Hacker News Reader

Comment by globalreset | Hacker News Reader

The actual real reason is that most management is just bunch of morons busy optimizing for their own success, and no one worrying about any common sense good of the company.

The company downfall is always hiring the first "manager". After that managers will just keep inventing excuses to expand their dominion, until the company is 50% management, there's more people than actual work that needs being done, yet all work grinds to almost complete halt.

Even if a given individual is not a self-serving moron, they are overpowered by the dynamics of the group and they either comply and play the game, or they are out.

The bigger the group, the easier it is to hide in a corner with incompetence, stupidity, politics, optimize for your personal gain, and the harder it is to actually competently judge the performance and contributions of each member.

Hierarchies make people optimize for raising in the hierarchy, and accumulating power, at the expense of actually doing what the group needs.

The way human groups organize in practice is pretty much always complete dysfunction without motivated, benevolent and competent leaders at the very top. Our own self-interest combined with natural bias and blind spots in aggregate always win. And the dysfunction grows more than linear with the size of the group.

At the corporate size there is practically no actual owner/leader overseeing things (even the board is just bunch of self-serving assholes), so you effectively get a smaller and private replica of a communist state. If you read anything about communist state politics and management you're going to see 1:1 with every corporation you've ever worked in.

View on HN

People have put in further thought about this and had good insights. A couple examples would be Rao's essay on The Gervais Principle [0] and, much heavier, Bob Jackall's 1988 book "Moral Mazes." [1]

[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes

> most management is just bunch of morons busy optimizing for their own success, and no one worrying about any common sense good of the company

That might be true but unless you're the owner of the company or have a significant stake I don't see why you wouldn't do the same as an individual contributor?

The "company" is not some sentient being you owe some compassion to. It's a legal structure with profit as its sole goal. It won't shed a tear if it makes more profit at your expense, so you shouldn't either if you manage to turn it upside down.

+1 to this

I ageee managers optimize for their own success, at the expense of the company, but how does that make them morons?

Sure the company is hurt and work grinds to a halt, but are you saying the rational thing to do is take actions that don’t optimize for your own success?

I should have been more specific. A lot of them are morons, which is orthogonal and more of a problem than being self-serving. A competent self-serving manager is possibly not best for the company, but might be great to work with (under) and still way better than a moron.

> That might be true but unless you're the owner of the company or have a significant stake I don't see why you wouldn't do the same as an individual contributor?

And here you hit on one of the core tenets of a good manager. How to align things so that what's good for the individual is good for the company? It starts with the owner/shareholders and cascades down the hierarchy.

It's a bit of a "tragedy of the commons"-type problem. If everyone optimizes what's best for themselves then the company likely goes out of business, which isn't good for most of the employees.

A good incentive structure isn't going to make a terrible manager into a good one but it can have a big impact around the edges. Including things like "employee retention" in the evaluation of a manager helps to align things - now if the manager wants her bonus she has to treat the employees well and help find a balance between what's good for the company & what's good for the employee individually.

That's correct, but it has to come from top-down. It is unlikely you'll make any change from the bottom (especially as that change would negatively impact your superior who is also playing this game), so you're better off playing the game too.

That's a bold statement "most managers are morons". What evidence do you have for this? I've worked with some excellent managers.

Yes, "most <insert any large group of people> are morons" is only true if you also believe most people in general are morons, which is a different conversation

> What evidence do you have for this?

Obviously there is no evidence for this subjective claim. However, the fact that you find it worthwhile to mention:

> I've worked with some excellent managers.

suggests you actually agree with me. If I've said "the sky is green most of the time" you would not find it worthwhile to say "I've seen some blue sky", would you? ;)

"Ninety percent of everything is crap"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

It's amazing how often I talk to people with polar opposite views about managers. Some people insist that most managers are terrible. Other people recount bad managers as outliers throughout their career.

I have a suspicion that people who end up reporting to bad managers are more likely to get stuck in companies or career paths that put them under a sequence of bad managers. Perhaps bad management gets normalized in the formative early years of their career and they don't understand that they're in a bad situation or that they should (or even can) move to companies with better management practices.

Obviously, there are a lot of bad employees out there of all job types. Managers are no exception. But the idea that managers are "mostly morons" is a ridiculous, hyperbolic claim.

Whenever I mentor someone who has these ideas, I work hard to try to let them know that bad management is neither normal nor acceptable. Otherwise they just assume their bad situation is normal and that changing jobs wouldn't help, which is not the case with bad management.

> Whenever I mentor someone who has these ideas, I work hard to try to let them know that bad management is neither normal nor acceptable.

A lot of the HR analyses I read on HN are coming from an extremely privileged position and are very US-centric. What you experience in the very few tech hubs in USA is absolutely not what you'd experience literally everywhere else in the world. This is an observable fact if you speak with a lot of non-US contractors. But it's also a fact that's usually not welcome on HN.

Most managers I had in my career were indeed morons in general: self-centered people optimizing only for their quarterly or annual bonus, very plain slave-drivers whose only difference with the real thing is the lack of actual whips, unable to understand simple concepts as "a good manager removes obstacles, they don't roast people", and never able to actually lead and not just cover their own bottom by shouting at people to not miss an impossible deadline, and always seeking to inflate their department's budgets out of fear for their budget to be not reduced the next fiscal period. All of that with very little regard for the actual product and success of the company.

Was it my fault for working with them? I suspect yes. But then again my formative years were filled with fear and dread to not end up living under a bridge (very rough and rocky start in life; don't ask). This has made me blind to my own negotiation power and I made many mistakes during most of my career. So strictly and mathematically speaking -- yeah it was my fault for tolerating morons. But once you control for fairly often-occurring human traits (like a beaten-down psyche) you can very easily see what a huge amount of programmers out there are either too afraid or too burned out to seek a better environment. This is often made even worse by them sticking to one market (country or a business area), too.

