I love that reference! Hitchhikers' Guide has been a lifelong favorite. As a desktop support contractor, I became aware of getting sick with every new job, and so I started bringing in my own Clorox wipes and cleaning keyboards before working on a system. Yes, I did sanitize phones as part of any desk setup or move for any worker.
Thanks for sharing, I guess we should just be glad we have occupations where we really feel like we are getting things done.
About the end of the world, check out https://jdanielsawyer.substack.com/p/how-the-hippies-saved-the-world. This essay makes insightful points about technology and how we can always be a few generations away from us losing it for good. [I may have gotten this author recommendation from you, I forget, so sorry if it is repetitive!]
Choice quote:
"And, most importantly, technology at root is not “gadgets.” The gadgets are the products of technology, not technology itself. Technology, as Jacques Ellul spotted, is “technique.” The understanding of how things are done. One of the difficulties of any given technological domain is that it has its own internal logic, and the obvious benefits of that technology are so profound that they easily sweep human concerns away when humans aren’t really paying attention.¹¹
Technology is culture and civilization, because technology is, at heart, knowledge rather than artifact.
Because of this, it has a terrifying vulnerability: Just like with artistic culture, religious culture, and political culture, all material culture is always two generations (or less) from extinction."
I’ve been increasingly tempted to become a paid subscriber and you have won me over by talking about my most treasured of pet peeves, the tolerance of or indifference towards incompetence at work. I work with several people who are simply not very good at their jobs, and there are times when the fact that their managers seem uninterested or incapable of doing anything about it makes me seethe. That said, I don’t think I’ve experienced anything like your description of your last job. Mind-blowing.
You're brain seems overloaded, so I may have to break this into several comments. As to "Why Huge US Companies Employ Foreigners", you have better knowledge than I do since I worked most of my career for companies where US citizenship was the most basic requirement. I have heard second-hand about the Indianization of Qualcomm. A couple of years ago they began hiring H1-Bs from India, and that snowballed until all American born workers were laid off and forced/bribed (with severance pay) to sign an NDA not to disclose what was happening as well as train their replacements. I can imagine how well that went.
In my last company there were two types of managers, those who were dedicated to bringing in contracts to keep the company making money, and those who were interested in climbing the corporate ladder. Fortunately, I worked in San Diego and most of the climbers migrated to the DC area where company headquarters and most of the employees were.
I refused several promotions because I didn't want to go from creating things and puzzle solving (my strengths and passions) to sales, or marketing, as we tended to call it. My company was very smart, and, a few years before I retired, created a technical promotion path. (They also self-corrected on the open-office mania just before the COVID/WFH revolution started, by instead creating a variety of spaces, some for individual work, some for bullpens and small teams, and some for large meetings.)
Of course one of the dumbest things they did was part ways with my manager who managed to keep a staff of 50 technocrats fully employed, almost all on individual contracts where their expertise was needed and welcomed. He was let go because he didn't charge enough "billable hours", which, in our context, meant pretending to work on those contracts and charging the government for that instead of working "overhead" to keep us all employed. Of course, he immediately landed a much better job with higher pay. Go figure.
I’m glad you’re enjoying your new job! Working with bosses who give you autonomy and authority to just get your job done are great! I hope everything continues to go well!
This is masterful. Precisely what you’ve described here is precisely why I took the chance on spinning up my own shop. It comes with its own trials and tribulations, but I will take all of them, work twice as hard for half as much take home, deal with raging customers, deal with the cavalcade of government functionaries, deal with every facility, payroll, compliance, supply chain, etc problem being ultimately my problem, to never have to sing for the tillerman ever again. Office politics might be worse than actual politics, which is truly saying something.
What can I say about PowerPoint and TED talks. I wish I had links to the stupidity, but years ago someone gave a TED talk about how to give a TED talk, telling people all the secrets of how to lay out things that nobody needed to hear but make you think it's interesting.
