Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?
annehelen.substack.com260 points by moonka a day ago
260 points by moonka a day ago
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.
> 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.
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.
The biggest mistake those employees make on their way to getting overlooked is assuming their boss knows.
Everyone needs to advocate for themselves.
A good boss will be getting feedback from everyone and staying on top of things. A mediocre boss will merely see "obvious" things like "who closed the most tickets." A bad boss may just play favorites and game the system on their own.
If you've got a bad boss who doesn't like you, you're likely screwed regardless. But most bosses are mediocre, not actively bad.
And in that case, the person who consistently helps unblock everyone needs to be advertising that to their manager. The person who's work doesn't need revisiting, who doesn't cause incidents needs to be hammering that home to their manager. You can do that without throwing your teammates under the bus, but you can't assume omnipotence or omniscience. And you can't wait until the performance review cycle to do it, you have to demonstrate it as an ongoing thing.
Your boss can know about it, but if their boss wants data on performance you’re back in the same boat.
Funny you mention engineers needing to market themselves though. That leads to its own consequences. I’ve been at a place where everyone needed to market their own work in order to get promoted, to get raises, and to stay off the chopping block.
The end result? The engineers at the company who get promoted are… good at self-promotion, not necessarily good at engineering. Many of the best engineers at the company—who were hired to do engineering—languish in obscurity while people who can game the system thrive. People get promoted who are only good at cranking out poorly-made deliverables that burden their team with excessive long-term maintenance issues. They fuck off to higher levels of the company, leaving their team to deal with the consequences of their previous work.
Run that script for five or ten years and it doesn’t seem to be working out well for the company.
You made excellent points. As someone looking to solve problems, finish tasks and go home. I just don't feel energized marketing myself if it is not during changing jobs.
And measurement has really taken over now. There is little value in getting task done well as compared to finishing more jira stories.
When it comes time for layoffs, it generally isn't what your boss knows, it's what your boss's grandboss thinks to throw onto a spreadsheet at the eleventh hour before Quarterly Reports are due.
A good direct boss might keep you on track for a bonus or other "local advancement", maybe even a promotion, but many companies you are only as valued as the ant numbers you look like from the C Suite's mile high club. (Which doesn't protect your good boss, either.)
> The biggest mistake those employees make on their way to getting overlooked is assuming their boss knows.
100%. You ask me to do the near impossible, I'll pull it off. But you will be very well-versed in how hard it is first.
I agree it's a mistake but one thing that's never taken into account in this discussion is that many people find it enough that they are doing their jobs. They don't want to do marketing. A lot of tech people are like that which is a real tragedy.
What you're describing was precisely our culture at the last startup.
One group plans ahead and overall do a solid job, so they're rarely swamped, never pull all-nighters. People are never promoted, they're thought of as slacking and un-startup-like. Top performers leave regularly because of that.
The other group is behind on even the "blocker"-level issues, people are stressed and overworked, weekends are barely a thing. But — they get praised for hard work. The heroes. (And then leave after burning out completely.)
(The company was eventually acquired, but employees got pennies. So it worked out well for the founders, while summarily ratfucking everyone else involved. I'm afraid this is very common.)
It's even got a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
While important, it actually misses a common problem I see: the assumption that every measurement is accurate.
It's got a name and we know that it's happening yet the overpaid overeducated c-suite demands it? What gives?
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
The problem is that this miserable state of affairs works at scale.
Yes, on problems that exist at the scale of one or intelligent, educated, experienced, and dedicated human (or maybe up to 3-5), an individual or small team will run circles around a business. You can have a top-notch CEO and COO and HR manager and six program managers (each with zero domain experience other than running a Jira board) and four dozen junior consultants who memorized just enough to pass the interviews and an art department and sales and finance and IT. For some problems, that whole $50M enterprise will be utterly demolished by a couple of determined engineers.
Likewise, a monarchy with a wise, benevolent, and just king can flourish, whereas a corrupted and bureaucratically entangled democracy is woefully inefficient.
But if you want your kingdom to last more than two generations before succumbing to a greedy monarch, or want your enterprise to solve bigger problems that don't decompose nicely to small ones, to vertically integrate huge manufacturing systems and scale out to billions of units, the only method that works is the inefficient one. And it does work!
Only revisionist history tell tales of flourishing kingdoms under a just king. In reality, the reason feodality worked for so long was the anarchy and power struggle, the cavalcades (basically raids) and a honour based justice (basically don't kill fellow nobility during war, and avoid killing militantes during cavalcades and you'll be good). The anarchical nature of the system made it particularly susceptible to organised raids, but also extremely 'agile' in it's political responses. Once power was consolidated however, the clergy and the royalty pushed their law and hierarchical order onto the mostly aristocratic feodality, it broke and you get the crusade against Alby, the war between Plantagenet and capetiens, and probably a lot of other misery inflicted to the general population. Then once the hierarchical order is set, you need an administration, which will become inefficient by nature.
The question is if the Kingdom would then still be worth surviving if life for everyone there ends up being miserable.
What if it doesn't survive and 70% of the people who were in the Kingdom end up in worse, arbitrarily-ruled, small despotic fiefdoms instead? And only 10% end up being better off by being lucky enough to have landed in the high-trust+high-competence small group?
Or, switching to consumer products vs company revenue/profit or kingdoms, and grounding in a specific example: people love to hate Windows, but how many of them would actually be better off if the options were just Mac (still expensive, still niche) or Linux? And "well they could just learn how to [code or configure text files or whatever]" for these purposes counts as worse off, IMO - more time spent on something that used to kinda-sorta-at-least-work-predictably for them.
> people love to hate Windows, but how many of them would actually be better off if the options were just Mac (still expensive, still niche) or Linux?