One truth that a lot of people hate hearing is: if somebody detects that you are vulnerable in any way, they'll make it their goal to turn that against you. There are plenty of such piece of sh1t people out there and many of them are HR or managers. I know this doesn't conform to the touchy-feely world view that many have and that's why it's not a popular thing to say.

Glad your own experience is the opposite. Wish mine was too because overcoming the negative inertia comes with a very real cost on your soul -- and you have to, every day, consciously and carefully, override your subconscious mechanisms. It's extremely tiring. Two years later I am just barely starting to have the right instincts during negotiations and have to measure every word to not put myself in a crappy situation. It started getting better, yes. Took a damn long time for it to even start happening though. Wish I met kind people who saw that in me and were willing to go out of their way to help me overcome it. I wish.

How you are brought up in your early periods (in this case: start of career, not literal childhood of course) makes much more difference than many are comfortable with admitting. Sure, at one point I inevitably realized this is exclusively my problem and it's me who has to fix it and reverse its negative effects -- and I do that. But it's not an overnight change, and the transitional period can be extremely hard. I know it was for me.

---

TL;DR -- yeah a lot of managers out there are morons. Can't claim a percentage obviously, but tons of personal anecdotal evidence combined can make for a decent statistical evidence IMO. And you can't counter one anecdotal evidence with another while claiming that yours is somehow the better source of truth. A lot of programmers out there will without hesitation say "most managers I ever worked with were morons". Your positive experience does not nullify theirs.

> A lot of the HR analyses I read on HN are coming from an extremely privileged position and are very US-centric. What you experience in the very few tech hubs in USA is absolutely not what you'd experience literally everywhere else in the world. This is an observable fact if you speak with a lot of non-US contractors. But it's also a fact that's usually not welcome on HN.

I’ve worked internationally and many of the best managers I’ve worked with are from smaller European countries.

I think you’re just projecting your own bad experiences on to the rest of the world.

Also, HN and Internet forums where people go to vent anonymously are not good barometers for how managers perform. You’re collecting negative anecdotes that confirm your bias.

I am simply listening to what people say when I ask them. You're free to do exactly what I predicted above: attempt to downplay my anecdotal evidence with yours. Not a convincing reply.

Shame that you think a random guy is on a crusade to prove that many (not all) managers are morons. Borderline conspiracy theories.

> What you experience in the very few tech hubs in USA is absolutely not what you'd experience literally everywhere else in the world.

I'd push back against this. I have worked for a few tech companies in pretty small midwest towns and found the culture much better than what I see and hear from FAANG experiences. I turned down an AWS position and ultimately declined to continue interviewing for an Apple position because of some management red flags.

Although I will freely admit my career and life goals are definitely not the average West Coast developer's.

Sure, I am not claiming it's only here or there. I am saying that the average HN poster is very likely to be much more privileged than many other tech workers.

I also worked with some excellent managers, but most were still bad.

I too worked with some excellent managers over my career but it doesn't change the rest of my history during which I worked with moronic managers.

Somehow it makes it worse. You know how things could be, but you’re stuck with this… thing.

I like how you think because largely correct. I believe it has probably gotten much worse in “inflation driven bubble growth” times we had the last ten years. Non productive individual contributors have proliferated … because why not hire and retain them if money is free?

Managers are 2nd or 3rd order derivatives of IC productivity. If you have over-hired and too many managers to the point where no one knows what productivity is or who is doing any work, then everyone would prefer to be management since no real work is getting done anyway, and any of the work you do as an IC often gets credited : stolen : reassigned to others to spread the credit around.

I categories managers in the following ways:

1. Truly awful or toxic, malicious

Actively interfere with you , fight with you, stop you from being productive. I have had several of these. They are the cancer of companies.

2. Leave you alone

This is one of my favorite types of manager. They just kind of hire you and let you survive and do whatever. Unless you run into political challenges requiring real management, or need resources or get lost. If you are highly self motivated and talented and can figure out what to do yourself, these are fine, mostly.

3. Enablers : Encouragers

These are the managers who really accelerated my career. I have literally only ever had 2 of them, after working for like 20 years.

My personal estimate is that out of 13 managers, 2 have been excellent.

That is a really bad ratio.

Of the 13, 3 have been the leave me alone kind which was ok for a bit.

4-5 have been actively malicious or completely incompetent to the point of making me leave. The rest in between somewhere.

Thank you! I wanted to tell you that I really needed to hear this today.

I’m not even sure you are right about evertything, and you are probably oversimplyfing a bit.

But lately I’ve been stuck on this projects with 2 developers (1 is me) and 5(!) managers/project managers assigned to it, plus 3 more on the client side.

The amount of emails exchanged where nothing is said is very funny.

And you know the drill, when it goes right the merit is of the managers (everyone wants the piece of the cake), while when something goes wrong, the fault is the developer’s.

It’s honesly been a shitshow, so it’s been really good for me to read this!

One of the skills as a lead dev that I need to exercise more is knowing when a project needs more people, and then making the case for it to management.

Management seems by default to assign according to bus factor not getting it done. So we have like the same six projects in flight for over a year.

Also, on failed projects, where an understaffed team never completed the assignment, they finally staff it properly the second time around. But, the project still takes a long time to finish having to make sense of what the previous team did and even more time sucking, purging the unnecessary bits, frequently being the majority of the work. It takes 2x the amount of time to delete something than it took to make it.

What you're saying about management is true, but there's another reason why ultra-productive engineers aren't paid accordingly. It's context-dependent which engineers get to go into that state; put a "10x" engineer on a 0.1x project, and he'll probably just end up failing and making a bunch of enemies.

