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Comment by wjnc | Hacker News Reader

The thing I find really hard to understand from a business perspective is that bullshit jobs are the low hanging fruit from a cost saving perspective. Why do they persist? What drives managers, teams, companies and cultures to accept bullshit in their environment. What drives the happiness of the bullshitters themselves. Coming from business I understand it's partially senior management does not care Enough. They've got real problems on their hands. But every now and again a No bullshitters should pop up and say stop this local incident of BS. It just does not happen. I'm one of those that tries to make senior management aware of total time and energy sinks in the corporation. Often it just doesn't click and I move on. Why don't cultures change (fast) enough?

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I have had a middle manager tell me that they where not cutting down the team, because he wanted to be a manager of 5 people, just like that.

The problem is that teams in large organizations are not run by the company owners themselves anymore, instead they are run by a middle manager whose job is to run the team.

The middle manager has no incentive to cut down too much on the team size, as that would risk his career, perceived social status, and even directly its job.

If a team of 10 all of the sudden becomes a team of 3, maybe there is no need for the middle manager anymore.

Also it does not look well on the CV to be a manager of a team of 3 instead of 10 people, so its not good for the manager career to cut down the team too much.

If the team size gets reduced a lot, the manager will be asked to do non-managerial tasks again, which would effectively mean a demotion.

> I have had a middle manager tell me that they where not cutting down the team, because he wanted to be a manager of 5 people, just like that.

Better yet: there are companies where a team needs to have at least N people in order for it to be assigned a manager. Otherwise it gets a "team leader" and several of those get assigned to a single manager.

N varies with the job, too. It can be as low as 5-6 in software development or engineering, and as high as 30-40 in administrative departments or poorly-automated production floors.

So if you cut the bullshit jobs, you also cut yours. No one does that.

How good it looks on the CV is also a factor, indeed, and often it's a barrier of entry, too. When hiring managers, many companies, including the ones that you'd think would know better, routinely demand a minimum team size, regardless of team performance. You can manage a team of 200 and run all projects into the ground and still get hired -- and yet get disappointed looks if you managed a team of 20, no matter how well it performed.

It goes the other way as well.

Managers offering to get their team trimmed because of lack of stuff to do is seen as a failure.

On one side the manager will be blamed for not being attached enough to its team, not being 'greedy' enough in general. On the other side the whole team will be blamed for not having come up with novel ideas and new expansion paths.

And as you say, even if the Level N manager is fine with that, it will look bad on the N+1 manager to not have a growing trend, and so-on.

> The thing I find really hard to understand from a business perspective is that bullshit jobs are the low hanging fruit from a cost saving perspective. Why do they persist? What drives managers, teams, companies and cultures to accept bullshit in their environment.

Typically, at least in large organizations, the manager is interested in increasing, not decreasing, his budget. Since everything that happens in modern companies is very opaque (i.e. how much actual value is created is not clear for people outside a given business unit), the budget size/headcount is often used as a proxy for value. So, according to this logic, the bigger the headcount, the more important for the company the manager must be, so he can then negotiate a raise, bonus, or a promotion for himself. I agree with Michael O. Church here - managers in tech are mostly one-man PR firms (managing their own reputation). That sucks, but that's the result of our current workplaces in tech getting so complex that judging actual merit is close to impossible.

'But': I've not once met a manager that was thinking about his budget first and foremost. Budget thinking is always implicit and couched in other objectives of a firm. So there must be some mechanism that fails holding said manager accountable for attaining the business goals he gets his budget for. So should I then look at the controllers for failing to control? I'm really at a loss (professionally) why some managers get away with no results and growing budgets and project portfolios, even within a culture that values delivery.

Such incompetent manager (let's call him manager A) is in turn a part of his manager (one level above, let's call him B) "empire". B admitting that A's department is incompetent and is actually not doing much, and thus could really be disbanded, is not in B's interest, as it would shrink the size of his empire.

It's not really impossible but it's not always worth the costs.

It's common for really large companies to use internal billing. So the IT department for example might charge other departments for their services and have to show it's a profit center. The problem with this of course is that it's also a monopoly, so this hardly incentivises better behaviour. In a situation where other departments can go outside the firm to get what they need, this is almost like outsourcing or divesting that department and it can act as a check on really bad cost:benefit ratios internally.

Everyone up the chain of command is wasting someone else's money. Ultimately it's stockholder money, but the stockholders are actually giant retirement funds, and the fund managers who use the voting powers don't actually have their own money in the fund.

Wasting that money does bring the status of having a bigger organization, more direct reports, etc. Saving the money brings the questionable honor of being the manager whose team shrunk by 25% in a year.

The only corporations where efficiency still is key, are the ones where the owner-CEO is still able to keep an eye on the whole operation.

But that does not explain real life differences between companies in the same sector and with the same type of ownership. In my sector I've seen good and bad cultures at work. The difference is astute. So there must be aspects of culture (and change) that are attainable by stock-owned companies, but only attained by some.

At my university which is also a heavily endowed top ten, and it's hard to not imagine that they were intentionally aiming to waste money. In my opinion the purpose of this was to justify increasing costs which internally is then seen as a measurement of growth. You would regularly see buildings, fully functional and usable buildings, being completely demolished and replaced with new buildings to no end. The only real changes would be snazzier looking architecture and some nicer desks because, ya know, you have to tear down a building to stick in some nicer desks.

What I think people forget when we speak of monolithic institutions, be they institutions of learning, corporations, or even governments is that they aren't really monoliths. They're just made up of lots of individuals who are mostly just interested in themselves. So who is the person whose motivation is to reduce costs? Go look at the regularly flaunted bios and list of achievements of presidents of any major university. You're not going to find reducing costs anywhere in there. Instead you'll just find a whole slew of different ways they managed to find to spend even more money.

Here [1] is the president of Stanford's bio. Lo and behold, among his amazing achievements include 'Dr. Tessier-Lavigne worked with faculty, students, staff and trustees to develop and execute a ... a $500 million / 2 acre campus expansion project in the heart of Manhattan that broke ground in 2015.' Literally managing to spend half a billion dollars of other peoples money for a 2 acre expansion is, in and of itself, regarded as a noteworthy achievement.

[1] - https://president.stanford.edu/biography/

There's the old saying "I know half of my advertising budget is wasted, I just don't know which half".

But in practice, the reality is probably far more that most of the jobs do add value to the company, it's just relatively difficult to quantify (the related "as we're not an IT company, we should just outsource this department" mentality has never worked out very well...). Or taking the ludicrous Graeber definition of a "bullshit job", just because the employees would rather be poet musicians than credit controllers doesn't necessarily mean the world actually needs more street poetry of dubious merit and less timely payments.

And the given example of advising someone they can't bring their own furniture in without a good reason is a "bullshit task" which takes far less time than the alternative "bullshit task" of evaluating whether doing so might cause conflict, clutter or insurance liability issues, and auditing who owns which piece of furniture.

I think it's ultimately about risk. Once it's able to make a profit, a huge, inefficient organization will probably continue to make the same sort of profit in the same sort of way. A smaller organization is more likely to do very well or very poorly, but investors don't want that. They're being paid to get 5% a year, not 200% some years and -50% other years.

IMO this would be one of the biggest benefits of UBI -- money coming from actual people instead of risk-averse institutional investors.

When a company grows in number of employees the owners and CEO go from having economical power to having both economical and political power.

As the company grows "too big to fail" it acquires power over society in general (and bailout money when needed).

That's a pretty good deal, and it can be the lifesaver when a company is struggling to be competitive.

People paid to pretend being busy doing something useful get good at their job, too.

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