There's also someone I met at an SF convention whose presentation was on Death by PowerPoint. No, no link because unlike what you'll find by googling the phrase, he meant literal death by PowerPoint. He made it clear how before the shuttle Challenger's tragic loss, the engineers had been tasked with and collected the data showing exactly what would happen, but then they reported it in the standard PowerPoint slide that had the graphics but was meant for other purposes, completely burying the deadly news in a busy slide consisting of 6 graphics of launchers on the same slide with the deadly information nearly hidden in a Where's Waldo like presentation.
I sometimes made PowerPoint presentations, but they were only as aids and illustrations to my speeches. As one manager told me, "You gave my your slides ahead of time, and I couldn't understand any of it, but when you gave the presentation with them, I really got it all!"
OK, just one more comment. Regarding corporate madness and how to deal with it, I recommend (ok promote) my work biography A Geek's Progress https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C3N2N14N.
As I say if you read the blurb:
"Many books purport to tell you how to innovate, but most of us will never be Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates. I never had any interest in being among those folks. I just have always wanted, like most of us introverts who develop software, to be able to do a good job, making things better and getting a little recognition along the way. So if you're a future high risk/high rewards entrepreneur, this book is not for you. It's for the rest of us little people who just want to have a good life."
I don't expect to make much money off the book, but I want you to read it rather than just click on it and forget it, so I charge $5 for it.
I'm also working on an essay called The Bottom Line is Wrong which may cover a lot of the ground you touch on.
Oh, sorry, one last thing. If you want to read my take on WFH, you'll have to wait until I finish my next book titled Advance Guards.
I think you're right about managers needing to make a case for their jobs existing so they want in-person work. I like working from home. I worked from home before the church, and I still do stuff from home, like all the writing and life coaching via Zoom. I do think people are meant to be more at home, and less in person. Though I appreciate all the people who like to work in stores (like grocery stores) where we do need them to be.
I have been remote working for most of the 21st century. I like it a lot. BUT I do think meeting coworkers from time to time is a good thing.
I'm not in favor of 9-5 M-F in the office, but somewhere between 1-2 days a week and 1-2 a month is probably good. I'm currently at the position where I meet most of my coworkers for ~5 days a year which is too little to get to know them. My boss agrees and we hope to at least double that going forward.
My company found that the almost entirely remote work during COVID led to a significant reduction in code quality and an increase in development time and now the development and operations teams come into work at least two days a week (they can do more, some do). I think part of this is that it is easier to ask someone in person about some minor problem you are having or to bounce an idea off than it is using remote chat channels like slack. I also feel that reporting one's progress in person makes it harder to get away with shading the truth and that therefore provides a bit more incentive to stop goofing off.
Remote work requires the right work culture and institutional knowledge. I’ve worked at two productive remote companies that worked because they took it very seriously.
I’m not surprised Covid saw many companies lose productivity since they had to transition and immediately - it takes a while to learn how to be a remote worker and how to manage a remote team. Also juniors heavily benefit from in-person work… not that companies very often want to hire juniors anymore.
Others became more productive likely because they adapted faster and remote work really is better for a large minority or small majority of people.
"Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation." - Carlo Cipolla
I don't know if you've read Cipolla's book "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity", but it seems like something that might resonate with you.
"Powerpoint makes us stupid." - Gen. James Mattis
I think he's onto something. I understand why people create slide decks, but informationally they are low bandwidth and low density. So they consume a lot of time while transmitting relatively small amounts of understanding. I also think there's some essential element of superstition in the view, implicit with Powerpoint, that complex discussions can be reduced to bulleted lists. (Jeff Bezos at Amazon would famously require people who called meetings to submit a paper in advance, in essay form, addressing the subject matter of the meeting.) Informationally, I think even videos are better than slide decks and I increasingly include custom-produced videos whenever I have to do substantive talks where everyone assumes there will be slides. Anyway, one of these days I'll retire, after which I plan on never using Powerpoint again.
