[jvanderbot]

There's a few types of "non workers" I've encountered, that for all extents and purposes are worthless .... until they very much aren't.

1. "former" engineers and non-specialists - they tend to sit in meetings, try to sound important, pontificate about "better ways" but never seem to do real work. Then when SHTF they seem to have all the knowledge to make the problem go away super fast. Maybe SHTF never happens to you.

2. Middle managers and HR abstraction layers - again, more meetings, demanding reports, passing down all this make-work, etc etc. Then when an audit, leadership change, layoff, or program collapse happens, they magically have all the context in mind to pivot the team into a new area so they aren't butchered.

3. Project management / systems engineers. My god do they cause headaches with their overly-complicated, under-knowledgeable "designs" and cross-functional requirements. And they'll sit in standups / scrums without any contributions and just nod along half the time. Or worse, they'll pass along 3rd party statements of what the system should do from "product" that make no sense, get feedback, dissapear, and repeat. Then you realize that your execs, investors, and customers are seeing a totally different view of the system, and thank god you don't have to try to talk to those troublemakers.

Over the last 10 years I've realized a lot of the bullshit jobs that you can do without - you probably could, until you can't. "Cut the fat" is a great corporate euphemism, but the biological analogy fails if there's a corporate version of "famine".

Let's be honest, if we're judging people by tangible improvements, process cranking, or institutional knowledge, the most valuable people are the admins, not even the engineers. Half the time an engineer is sitting around thinking or drinking all the coffee.

[bryanlarsen]

They're very much like firefighters. Firefighters spend the vast majority of their working hours either literally doing nothing or else doing somewhat pointless make work, like washing the fire truck.

If your firefighters are spending more than ~10% of their time doing their actual job, then the odds of them needing to be in two places at once reaches unacceptable levels.

Old fashioned secretaries are similar, if less extreme. An executive secretary's main job is not to do secretarial work, but to be available at a moment's notice. If they're busy, they're not generally available.

[JumpCrisscross]

> If your firefighters are spending more than ~10% of their time doing their actual job

Firefighters do a lot more than just fight fires.

[justinclift]

Cats up trees aren't just a meme, right? :)

[rickydroll]

In other words, we don't pay them to put out fires; we pay them to be trained and available to put out fires

[ta1243]

Which of course leads to the parable of the old engineer with the hammer

[nullc]

When I worked at a muni the firefighters seemed to have a knack for setting the firestations on fire.

That might also fit into your model of corporate participation pretty well.

[paulpauper]

pointless make work, like washing the fire truck

lol

I think it's more than that

[spamizbad]

This has largely been my experience. Obviously, there are people in these roles that can be "dead weight" just like any other job, but overall the net contribution is beneficial.

I feel like the tech industry has spend the last year or so over-correcting and is now burning the furniture to heat the cabin. Slashing headcount is fine if you're also willing to scale back the things that headcount was expected to build/maintain. Now you have teams that are stretched thin just keeping the lights on. It's not an environment that's going to be conducive to innovation.

The only positive I see in all this is that many of these big companies are now much more vulnerable to competition. Unfortunately I feel like the appetite to take on the big guys just isn't there right now - it's definitely a muscle that's atrophied in the startup space over the last decade.

[peteradio]

> Half the time an engineer is sitting around thinking or drinking all the coffee.

Is that supposed to sound like a bad thing?

> tangible improvements, process cranking, or institutional knowledge, the most valuable people are the admins

Valuable like a splinter in your big toe. "It hurts when I move it!"

[smegsicle]

> "Cut the fat" is a great corporate euphemism, but the biological analogy fails if there's a corporate version of "famine".

or you might say the culinary analogy turns into a biological analogy

[dredmorbius]

There are any number of organisations and organisational functions which are essentially risk management. Some of those risks are upside (new products / markets), some are downside (loss, fraud, moat-building, etc.).

You'd expect that a VC of all people would appreciate the fact that in high-tech spaces, many new ventures are required to find one unicorn, with absolute failure rates of about 90%,[1] and Angellist giving 1:40 odds (2.5%) likelihood of seed-stage startups reaching US$1b valuation ("unicorn").[2]

Google has hit paydirt once with advertising, and spent most of its subsequent life either reinforcing that status (with varying levels of legality) or seeking out alternative hits, with ... stunningly little success. But then, nobody else has had any real success there either, save Facebook.

There are also the roles within organisations which are principally risk mitigation. I had the insight a few years back that ops is essentially a risk-management role.[3] In one of my earlier mentions of this on HN someone responded that that is in fact how Google treats its SRE role, and is a point emphasised in its fairly well-known book on the topic.

Another point that's become glaringly clear over the past few years is that efficiency and resilience are contrasting points on the optimisation space. I'm not sure if that's one-dimensional or multi (think "fast, cheap, good"), but it does have multiple optima depending on the specified criteria.

And ... in some spaces, notably pharmaceuticals (very large search space, very high search costs, long-term exploration), a business model which has emerged is to spin out new-molecule / treatment development indepenently of the majors (Pfizer, J&J, Roche, Novartis, Merck, AstrZeneca, GSK, etc.), either as controlled subsidiaries or independent ventures, and then aquire the successes. Contrast other R&D-heavy models such as 3M, Edison Mfg. Co., DuPont, etc. There's also the hit-factory / tentpole model of film, music,[4] and print (a small number of hits supports a much larger mid-list). I'd argue that much of the start-up and established-firm tech space has come to resemble these models, for much the same underlying dynamic logic.

--------------------------------

Notes:

1. <https://explodingtopics.com/blog/startup-failure-stats> <https://www.luisazhou.com/blog/startup-failure-statistics/>

2. <https://web.archive.org/web/20210716175009/https://www.angel...>

3. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27701929>, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29152832>, and <https://archive.is/HknlO>

4. I've discussed this and referenced Charles Perrow's excellent treatment here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31254795>. Perrow's discussion is in Complex Organizations (1972, 1985), pp. 186--187. <https://archive.org/search.php?query=Complex+organizations+:...>

[eureka-belief]

I agree that these archetypes exist generally speaking. And any team will inevitably have a certain degree of waste. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not very important for director level and above management to continually be looking for ways to restructure the system so that skilled and motivated employees can do their magic without BS. When I look back on my career, there were definitely some teams that were much better at this than others and it seemed to be correlated with how much original critical thinking managers were doing, as opposed to just executing industry playbooks by rote. It’s easier to do this on small teams. Harder to do this at scale. But that’s the game to be played even if it’s difficult.