This is one lesson you learn if you work in consulting. The biggest, most important companies in the world are chock-full full of glorified paper pushers. I spent six months working at a Fortune 500 company building a system to give mid-level knowledge workers better access to their data. I've never felt as demotivated as I did when I realized that at the end of they day they were just producing PDFs that were immediately archived away without ever being read by another human.
I am currently contracting for a major corporate retailer and this is absolutely spot-on. 10 managers with zero tech experience pushing 3 developers (I'm not kidding) to complete a massive project.
> 10 managers with zero tech experience pushing 3 developers
Daydreaming here a bit, but suppose the 3 developers banded together, went to the top decision maker in the company, and proposed that they fire 8 or 9 of the managers, keeping the best 1 or 2, and that the developers' salaries be immediately doubled going forward. It could be stated or left unstated that the developers are willing to quit (which is still better than being eventually fired if the project fails, or becoming burnt out). If the project is truly important, and the situation really is 10 non-technical managers pushing 3 developers, why not try something audacious?
Doesn't work. I went through a year of executives and managers above us getting the chop, month after month after month, and layoff after layoff at one company, and we just got an email saying "how we're going to invest all this money we're saving back into the company!".
When people started quitting after being demoralized by repeated benefit cutbacks and layoffs, they said "We heard you, you said you want raises (after a year of no bonuses and two years of no raises), we're going to get them to you!"
With all that money you saved by laying off like 30% of the entire multinational corporation? Great! These should be decent raises! After the raises were finally granted, it wasn't even enough to cover a cost of living increase for a single year, let alone the two years that had passed with frozen salaries. And then they congratulated themselves in a corporate email sent to everyone for "listening to their employees and giving them what they ask for".
Oh, and they're still closing offices and laying people off, and expecting everyone to still keep serving paying clients (other corporations) at the same level of service they did with 5%-50% of the staff they had beforehand.
Any money they save, just stays in the corporations' hands. They don't care to give any of it to the peons. They're totally interchangeable cogs anyway, right?
went to the top decision maker in the company, and proposed that they fire 8 or 9 of the managers
The people at level n+1 to you in an organisation are there because they have the support of people at level n+2 and so on.
If you want to pull a stunt like this you need the support of someone level n+4 in a different department who hates whoever is n+3 in your own reporting line.
It's true. I was in close to this situation once. There were 5 developers instead of 3, and 6 managers. They fired 3 of us developers.
Management are like a cult. They've all gotten to where they are because manager A has dirt on manager B, and so on. There should be no non-technical management in tech, and they should be the first to be automated.
I have found myself in this situation, a company top-heavy with nontechnical folk. When the company opened my department what they should have done is headhunted a leader from another company. But what they actually did was promote people within the company to run a department they have no training or experience in. I've now heard they've hired yet another manager with no technical experience beyond PowerPoint. So where do you go? Try to teach the CEO himself how to run a tech company?
> I spent six months working at a Fortune 500 company building a system to give mid-level knowledge workers better access to their data. I've never felt as demotivated as I did when I realized that at the end of they day they were just producing PDFs that were immediately archived away without ever being read by another human.
I've done that exact project for like 6 giant pharma companies.
The problem is that we often think of a company as a single abstract decision-maker.
It isn’t, of course. It’s made up of managers who want to look like they’re doing something big so that they gain status and get a pay raise (“I led the company’s first blockchain initiative!”). It’s made up of employees who want to cover their own asses by recommending that a brand-name consultancy be added to their project. And so on.
Each individual in a corporation acts in accordance with her or his own incentives, which may or may not be well aligned with those of the company’s shareholders.
Not disagreeing but there isn't only the negative side (self-promotion, ass-covering). There are people trying and failing. Life happen: acquisition (you or some of your provider), restructuring, negotiation, strategic changes, key person leaving, new people coming, ... all of that produces little bit of inefficiencies in large organisation.
That's not dissimilar to the food you buy and throw away, the antique furniture you bought planning to restore but never got to it, the stack of book you wanted to read but other things occupy your time.
Similarly, a lot of employees don't really know what the global mission of the company is or what their strategic interests are. I've definitely seen leaders fail to clearly communicate this. When that happens, people fall back to optimizing their local environment or department and that can definitely lead to useless shit or actions which while locally beneficial, actually impede the mission of the company.
Most employees don't really care what the global mission of the company or their strategic interests are. It's whether you can get a decent paycheck with some stability while having a semblance of control and balance. The more you work the more this becomes true.
I will say, as an employee myself, I don't feel like my company cares about me and how well I do as a person. So why should I care about the company and how well it does for its shareholders? It's just an economic transaction between me and the organization; I do whatever they tell me to do for 8 hours, and that's that. If what they're telling me to do hurts them, then that's not really my problem.
I will say, as an employee myself, I don't feel like my company cares about me and how well I do as a person. So why should I care about the company and how well it does for its shareholders?
When you as an individual don't feel any sense of doing better for your organisation. How can an organisation composed of diverse set of people think of your cause?
> managers who want to look like they’re doing something big so that they gain status.
So much this!
I've seen many outsourced multi-million-pound projects that would have been quicker, cheaper, and better as in-house projects for a few hundred thousand.
A senior manager doesn't want "In charge of a £100,000 3-month project" on their CV. They want to be able to write "In charge of a £20,000,000 2-year project". It doesn't matter that the cheap one works and the expensive one doesn't.
Quite a lot of work that's not immediately obvious as useful is producing defensive material.
