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

(annehelen.substack.com)
287 points moonka | 2 comments | 02 Apr 25 21:54 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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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WorldMaker ◴[03 Apr 25 15:57 UTC] No.43571592[source]▶
> overeducated c-suite

Arguably the modern MBA has gotten so insular, with many graduating with an MBA having only the barest modicum of humanities courses and the barest foot out of the door of a business college, that despite supposedly representing a higher University degree it seems increasingly fair to call it "undereducated". MBA programs got too deep into the business of selling as many MBAs as they could as quickly as they could they forgot to check their own curriculum for things like "perverse incentives" and "regulatory capture" and "tribalism".

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1. nradov ◴[03 Apr 25 21:27 UTC] No.43575668[source]▶
An MBA is a professional graduate degree, like a JD or MD. Criticizing professional degree programs for lack of humanities coursework rather misses the point. Students are supposed to have got that in undergraduate.
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2. WorldMaker ◴[03 Apr 25 23:04 UTC] No.43576528[source]▶
Sure, but a lot of Business undergraduate programs, even at prestigious Universities, are now "pre-MBA" and very MBA-focused, if not "direct to MBA" and allow taking bare minimums of non-Business classes and just about guarantee MBA program entry. For MD this sort of "academic incest" makes sense that you are going to have more because there is too much specialized knowledge to learn during graduate programs. (But also most pre-Med doesn't pre-qualify Med School like "pre-MBA" can.) JDs still seem to expect a variety of candidates of different undergraduate backgrounds, though "Pre-Law" sometimes exists, it often isn't a specific "program" and to my understanding can be several different options from very different undergraduate college options; "Pre-Law" seems as much about navigating the analysis paralysis of all the possible paths as anything else, without narrowing the number of paths.

I think the MBA programs have built "pre-MBA" programs not because they have so many skills to specialize, and not necessarily because they have so many possible paths to try to navigate, but because the it sells more Business school undergraduate credits.

Good MBA programs still exist. Not all MBAs involve "academic incest", and there are still MBA programs that encourage non-Business undergraduate degrees. Not all "academic incest" is bad either. But there's definitely an anecdotal sense that many of the people I see with MBAs spent the least time learning anything that wasn't taught in a Business School classroom, with the least consequences for their non-Business School GPAs, because the Business School wants that graduate degree funnel and the tuition dollars it guarantees, than any other graduate degree program I've seen. (Hence why I mentioned "perverse incentives", especially. The Business School wants you to do well in Business School so you keep paying the Business School. The Business School cares less what you do outside the Business School so that you keep paying the Business School.)