[ilaksh]

A lot of good information.

But my cynical worker viewpoint is that the problem is really that upper management doesn't do the actual work and that is by design. It's a class separation. They are there to crack the whip and collect the spoils.

The only way for upper management to really understand what's going on and give useful input would be for them to be directly involved on a day-to-day basis.

In other words, they would have to do actual work.

That's not going to happen. So the best they can do is to stay out of the way of people who are actually working, avoid making decrees, and maybe try to keep the other managers from interfering with the work also.

Maybe another approach would be for the workers to share more equally in the spoils so that they would be naturally inclined to integrate business improvements and goals. But that's never going to happen.

The structure is much more directly related to a caste system than people may acknowledge.

[mwerd]

That's a point of view that would change quickly if you were in one of those management positions.

You get to a point where it's impossible to do the work anymore. There's too much of it. You have to develop teams, processes, structure, etc. that delivers the outcomes you're accountable for with full knowledge that you cannot do them yourself. It's very different than doing the work and experience shows that fewer people are capable of doing it, especially with any repeatability. The working world yearns for effective managers.

I encourage you to compare the productivity of the modern multinational corporation to any commune in history. The people working in collectives are not stupid or lazy. It's not an effective structure.

[LapsangGuzzler]

> I encourage you to compare the productivity of the modern multinational corporation to any commune in history. The people working in collectives are not stupid or lazy. It's not an effective structure.

It’s a hard comparison to make when the goals of those two systems are vastly different.

I worked for a multinational software company and the amount of waste I saw was just staggering. If outside shareholders knew how little we actually produced on a day to day basis, they would probably be appalled. But because the company knew how to engage with market analysts, we looked good on paper. So much of the money made today involves just being the biggest player in a given market, regardless of how effective the product is (i.e. “nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft”)

[phs318u]

But maximum efficiency does not scale linearly with organisational size/product complexity. So yes, lots of wastage, but still possibly the least wastage of other tried-and-tested organisational models.

Also, effectiveness of software relates to the attributes that align to the dimensions of "goodness" as defined by each user not the developer. The software does not have to be the best (among its peers) to be the most effective for me. The same software may be completely ineffective for you, if what you want out of it is different to what I want.

[femiagbabiaka]

Productivity is not a universal good. Productivity on its own does not lead to better business outcomes. The problem with management that doesn’t do or know how to do the work is that they get detached from what should be done — they can be neither visionary nor maintainer. This can be overcome when management loses their ego and listens to those doing the work, merging their high level view with the data gotten from perspectives on the shop floor. I can count the number of people in management I’ve observed capable of doing that on one hand in a decade.

[chrisdbanks]

Agree. In fact one problem many have when new to management is actually doing the work themselves rather than coaching others to achieve it.

[AndrewKemendo]

>They are there to crack the whip and collect the spoils

This is historically correct

Here's a recent unambiguous proof from Tesla's own words:

"Tesla argued that stock options were used to ensure Director's incentives were aligned with investor goals." [1]

Said another way, "we massively over-paid directors in order to give them an incentive to prioritize investor goals over all other goals"

In the parlance of finance this is the only goal and the ultimate decision that cannot be questioned.

I have seen this made explicit in multiple organizations as a Director or Senior Manager. As a manager, if you are explicit in supporting employee benefits over increase in stock price or C-Suite direction (when given the choice) then you should expect no further growth or promotions (unless you can manipulate the org or have some damaging information on the company).

>Maybe another approach would be for the workers to share more equally in the spoils so that they would be naturally inclined to integrate business improvements and goals

The strong form of this is a worker-owned-cooperative but second to that are labor unions. So if you want to change it, then start/join a union and stop creating corporations with separate ownership rules for investors.

[1]https://www.engadget.com/tesla-directors-agree-to-return-735...

[chrisdbanks]

Workers vs investors shouldn't be seen as a zero sum game. If it is then that's short-term thinking. Simon Sinek explains this all very well in The Infinite Game.

[AndrewKemendo]

Guess which one thinking short term can hurt the other?

I’d agree if there was any semblance of a power balance or history of successful outcomes for the vast majority over the long term.

All people point to are the infinitely rare (over represented here by multiples) first few employees of a huge start up - and even that is getting rarer for anything but the first 100 employees at most.

When was the last big employee millionaire event like Microsoft or Google or Amazon - over 20 years ago for all but Google (19)? That’s an entire career.