Therefore, as the company sees it, they deserve the bulk of the rewards since they are (magnanimously) giving the opportunity to the 10x engineer. He'll still get his 10% bonus if he performs well, won't he? So why should they feel compelled to give him more?

Obviously, this is bad for workers and bad for society, but it makes sense from the corporate viewpoint.

> Therefore, as the company sees it, they deserve the bulk of the rewards since they are (magnanimously) giving the opportunity to the 10x engineer.

I think it's really two things.

1. The company provides the structure in which the engineer works. Code is not valuable on its own, it's valuable when it solves a business problem. The company structure converts business problems to engineering problems for the engineer to solve. That transmogrification has value and the ability to build & maintain the transmogrifier (aka the rest of the company) is a skill that gets rewarded. The transmogrifier also uses money as one of its inputs (salaries for the rest of the company) and so some of the "pure value" that the engineer creates can't be converted directly to money for the engineer, because it has to be used in the "business problem to engineering problem" conversion process.

It's similar to the argument about taxes. Why should I pay taxes for things I don't use? Well, even if I don't drive, the roads support other parts of society that benefit me.

2. The engineer effectively pays the company (meaning the owners or shareholders of the company) to reduce the engineer's risk. If an engineer wants to extract every cent of value they create then they need to also take the burden of all the risk. Otherwise the company owners will not make enough on the successes to cover the failures.

If an engineer wants to extract every cent of value they create then they need to also take the burden of all the risk.

This is, of course, the argument that capitalists use to justify their disproportionate take, but it doesn't hold water, because they don't really take on much risk. They risk capital they have. often in massive amounts; laborers have to work because they don't have capital to put at risk in the first place. The only thing the bosses are actually risking is becoming workers again, which they'll fight furiously to avoid, because they know how much it sucks, because they're the reason why it sucks.

If managers were just be a bunch of morons optimizing for their own success, then there would be no winners and losers, just losers.

But that's not the case. There are companies which are very definitively winners (in that they avoid managerial dead weight), and especially ones in technology that don't hire managers the way you describe. You often see this at quant funds (Two Sigma, HRT, etc). Of course, not everyone can or wants to work at a quant fund. But the truth is, there's no room for a ladder climbing mediocre manager at such a company, so the culture ends up being quite different.

I think the reason why you are wrong on the whole, is that you're not looking at the game that is being played. It is true that managers are busy optimizing for their own success, but if a company cannot align manager success with that of the broader company, whose fault is that, and who is wasting their resources? Leadership and investors. If you have only worked at companies with poor leadership and weak investors, it is easy to think that managers are always idiots optimizing for their own success at the expense of the company's. The truth is, there are many companies where managers get fired for just that, because the outputs are obvious and managers are looked at as intrinsic cost centers rather than profit centers. Why would I hire an ineffective layer of middle management when I could just fire all of them, hire one great leader, and have most of the team report to that great leader with strong senior ICs eventually becoming functional leads that help that single leader support the team at large?

The simple answer to avoid the problem you are raising is to not work at companies with poor leadership and investor bases. Poor management is a symptom of, not a cause of that root cause. I wonder if the reason you blame it on managers (rather than investors and leaders) is the same reason you think of managers as morons -- because you are not looking at the bigger picture.

Hmmm, I disagree. I also don't think that all managers are morons, but even if they were, the fact is that companies often succeed in spite of managerial issues. Sure, there's lots of people are optimizing for the wrong thing, but that doesn't mean it is affecting the final outcome. As long as managers and reports aren't being paid an exorbitant sum, the only loss is in the sanity of individual contributors.

In a large enough company, managers have to do a lot to compromise the success of a company. I'm not saying managers are completely unimportant, but they're not as important as you think.

Point taken; I think that you are correct that things vary significantly based on the overall size and shape of the org.

Poor management can contribute significantly to OpEx. Compared to ICs, managers have a disproportionate ability to destroy value. Of course, even that is not unlimited. It is true that companies often succeed in spite of managerial issues, but it is only to a point. Once certain lines are crossed from the legal or HR side, the potential collateral damage compared to the average value add can be massive.

With that said, I don't disagree with you that in large enough companies, managers have to do a lot to compromise the success of a company. In practice, there is often enough vertical pressure from and sideways pressures from competing fiefdoms to prevent a single rogue manager from going hog wild. And from the other end, so long as managers are adding (or able to sell the perception of adding) just enough efficiency to the overall organization to support their paycheck, it is true that the only loss is of sanity to ICs, who necessarily must become fungible to a company of that size.

Yep, agreed. Good observation about operational expenses: management can really fuck things up when it comes to it. But with a large enough company, this might not affect the success. I agree about the "collateral damages" part. And I'd like to rectify my previous post and say it does also affect innovation, culture, long-term-growth, etc., alongside with the sanity of individual collaborators.

That’s a phenomenon I have observed mostly only in US-based companies I have worked for.

AFAICT, smaller, privately owned software companies are more popular in Europe, and they are often much more competently managed (because the owners actually care). Easy access to funding in US makes building large, collectively owned companies more popular, and these while usually very poorly managed can dominate global markets due to better funding, better initial market (one language, more people, richer users, whole world knows English anyway).

If it is, I have yet to see it. Managers, owners and middlemen making everything a slog to work with is very much a thing in Europe. And when you realize European managers are also sitting on ivory towers relative to ICs, it becomes pretty apparent why this behavior is somewhat universal.

