The Iron Law or Bureaucracy:
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization. (Quoted from Wikipedia)
Hell, DNA is just rules about what you can build and it's primary purpose is just making sure the rules survive. All the wonderful complexity and diversity of life is a side effect of the little changes necessary to propagate the rules.
I think in addition to rules survival and admin self-concern, people genuinely underestimate how much maintenance and effort go into accomplishing goals in an organized, communicable, trustable way. It is also why AI is not as successful as people thought it was going to be at taking over jobs.
If you think the only value add to a business is the business output, you are taking admin work for granted.
“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”
The quote actually reads like a summary of Parkinson's Law, that bureaucracies inherently tend to grow because officials create work for each other another and seek to increase their numbers. But the exact quote doesn't appear in Parkinson's original essay. Quote from that essay:
"Factor 1: An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals; and
Factor 2: Officials make work for each other."
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/parkinsons-law_c-northcote-par...
Imagine a school with only teachers and no administration. Who hires the teachers, who collects tuition, who schedules classes? Even if the teachers could do those things, now the teachers have to do the administration, which takes away from teaching--and the teachers quickly find (like any new business owner) that most of their time is spent on 'overhead' and very little on teaching itself.
The Iron Law is generally viewed as undesirable, because the 'doers' don't want the 'managers' to control the organization--this is how everything becomes enshittified. At best you have benevolent managers who are extremely sympathetic to the doers and act accordingly, but this is generally short-lived and depends on the organization hiring those benevolent managers. So the big question is, how can we ensure that the values of the organization (System 5) remain aligned with the values of the doers?
In general, one should speak more circumspectly about that third type.
From "Son of a Liche", by J. Zachary Pike.
If you think 1:1s don’t add value, your slice of the reality of what even modestly sized teams need to operate smoothly is so far from my experience I don’t think we’re likely to bridge the divide.
But to make a good faith effort: what is the job you think line managers are supposed to be doing, if not listening to devs, going to meetings you would prefer not to sit through, and writing up carefully documented feedback for the under-performers you seem convinced surround you at every turn?
There are lots of lousy managers out there, and you can’t control that - but you can set the agenda of your 1-1 yourself if they don’t have one. It’s your 45 minutes with the person who signs your checks, use it to your advantage.
Search the net for questions / topics to manage up in 1-1s.
I often ask my manager for feedback, ask about expectations for promotion, career opportunities, ask advice on problems I have, ask how I can get my thing prioritized, brief her on something I think she should be aware of and what I need from her, etc.
Don’t let your manager turn your 45 minutes into a waste of time.
We have standups for our team as well as the larger team and we are in constant contact with one another throughout each day via IM. Why would we need to repeat the same shit in a 1:1?
I consider their 1:1s THEIR meeting. If they want it, I'm there; if they don't and want to work, great.
As such, we almost never have 1:1s and my team continually leads the organization w/the highest overall as well as manager satisfaction. It's been this way at each and every company I've worked for and is likely why all but one inherited direct report has worked with me at multiple companies before.
- General sentiment about problems with the team and company that bother me but that I don’t have a solution to yet or decided how to bring it up with the team.
- Fun / interesting projects I unilaterally decided to dedicate my working hours towards that I never asked permission to work on. Sometimes it ends up being something cool that my manager wants to join in on or promote to a bigger effort.
- About our lives and what's going on.
Did productivity actually change dispensing with those meetings? Probably not by much, it's hard to say empirically because task estimation was always a wildcard.
Qualitatively, I think a good balance is twice-weekly standup, bi-weekly long form. It adds some structure and regular communication, I think it helps people feel better and have a bit more relationship. But I supplement this with frequent invitations to talk about product ad-hoc, talk about tasking ad-hoc if you feel you're not productive, and schedule more pointed meetings with me whenever I'm free. Which is almost all the time, because I need to not be in meetings in order to get work done or spend time thinking.
Honestly, I don't begrudge anyone a job. If people want to do SWE as a performative role, I'll detect that fairly quickly and let it be, even people under me if I were to climb the org chart beyond the first rung. They actually do serve some benefits to the company and to society, as long as they are amicable and respond positively to requests. I'm eventually going to tune them out for serious/urgent development work, and no one can make any guarantees about protection from layoffs, period. C'est la vie.
If people are driven to achieve more, love engineering products, and enjoy working with technology, it's going to be obvious. We will end up working together to solve problems like gravity creates stable orbits. But I can't realistically only hire those people, or run even a medium size company with only the vital few on payroll. It's statistically unlikely, that's why a unicorn startup is a unicorn. Statistically most SWE roles exist outside of that... right? Like after IPO, in big companies where some amount of bureaucracy is just a fact of the size of the machine.
