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Using a throwaway for this comment, but my first experience with this kind of thing was in 2013 when I joined a major international company with over 100k employees worldwide and realized that there were entire departments and organizations dedicated to delivering no value at all. Departments with 100s of people, with middle managers making several times the average salary in my country, where after years of work nothing of value was delivered and nobody was held responsible. I always wondered how companies like this can even exist and why shareholders invest in them.

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Imagine that you decide that you would like to try farming, and you buy some geese. One of the geese, for whatever reason, begins to lay golden eggs. Your little farm is now unbelievably profitable. It is as profitable as your thousand closest neighboring farms combined. So naturally, you hire guards for the goose and experts on golden geese veterinary science to make sure that the goose is fed and healthy and is maximizing egg mass per day, and you hire people who figure out how to turn gold into wealth as profitably as possible, but at some point, you run out of ways to significantly improve the magic goose pipeline.

At this point, you've stopped growing. Not growing is completely unacceptable; it is anathema. So you start spending a lot of the money on long shot bets. Maybe try buying lots of geese to see if any lay golden eggs. You heard that somebody found a hen that lays golden eggs because of some magic beans, hire some bean farmers and see if that gets you more gold egg poultry. Jack who was the manager of goose calisthenics has really wanted a chance to grow, and he's dating your cousin, so let's put him in charge of the beans.

The only way to grow is long shot bets. Most of them will fail. All of them will be expensive. But the alternative is not growing. That can't ever happen.

> Not growing is completely unacceptable; it is anathema

Succinctly put and so very both unfortunate and accurate. The only other thing I can think of that grows endlessly is cancer. There’s an analogy in there if you squint hard enough.

Cancer does not grow endlessly.

It eventually kills the host. That was part of the analogy, well done you found it!

Doesn't it?

Up until death, yes.

Well, it depends... Biology is complicated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease

Ah, the "colonize the stars solution".

The responsible alternative to not going is to return capital to your share holders who can then do the goose hunting themselves, and management should in invest their personal stock into other companies.

For very human reasons, they thing they have a better chance of finding the goose themselves.

Does R&D have to have a guaranteed ROI in your view or do allow for speculative research that may not pan out?

Of course not, but the expected return should be positive in the long run, no? Otherwise, you might as well donate to an existing university or research lab.

> One of the geese, for whatever reason, begins to lay golden eggs. Your little farm is now unbelievably profitable.

how? the value of gold plummets the instant that the market learns that the stuff literally comes out of rear ends

well, mainly, because its an illustrative parable and not reality.

> ...comes out of rear ends

Instead we know it literally comes out of the ground and the market doesn't plummet.

Law of Demand. Cheaper gold supply means that the demand for it grows tremendously. Or something.

It's UBI man. All those jobs are essentially UBI.

I've been thinking about this a lot, but basically, my old job was basically superfluous and we didn't accomplish anything important but I had to pretend that it was real, important, meaningful, and progressing.

The truth is that most people's jobs are kind of unnecessary in the white collar world, and in some David Graber-esque hellscape we have to pretend that all the work is hyper important and aligned, etc.

Basically, society in the US is so opulent that for a great many people in the white collar world, it's more important that they look busy than actually do anything. It's the Pareto principle in action, or maybe a power law thing, or something where to get those few people who bust their ass and produce and add great value a ton of hanger-oners have to be a part of the org in order to facilitate that. Regardless, it's basically UBI but with meetings.

I am impressed that Graeber made his way into this conversation (and the author's article), and really appreciate your take.

I think about "Bullshit Jobs" every time I hear someone tell me how lean, efficient and rational the free-market private sector is compared to socialist central planning. In many senses, it is of course true, but it's not quite as true as one might believe at first glance.

Because in general they are still making more money than god on average.

This and they spend a lot of effort in rent seeking and otherwise ensuring their profits are encoded into laws.

Also, quite often those 100s of people sitting around are a political requirement. That is, they got some tax break to ensure X people have jobs. That is, it's a job program.

I was shocked by this as well. I think it's a natural property of large organizations and it takes great effort and great leaders to fight it.

The way I think about it is that building something truly successful comes with a tremendous amount of momentum. So much momentum that growth for these companies still occurs.

The people hired into a mature organization are literally there just to keep the lights on and let the momentum do its work. They also create and grow their little fiefdoms.

You can try and build something and innovate there, but it takes a deeply concerted effort to try and sustain it. Even if something is made wildly successful and is growing 50-100% year over year, it still likely pales in comparison to the 0.005% growth of the large core business.

Even if the new innovation is given space to breath, it can be killed at any point by the core business as the fiefdoms look over and say: that should be part of my org, or those resources can be better spent on the core business. So instead of waiting the years it takes for the new, small thing to grow large enough to be important it is easily killed by the parts of the organization just keeping the lights on.

This. Also sometimes the small thing is collateral damage from random reorganizations, nothing personal but you're now part of org Y which doesn't have budget for that.

Everyone knows this is true of every large enterprise shop and is one of the reasons that wall street rewards layoffs.

If Wall Street was so wise they would only reward meaningful layoffs. Laying off 10% of a company by stack ranking every team accomplishes nothing. Particularly if the company just hires the same number of cut people next quarter.

If a tree has a dead branch, you cut it off. Cutting off 10% of the leaves evenly distributed among branches will remove some dead leaves, but it leaves the source of the problems unaddressed.

The only time layoffs work is when the go with cutting the product worked on completely from the company. Everything else should be managed by not growing too big when times are well, and not hiring when someone leaves when times are bad. There will be ups and downs in your market, figure out what they are and ensure your headcount matches that long term, ride out the bad times with no profit knowing they will get better again - cutting all other costs.

But then you are asking hard questions. Which leaves? Which branch? How do I create a protective legal theory to prevent numerous lawsuits?

Best just to do it randomly to avoid hard decisions and lawsuits.

Most short term changes with stocks like this are wholly irrational and have very little to do with accomplishing anything other than signalling.

Follow the money, and answers become more obvious as to why. As to how? Hehehehe

entropy

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