I know, I am European and am the CTO for a US-based institution these days. Of course the same mechanisms of management exist here also, but in no way, shape or form in the same way they do in the US. It’s still like night and day on average. After talking with the CEO a lot, he had some sort of realization himself and almost seemed like he began questioning his whole reality. Some of my (subjective) impressions after working for small- and medium-sized (=< 500) European companies for over a decade and now being in US executive management:

Generally employees in the US tend do not have a sense of responsibility for the bigger picture, honestly, most just don’t give a shit. There’s no sense of belonging to a bigger cause. This is not meant as some sort of accusation, because I can understand 100% why that is. There's no reason for anyone to be actually motivated. People are treated like slaves, the general mindset is one of extreme superficiality, and even the most self-motivated and ambitious thought leaders end up being drained and exhausted and then dumped.

US work environments have brutal and insane administrative and technical overhead, are extremely inefficient and there is an abhorrent amount of parasitic middlemen ventures that have penetrated deep into even the most simple tasks and concepts. The environment itself is hostile towards efficiency and creativity.

US workers work more hours than in almost any developed country, yet efficiency is lower than anywhere else. It’s a common theme apparently, same shit with healthcare. Most expensive, least efficient and worst health outcomes in the developed world. Decreasing life expectancy, more infant deaths than in Russia and for some parts of the US, lower life expectancy than in Bangladesh. Sounds absolutely wonderful, and is a perfect example of exactly what’s wrong with the general work culture as well. It’s not about reaching some sort of long-term goal together, it’s just splitting the 3 step way up into 30 pieces and leeching and draining money out of every single one no matter the outcome. Short-term profit over anything else, fuck the future, fuck the new debt and fuck everyone else.

Personally, I had to distance myself from getting too invested and attached as well (so, in a sense, also giving less of a shit) because I got seriously depressed after a while.

But yeah, socialism is “evil”. Tell that to anyone of the happy, healthy and wealthy people in Europe enjoying their paid vacation after taking pride in their work, doing it efficiently and being respected as human beings. I guarantee you they’ll know you’re an American. We must have different definitions of freedom over here.

Basically, we've just privatized socialism, not only because we've outsourced health insurance into an employer-provider benefit, but also in the sense that large corporate structures are overseen by bureaucracies that lead to huge amounts of opacity and waste, akin to stereotypical Soviet era governments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30928403

And gains are redistributed similarly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30724348

You sound like you're working at a dysfunctional company. The people I've worked with at high performing companies have greater productivity than any F500 company I've seen. The trick is to hire few high performers, pay them a lot, and pay them according to their impact on the business. Go work in HFT some time and you'll see what I mean. No X years of experience required to be Y level bureaucracy.

There's a reason that every European car company has failed to compete with Tesla on software.

Of course its dysfunctional, that’s what I’m saying, but a dysfunctional company like this would go bankrupt in Europe while it is almost (besides the examples mentioned by you) the norm in the US. And then, consider how many of your awesome HFT ventures actually produce anything of value instead of being parasitic and you’ll come to some good conclusions on why even some third world countries have a dramatically higher living and work standard.

Who cares about Tesla in the bigger picture? Guess where most of the good cars come from - it’s also not the US. Tesla has first movers advantage, but I would strongly disagree that their software is in any way exceptionally better than other software - unless we’re not talking about the same software that powers autopilot killing people left and right. If you’re referring to the general concept of advanced autopilot and so on, sure, they toot their horn a lot, but I’d argue that having stable and reliable software (that inherently takes longer to develop and test) is still the best long term strategy. But it makes sense in the perspective of short term profit over anything…

Give it a few years and Tesla will be overtaken by a mile by even Ford and then another mile by VW and Hyundai.

> a dysfunctional company like this would go bankrupt in Europe

Is that because of higher government overhead (taxes, regulations) or is it because of some other reason? I doubt it's because of competition, because US companies compete in Europe just fine.

> consider how many of your awesome HFT ventures actually produce anything of value instead of being parasitic and you’ll come to some good conclusions on why even some third world countries have a dramatically higher living and work standard

Two things here: first, I could have mentioned any number of startups which are having real impacts on the world - not the Ubers and WeWorks but the Commonwealth Fusion and the Databricks types. It doesn't need to be HFT - my experience just comes from HFT (also, your European paradise also has HFTs - check out job postings in Amsterdam). Second, maybe by your definition of work standard (lower hours, lots of PTO), other countries have better work standards, but the US has by far the highest salaries for skilled workers. Healthcare costs are not even a consideration when your work pays for excellent insurance. And I would hazard a guess that US companies are closer to the leading edge of tech and therefore more fulfilling to work at. You certainly won't find the breadth of opportunities in Silicon Valley or NYC in any European city, not even London.

Obviously if you are an unskilled worker, Europe is better, but if all the high paid skilled workers start leaving Europe (as they have been for the past 20 years) then you won't have a tax base to pay for the benefits of the unskilled workers.

> but I would strongly disagree that their software is in any way exceptionally better than other software - unless we’re not talking about the same software that powers autopilot killing people left and right

We are not talking about Autopilot but the rest of the car. Take a look at this WSJ article about VW's software development failures [1]. That's from 2021 by the way, very recent. Europeans treat software engineers like factory workers while Silicon Valley treats them like impact makers. That extends to pay, work routines, and everything else. You'd never see a picture like the one in the article where an executive in a suit is presenting to a bunch of other executives in a room.

> Give it a few years and Tesla will be overtaken by a mile by even Ford and then another mile by VW and Hyundai.

Ford, perhaps in trucks. VW and Hyundai, doubtful. If Toyota or Honda had competent EV programs then the conversation would be different.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-volkswagens-50-billion-plan...

> Is that because of higher government overhead (taxes, regulations) or is it because of some other reason? I doubt it's because of competition, because US companies compete in Europe just fine.

I assume it's simply because we produce value with more efficiency and less initial funding.

By the way, on the matter of personal taxes, US citizens are paying, if you take local, state, sales, etc tax and healthcare premiums into account, the same or in some cases even more taxes than Europeans do. They just get absolutely nil in return.