EDIT: twice weekly standup, although I guess bi-weekly can mean both every other week and twice a week?
When you do daily standups or mandatory everyone says something type stuff, it does something damaging psychologically. You end up scrambling to get things together for the standup to not look like you are a fumbling idiot, when it would have been better to take a few more days with a clearer head, less cortisol in your blood, and output and share better work.
I'm not outright saying they are useless but 1:1s won't make a bad manager good and they're a nice bonus when your manager is competent. In the latter I actually get career and professional guidance.
Like you’d try to talk to someone about an urgent issue and you’d be told to save it for your upcoming scheduled 1:1 on Thursday because they don’t have any time until then. Why don’t they have any time? Because they have so many 1:1 recurring meetings scheduled each week that they don’t have time for anything else.
1:1s started as a good way to formalize manager to report communication on a predictable schedule. This is good if the team isn’t regularly talking organically. Some company cultures take it too far and turn it into an excuse to make recurring meetings the focus of all work. I was requested to set up 1:1s not only with my team, but with each of the other teams we interfaced with, team leads on those teams, designers, stakeholders, interns, product managers who wanted to interface with us, the security team, and an endless list of other people.
All the managers were just shuffling from one 1:1 to the next. Many never had time to deal with issues from the 1:1s because they were so busy moving on to the next 1:1.
Middle management was always congratulating themselves on the success of their 1:1s because they said it was when they heard about all of the real issues they didn't know about. They didn't realize that by making themselves unavailable except for the 1:1s they were forcing this result.
It was even worse when the problems involved multiple people or teams, which was almost always the case. Now you had to wait until Thursday to talk to your manager about it, who promised to add it to the agenda for his 1:1 with other team the following Tuesday. Then in that 1:1, the other team lead would say he'd bring it up with his schedule 1:1 with the person the Friday after that. It was like every communication queue only got processed once a week, so each hop added more delay. The managers would always tell is it wasn't supposed to be like that, but trying to direct would get you hit with "Let's talk about this in our next 1:1"
The worst were the managers who had silly agendas for every 1:1, like my manager who blocked out the first 10 minutes for us to talk about our weekends with each other in a performative manner, 5 minutes per person. I could be dealing with an urgent issue in prod and he’d get angry if I tried to rush past the forced chit chat about our weekend to get back to business.
If you haven’t seen calendars stuffed to the gills with performative 1:1s then this is all probably hard to believe, but it happens. Some companies got so fat with middle management that performative meeting rituals were the primary use of everyone’s time and you would be chastised if you tried to break the mold.
Dude, a a weekly 1:1 should be 30 minutes long. And managers should have at most 10 directs, so 5 hours total out of a 40 hour work week. Something has gone haywire and it's not the 1:1 thats the problem.
> I was requested to set up 1:1s not only with my team, but with each of the other teams we interfaced with, team leads on those teams, designers, stakeholders, interns, product managers who wanted to interface with us, the security team, and an endless list of other people. ... All the managers were just shuffling from one 1:1 to the next. Many never had time to deal with issues from the 1:1s because they were so busy moving on to the next 1:1.
Yes, managers go to meetings but they're not all 1:1s and if they are, the problem isn't too many middle managers, it's not enough of them. But what you describe does not sound like a 1:1. At most it's a cross-functional meeting, and should have multiple people from both sides.
> The worst were the managers who had silly agendas for every 1:1, like my manager who blocked out the first 10 minutes for us to talk about our weekends with each other in a performative manner, 5 minutes per person. I could be dealing with an urgent issue in prod and he’d get angry if I tried to rush past the forced chit chat about our weekend to get back to business.
It sounds like someone got halfway through the ManagerTools guidance on 1:1s and decided they could improvise a better solution and failed. The purpose of 1:1s is to build and keep relationships, and they encourage this chitchat as relationship building, but the key thing is that the direct goes first and gets to talk about _what they want to talk about_. If you want to talk about work that's great! The best way to build a relationship is working towards a common goal, and work is pretty much the only expected common goal anyways. And if your manager _wants_ to talk about their weekend, they can, but the recommendation is to always let the direct set the first 10m of the agenda -- if a manager wants time on a direct's calendar they can always ask for more, but the reverse is much harder.
The best companies I worked for had no 1:1's. Eventually the company was acquired and the practice was "installed" by the acquirer.
The problem with this is we will ask, “if you want to talk about career progression, or go over a technical question, or talk about performance feedback, how do you get that from your manager?” And one might say, “just Slack them or ask them for a call.”
