HR complaints, no chit chat. Just pure work done in plain language. Work done overnight, right, the first time. A middle managers dream worker.

The thing that is more important is the budget. It's always the budget. Nothing matters but the budget. That's the second iron law of beauraracy, of course.

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As I see it, hiring people is the most important part of running any business - by a large margin. And if you have a lot of employees, then hiring people who are good at hiring becomes your highest priority.

> The manager is responsible for $X but only gets paid their salary.

That's why somebody higher in rank makes sure the manager gets the time he needs to make the best hires. Somewhere up the line there is somebody who cares about the basics of running a business right.

> I'm their day to day, hiring is a pain.

Of course it's a pain, that's why it's a job and why people get paid for it.

> This is also why AI is appealing. The promise of no sick days, no HR complaints, no chit chat. Just pure work done in plain language. Work done overnight, right, the first time. A middle managers dream worker.

Okay, but that means the company instantly lost all customers and all income and went bankrupt. Because why in the world would a client hire your company to use an AI, when they can just use the AI themselves? And don't say that there needs to be a human who is specialized in using the AI, because then you're back at hiring and having employees again.

I'm not trying to be glib here, but I'm not entirely certain that you have worked for a long time in a large corporation, right?

If you have not, I would like to introduce you to one of the best pieces of writing on corporate workings that I have ever come across: The Gervais Principle.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

It is a very good lens, but a very cynical one, to look at the corporation.

In general, shows like The Office, though satire, are close, I feel, to reality than what you are espousing here.

Not that I disagree with you at all. There should be people that are all about hiring. There should be managers that see their paychecks as adequate compensation. There should be consumers that are that reactive to internal staffing decisions.

But in my limited experience, the things that should be there, typically are not.

> https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

This should be required reading for everyone wanting to enter the corporate world. It rambles on a bit but even today, decades later, it's still spot on!

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