This also extends to companies to some degree, vice versa. There is no real regulation that says you have to shut your unprofitable business down, but you're not going to be in business for very long if you have to treat your employees fairly, which is by regulation.

> your European paradise also has HFTs - check out job postings in Amsterdam

So.. this is pretty much what I'm on about. And I can guarantee you that they have dramatically less expense, overhead and a dramatically higher standard of work.

> That's from 2021 by the way, very recent. Europeans treat software engineers like factory workers while Silicon Valley treats them like impact makers.

The thing is, our "factory workers" are getting, BY DEFAULT, better benefits than even the most highly advanced Silicon Valley "impact makers". Even the fucking janitor gets by law almost a month of mandatory paid vacation, unlimited sick days, complete and utter unlimited job protection in addition to ±80% of his salary in the case of illness, forever, has to be paid, if not (likely) more, a living wage that is on average twice as high as the US minimum wage, has complete and utter protection if he turns out unemployed at some point and he will be taken care of at old age. He will also not be working more than 40 hours per week and especially not unpaid.

THE JANITOR. Everyone.

Yes, our wages for highly skilled workers are not as high as some insane 300k FAANG jobs, but I'd rather have it this way and the janitor happy as well. When you hear about “factory workers” here it is not what you think it is.

> VW and Hyundai, doubtful.

I cannot share much here due to my field of work, but I think you're going to be very surprised.

> I assume it's simply because we produce value with more efficiency and less initial funding.

But the data doesn't back that up. According to the EU, the US has 40% higher GDP per capita [1] compared to the EU. And that's according to the EU, which has to be the most biased source possible.

> US citizens are paying, if you take local, state, sales, etc tax and healthcare premiums into account, the same or in some cases even more taxes than Europeans do

That isn't true, at least for me and many other software engineers. Sales tax is definitely lower in the US because we don't have VAT - typical rates are 7-10% vs. 12-20% in EU. Income tax is also lower in the US. According to this calculator [2] I would pay about 10% lower income tax effective rate on my current income in the US vs. Berlin, Germany. My health insurance costs <$2000/year for a high tier plan so that cost is negligible. Payroll tax for companies is lower. Gas tax is lower, by a substantial margin.

> So.. this is pretty much what I'm on about. And I can guarantee you that they have dramatically less expense, overhead and a dramatically higher standard of work.

What's your point - that EU does have parasitic companies which produce no value or does not? You seem to be flip flopping. And I can tell you the only reason the EU has dramatically less expense is the workers make less. A lot less. I make double what my counterparts in the EU are making. They definitely don't have a higher standard of work either.

> The thing is, our "factory workers" are getting, BY DEFAULT, better benefits than even the most highly advanced Silicon Valley "impact makers"

Are they? Your factory workers get free breakfast, lunch, dinner, multi-thousand dollar offsites and dinners, and the ability to invest your salary in the (private) company? You consider things like guaranteed job protection as benefits, but I see them as lowering my pay and reducing the number of jobs available. There's a reason why European unemployment is 300 basis points higher than US and why far more startups are started in the US. Banning non-competes and at-will employment in California are the #1 reason why SWE wages are so high here.

You may value work-life balance over pay, but that is a personal choice and not an objectively superior option. Some of us are willing to work hard to become wealthy, others are fine where they are.

> a month of mandatory paid vacation

That ends up reflecting in your pay (or lack thereof). The market rate for wages will be lower because the month of vacation will be priced in.

> THE JANITOR. Everyone.

The janitor's benefits are irrelevant. I already said unskilled workers do better in EU. Your original comment was about white collar workers in companies. That means skilled workers. And a skilled worker is going to have a way better life in the US.

> Yes, our wages for highly skilled workers are not as high as some insane 300k FAANG jobs

Not as high is one way of putting it. According to levels.fyi the gap is 2-3x for a senior SWE in most FAANG or FAANG adjacent companies.

> I'd rather have it this way and the janitor happy as well.

And you are entitled to have that opinion, but you shouldn't go around claiming that US companies are "extremely inefficient" or that the environment is "hostile towards efficiency and creativity".

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/portlet_file_entry/2...

[2] https://www.arbeitnow.com/tools/salary-calculator/germany

> But the data doesn't back that up. According to the EU, the US has 40% higher GDP per capita [1] compared to the EU. And that's according to the EU, which has to be the most biased source possible.

The US is the richest country in the history of modern civilisation, yet in every possible metric worse then the rest of the developed world, sometimes less than even some third world countries. I would argue that GDP per capita is not necessarily a good indicator when most of the GDP goes into the pockets of the ultra rich and parasitic middlemen instead of back to the population, no? This is also a form of lack of efficiency.

> That isn't true, at least for me and many other software engineers. Sales tax is definitely lower in the US because we don't have VAT - typical rates are 7-10% vs. 12-20% in EU. Income tax is also lower in the US. According to this calculator [2] I would pay about 10% lower income tax effective rate on my current income in the US vs. Berlin, Germany. My health insurance costs <$2000/year for a high tier plan so that cost is negligible. Payroll tax for companies is lower. Gas tax is lower, by a substantial margin.

Sorry, no, obviously any generalisation is not valid for every single individual case, so that's why I was talking about a mean of the population and not specifically you.

However, if we were to start contemplating e.g. how much your health insurance even covers and how much you pay in co-pay (spoiler, its $0 here), even if we don't, we are still surprisingly close to each other, aren't we - and then, considering how much value you receive back of it.. it's not going into your crumbling infrastructure either.

> Are they? Your factory workers get free breakfast, lunch, dinner, multi-thousand dollar offsites and dinners, and the ability to invest your salary in the (private) company?