And the problem is that you now have created an environment where the voices the manager hears the most are the squeaky wheels, the people who can play politics. You don’t want that as a manager - you want an environment where you can get the best from all your team and everyone has the opportunity to get the benefit of a structured communication cadence with their manager, regardless of who plays politics.
There are some situations where you really don’t need 1-1s but these are rare edge cases (Jensen Huang is famous for not having them… but the people that report to him are senior enough to report to the CEO of the worlds largest company. So they don’t need much supervision.)
How about if the direct has absolutely no interest in talking about anything because they are just trying to do their job, which is going fine? Because that's 99%, maybe 100% of these meetings I've ever had.
The first ten minutes are usually kinda whatever, just catching up or chatting, but at around the halfway point, the REAL shit comes out. The things that were bothering them, or the task they were stuck on, or the team that’s been blocking them, or in better weeks, the ideas that have been really exciting them, or the people they’ve really been enjoying working with, or the tools they’ve been having success with, that kind of thing.
All of that stuff is INSANELY actionable for me. Sure, I can do project-steering work until the cows come home, but all these “little things” I find out in 1:1s that let me reduce friction or create opportunities, that’s gold.
A middleman's value is quite limited, of course as a middleman, you don't see it that way, but I find these meetings extraordinarily unproductive, even anti-productive, depending on how bad the "manager" is.
Only a few people can adequately explain themselves through slack.
It doesn't help that a lot of managers are _bad_ managers, and don't/can't/don't know how to run a tight 1:1.
the point of the 1:1 is to provide a high bandwidth way of getting worries and steers from employees to management and direction back to employees. if there is nothing to talk about then cut the meeting short.
Managing via 1 on 1's sounds (to me) like a complete waste of everyone's time and a little bit toxic. It also can create an environment encouraging people to go around each other and backstab rather than collaborate. I have been in a lead position before, I'd be very concerned and probably have a series of chats with any dev that sat on something like a blocker until we spoke one on one, or only felt comfortable speaking one on one.
Some things do need to be spoken privately, and they should feel comfortable doing so/scheduling it, but a regularly scheduled thing as a way of managing, unless I am completely misunderstanding GP comment, is crazy to me. Of course I am speaking strictly manager/lead -> developer. A manager managing managers is probably quite a bit different and does require scheduling 1 on 1's regularly to align and adjust, but I wouldn't really know, because I've never been in that role.
You're also an asshole manager if you're giving any sort of negative feedback on a person in a public setting.
You could always just schedule a meeting when someone needs a course correction, but then your employees who are clever little humans, will quickly figure out that any ad hoc meeting is going to be a problem for them and then have anxiety about those, even if its going to be a positive meeting for once.
Have you never heard people joke that their boss asked them for a quick chat and they thought they were getting laid off?
This is reframing the discussion a little bit. I said up thread, certain things need to be discussed in private, but why would it be on a regular, frequent cadence?
As far as negative feedback - yes, but isn't that what quarterly/bi-yearly/yearly reviews are for? If someone requires negative feedback on like, a once a week cadence, I'd be very concerned that employee was a good fit or being managed wrong.
Conspiracy theory (which I believe in): because calls or in office meetings are not persistent and they are not recorded, but chat messages are persistent. Anyone can say they didn't say something, it gets harder in writing.
I worked at a range of startups before joining my first corporate style company. This 1:1 meeting ritual was hard for me to adapt to.
At the startups, particularly the high performing ones, issues were addressed immediately. If a problem arose you talked to the people involved quickly. If it needed a meeting you got everyone together as soon as they were available or you messaged your manager to get it in front of the right people quickly. If you saved things up for the next recurring meeting then it was a problem.
When I joined a corporate-style company, that immediate and direct communication style was discouraged. Everyone was so busy with their meeting schedules that you were burdening them by bringing something up out of the regularly scheduled time slot.
The 1:1s had a performative agenda you had to follow with the classic ten minutes of obligatory chit chat or ice breakers before it was acceptable to bring up the work issues that you had been holding on to for 3 days for this scheduled meeting where it was permissible to bring it up.
All of the managers thought it was such a brilliant invention that this 1:1 format was surfacing the “REAL shit” that was “INSANELY actionable”, as if this was the only way to communicate. It seemed so absurd to me, having come from high performing startups where everyone just communicated to get their job done and was coached if they weren’t. Now I had to queue up all the issues and then follow the weekly ritual of chit-chat first, business second before I had a chance to bring it up in the culturally acceptable time slot.
I think these rituals are really comforting and provide a sense of routing and predictability that some people like, but I also think it can become a performative replacement for good communication when it becomes THE acceptable way to surface the real issues.
> what is the job you think line managers are supposed to be doing, if not listening to devs, going to meetings you would prefer not to sit through, and writing up carefully documented feedback for the under-performers you seem convinced surround you at every turn?