Excellent observations and many large organization veterans will affirm every detail. I would like to offer a slightly different framing. I think you are crediting people - even the stupid ones - with more strategy than they are capable of. And I think the overall frame is bureaucracy and its systems. People respond to incentives and it is impossible to see the entire system, no matter where you sit in the system. First - on foreigners the cost is always lower and the incentives are not connected. The leader of the group responsible for delivering FCR metrics (who is 100% focused on cost) does not share a goal with the leader of the group responsible for sales (who is 100% focused on revenue). The result is that post sales service can be mediocre, even awful, up to the point at which there is sales impact. If there is sales impact you’ll see a tiger team form immediately around that client or customer group until it is resolved after which all work will resume in the flawed system. There are certainly managers with egos wildly out of proportion to their competence however I don’t think anyone other than the Elon level people can indulge their egos as decision driver. Regarding all the useless managers, investing in bureaucracy seems to be the normal path in organizational evolution. Success happens, cash is flowing and the leaders invest in a handful of things that truly advance the core competency of the organization. The cash however also attracts parasites who form stupid programs and add stupid steps to the system. As you note useless, talentless, lazy people want power and money too so the parasites and parasitic behavior are entirely logical. What I’ve always wondered is 1-) why the talented people give up or give in or get swindled by the parasites and 2-) many bureaucrats know what they are and make no bones about power plays and maneuvering (Fauci is poster child for this) however just as many are true believers, they really think they are changing the world. What creates this mix, what is the pattern?
You may be right in general, of course. My experience is very limited. But I really do think that the two managers on my final team have been making ego-based decisions for well over ten years now. And they both still have jobs. It may be something that only a huge company can tolerate or hide, but I suspect they can't be unique.
Golgafrincham B Ark, anyone?
Arguably, though, hairdressers and telephone sanitizers are more useful than most middle managers.
LOL, seriously.
I love that reference! Hitchhikers' Guide has been a lifelong favorite. As a desktop support contractor, I became aware of getting sick with every new job, and so I started bringing in my own Clorox wipes and cleaning keyboards before working on a system. Yes, I did sanitize phones as part of any desk setup or move for any worker.
Thanks for sharing, I guess we should just be glad we have occupations where we really feel like we are getting things done.
About the end of the world, check out https://jdanielsawyer.substack.com/p/how-the-hippies-saved-the-world. This essay makes insightful points about technology and how we can always be a few generations away from us losing it for good. [I may have gotten this author recommendation from you, I forget, so sorry if it is repetitive!]
Choice quote:
"And, most importantly, technology at root is not “gadgets.” The gadgets are the products of technology, not technology itself. Technology, as Jacques Ellul spotted, is “technique.” The understanding of how things are done. One of the difficulties of any given technological domain is that it has its own internal logic, and the obvious benefits of that technology are so profound that they easily sweep human concerns away when humans aren’t really paying attention.¹¹
Technology is culture and civilization, because technology is, at heart, knowledge rather than artifact.
Because of this, it has a terrifying vulnerability: Just like with artistic culture, religious culture, and political culture, all material culture is always two generations (or less) from extinction."
I’ve been increasingly tempted to become a paid subscriber and you have won me over by talking about my most treasured of pet peeves, the tolerance of or indifference towards incompetence at work. I work with several people who are simply not very good at their jobs, and there are times when the fact that their managers seem uninterested or incapable of doing anything about it makes me seethe. That said, I don’t think I’ve experienced anything like your description of your last job. Mind-blowing.
You're brain seems overloaded, so I may have to break this into several comments. As to "Why Huge US Companies Employ Foreigners", you have better knowledge than I do since I worked most of my career for companies where US citizenship was the most basic requirement. I have heard second-hand about the Indianization of Qualcomm. A couple of years ago they began hiring H1-Bs from India, and that snowballed until all American born workers were laid off and forced/bribed (with severance pay) to sign an NDA not to disclose what was happening as well as train their replacements. I can imagine how well that went.
As to "Most Managers Are Useless", I refer you to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html.