It's a different story to say "we analyzed a market and decided against pursuing those opportunities because of x, y and z" (an activity that produces lots of shelves full of reports) than to say "we didn't pursue some opportunities and we never bothered to look into it" (an activity that never occurred because nobody was filling shelves with reports).
"Give me everything we know about foo" is only possible if somebody has been collecting shelves full of things over time.
The book goes into it a bit. Some of it is status (i.e. people wanting others working under them, even if it's pointless work), other times it's to claim they care about something even if they don't (imagine a company that pretends to care about their employees wellness, they could hire a wellness consultant and ignore the recommendations).
My workplace just went through that very thing. We had a company-wide review of employees attitudes, remuneration, equipment, the works. They released a letter telling us they were going to begin a few months later, starting with pay raises and equipment upgrades - and then did nothing. It's a year on from the initial review, and I guess they managed to complete their goal: stave off the riots for a while by letting the minions feel heard.
Step 1: senior management asks for some numbers
Step 2: report produced. Management reads the executive summary.
Step 3: someone trying to look busy asks for an update. Report is updated manually, because it was never designed to be automated.
Step 4: report continues to be produced for years after anyone stops reading it.
Some people get hired between step 3 and 4 and might never make the mental connection to step 1.
Step 5. Consultants get hired to digitalise the process of reporting.
Now a good consultant can make the leap to step 1 and start redirecting value to something else. A shitty consultant milks the company for $ without ever undermining the sorry people stuck at step 3.
I'd say that the people who get paid based on the bottom line have that goal. Not their employees, they want to be paid well themselves, and work with people they like, and probably a hundred other things before they worry about the bottom line.
I would guess it would depend on the company. If it's small enough that an employee feels they can have a meaningful impact on the company financials (say, maybe <= 10 people in the company), then I would guess so.
If, on the other hand, your company of 500 employees introduces profit-sharing, then there's probably no point to even trying. Too many decision makers pulling in too many politically motivated directions.
If co-ops are any indication, yes. I like the Mars Trilogy model in theory, where corporations are gradually replaced with small co-ops that are all employee owned, and then they collaborate with other small groups on an ad-hoc basis to get things done. I don't think that's entirely practical, but I do think it's a great outcome to aim for and is far short of socialism.
After 10 years in consulting, my conclusion is that we haven‘t really figured out how to run a large company properly. Its Kafkaesque and causes so much suffering.
The thing is that any sufficiently large company is, by definition, full of average people. And average people are, well, kinda average.
The large consultancies think that they’re the ones who’ve managed to crack this code. “We only hire The Best!”, they say. But once you get past a certain size, that’s just not possible.
You might have The Best front-line customer-facing champs, but Bob down in Payments Processing still lives with his mom and he’s dragging the whole lot down with him.
I am now convinced it's some kind of money laundering scheme to move money from big customer companies into the pockets of the top brass/owners of the consulting companies while making it look like value was created. Money the managers of the customer company can not siphon out by themselves without having a project to pay for.
Your assumption is that avoiding personal suffering or miserable beuracracy is the goal, that isn’t the point. Maximizing return on investment is the point, of course these other goals won’t be met.
With the huge numbers of companies that tried giving employees autonomy and responsibility over their own domain then collapsed, what else are we supposed to do? Oh wait, no one has ever tried that? Not even since we transitioned from rote repetitive manufacturing tasks to mental work? Wow. How stupid are we?
You're right of course, but they're also chock full of consultants doing the same thing.
We joked that the big 4 just had a Markov chain managerial speak program, and all they needed to do was enter the number of pages they produced, and it would spit out pre made reports with the latest buzzwords of the required lengths.
Yup. You figure out pretty quick that the vast bulk of all economic activity is digging holes and filling them up again. I have worked in government, academia, and large-ish companies and you find a ton of bullshit work in all three. I would not say government or academia are worse than large corporations. It seems to correlate more with entity size than public vs private.
Ha. I quit my grad school when a prof admitted he didn't read the papers he made us write. It was good practice for making sure I never put up with a job like that.
I had to prepare reports and such for the board to read before. I worked my ass off on them but never saw anyone actually reading them or even talking about them.
So I printed off random "techy" stuff and some cat pictures online and gave it to them to see if they even opened the document up. To this day they never noticed anything and I did that for 2 years before I left. I still did what I could at my job, but the time spent on those reports dropped to nothing after my test.
The was government though, but I have seen the same thing at many schools I worked at before.
Not sure this is a good example. As - for me at least - the point in students writing papers is not so much in someone reading them. But the students writing them. As only by writing a bunch of papers will you learn how to write a paper.
I agree that it would be better if someone would read them and give actual feedback based on your actual performance. But looking at my own little episode in academia, the most was learned while writing stuff.
That flies in 1st year undergrad, after grad school they hand you a "masters", I feel like to be a master someone should have cared enough about your project to read the paper
I feel you. I took it upon myself to build a tool at my current job to increase the quality of life for employees of another department and tried in vain for a year to get their department head to have them try it, only for some mandate to come down from on high to gather certain metrics my tool was well positioned to gather. Tacked on some metric gathering and now everyone uses it... pretty much just to gather the metrics.
I've accidentally participated in making their lives more tedious for the sake of generating numbers people look at but do not use for anything but complaining about the numbers. And now all my development time on that tool is spent rearranging the numbers. We could at least be using that data to make actionable decisions, but no one is interested in that.