Actually managing. The listening to devs and sitting on meetings is pointless if you are not actively using those meetings to organize, prioritize, plan and execute parts of plan.
But once the company is just large enough, there is no way you're going to interact with everyone in a meaningful manner (n^2 relationships and all that), and the simplest solution is intermediaries and 1-1s.
[also, being sarcastic is unhelpful.]
I'm a staff eng and have 1:1s with other managers I don't report to and my peer staff/principle engs in other reporting chains and they are some of the most valuable meetings I have to keep connected with what other teams and the rest of the organization is doing, what's going well, what they might need from me, pain points, initiatives, etc. And of course just to build and maintain rapport across the org, which absolutely pays dividends.
I do these less frequently than with my direct manager, but still on a regular cadence, typically once a month or every other month.
In larger corporations, teams are insular - members aren't rewarded for doing work outside of their domain, and would be punished for letting another team do their job. Some members are so indoctrinated that they won't respond to any communication outside of their team, unless it's through their own manager.
In a 25 person company, context is easy, assuming even half arsed communications. Its possible to hold the state of the entire company in your head.
That scales to about 50. after that it becomes hard. then you start having team meetings and the like.
Even at my old startup we had 1:1s when we were ~25 people. it was a great way to get additional context that was otherwise hidden
This is arrogant thinking typical of developers. Most developers I have talked to (including myself 10 years ago) thinks that they or their friends who agree with them about all sorts of random code quirks are the only one that does work and "carries" the team, and everyone else's work is largely useless. The reality is that a lot of people do a lot of jobs; and they are not perfectly equally distributed, but they are often all necessary and contribute to a large extent.
I recommend a clear, fresh look at the team; or get the opinion of some third party that is not your SWE friend (who is going to be just as sycophantic as the latest LLM, perhaps more). You might find that others at work appreciate them more than your superstar coding. Thinking that their jobs are useless makes you feel good, but may not be the truth.
I've seen it first hand, people cotton on to EM's latest buzz word, find some space to shove it into and then show it off. EM is blown away despite the result being over engineered or poor fit for the solution.
Last time I saw this was a system decomposed to events when tight orchestration was necessary. 10 months later a single function app was dropped in place to replace it. Dev who did the original work got a promotion for their gift of technical debt.
typical for a lot of knowledge workers. "engineer's disease"
i am good at solving problems in X domain, and believe that carries over to all domains. it's just so simple, they're so dumb, etc.
these guys get to management and then crash out.
Meanwhile the people in those departments are working balls to the wall in permanent crisis mode to meet real business needs.
Also very typical of hn. Prevailing sense of anyone not physically coding adding no value
Ultimately the "last 80%" of boring business logic actually needs to get built and the day to day operations have to happen. It can't be all AI prototypes and vibe coded demos.
If there are no layoffs in their future, they must be creating value you can’t yet see.
Get closer to the work they do and maybe you’ll see it.
Also: the “waste” might be dwarfed by scale. For example Twitter famously had Linux kernel devs on the payroll. Why would a tweet company need kernel developers? Simple. At that scale a salary was nothing next to the gains if some primitive they needed could be built, or some bug or perf problem could be promptly fixed. An engineer could contribute many times what they cost the company, so although it’s far from Twitter’s core business it’s still ROI positive.
There’s also the matter of organizational “slack”. Have a look at this sound advice: https://www.seangoedecke.com/doing-nothing-at-work/?ref=dail...
Beware when making assumptions from afar. Get closer and really try to understand. Things work the way they do for good reasons.
> If there are no layoffs in their future, they must be creating value you can’t yet see.
I've been involved in a few projects where the value appeared clear at the beginning, but by the end there was little value.
In one case the project failed due to incompetence and mismanagement: Basically, the project dragged on and on until it missed its market window. (What stinks is it was basically a port of a Visual Basic sales tool to a more modern v2.)
In another case I was hired into a machine learning project in a company where everyone spent a lot of time justifying their jobs. The project ultimately didn't "improve" over the non-machine-learning approach, and devolved into a "solution in search of a problem".
---
As far as why the company held onto the people involved? (I left after both projects.) That's harder to explain, but I like to think of an analogy to a king holding on to a standing army: It's there when you need it, and your soldiers aren't helping the rival kingdom.
A different way to say it: One of the downsides to working in a large company is that a lot of the people there are "warm butts on seats." The company could function without them. Many of the people you work with have competence issues. You're probably a "warm butt on a seat" too, and may have some competence issues. That's why I like working for smaller companies: they can't afford to be fat.