I don’t recall a wave of new millionaires from Snap, AirBnB or Uber IPO in the same way. Maybe I’m totally wrong here and just missing these groups - seems all the spoils went to the VCs.

[slt2021]

Any non-zero sum game can be re-formulated in zero-sum game terms, this is a rule.

Give me example of any non-zero sum game, and I can prove that under the hood it is actually a zero-sum game.

The trivial proof is that profit/revenue pool available for Corporation is limited, and the main question is how that profit pool is to be divided among Labor (employees) and Capital (investors/shareholders).

The fundamental laws of mass/energy preservation equally apply to money - you can't create money out of thin air, it has to be taken from someone else (customer) and then redistributed (among suppliers/labor/investors/shareholders/tax man)

[adave]

USA literally creates money out of thin air, there is no upper cap as they keep extending the ceiling.

This is how we have a CEO making $100b from a single company stock which would be impossible if it were a zero sum game.

Hype which is even more rarefied air, can create so much money without taking anything from the customers. Silicon Valley VC's create valuations for companies out of thin air and then triple it even without anyone ever seeing that money.

Attention which is unlimited in a way is a new form currency, which is why you see platforms being built up to get more eyeballs.

The rule you mentioned comes into play when taking into account players in the game i.e any game where you can add more players is guaranteed to become zero sum.

In real world situations where cooperation is needed, we mostly have a non zero sum game.For ex - https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/project...

[slt2021]

thank you for your comment, your points are valid

[aschearer]

Giving and receiving love is not zero-sum. Cultivating mutual trust is not zero-sum.

[slt2021]

it is not zero-sum between two parties (as in if one party shows more love, there is a chance it will create more mutual love from the other party).

But, the problem can be reformulated as zero-sum in terms of time: Time is the ultimate scarce and zero-sum resource, you cannot create time, only redistribute.

The more time we spend with the loved ones, less time we have for other things like hobbies and work. Company wants people to spend maximum time on work and worker efficiency (so called "career growth"), and less time on personal life etc. For corporation - worker's attention is absolutely zero-sum game and they want maximum of worker's attention, on top of 9-5.

That's why they create more employee love by throwing benefits, free food and snacks, corporate parties so that they spend less time on personal matters and work more toward the company's goals.

[Chrisoaks]

Free time isn’t zero sum. An accountant and a plumber can create free time by trading services. If it would take a plumber five hours to file his taxes, he could instead fix the tax accountant’s sink in one hour in exchange for the tax accountant filing his taxes. Assuming the tax accountant can do so in one hour and would have taken five hours to fix his own sink, both profit by reclaiming four hours of time.

[aschearer]

If "anything can be broken down to a zero sum game" just means "time is finite, react accordingly" that's all well and good. Kind of banal, though. I was hoping for something more theoretical...

[snovv_crash]

How does this model account for varying growth based on employee alignment with company goals?

[slt2021]

Think of annual profit generated by company as a fixed pie. or total market as a giant pie.

Question is how to slice a pie between Labor and Capital?

Now we know that IT is a growing market, and next year pie will be bigger, much bigger. That's why Capital needs Labor to cooperate along and work as efficiently as possible to capture maximum slice of pie for the Corporation next year and the year after.

That's why they give variable compensation and give sense of ownership. Just by giving out 0.1% of shares, Capital is able to extract max value form Labor and make their pie grow at 30-40% per year.

Absolutely killer deal for Capital.

That's how zuckerberg et al become billionaires, while employees who created the money making machine are mere (multi)millionaires.

you join stage B startup and get 0.01% of company as ISO options, but you do the 100% of the work required to make product and grow company from $10M valuation to $10B valuation. Three orders of magnitude growth for Capital, while Labor get 1/1000 of that growth

[admax88qqq]

> Now we know that IT is a growing market,

That's literally a non zero sum game. You can phrase it as cynically as you like, but that's still the definition of a non zero sum game.

[PartiallyTyped]

Why should they care about long term health of the company when their stake can change [almost] on a whim?

The whole system seems to exist for short term profits.

[AndrewKemendo]

Simon is wrong.

It is absolutely zero sum for any measure that matters over periods that are impactful to individual and familial human flourishing

This capitalist rationalization of greed-based markets, loves to pick whatever timeline for measurement which fits their criteria.

It is unambiguous that wealth and power accumulation will persistently concentrate into the smallest number of hands in absence of collective structural countermeasures.