Actual factory workers, no, but you think our highly skilled workers don't get this? Of course they do, again, maybe only 100k instead of 300k salary off some VC funding, on the other hand you're not going to be spending 100k for stuff we get for free and the janitor and everyone else is not treated like a slave either. Don't you think it is a very reasonable assumption that in a functioning society every part, no matter how skilled or not, has to function properly and be healthy? You yourself are also dependent on every other part functioning properly.

> why SWE wages are so high here

Great, and they are part of an unsustainable bubble and destroying the whole balance between supply and demand, causing inevitable rise to homelessness, crime, mental illness and drug epidemics. I think I'm starting to understand what they mean with "driving over bodies"

> That ends up reflecting in your pay (or lack thereof). The market rate for wages will be lower because the month of vacation will be priced in.

This is correct.

> And a skilled worker is going to have a way better life in the US.

No. He will statistically die sooner, receive some of the worst healthcare in the entire world, live in the midst of poverty and crime, and will have considerable less time to actually live his life.

> You consider things like guaranteed job protection as benefits, but I see them as lowering my pay

Only until you realise that this also applies to yourself, and then consider that you are much more likely to suffer from chronic illness, depression and burnout.

I mean, I do understand your perspective from a very egoistical standpoint, but please just take a look at your country and how that's working out for you these days.

> I would argue that GDP per capita is not necessarily a good indicator when most of the GDP goes into the pockets of the ultra rich instead of back to the population, no? This is also a form of lack of efficiency.

That is your opinion. Output per person (GDP per capita) is the objective measure of efficiency. Also, European taxes on capital gains are about the same as the US, so in fact EU is not really taxing the ultra-wealthy any more than the US. High wage earners are taxed instead, but high wage earners are not ultra-wealthy.

> Sorry, no, obviously any generalisation is not valid for every single individual case, so that's why I was talking about a mean of the population and not specifically you.

Again, that's not supported by the data [1].

> However, if we were to start contemplating e.g. how much your health insurance even covers and how much you pay in co-pay (spoiler, its $0 here), even if we don't, we are still surprisingly close to each other, aren't we - and then, considering how much value you receive back of it..

My health insurance might not have $0 copay but it is low enough that a doctor's visit costs about as much as a dine-in casual lunch would. And I get higher quality doctors, since our doctors make 6-7 figures compared to maximum 100k of EU doctors (the NHS in the UK pays less than 100k GBP for specialist doctors...), so all the talent gets vacuumed up by the US.

And they are not surprisingly close - I ran the numbers with my US income. My income for the same position in EU would be halved or more. So the actual gap in net income after tax and health insurance would be substantially larger.

> No, but you think our highly skilled workers don't get this? Of course they do

Do the engineers at your company get that benefit? How much money do you think they can realistically invest when they make half of their American counterparts and get taxed at 35-40%?

> Great, and they are destroying the whole balance between supply and demand, causing inevitable rise to homelessness, crime, mental illness and drug epidemics

These things are caused by a failure to build housing and prosecute petty theft, not by high wages.

> Our minimum wage is still twice as high as yours.

Netherlands minimum wage is 10.14 EUR/h [2] while CA minimum wage is $14-15/h [3]. And in practice, the wages for low skill workers in CA are around $20/h now due to market demand. Not only that, but the unemployment rate (and particularly the youth unemployment rate which is a proxy for unskilled labor) is much higher in EU.

> No. He will statistically die sooner, receive some of the worst healthcare in the entire world, live in the midst of poverty and crime, etc etc etc.

You are trying to make inferences about a high earner from statistics about the median. That's egregiously incorrect.

> But at least you yourself earn twice as much. Sounds reasonable.

Again, that's your opinion that it's unreasonable. As long as skilled workers continue to migrate from EU to the US due to the higher wages, your opinion is irrelevant. And if you take a look at the makeup of any top ranked master's or PhD program today in STEM or business in the US, you will see that it is 30% European, 30% Chinese, 30% Indian. So I think the market does not really care about your opinion.

[1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxe...

[2] https://www.government.nl/topics/minimum-wage/amount-of-the-...

[3] https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_minimumwage.htm

> Again, that's your opinion that it's unreasonable.

First of all, I specifically started off my original post saying that everything that followed is my subjective, personal opinion and experiences. What exactly did you expect trying to argue with me about it?

> Netherlands minimum wage is 10.14 EUR/h [2] while CA minimum wage is $14-15/h [3]. And in practice, the wages for low skill workers in CA

So we're cherry-picking US states and EU countries now instead of going by averages?

> > No. He will statistically die sooner, receive some of the worst healthcare in the entire world, live in the midst of poverty and crime, etc etc etc.

> You are trying to make inferences about a high earner from statistics about the median. That's egregiously incorrect.

Higher earners are still almost equally affected by any of the issues above, as are you. My statement stands.

> Again, that's your opinion that it's unreasonable. As long as skilled workers continue to migrate from EU to the US due to the higher wages, your opinion is irrelevant. And if you take a look at the makeup of any top ranked master's or PhD program today in STEM or business in the US, you will see that it is 30% European, 30% Chinese, 30% Indian. So I think the market does not really care about your opinion.

.. so? We also have a lot of US citizens living here and our universities are filled with expats from all over the world.

Also, BTW.. these students you mention will mostly be left with horrendous, crippling student debt.

Ours will have 0 in student debt because all education is free, so people are also studying for longer periods of time, maybe even your doctor.

> These things are caused by a failure to build housing and prosecute petty theft, not by high wages.

Not by high wages, by disproportionally high or low wages. There is enough housing in the US already. There is just simply no way to afford it for anyone but high-skill workers because of this. Combine that with the absolute lack of social housing or regulation and poverty and you arrive at exactly the inevitable rise of homelessness and crime that you think needs to be cracked down upon instead of fixed at its root.

