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Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?

(annehelen.substack.com)
287 points moonka | 6 comments | 02 Apr 25 21:54 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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rqtwteye ◴[02 Apr 25 22:36 UTC] No.43562536[source]▶
I have been in the workforce for almost 30 years now and I believe that everybody is getting more squeezed so they don’t have the time or energy to do a proper job. The expectation is to get it done as quickly as possible and not do more unless told so.

In SW development in the 90s I had much more time for experimentation to figure things out. In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. So you just hurry through your tasks.

I think google had it right for a while with their 20% time where people could do wanted to do. As far as I know that’s over.

People need some slack if you want to see good work. They aren’t machines that can run constantly on 100% utilization.

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p1necone ◴[02 Apr 25 23:12 UTC] No.43562875[source]▶
> In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. So you just hurry through your tasks.

This has been my exact experience. Absolutely everything is tracked as a work item with estimates. Anything you think should be done needs to be justified and tracked the same way. If anything ever takes longer than the estimate that was invariably just pulled out of someones ass (because it's impossible to accurately estimate development unless you're already ~75% of the way through doing it, and even then it's a crapshoot) you need to justify that in a morning standup too.

The end result of all of this is every project getting bogged down by being stuck on the first version of whatever architecture was thought up right at the beginning and there being piles of tech debt that never gets fixed because nobody who actually understands what needs to be done has the political capital to get past the aforementioned justification filter.

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stouset ◴[02 Apr 25 23:38 UTC] No.43563084[source]▶
Also this push to measure everything means that anything that can’t be measured isn’t valued.

One of your teammates consistently helps unblock everyone on the team when they get stuck? They aren’t closing as many tickets as others so they get overlooked on promotions or canned.

One of your teammates takes a bit longer to complete work, but it’s always rock solid and produces fewer outages? Totally invisible. Plus they don’t get to look like a hero when they save the company from the consequences of their own shoddy work.

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the_snooze ◴[02 Apr 25 23:47 UTC] No.43563155[source]▶
It's even got a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
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2OEH8eoCRo0 ◴[03 Apr 25 00:13 UTC] No.43563336[source]▶
It's got a name and we know that it's happening yet the overpaid overeducated c-suite demands it? What gives?
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1. kevinventullo ◴[03 Apr 25 01:00 UTC] No.43563575[source]▶
This was previously recommended to me on HN, so I’ll pass it along. The book “Seeing Like A State” gives a pretty reasonable explanation for why this happens: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

The basic idea is that the only viable way to administer a complex and heterogenous system like a massive corporation is to simplify by enforcing “legibility” or homogeneity. Without this, central control becomes far too complex to manage. Thus, the simplification becomes a mandate, even at the cost of great inefficiencies.

What makes the book particularly interesting is the many different historical examples of this phenomenon, across a wide array of human endeavors.

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2. scarecrowbob ◴[03 Apr 25 01:48 UTC] No.43563831[source]▶
I like the book quite a bit, and it's been formative in my politics.

That said, I am not sure if the take-away is that managers need to account for these factors by allowing for illegibility- I am not reading you claim that, but contextually that's how the discussion feels to me.

I do agree with Scott that enforcing perfect legibility is impossible and even attempting to do so can cause immense problems, and I agree with his analysis of these modernist efforts and have found that it's a useful lens for understanding a lot of human enterprise.

I find a lot of hope in that view: nothing actually gets done without some horizontal, anarchist cooperation.

But I also find hope in the fact that it's structurally a issue with authoritarian organizational strategies which can't be accounted for and surmounted.

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3. kevinventullo ◴[03 Apr 25 02:53 UTC] No.43564174[source]▶
Thank you for the reply!

I don't want to make any strong claims here, but my gut reaction to your first comment is that what one manager calls “allowance for illegibility”, another might call “trust in my reports”.

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4. sidewndr46 ◴[03 Apr 25 12:41 UTC] No.43568779[source]▶
Maybe I would have found the book more impactful if I had read it earlier in life. I felt like it put together various ideas and presented them well in a comprehensible manner. What I feel it omits is that the mechanisms of a state only have to be actionable, not rational. If you ask me how to mow a lawn and I come up with some byzantine process involving multiple steps that don't even contribute to the end goal I'm going to be labeled nuts or maybe "eccentric" if they want to be polite. The same scrutiny doesn't apply to the various bureaucratic processes of a state for whatever reason.
5. weard_beard ◴[03 Apr 25 13:08 UTC] No.43569056{3}[source]▶
Everything rots, everything changes.

Investors want to know how long you're going to keep making them money. They don't like surprises.

Really, I think what we need are new ways for investors to participate and understand and structure their investments that don't have negative downward consequences for the structure of businesses.

6. scarecrowbob ◴[03 Apr 25 16:51 UTC] No.43572385{3}[source]▶
Yes, at the end of the day it's necessary to have some amount of "trust" in the people doing the work. Which is good- you can try to avoid that but if it didn't happen very little would get done.