In my last company there were two types of managers, those who were dedicated to bringing in contracts to keep the company making money, and those who were interested in climbing the corporate ladder. Fortunately, I worked in San Diego and most of the climbers migrated to the DC area where company headquarters and most of the employees were.
I refused several promotions because I didn't want to go from creating things and puzzle solving (my strengths and passions) to sales, or marketing, as we tended to call it. My company was very smart, and, a few years before I retired, created a technical promotion path. (They also self-corrected on the open-office mania just before the COVID/WFH revolution started, by instead creating a variety of spaces, some for individual work, some for bullpens and small teams, and some for large meetings.)
Of course one of the dumbest things they did was part ways with my manager who managed to keep a staff of 50 technocrats fully employed, almost all on individual contracts where their expertise was needed and welcomed. He was let go because he didn't charge enough "billable hours", which, in our context, meant pretending to work on those contracts and charging the government for that instead of working "overhead" to keep us all employed. Of course, he immediately landed a much better job with higher pay. Go figure.
Oh yes, a special shoutout to your former colleague and the First Call Resolution madness, I wrote an essay on that from the customer perspective: http://frank-hood.com/2024/01/02/is-your-customer-service-feedback-a-lie-and-how-does-that-impact-our-brave-new-ai-world/.
I’m glad you’re enjoying your new job! Working with bosses who give you autonomy and authority to just get your job done are great! I hope everything continues to go well!
This is masterful. Precisely what you’ve described here is precisely why I took the chance on spinning up my own shop. It comes with its own trials and tribulations, but I will take all of them, work twice as hard for half as much take home, deal with raging customers, deal with the cavalcade of government functionaries, deal with every facility, payroll, compliance, supply chain, etc problem being ultimately my problem, to never have to sing for the tillerman ever again. Office politics might be worse than actual politics, which is truly saying something.
What can I say about PowerPoint and TED talks. I wish I had links to the stupidity, but years ago someone gave a TED talk about how to give a TED talk, telling people all the secrets of how to lay out things that nobody needed to hear but make you think it's interesting.
There's also someone I met at an SF convention whose presentation was on Death by PowerPoint. No, no link because unlike what you'll find by googling the phrase, he meant literal death by PowerPoint. He made it clear how before the shuttle Challenger's tragic loss, the engineers had been tasked with and collected the data showing exactly what would happen, but then they reported it in the standard PowerPoint slide that had the graphics but was meant for other purposes, completely burying the deadly news in a busy slide consisting of 6 graphics of launchers on the same slide with the deadly information nearly hidden in a Where's Waldo like presentation.
I sometimes made PowerPoint presentations, but they were only as aids and illustrations to my speeches. As one manager told me, "You gave my your slides ahead of time, and I couldn't understand any of it, but when you gave the presentation with them, I really got it all!"
OK, just one more comment. Regarding corporate madness and how to deal with it, I recommend (ok promote) my work biography A Geek's Progress https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C3N2N14N.
As I say if you read the blurb:
"Many books purport to tell you how to innovate, but most of us will never be Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates. I never had any interest in being among those folks. I just have always wanted, like most of us introverts who develop software, to be able to do a good job, making things better and getting a little recognition along the way. So if you're a future high risk/high rewards entrepreneur, this book is not for you. It's for the rest of us little people who just want to have a good life."
I don't expect to make much money off the book, but I want you to read it rather than just click on it and forget it, so I charge $5 for it.
I'm also working on an essay called The Bottom Line is Wrong which may cover a lot of the ground you touch on.
Oh, sorry, one last thing. If you want to read my take on WFH, you'll have to wait until I finish my next book titled Advance Guards.
I think you're right about managers needing to make a case for their jobs existing so they want in-person work. I like working from home. I worked from home before the church, and I still do stuff from home, like all the writing and life coaching via Zoom. I do think people are meant to be more at home, and less in person. Though I appreciate all the people who like to work in stores (like grocery stores) where we do need them to be.
Agreed. Those people are vital and play crucial roles. I hope they are able to be home a lot the rest of the time.