> Again, that's not supported by the data [1].

I cannot see any of your data taking into account other expenses and correlations to expenses that the US population is affected by and EU citizens are not. Obviously the tax rate on paper is lower, but that wasn't my point to begin with.

Let's just leave it at that. You have your opinion, I have my opinion, end results matter and statistics are speaking loud and clearly.

Perhaps except Polestar?

Spot on comment - agreed 100%. I generally agree that certain aspects of US system are completely broken comparing to UE. (I was also born in UE and moved to US).

However w.r.t. "capitalism" vs "socialism" I must say that it is related but wrong lenses to look at it. The right distinction is "individually" vs "collectively" owned.

US corporations are "collaboratively owned" even if they are "private" in theory. This is what makes them work the same as "collaboratively owned bureaucracies". Working in a big US corpo is like getting a cozy job in a government. European SWE companies are "individually owned", even if they are surrounded by more social-inclined environment (which comes with it's own pros and cons).

You’re right, most, especially almost all of the smaller and medium-sized SWE companies are owned by individuals, but we sure do have corporations here as well. They look similar to any other US institution on the inside, but are obviously mostly still operating under the local understanding of work and employee rights. I have no real experience with the seriously big corporations, that always seemed like something I’d rather not work at personally, but I don’t believe it’s very different there.

I mean, I've seen the same exact thing in the UK and Germany. People just don't give a fuck about their job, they come to do the minimum amount of work and fuck off. More Brits stayed for overtime, Germans preferred to leave on time. But they solved it by hiring immigrants who will work like horses.

And for low/unskilled workers, in the UK they're with an agency so they can be sacked anytime, while in Germany they're hired on a 6 month contract, then swapped with others for 6 months, then the previous guys return after 6 months, it's rather insane. So much for social protection or whatever.

Mercedes parts QA people and warehouse workers are on 6 days/10-12 hours for 3-6 months. Literally looking at an advert right now. Wage doesn't even matter (it's minimum), that kind of schedule is bad for quality. Also, great European work/life balance lol

What I'm trying to say, it's more of a company problem.

No, that’s really just picking out the bad apples in the face of undeniable statistics. I could do the same for the US now but then we’d end up with almost the whole apple tree

I’m also not saying that we don’t have problems in Europe either, but they are not structural and by default

US productivity, that is, GDP per hour worked, is higher than almost all European countries. Only the Germanic-speaking countries have comparable productivity.

Yeah, but we see much more of it again.

Thanks for your comment. It's save me to write my own.

Count yourself lucky thay you didn't have the misfortune of working for any Asian companies. Big or small, most are extremely hierarchical and your loyalty to a specific director/VP is the only currency that matters.

Oh, yeah, you’re right. I only know about the Japanese work environments but that’s already more than enough. It’s like end-stage America

It’s easy to massively improve the performance of most companies:

1. Fire 50% of managers. 2. Use the salary money saved to hire people doing the actual work. 3. Wait for a while to see how much things have improved. Repeat if overall performance has improved (it almost always has).

You'll run into the same problem you run into with stack ranking where you up firing x% of ICs every quarter - the good ones leave, the bad ones stay.

Say you fire half the managers. Let's say you live in a fantasy world where you can accurately measure who is the bottom half vs. the top half by whatever metric matters to you. So you fire the worst half. You've just done a couple things:

1. Probably triggered some sort of "layoff" legislation/notice/severance/whatever and sent a ton of people looking for work before the next round, whether you expect there to be a next round or not (but you've already said there would be).

2. The good managers, who could probably walk into another management role without much trouble, do so. Why risk being in the second round?

3. You're left with something approaching the middle quartile, but now they're doing more than 2x the work after the top 5-10% of your management leaves after your purge. How many people do you know suddenly get better at their job after you double their workload?

4. I don't know how true it is but there is an old saying "people don't leave jobs they leave managers," and so now for half the company you've fired their manager and given them someone very overworked. For some non-trivial percentage of the company their new manager is worse than their old manager.

5. Due to #1 and #4, your best ICs start to leave, so engineering and product quality (and velocity) drop precipitously.

6. You've lost your best managers, who would fight to keep the hiring bar high, so the weak ones compromise on shaky candidates. Engineering and product quality drop even more, and morale tanks.

Congratulations, you've just filed for bankruptcy with extra steps.

I think you are right if it is the good managers being fired. If it is the bad managers being fired then it is 100% a good thing. A real world example is Steve Jobs turning Apple around after Sculley nearly ran it into the ground. Jobs did it by firing most of middle management. Basically anybody who was not directly contributing to products. It worked.

Moron or not, I dont want people to starve simply because they dont help a company perform optimally.

If we were to implement some form of a universal basic income there would be no obligation to become a self-serving asshole at whatever company you can get yourself into. The people doing the work would be able to stand up for themselves and tell management to fuck off if they do become moronic or overly self-serving

A bureaucrat has never created a solution, so thinking UBI would solve anything is naive at best. Why not go for something simpler, like make basic life cheap and efficient so people can live with very little work? Bonus point: no need to take (steal?) money from people to implement.

UBI might not be the solution but how is that in any way simpler to do or even to conceive

All you have to do is have bureaucrats remove the hurdles they added. It will just take some time.

Just to pick one example, do you see something like state-imposed food standards as a 'hurdle' added by bureaucrats? What about housing construction standards? One person's hurdle can be another person's safety net?

Yes monopolistic regulations are 100percent hurdles. Now free market standards that people can choose (if they want more safety net), or personal standards, well they don't affect everyone so those are fine.

Lol what a loaded statement. There are plenty of government programs that have produced better lives for people after being implemented. Imagine being this religious and blind about state-market interactions.