And then, someone needs to build cafeteria menus. And the tool to manage health care enrollment. And badging. And ultimately, you have a product that could probably be operated by a lean team of 100 people, but you have 5,000 employees to take care of all the auxiliary functions, from legal compliance to providing benefits. You need slack in that org structure too, because you don't want everything to grind to a halt when one important person leaves or takes a week off.
I don't understand why you find this objectionable. Would Google or Facebook be more fun if you were on a very small team with zero slack and constant grind, and there was no one to call if the printer is broken? Yes, it's a jobs program funded by the revenue from core services, but it ultimately makes life better for everyone?
1. that the existence of such very "chill" roles often leads to hiring of more mediocre people and diminishes the value of working at such a company (at least psychologically)
2. That little gets done / built with all these people and resources, which is seen as a waste of potential.
3. That bureaucracy itself may be more exhausting than doing real work.
That said the unevenness of contribution isn't strictly a large company phenomena. Small companies have the same uneven distribution. I've worked at two startups with about 4 people total and people were not equally productive.
That said, this is not necessarily the goal and productivity is also very hard to measure. It's doubly hard to measure across different types of work. One person can code up a greenfield back-end for something in 3 days while another can spend a week fixing some elusive infrastructure problem.
Not everyone is as good at everything. So we do have engineers who truly are much better than average. And in large companies most are average. But that is just one factor here.
1:1's can add value or they can not add value. Large companies can't just be flat so someone needs to manage people. A good manager adds value, a bad manager might subtract value, but that's orthogonal.
Is it demoralizing to work for a big and inefficient company? Sure. Is it more demoralizing for people who are motivated to get things done and are good at it? I think so. Go start your own company?
1. The level of "this is an arrangement of labor/capital in order to produce money"
and
2. This is an enterprise where thousands of people spend 1/3 of their time and takes up a huge mental space, so they arrange it in a way that affirms their internal sense of purpose
Organizations, especially large corporations which have passed a few "too big to fail barriers" gradually become a "purpose factory" where their product partially becomes imbuing their higher level employees a sense of importance and justification for spending years there.
This dynamic seems almost inevitable as a company grows. It's not necessarily bad, as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated.
Are the 15% getting 80% of the compensation, though?
We went through a round of layoffs and I had to “finish” another programmer’s work. It was a java app with servlets and JSP and a bunch of web forms submitting back to a database. He had just copy and pasted the html into his JSP so it had the sample data and messages. Everything submitted and went to the next page, but nothing was posted or saved.
He did this like 20 times for all his modules. Maybe six months of “work” was like nothing done.
I like to work on small teams that collaborate enough so if someone isn’t doing anything then we know. And I don’t think anyone’s work in my immediate vicinity is performative.
That being said, it’s hard to know people’s process and what is productive to them. If you take a small sample you might not understand. And what you think is performative may be essential. This seems common when I was younger when I thought “I don’t understand it, therefore it’s not important.”
I’m currently thinking through a tough program and browsing HN at 10am and it’s an essential part of my workflow.
Additionally, you can be productive from a development sense, ship functional software that is to spec, and everybody is happy - and it still never gets used, or gets canceled, and does nothing for anyone. This too, could also be considered performative.
The money does put food on the family dinner table, so be it.
I have seen this a lot in the mid sized business (<300 employees usually) and its the "we have enough money and no accountability and terrible processes to even understand the world" but my favorite one is my friend spent six months building a product offshoot from a core product, got pulled into meetings with directors to tell him to shut up about how it wasn't going to work for the target market, and when he finished they sold 4 units.
4 units.
One firm might have the most dialed in effective team you’ve ever dreamed of. The next four are average or OK. Then you get companies run by absentee owners and half the developers are stacking a $150k a year paycheck and literally not working at all. The company itself is highly profitable so the owner doesn’t care
It’s just a mixed bag all over everywhere you go. No generalities to be found in size but only in culture and outcome.
I was thinking more of people burning stuff down.
There’s also people burning the furniture for immediate warmth.
And there’s people you mention who are doing things that look good but have time bombs inside them.
YMMV though - if you know people who managed to stay at a FAANG for a significant time without producing anything of value, more power to them.
I'd imagine it's the people who are better at "demonstrating value" than actually producing it that are the target of the original post.
The stock price went down 20% during the time I was there, and I could see why - it took months to ship a tiny button.
I work with a lot of ex-FAANG now and they haven't had much of a chance to do impactful things. I've heard a lot of "I was responsible for the reporting function on this dashboard that's 10 clicks deep on Google Play"
I do think Layoffs, while obviously very sad for those involved, were needed.
There's definitely a ton of cruft that accumulates, and a lot of "work" being done that accomplishes little, just to satisfy a corporate bureaucracy.