So the default state of large scale capatalist systems follows power law in both wealth and power distribution. It’s a mathematical reality that is shown over and over and over to repeat itself

[Zetice]

You're pitching this as truth when in reality it's just one viewpoint. Simon is not "wrong" any more than you are "wrong". You're just arguing from different perspectives.

[capitalsigma]

Most big tech firms give engineers RSUs for this reason

[slt2021]

also SBC (share based comp) looks favorably on cash flow statement, because SBC does not decrease EBITDA, thus artificially inflating EBITDA numbers and price target of the company.

How this works: new SaaS startup shows up and shows $10M EBITDA to investors. This does not reflect $5M in SBC.

According to industry averages, bankers apply average (lets say 10x) EBITDA multiple and derive valuation of $100M and invest funds based on that calculation.

Had company paid cash salary instead of RSUs, firms' EBITDA would have been $5M and valuation of $50M - a half of original pitched value

Obviously this is just a naiive textbook example, and actual valuations are more complex and involve several ways of deriving value and multiples, but in general RSU is viewed favorably mainly because it improves Cash Flow from Operations and EBITDA numbers - in addition to creating incentives to employees

[AndrewKemendo]

Indeed, which are sub class of stock with no power.

So it’s the same story and is effectively a lottery ticket.

[edmundsauto]

RSUs that you can sell are effectively cash, not a lotto ticket.

[AndrewKemendo]

They depend on the stock which is totally unpredictable

For example, literally the day before I started at my last company, their stock went from $120 to $40

So yes it’s a lotto ticket

[edmundsauto]

I just… sell the stock when it vests? I guess I can see your pov is consistent as long as you consider every stock as a lotto ticket, but I don’t think that’s the typical opinion.

[TheCowboy]

I've often encountered software that feels like it was designed by people who don't have to use it to do work, and not necessarily because they're engaging in class conflict (though it can certainly appear that way based on the painfully flawed software people can be forced to tolerate).

The worst system was a DOS-based point-of-sale system in a restaurant---kept around way beyond the 'age of DOS'. The main gimmick is that it had a wired light touch pen (I think it worked like a classic Nintendo gun) for selection. It gave the illusion of innovation/ease of use, but was extremely cumbersome and required a good amount of experience to avoid mistakes.

I also think trying to pin down things as strictly class warfare every time can muddy problem areas. Institutions realistically do gain some functional productivity by having people specialize and having defined roles, but having them too separated and specialized can also create problems. You can also have a lazy human problem, where people don't want to do the work that isn't directly associated with their role, and so on. There is also a lot in the bschool lit about how different business structures contribute to these problems too.

[paulryanrogers]

Ironic since my experience during the transition away from ASCII displays and shortcut inputs is that the touch screens and deep menus were slow. Touch won because it was more approachable, at least for the shallowest options

[TheCowboy]

Touch is fine when done right with responsive hardware. I'm not making a blanket statement about if touch is good or bad. This was just a poorly designed UI and software. Additionally, the light pens could be prone to error due to dirt and grime.

[spacephysics]

To be frank, this has an anti-capitalist smell and I don’t feel is written in good faith.

Sure there are managers that crack the whip, but most the places I’ve worked for, my manager was a former IC and cared deeply about the health of the product, while protecting the IC team I was on from the business side.

Learning more about the business portion and product manager viewpoints, gives me a more sympathetic tone to the whole situation.

We shouldn’t expect someone whose career they’ve focused on the business side to understand the software in depth. Sure there’s space to learn anything, but people have lives outside of career. Instead, a healthy company delegates these tasks out. It’s the responsibility of my manager to have one foot in the software, and one in the business, to help best translate and champion towards a common goal.

It’s the responsibility of her managers to respect the decisions she makes, and when hard lines are drawn for the sake of the health of the product to adhere to them. Within reason, of course.

This to me makes me feel excited to go to work (not every day, I’m not a psycho :) ), and makes me want to climb the ladder. I get paid well, produce value for the company, and get opportunities to work on challenges and with data/systems that I otherwise would not be able to.

With that knowledge, I can then take that to my side business and more effectively grow it. Don’t think there’s any “they’re taking the spoils” going on…

[ilaksh]

Most of those are good points. I am technically anti-capitalist, but also anti-socialist. I think both philosophies are extreme and oversimplified. We need a worldview that integrates the insights of both with technological developments and is truly a step forward. It must value the application of science to solving society's problems by creating and using tools in core structures. It must value diversity and evolution but also holism and harmony.