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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

An outsider was brought in who knew nothing about X-Ray. I was later told the new manger was hired based on management experience. She spent her first week being trained by one of the temps who had been deemed unqualified for the product manager position. After spending a week training the manager, and being her go-to person for the next three weeks whenever there was a problem, he was let go because he reached the maximum of eleven months on his contract.

I fail to see how it would be worse to make a commitment and provide some employees with benefits and some sort of job security. This HR policy is pathologically dysfunctional, and seemingly widespread, not just in the tech sector. I really wonder how long CEOs and management people in general think this party can go on.

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I really wonder how long CEOs and management people in general think this party can go on.

The trouble is, many tech-based industries today have little effective competition in the short term. No-one is going to disrupt Amazon and take over "We own on-line sales for the entire universe" because someone made a dumb hiring decision. No-one is going to beat Google out of the online advertising space because they have terrible customer service.

Sure, they might succeed despite these obvious failings rather than because of them, and they might have succeeded more if they'd been smarter, but in a very real economic sense, success is relative. Until these kinds of screw-ups make a dent in the bottom line that is both significant and clearly visible, there's nothing to drive a change unless something catches the eye of a few people who are very powerful but even more busy.

Very true. I think the Internet accelerates superstar effects to the detriment of the economy as a whole. I hope Alibaba/Taobao decides to leave the Yangtze sooner rather than later.

http://pandodaily.com/2012/08/30/unleashing-the-crocodile-wh...

re: "management people"

That is part of the problem. You will often find that the skills it takes to climb the corporate ladder are not the same as the skills it takes to be a good manager. Management in bigger companies tends to be littered with well connected but incompetent people who are really good at bullshitting and 'looking the part'. This doesn't apply to every manager, but it is common enough that you are almost guaranteed to work with plenty of them throughout your career.

The problem boils down to that managers are rewarded by their upper-managers for doing things that make the upper-managers happy, and are rarely rewarded for doing things that make their TEAM BETTER.

So as a result, most managers practice schmoozing the management hierarchy, and not at all about making more effective teams. And then guess which one they get better at? (hint: the one they do more of)

And then which one do they do MORE of?

And the cascading spiral ruins modern corporations.

This is part and parcel of current corporate theory.

The mantra of "increase shareholder value" really means "make the investors happy", which currently means "make the quarterly number look great". Combine that with a giant primate dominance hierarchy, where the only goal is to please the bigger monkeys, and idiocy like this is basically inevitable.

This isn't the only way to run companies, but it's the only way most people have even heard of, so alternatives are literally inconceivable. From what I can tell, the infection vector for this meme is MBA programs.

Happily, there are signs that this is starting to change. E.g.: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/07/09/ft-urges...

Or the rise of the various Lean-derived methods, which have a fundamentally different theory of business.

> which currently means "make the quarterly number look great".

Corporations with high P/E ratios are the counterexample to this, and Amazon in particular has a very high P/E.

Can you name some more long-running exceptions?

Amazon is an outlier in American corporate culture. Its founder and very active CEO is somebody who double-majored in CS and EE. My explanation of them is that Bezos never was indoctrinated with MBA dogma, and instead runs his company like an engineer. He's been lucky enough (and skillful enough) that Amazon has always done well enough that his investors have never pushed for a "real" CEO.

So for me, Amazon is proof twice over for my theory that MBA dogma isn't even very good for business. Not only are they doing well in the long term by not giving a crap about quarterly numbers, but they don't have serious competitors because typical execs don't even get how they're being run over.

At some point though the market expects this trend to reverse and the quarterly numbers to start looking very good. Which is what has been priced into the current share price.

The problem boils down to that managers are rewarded by their upper-managers for doing things that make the upper-managers happy, and are rarely rewarded for doing things that make their TEAM BETTER.

Any sufficiently large organisation becomes an ecosystem.

To succeed inside that ecosystem might damage the ecosystem itself in the wider world, but that doesn't matter in the short term to those inside it. At a certain size the ecosystem seems invulnerable and everlasting, and eclipses the wider world for those inside it.

This happens not just in corporations, but in any other social grouping I've seen, including governments, politics, and academia. It's very hard to avoid when any significant number of people are involved.

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