I have been remote working for most of the 21st century. I like it a lot. BUT I do think meeting coworkers from time to time is a good thing.
I'm not in favor of 9-5 M-F in the office, but somewhere between 1-2 days a week and 1-2 a month is probably good. I'm currently at the position where I meet most of my coworkers for ~5 days a year which is too little to get to know them. My boss agrees and we hope to at least double that going forward.
My company found that the almost entirely remote work during COVID led to a significant reduction in code quality and an increase in development time and now the development and operations teams come into work at least two days a week (they can do more, some do). I think part of this is that it is easier to ask someone in person about some minor problem you are having or to bounce an idea off than it is using remote chat channels like slack. I also feel that reporting one's progress in person makes it harder to get away with shading the truth and that therefore provides a bit more incentive to stop goofing off.
Remote work requires the right work culture and institutional knowledge. I’ve worked at two productive remote companies that worked because they took it very seriously.
I’m not surprised Covid saw many companies lose productivity since they had to transition and immediately - it takes a while to learn how to be a remote worker and how to manage a remote team. Also juniors heavily benefit from in-person work… not that companies very often want to hire juniors anymore.
Others became more productive likely because they adapted faster and remote work really is better for a large minority or small majority of people.
Excellent. Looking forward to more of your thoughts along these lines.
"Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation." - Carlo Cipolla
I don't know if you've read Cipolla's book "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity", but it seems like something that might resonate with you.
"Powerpoint makes us stupid." - Gen. James Mattis
I think he's onto something. I understand why people create slide decks, but informationally they are low bandwidth and low density. So they consume a lot of time while transmitting relatively small amounts of understanding. I also think there's some essential element of superstition in the view, implicit with Powerpoint, that complex discussions can be reduced to bulleted lists. (Jeff Bezos at Amazon would famously require people who called meetings to submit a paper in advance, in essay form, addressing the subject matter of the meeting.) Informationally, I think even videos are better than slide decks and I increasingly include custom-produced videos whenever I have to do substantive talks where everyone assumes there will be slides. Anyway, one of these days I'll retire, after which I plan on never using Powerpoint again.
Bureaucracy is bullshit and is responsible for the many inefficiencies that contribute to burnout. It's the perfect way to disrupt a natural order.
Excellent observations and many large organization veterans will affirm every detail. I would like to offer a slightly different framing. I think you are crediting people - even the stupid ones - with more strategy than they are capable of. And I think the overall frame is bureaucracy and its systems. People respond to incentives and it is impossible to see the entire system, no matter where you sit in the system. First - on foreigners the cost is always lower and the incentives are not connected. The leader of the group responsible for delivering FCR metrics (who is 100% focused on cost) does not share a goal with the leader of the group responsible for sales (who is 100% focused on revenue). The result is that post sales service can be mediocre, even awful, up to the point at which there is sales impact. If there is sales impact you’ll see a tiger team form immediately around that client or customer group until it is resolved after which all work will resume in the flawed system. There are certainly managers with egos wildly out of proportion to their competence however I don’t think anyone other than the Elon level people can indulge their egos as decision driver. Regarding all the useless managers, investing in bureaucracy seems to be the normal path in organizational evolution. Success happens, cash is flowing and the leaders invest in a handful of things that truly advance the core competency of the organization. The cash however also attracts parasites who form stupid programs and add stupid steps to the system. As you note useless, talentless, lazy people want power and money too so the parasites and parasitic behavior are entirely logical. What I’ve always wondered is 1-) why the talented people give up or give in or get swindled by the parasites and 2-) many bureaucrats know what they are and make no bones about power plays and maneuvering (Fauci is poster child for this) however just as many are true believers, they really think they are changing the world. What creates this mix, what is the pattern?
You may be right in general, of course. My experience is very limited. But I really do think that the two managers on my final team have been making ego-based decisions for well over ten years now. And they both still have jobs. It may be something that only a huge company can tolerate or hide, but I suspect they can't be unique.