Hacker News Reader

Comment by etempleton | Hacker News Reader

The lower you are in the organization the more work you are likely doing and the less flexibility you have.

As you ascend the organizational ladder what matters is your ability to organize and motivate others, relationship building and communication skills, and your general vision / insights / experience.

The above means that you can be pretty lazy later in your career if you are just highly competent at those things. If you are hard working it certainly helps, but give me a lazy but competent and fair leader over a hard working incompetent one any day.

However for bottom of the org chart employees hard work and accuracy of work are most valued.

View on HN

I mostly agree with you but I do think you’re missing the most important piece: who has power and leverage.

Low level employees don’t have much power (in the US at least) so they’re overworked and underpaid. Senior leadership are literally the people who make the rules, so they’re not going to force the same degrading conditions on themselves as they put on low level workers.

Then there’s something like the cushy engineering jobs some of us have in SV, that’s because they have power in the form of a labor shortage and can demand good working conditions.

> ...have power in the form of a labor shortage...

It can be much more than this. A short order cook might prepare $1,500 worth of food in a shift. $30,000 in a month. It's hard work in a busy diner.

As an extreme example, at one point, WhatsApp had 40 software engineers and 400,000,000 users. That's 10,000,000 users per engineer. If a user was worth $1/month, they were each responsible for $10,000,000 per month in revenue.

That's an extreme, but even at my company, for example, one engineer is responsible for about $200,000/month in revenue.

Generally, I agree you. In engineering orgs, it seems like the social dynamics of the org distribute who is perceived to be creating that value in a non-average way. e.g. the engineers improving reliability are probably perceived as less valuable than engineers putting out user visible changes. This seems to be what happens by default, unless leadership is self-aware enough to mitigate.

Attributing revenue to the short order cook is a lot easier than the engineer. (Sales people are also easier to quantify.)

I hear that and I do think that raises the ceiling for pay, since you can pay engineers a ridiculous amount of money and they’re still a net positive.

If there was a surplus of engineering talent I guarantee you our salaries would drop significantly, no matter how much profit we generate. Under capitalism, there’s no incentive to scale workers’ pay based on how much value they bring. Even in your examples, the engineers that pull in 200k/month for the company are making a tiny fraction of that, and if they start making 400k/month on average it’s unlikely salaries would increase if pressures in the labor market are unchanged.

Edited for clarity

The problem is you can pull any old programmer in off the streets to work on the stuff that brings in 200k/mo per person, so I'm doubtful there will be a surplus of engineering talent at the desired skill level.

What does that have to do with capitalism, or any -ism?

You would not pay $4 to seller A for the same apple that seller B is selling for $1. Attempting to maximize utility to cost ratio is natural, maybe even necessary as it would convey evolutionary advantages.

I think that OP just means that capitalism, as a system, has absolutely no incentive to increase wages as productivity increases, it's a race for profits so extracting maximum profit is the metric. It's this reliance on a single metric that, for me personally, is a major failure of the current economic system to provide not only wealth and innovation but also good standards of living for people.

I'm a bit of a humanist and quite leftist in my views though, not a communist by any means but I will always try to look into economic systems with this more humane optic.

No, you're forgetting the most important component of middle and senior management - the taking on of responsibility. We can all throw around anecdotes of CEOs that never pay for crimes, but in the operation of a company if you can keep the machine moving smoothly, the job is actually not very demanding on a daily basis.

The catch is that you're absolutely on the hook when things don't run smoothly in ways that individual contributors never are. How do you fix processes, people, and tools to resolve immediate problems and improve effectiveness of processes over the long term? How do you liaise effectively with senior management to affect change? How do you tell someone or a group of people that their job is being eliminated? Those aren't frequent tasks, but when they happen they are highly demanding. In management you need to soak up responsibility like a sponge - for a good operations manager, their idle time isn't a function of being lazy, it's a function of having paid it forward in process design while ironically amassing liabilities each day for when shit hits the fan.

Nope. A typical manager will simply blame somebody else when things go wrong, and take all the credit when things go right. You are right that good managers take responsibility. But good managers are rare to find.

What can I tell you? You work around bad managers, not “typical” managers, IME. The typical productive ops middle manager is a pretty stressed out animal or left on the side of the road, the typical senior ops manager has an easier daily life punctuated by episodes of challenging and rewarding hardships. Good managers _are_ hard to find relative to good individual contributors. On that we agree. Most individual contributors who think they want to be managers quickly find out it’s not an easy or fake job - it’s a damn hard job to do correctly. Bad managers beget bad junior managers, but that’s rarely sustainable in the long term for an organization, again IME.

CEOs have to fuck up pretty bad to be in a worse position after getting fired than a burger flipper who also just got fired. They really aren't on the hook for much.

That’s why I tried to point out that my comment wasn’t about the typical anecdotal CEO.

I don't disagree with your general take although it matters what sort of higher-level position. It's true that a senior individual contributor can potentially cruise if they can churn out quality work quickly. But senior execs mostly work pretty hard, (normally) a ton of travel, lots of calls at all hours of the day and night, etc.

ADDED: Not sure why people disagree with this. Yes, those senior execs are well-paid (some would say excessively paid at the largest companies) for their hard (as in long hours/stress) work, but it doesn't mean they're just taking it easy.

I agree. It is a different type of work, but it is a lot of work nonetheless. There is a greater degree of flexibility afforded to executives and many consider the actual work much more desirable. I think many have trouble understanding the value that a good executive brings and seeing the types of work that they do as "real."

Yeah, as a senior IC, I have a lot of flexibility compared to an exec who probably has most of their day scheduled including late night calls. And I fully appreciate this when I'm on a "road trip" of some sort when I'm pretty much scheduled from breakfast through post-dinner.

And sure, a senior exec has freedom to say that this AM doesn't work for me--reschedule things. But there are still a lot of meetings/calls at odd hours.

If you are a manager and work hard then you are doing a bad job. A good manager will make sure that his team has the skills and autonomy to make the right decisions without constantly involving him/her. Leaving the manager to focus on identifying and improving the current bottleneck (Theory of Constraints style).

I think most people have this weird idea that execs don't actually do anything and their job is ridiculously easy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com