Ask HN: Is it just me or are most businesses insane? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it just me or are most businesses insane?

15 pointsjustenough7 comments

I realize that its probably me, I'm the dumb one, but please bear with me and help me understand. I've been recently looking for a new job as I am slowly viewing my previously functioning workplace accelerating towards a static dysfunction.

I have spoken to quite a few companies and read a lot of recruitment boards in a rather sizable european city that ought to be filled with opportunities. With tech-sovreignty on everyones lips I would expect some drive and excitement in the european software scene, but to get to companies with a mission I have to wade through The Swamp. The Swamp is waist high in Scrum certifications and gigs where the key skill is "navigating red tape". There the architects roam, with no expectations of from management, and with a mandate to stop every system that does not yet include an Azure Event Hub. In the large corporations where the most important roles are the power-BI analysts and the best metric for value-creation is the fill of your calendar and your hours of overtime.

And somehow, if feel like your getting somewhere with a company that thats primarily motivated by crafting something good, not focusing on vanity metrics or micromanaging how things are done -- its going to be a marketing startup.

Summarized: Most of the businesses I see seem to be bloated. They have way to many employees for what they produce. They have too much structure and too many rules to effectively generate new income, and new ideas are shut down and not welcome.

But I genuninly do wonder: Are businesses somehow incentivised to become inefficient? Is it possible for a business to stay ambitious over time? Has one seen it succeed or how have you seen it fail?

This is how BigCo works. They are optimized for resilience and providing predictable cashflows for investors, not efficiency as such. If they had, say, 2 "10x" engineers who were brilliant and could do everything with no red tape or inefficiency, then one or both of them could leave, or demand pay raises, and the company would be screwed - it would be a very brittle, unsustainable period of efficiency.

So, it's better to have 20 1x engineers, with significant slack in the system, who are all interchangeable cogs in a machine that takes tickets in one end and pushes mediocre software out the other end. That way, if 5 or 10 of them leave, they can be replaced, and nobody will tell the difference. If there's a lean quarter, you can lay off half of them, and then rehire a bunch of average randos off the street a few months later, and again, nobody will be able to tell the difference.

Also, the mayor will visit the grand opening of the new office, and the media will write a lovely story about how many jobs have been "created", and the company will be able to negotiate some tax breaks for creating so many mediocre jobs.

You might find things are better at a mom & pop, or startup, or maybe outside of a big city.

And notably, totally interchangeable cogs is exactly what a startup should not want. For the reason that it requires a lot of slack. Startups are supposed to move fast, and if you move fast that means there should be minimal overlap in work between different employees. Layoffs could be fatal at that stage in a company's story.

So I work for a small defense contractor, for more than 2 years now. The means to success so far is almost entirely in the soft skills. It’s helpful to understand the technology but the soft skills are so much more important. It’s certainly the 80/20 rule.

Here is what I mean by soft skills:

* Actually caring about people. Checking up on your peers and seeing if they need help.

* Constant awareness of the people under your management. Having some idea of what they are working on where their pain points are. They should always know they can come to you if they have a problem.

* Tracking down undocumented requirements by actually talking to people and getting to know more people.

* Constant awareness of hot issues affecting major projects and operating status.

Since my business is technology contracting the business goal is to put people into employment and retain those people to the success of the client. The more I retain people the more successful I am to my employer. The inefficiency of the work is up to the client and coordinating business partners.

I started here as a developer and within a year was promoted to a manager. In the contract I am still a developer. The complexity there is that I operate in partnership with an another company who would prefer I were a junior developer even though I manage 15 seats. It’s still all about the soft skills.

They aren't incentivized to become inefficient, but once they grow large enough you get into a situation where everyone is playing a political game to minimize their own risk and effort.

And worse, the only people with motivation to fill the top tiers of the company are usually a little off. You essentially have to be a bit nuts to want to be C-level or above in a large corporation. I've seen it, there are employees who will ruthlessly seek out more money. Usually their competence levels aren't quite there, but they are the only people who want the job.

You have discovered Wally's playground. Wally is one of the guys from the Dilbert comic strip.

Basically, many incentives are "misaligned" in such a way, that micromanaging demise is (locally) considered more valuable than actually bringing in cash from customers by actually giving them something.

As long as the company's owners don't pick up on this and are effective at doing something about it, "all bets are off."

It sounds like you’re applying to enterprises rather than startups. There _will_ be a startup scene in your city, you just need to find it. Look for the meetups, gravitate to where the founders are, find out which meetups _they_ attend, and go network there.

It could be incentives to lower prices (race to the bottom from competition).

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