A bureaucrat decides whether to add a hurdle or not. Now once in a while they do things that end up positively affecting some of the population, but at what cost?

Life is more nuanced than your bad faith one-sided takes. I think deep down you know this. You should stop spreading exaggerated propaganda.

I don’t think people that want UBI are bad-faith, they are more likely naive. Asking for life to be cheap and efficient so people can live with little work if they want is spreading propaganda, while asking for the biggest monopoly that had killed people for war experiments, to get a lot more power is somehow being good-faith and responsible person? I’ll let others decide this one.

Exactly.

UBI is like printing money - the last stage before a country's hyper-inflationary collapse.

Instead of inflation & printing money, we should instead be thinking of salt - once a valuable commodity, nowadays so cheap people are literally giving it away (restaurants don't charge for it).

With enough technological development, almost every necessity of life can be as cheap (and cheaper) as salt. Except medicine, because people will always want to live longer, but even there technology helps - poor people in first-world countries have access to much better healthcare than even the riches human 100 years ago.

Great elaboration. If the government kept small like the founding fathers envisioned, I am 99% sure an American would be able to live comfortably on one day of work per week today. They were able to raise a family with one salary way back, and with how much productivity has increased (and would have further increased if not for the government) today would be very different.

>A bureaucrat has never created a solution

>make basic life cheap and efficient

I'm interested in your take on how we exercise total control over the cost of living without any sort of bureaucratic processes being implemented?

If vendors are required to accept UBI credit for certain goods and services and must then collect payment from the government, the government is able to restrict inflation by refusing to pay inflated prices.

A "UBI-like system" has such broad range and flexibility of design and implementation that to dismiss it entirely while suggesting (im not sure exactly what to call your suggestion) market manipulation? is ludicrous.

There is a finite amount of work that needs to be done to sustain the necessities for everyone. basic life IS cheap and efficient, but we arent allowed to pay for what it is. I cant buy a simple small house for cheap, because someone who already has a house can afford to pay more and then rent it to me instead.

There NEEDS to be a centralized power separating out basic needs purchasing from "extra" purchasing. All of the "extra" economic activity should be more expensive and the basic needs purchasing should be cheaper. You cannot accomplish that without government. you need centralized power to enforce it.

I would suggest reading or listening to Thomas Sowelll's Basic Ecconomics. Even just listening to the first chapter should convince you that a centralized power is a bad idea. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrPxEmOV0YI

Thomas Sowell seems very considerate of the opinions he forms, I'll check it out. I do already agree in general that centralized power is typically a bad idea. We cannot avoid it, however. For example, the Police force exists as a phenomenon. Without them, a group of people will naturally form privately and specialize in protection services under self-serving chaotic interests (a "mafia" for short). And since they are responsible for protection, they will be able to enforce their chaotic will upon anyone. This is because human-to-human interaction can be extremely volatile and we are capable of killing each other quickly. So it might not be ideal for economics, but we still exist as part of nature and need to account for that.

We must rely on social contracts to stabilize human interaction enough for an economic system to even be possible. Buying and Selling is meaningless when Looting and Destruction are nonpunishable. A social contract is meaningless if we do not punish people for breaking them. A government is a collection of such contracts. The US government differentiates these contracts by various types and instills a separation of powers as a public framework for dealing with dangers of centralized power. Mafias have no such considerations

Power still continues to consolidate among "mafia"s. They are less effective directly as a result of public centralized powers. I believe the next evolution in this war is the differentiation between what people need and what people want. They should not operate under the same economic model. If I WANT the food you NEED to eat, I should let you have it and pursue purchasing it from you instead. that should be a social contract.

This should be common sense, but in the world we live in there is no visibility to what is needed vs what is wanted. People would be incentivized to claiming a NEED on as much as possible. "Bad" Public centralized power used to enforce reasonable claims to NEEDs is the only way forward given the nature of our reality. "Only way" sounds limiting, but of course there are a million+ different ways we can go about it.

OK, OK. I am a supporter of of UBI, but let's not make it sound like ICs are the victims that are tolerating the abuse, working for peanuts, or otherwise they will starve.

Lots of ICs are also self-serving morons. It's not like the managers designed crap solutions, wrote the crap code, and are the cause of barely anything working, at least not directly.

My point was mostly that the whole point of hiring managers (and often paying them more than ICs) was to get some people work on optimizing the productivity, making sure best ICs stay and can be effective, and help in various ways ones that are not as solid (possibly yet). By reliably failing to do so, what's the point of having them in the first place, and even more so - holding them in such a high esteem, paying them more, and having so many of them around.

>what's the point of having them in the first place,

to increase company size and keep more people in the world fed. without them, that money just goes into the CEO's pocket anyway.

>paying them more,

this i disagree with as well. Money should be way better allocated to the people keeping the company alive since everyones dinner depends on them.

But overall a company should hire as many people as it can afford. have them work from home and do almost nothing most of the time. pay them the least in the company.

Usually these discussions leave out what happens when people dont have jobs at all, which would happen to a lot of people if companies were run optimally and morons were fired. Do we let them die so that we can buy yachts? I dont think we should all die together if we cant save everyone, but I do think we should be working to maximize the number of "free loaders" our country can support and viewing that as a signal of strength.

I also believe if we remove all these people who are better off as free loaders from the workforce, that companies would become more productive overall, not less. There is this belief that everyone would just stop working if they didnt need to and nothing would get done. I dont buy it. Absolute worst case scenario we could have a draft and use the military to fill the gaps in the workforce lol

Do you consider a Director as a manager of managers?

Yeap. It's manager^2. Thankfully at that level they are so detached, that they could be a highly paid potato and it wouldn't change much for the people at bottom doing the actual work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com