I don't know, but Windows has becoming increasingly worse at everyday usage. I swear Linux has better suspend/sleep functionality now, doesn't sneaky restart randomly (yeah, just because you reopen an explorer window but none of my other, actually important programs will definitely make people notice), doesn't take a minute to react to an unlock attempt several times a day for no reason on even very performant hardware..
So yeah, I think many would be better off with Linux.
Your comparison isn't very good as Microsoft Windows undergoes perpetual change and churn for the sake of doing it. This breaks existing workflows along the way. As a product it was effectively complete by the time Windows 2000 was released, having successfully integrated what was then considered state of the art technology to develop a practical operating system based on the principals known at the time. All it ever needed from there forward was maintenance updates and kernel updates to enable new hardware level technology to be harnessed by software.
> The problem is that this miserable state of affairs works at scale.
It "works" in the sense that it can be kept going by patching the damage it causes by throwing more money at it.
What it mostly does at scale is appear to work, to those high enough above it that they can't see any of the details: only the metrics that are being optimized for.
> 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".
Try to make a thread about unions on HN and read the comments, then it'll make sense.
There's chance that maybe there exists a revenue stream that increases by further applying that policy across a system that you don't have access to?
> Also this push to measure everything means that anything that can’t be measured isn’t valued.
Never thought I'd see an intelligent point made on hackernews, but there it is. You are absolutely correct. This really hit home for me.
You could have made your point better without insulting everyone on the forum.
The phenomenon being discussed here is a type of overfitting:
https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....
The last 50 years or so of managerial practice has been a recipe for overfitting with a brutal emphasis on measuring, optimizing, and stack ranking everything.
I think an argument can be made that this is an age of overfitting everywhere.
Interesting that something similar came up recently where an AI being trained might fake alignment with training goals.
Worse yet, these are upward-censored metrics. Failing to make them hurts your career, but making or exceeding your targets doesn’t really help your career—it’s just seen as validating management’s approach.
As soon as they impose metrics, you need to bring in a union, and (to be frank) chase or bug out anyone who’s not on board with worker solidarity.
It's fascinating that you end up sort of doing the work twice, you build an excel (or jira) model of the work work along with the actual work to be done.
Often this extends to the entire organization, where you have like this parallel dimension of spreadsheets and planning existing on top of everything.
Eats resources like crazy to uphold.
Jira is already almost like "productivity theater" where engineers chart the work for the benefit of managers, and managers of managers only. Many programmers already really resent having to deal with it. Soon it will be a total farce, as engineers using MCP Jira servers have LLMs chart the "work" and manage the tickets for them, as managers do the same in reverse, instructing LLMs to summarize the work being done in Jira.
It'll be nothing but LLMs talking to other LLMs under the guise of organizational productivity in which the only one deriving any value from this effort is the companies charging for the input and output tokens. Except, they are likely operating at a loss...
Managers (as in PMs, EMs, and C-Suite) don't like JIRA either - there just isn't an alternative.
Customers and investors ask for delivery timelines and amount of resources invested on major features or products, and you need to give an accurate-ish answer, and you as a company will be dealing with hundreds if not thousands of features depending on size.
In that kind of a situation, the only way you can get that visibility is through JIRA (or a JIRA type product), because it acts as a forcing function to get a defensible estimate, and monitor progress.
Furthermore, due to tax laws, we need to track investments into features and initiatives, and JIRA becomes the easiest way to collect that kind of amoratization data.
Once some AI Agent to automate this whole program management/JIRA hygiene process exists, it will make life for everyone so much easier.
This explanation is not incompatible with calling the whole business a "theater".
Its not _all_ theater. Sometimes something does make it into the box and out the door.
How is it theater?
When customers give you money, they expect a date.
When investors give you money, they want to see whether or not you are investing in the right initiatives.
When you open a company, the IRS, SEC, and other regulators expect some amount of financial compliance.
Do you want me to come to you and give you an ultimatum to give me an exact date, calculate amortization, and defend existing investments, and if any of those slips you are the fired? And do that with all the hundreds and thousands of initiatives on a daily basis?
That's the alternative.
Welcome to the industry - you're paid to make purchasers happy, not you. Purchasers don't care if you DuckDB or OracleDB - they care if the product they paid for will be delivered on time and meet the needs stipulated in their contract.
If you want to be happy and only deal with engineering problems, you sadly have to deal with the poopshow that JIRA is.
It's theater because the numbers in JIRA are, for the most part, pulled out of someone's ass, and then multiplied by various coefficients by managers along the chain (based on their pessimism and/or experience). Garbage in, garbage out.
So yes, this is theater, and it only makes someone happy for as long as they aren't aware (or can pretend to not be aware) how the sausage is made.
If you round up great engineering orgs that ship impactful stuff more of them don't use JIRA than do. Linear, Basecamp, Asana, Monday etc.
My experience is by the time an org gets hundreds of priorities and can't effectively delegate to sub orgs they're already fucked and there's no point working there if you want to do anything meaningful.
How do the great engineering orgs that ship impactful stuff organize / run a major project?
None of this sounds necessary for the human race. Maybe David Graeber was right.
Nothing is necessary to exist besides foraging, yet you are still using an industrially manufactured product (laptop or mobile phone) to reply to someone on a VC-subsidized forum.
So I'm not sure your contention has much merit, unless you wish to return to the woods and stop using HN, otherwise you're just enabling the supposed waste you appear to detest.
Or alternatively, you could hop off the high horse and understand the headaches the people you report to at work deal with, and thus maybe learn some additional context that can help you at your current or future job, and maybe think of a way to remove the drudgery in a process that annoys everyone.