But there is a reality where "good performance" is not just about the work you do, but also about your ability to get things done practically, e.g. not just your ability to write a specific microservice, but to make a compelling case for that architecture over another, and to get it reviewed and merged.
That's not to excuse wasting everyone's time on sycophantic vanity projects that don't help the business.
But I do think there's a tendency (especially on HN and Developer Twitter) to only respect complicated engineering work (e.g. optimizing Kubernetes deployments). To be fair, I'd love to almost never deal with company politics and performative work and am lucky to be at a company where effectively zero of that exists.
But as orgs grow, so does the share of work that's more political.
Most solutions to understand what's going on, in detail, are naturally going to be quite time consuming.
Depending on the manager and on the team, 1:1s with people can be very valuable for all involved.
And all things that scale have this property. We spend a large percentage (almost half) of our human body on the sum of blood vessels, interstitial fluid, and other such stuff that is entirely internal waste/nutrient scaffold while the “organs and limbs that actually do the stuff” are the other half. A fifth of San Francisco is roads- just sits there not doing stuff most of the time. Some half of the brain is not “thinking stuff” but networking. A fifth of a datacenter is just networking.
Similarly a large amount of organizations is often dedicated to the motion of information flow and so on. “I take the specs from the customers and give them to the engineers. I’m a people person.”
The only parts of these companies that actually do real work at any acceptable rate are skunkworks, and they are created precisely because the rest of the company's structure doesn't actually function for getting anything done.
I eventually worked out that the bureaucratic red tape was a hurdle rather than a deliverable and everyone else on the floor was dodging it. I'm still not sure why they hired me then put me on a team with no work in the funnel and a scope too narrow to make my own work, though I was grateful for the ridiculous pay.
So in that case yes, with a two-tier employment system it enabled FTEs to be de factor retired while contractors carried their palanquin up the income ladder.
For example, generally you'll be fired if you're not on time, regardless of whether "on time" is meaningful or connected to any real constraint. If there isn't a hard deadline, someone will pick an arbitrary one and decide that's what they need to be mad about that week. It could be that you just weren't on Slack at the moment they said "hey".
If it's not immediate, they'll note it down and weaponize it later. There's seemingly always someone like this in charge and there are only limited, temporary, or lucky ways around it.
If it's not specifically time, it's some other aspect of visibility that's never sufficient. Controlling people and organizations are built on an insidious lack of trust and the pursuit of measurability. This is why, imho, it's rarely worth doing more than the bare minimum, because you need 100x positive extra credits to compensate for even one petty mistake. Not being available in the middle of the night to fix a bug in the system gets you a negative mark in a performance review, while staying late to fix the bug gets you 0.01 positive marks.
Most of what you call performative is likely real, but even if it were purely performative, it would surface people who were not on board and possibly unreliable.
Similarly, a 1:1 with no apparent content could serve its purpose of looking you in the eye to see if you're of sound mind.
I think your concern is better framed as whether people are pulling their weight. The solution for that is to make them deliver something hard on their own every so often, and cycling people through teams to avoid free riders.
https://www.piratewires.com/p/paul-buchheit-interview-transc...
I've found this to be true in almost everything in life, including work and business.
This is most big companies. As they grow in size, staff functions get compartmentalized. As their main product matures, the need to develop new things slows down, and daily life becomes more about knob-turning and optimizing what you have to extract more revenue. This means that, for example, the developers, PMs, designers eventually run out of things to do, so whatever they still got ends up growing in size and eventually taking most of their time, be that mentoring, committee work, random initiatives here and there etc.
Source: was dev turned PM in a previous life, managed to flee to greener pastures.
Corporations are not alone in this, of course. When I was in university, in the late 2000s, we had 2 administrative staff for every professor (up from a 1-to-1 ratio in the 90s). You can draw your own conclusions about whether that was a net benefit to educational outcomes.
I live near a major university, and a lot of my friends and relatives are academics, including adminstrators. I was an adjunct teacher for a semester, long ago.
This was not the case in my time/place - our adjuncts were all counted under the professors bucket, not admin. Grad students teaching classes (as I was at the time), were not counted in either bucket.
"The Ringelmann effect is the tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases."
There is evidence of this in simple tug of war games.
But I think there is also truth in realizing work is mostly performative: the pareto principle seems to apply. 20% of the workforce sustains the other 80%. That's purely anecdotal, I doubt the numbers align that way. But it does always seem there are a few all-stars carrying others.
Consider yourself lucky. This part is missing in some places.
