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Comment by tester756 | Hacker News Reader

>There is a high likelihood that many other people in the org were lightyears ahead of the author. It's even more likely that an engineer or manager in their group was "Banking" the inefficiencies to use during a cost-cutting period - and the author ruined that chance... which will inevitably cause massive suffering and possibly poor performance reviews when there is nothing to trim."

That's crazy, how it isn't pure sabotage? career oriented people, jezz christ.

That's instant fire by me if somebody considered such a thing

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Seems like a normal day in a corporation? Bean counters who decide your salary use beyond-stupid metrics. For instance, fighting fires is often rewarded disproportionately, so it’s good to be “visible” during many, recurring fires. Of course people game that, intentionally or unintentionally. You don’t get the behavior you say you want, you get what you incentivize.

Even at pure tech companies with somewhat technically competent leadership the incentives are whack, and often the people at the very top are still replicating some MBA doctrine that will be debunked as horse manure within a decade.

Just because our computers get exponentially better doesn’t mean people do, particularly groups of people.

I think there’s a spectrum here, I doubt many people are deliberately hoarding huge, easy, and /certain/ cost or resource savings just to use later, but it is easy to end up with a long list of possible things that you haven’t had time to try, and won’t get prioritised until somebody else cares.

Also, be careful what you wish for regarding cost savings. You may think you’re doing well saving 500k, but in a medium sized company there are likely a lot of easy ways to save a chunk more than that which you really aren’t going to like.

I have a book about the management consulting industry that suggest there is at least one large successful firm of management consultants where the answer is always "fire 23% - 33% of your staff" regardless of what the question was.

Apparently this is the level that most organisations can stagger on long enough for senior management to bank the bonuses and move on and upwards and before long term effects kick in.

Yeah that’s always a bit depressing, but most companies only really seem to get the consultants in so they can be told the thing they were going to do anyway.

I’ve seen good products and companies brought low by making the wrong bets and doing what was safe and sensible and cost reducing but not really thinking long term enough. They can stagger on for a long time still turning a reasonable profit until they suddenly don’t.

I suspect senior management who hire that consultancy know exactly what will happen but they need the cover to be able to say that they had "independent" management consultants come in and look at the business and give their "honest" recommendations.

GP did mention that the whole project was actually a waste of money.

Yeah, but I’ve seen plenty of very smart engineers over the years who can’t see why a business values X which they think is worthless but not Y which they think is important.

I was thinking of all the other ways businesses can “save money”, like travel bans, or getting rid of nice things, or closing offices, or getting rid of staff… They may not really save money, but they’ll look just as good on somebody’s spreadsheet.

> “visible” during many, recurring fires

Always turn up second or third to the fire otherwise they might suspect you of being the arsonist - Firefighter Arson is a real thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefighter_arson

"Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." ― John Maynard Keynes

On that level? The original comment, which it is extremely funny to see getting roasted like this, was being hyper-cynical. It probably has happened somewhere but that level of dysfunction is not widespread.

On smaller levels .. it is well-known in organisations that employ "stack ranking" that there is no incentive to get rid of poor performers immediately, and indeed an incentive to acquire one or two, so they can be sacrificed at stack ranking time.

Sometimes companies are incentivised to grow, sometimes to cut costs - investors reward different things at different times. Knowing areas that could be trimmed and not trimming can be entirely rational then.

That would be rational within an irrational context.

That is still irrational, and I see no reason to forgive or excuse it instead of calling it out as irrational.

It's understandable, but that doesn't mean tolerable or excusable, just that the mechanism by which the irrational process plays out is understood.

It's is not irrational to follow the desires of the owners. And those desires need not be irrational either, as capacity for change and execution is limited in any corporation - focus matters.

Do you fire engineers who consistently finish projects ahead of their estimates?

Is any degree of sandbagging is a firing offense? If not, wheres the threshold?

Is your organization completely and unconditionally free of mandates like each department must "Cut budget x%" or "improve output by y%" -- irrespective of the incremental cuts and improvements that a group may have had in recent memory? If not, isn't a group that diligently finds and implements efficiencies at a disadvantage compared to ones that just don't look until a mandate comes in?

Kudos if you really do have an organization where there is no structural incentive to sandbag or otherwise bank results.

>Do you fire engineers who consistently finish projects ahead of their estimates?

>Is any degree of sandbagging is a firing offense? If not, wheres the threshold?

Intentionally just to slack off or just because they arent sure or want use that time to improve other small thing?

As if the average manager can reliably tell the difference.

People who are consistently conservative in their estimates do get noticed, and the estimates adjusted appropriately in the same way that people who always under estimate get their estimates adjusted. That’s fine, the worst that’s going to happen is a conversation about learning from previous estimates.

People who sandbag to give themselves an easy life, or to try and empire build by getting more resources, definitely get noticed, and not in a good way.

> try and empire build by getting more resources, definitely get noticed, and not in a good way

This is actively incentivised in a lot of tech companies - maybe more so for managers than ICs, but the bigger-your-fiefdom the easier it is to promote phenomenon tends to be pretty widespread.

Empire building is often incentivised, sandbagging to try and get those resources generally isn’t.

"Adjusting estimates" is just another way to force engineers to lie in their Jira tickets about how much time they spend on each ticket.

At one point my agile master was complaining to me about estimations, so I just focused on reporting the correct amount of hours to make the burn down chart be straight. Decoupling reported time from actual time spent.

Good lord I switched jobs.

Humans are bad at estimation and there's no evidence that "having a conversation" will make them any better at it.

Your organization should acknowledge and handle the fallibility of humans, not try vainly to excise it.

If your colleague always estimates that a particular type of task will take a couple of days, and it always takes a couple of weeks, you wouldn't discuss it next time they estimate it is only going to take a couple of days?

Yes, humans are bad at estimation, which is why it's good to reflect on how well you do and to correct if you consistently over or underestimate.

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