Enough of this and people will learn to play the game over doing the right thing.
there is always an aspect of every job that is performative - even small companies. I like to call this perception management. a lot of any job is effectively communicating what you're doing. a lot of effective communication is also not just saying what you're doing, but also how you deliver the information. people are more likely to listen when you communicate things in a more positive tone, make the information concise in a bottom-line up-front style, use a deeper voice (told to me by my wife and women colleagues), and pace the information in a way that lets people ask follow up questions iff needed. no one should _have_ to do all this, but it does change people's perception of how competent you are. I've seen both sides of this coin - amazing engineers that get no promo because they can't communicate, and mediocre engineers that get promoted quickly due to their ability to communicate. I'd almost even argue that this is how should be - as you climb the corporate ladder, communication becomes a lot more important than technical skills and ability
to your point about 1:1s: if you're not getting anything out of your 1:1s, that's a skill issue and is on you IMHO. even when I had bad managers, I was able to effectively communicate my needs, goals, updates, thoughts, as well as give feedback back; in doing so, I've been able to turn horrible manager-team dynamics into a positive experiences. and I'd always argue it came down to the fact that the people perceive you directly correlates with how serious they'll take your word
at the same time, I can empathize with the idea that some middle managers are just bodies that get in the way - everyone's had their fair share of that. but if you're actually good at your job and communicating , you should almost always be able to get around them when it's really necessary
EDIT: and this is coming from a person who is and will always want to stay as an IC engineer
everything else is downstream of that
When I joined big tech, I understood that most of work is going around and “proposing” solutions or “solving inter team blockers”. People who did the actual job, got very little recognition. People who did peacocking were promoted.
At that time I realized how fucked up corporate is.
Replaced with a new set of problems of course. Like no money. And if the startup is successful it will eventually morph into a big fat corporate culture. The circle of life.
Startup life has it's own problems. Primarily that the company may cease to exist at any time. it's not for everyone, but I adapted after my first big layoff.
"The bureaucracy is expanding to fill the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."
This burned me right out, and I don't plan on ever working for any Silicon Valley company again. I'm now happily employed in a small (10 person eng team) company where we are all doing meaningful work.
Startups also often have their own perverse incentives built around the vagaries of venture investments or the whims and personalities of the founders.
What would make them less vulnerable to this?
And still ... there's a lot of this.
So sad that with the right incentive structure his work would be of immense value to society, instead of his current Wall-E prologue side quest.
At a place like that - results mean nothing, the only result is what your boss's boss's boss is getting yelled at for, and it trickles down from there. The company is likely slowly killing itself yahoo-style if it doesn't have a corner on some prestigious market, or just flailing but number go up if it does (meta), meanwhile all the products that come out of it are absolutely garbage (messenger, yahoo mail) than even a single startup engineer could improve in 1 month yet somehow the politics that be prevent it from happening at big co.
</rant>
IMO it's the death-knell for quality products (though the company may linger on for decades [microsoft]) if it's hard enough to switch to a viable competitor.
Saw it happen at a company I worked at. Company had flat org structure that took it very far, and worked well. Leadership rolled over, bunch of new manager blood came in, from FAANG, talked about how nice our systems were, and then proceeded to upset the applecart by implementing all the level systems and such, in such a way that the engineers who had been at the company before were never above an L4, and all the "staff" and "platform" were new blood. They then did one or two token promotions, and were astonished when half the legacy seniors quit within the year
Your management team is literally telling you what they value, by rewarding it. You might wonder why they value vibes over results. Look way way up the org tree. How is your CEO compensated? Mostly in stock? Who are they trying to impress? Shareholders? Are those shareholders concerned about delivering for customers, or short-term gains? Is the short-term price based on long-term customer value, or what's in the business news this week? What is productive again?
Trying to be a rockstar every day is the fastest way to burning out and making bad decisions. It ensures that you will be left holding the bag. How is that not more performative, if it's in the name?
But if you paid them hourly, they'd starve or fuck off to another job during a lull, and then where would you be when you needed them again 3 or 4 months later? Similarly, salaries don't really work any better either, because there's this psychological expectation that there will be regular duties to perform for that weekly paycheck. Psychological expectations for all parties involved. These systems have evolved and adapted to cater to those psychological needs. They keep the extra engineers on hand, cosplaying, in case there is work for them, so that they could in theory start working immediately (the hiring cycle is brutal, but the learning curve to make them useful is worse).
Even those involved aren't typically aware that this is what's going on, if they became aware of it they'd be forced by convention to try to come up with a new system that was more efficient in one way or another, but that's impossible on practical grounds (disincentivizes key personnel such that businesses which attempt it tend to fail). When this does happen, quite often there are lots of comical stories that come out of it (for instance, believing that because these people tend to do little in the way of constant work that they can be replaced by people who are wholly unqualified, because unqualified people can screw off just as easily as the qualified).
But I will say this: at a certain point in a large company once the revenue-machine is discovered and deployed, what you want to be building is systems that let you ship and build reliably on top of that foundation without destroying it.
Google in its best phase -- which was already in decline when I joined in 2011 -- did have a slow and cautious development cycle where multiple levels of review covered everything. OWNERS, "readability", very uptight code review. And in order to survive in this environment you had to have a pile of code reviews all running concurrently because making progress on any single one could take days and days to get through review.
But that was kind of the point because pushing the wrong thing and breaking the money printing machine is far worse than moving slow.
But IMHO this didn't scale past 30k, 40k engineers. And inside Google, the culture shifted from one that was SWE/SRE driven to one that was PM driven. And the perf/promo culture for them had really perverse incentives.
Also I have a theory about Google in particular -- its founders and all its initial strong hires all came from academia not industry. And so its internal culture became biased towards a "publish or perish" structure, and "perf" performance reviews honestly looked more like a thesis defense committee for someone's masters/PHD than anything I'd encountered in the software industry before.
IMHO this in large part responsible for Google's ADHD around project cancellations/replacements.
Not restricted to PMs but it is especially pernicious when product direction gets pushed this way.
Cost cutting and underhiring were never a problem while I Was there. More the opposite. They overhired and then there was no good throughput on projects because every chef was in the kitchen at once.
If I recall, the turndown on e.g. Google Reader was more about finding it difficult to get SWEs who wanted to work on it. I think it would have been increasingly difficult to survive the performance review cycle if you were stuck on a "backwater" project like that.
What's funny is that Twitter SRE used to be horrible and the app probably would have collapsed entirely (rather than the little bit that it did) without hundreds of manual operators, but in the few years leading up to the "acquisition," massively improved to the point that they literally automated themselves out of a job.
Anyway, Twitter had thousands of engineers, salespeople, support people, and so on. They were working on tens of new products in an attempt to find more revenue (everything from clones of every single social media app you can imagine to becoming a sports TV network), and on the other side (Goldbird), selling and supporting ads, the thing that made Twitter money.
The metric to look at isn't uptime, it makes no sense that people keep parading this metric. The metrics are revenue and revenue growth and surprise! by most available metrics, the Elon strategy torpedoed those.
Twitter was, like almost every "web" company in ~2020, a very "fat" company because they were re-investing free ZIRP money in future growth investment. Elon turned it into a KTLO operation, and didn't even manage to succeed at the standard PE style "fat" company slim-down (where you chop growth initiatives and keep the revenue, like everyone else is doing now), because he also chopped the revenue side.
December 2022 - https://mashable.com/article/twitter-down-elon-says-works-fi...
February 2023 - https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-outage-elon-musk-cos...
March 2023 - https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64811286
maybe theres some scaling limit where twitter will have difficulty running, but its a fairly straightforward piece of software?
on the other hand, it likely has a bunch of security holes from not updating dependencies and so on
are there performative jobs|tasks|employees|cultures? yes.
are most of the things that engineers think are performative and useless actually so? nope.
some examples:
* managers managing upward - feels useless - is actually the most impactful bang-for-buck for managers to give their teams space to operate without micromanaging
* sales and marketing. The best software in the world won't get known, bought, or used, without good sales/marketing. There is no meritocracy on quality. Almost no business succeeds through technical credibility alone.
* 1on1s. They may not add any value to you, but 1) you'd miss them when they're gone, 2) i don't know how else you expect managers to stay on top of employee concerns - just know "inately"? 3) they may matter A LOT for your teammates, and them being happy means your team will be happy
There are other things like that.
All of “adult” life is performative . Life is a game, a performance, a little play you put on for the benefit of all.
Consider this: if management thinks something is impressive, well that makes it impressive. Managers, by definition, manage people, and having 1:1 meetings helps with that. Are you supposing managers also make the same exact effort and contribution as ICs? Would they still be managers?
Do you have an engineering license? Are you personally liable for the code you write? No? Guess who else is “cosplaying as engineers”?
This entire post rubs me so wrong. It just feels so naive, so foolish. I feel I’ve been baited into anger.
Meta, OpenAI, etc. could disappear overnight and I think most people would say good riddance (apart from those needing jobs).
My personal thoughts on the matter are: we should burn this society to the ground and begin anew. Life will grow from the ashes of the Capitalists.
The compensation can be high, but the psychological cost is real. Over time, that tradeoff isn’t always worth it: someone might earn more in the short term, yet pay for it with chronic stress, declining mental health, and even a shorter lifespan compared to a lower-paid role that’s more meaningful and less draining.