I'm surprised at the hostile reception to this post, because I think it's making a very good point.
The trend in the new economy is for a large percentage of people to be discarded like rubbish, while increasingly insane workloads are placed on the remainder. Not only is this bad for all the individuals involved and for the health of society, but OP makes the point that it's actually bad for the bottom line too. Executives are rewarded for doing things this way because it superficially looks like they are saving money, but the resulting productivity cut ends up reducing profitability. A more sane and equitable distribution of workload, would be better by every metric including profit.
> The trend in the new economy is for a large percentage of people to be discarded like rubbish
This trend started over a century ago. As mass production took over, skilled labor (artisans and tradesmen) were replaced with people who may as well have been machines (for all their employers cared). Scientific management led to a hyper-micromanaged workforce (at least as a goal) where each worker was instructed in the most efficient way to do their job and weren't expected to deviate.
Interestingly, Taylor saw some of the same things Deming did but came to very different conclusions about how to resolve the issues. Taylor effectively worked to disempower workers (failing to recognize that this was also what led to their demotivation and poor performance) while Deming worked to empower workers (recognizing that this led to pride in their work and better performance).
The problem has been that, while Taylorism has been discredited for nearly a century, his influence remains. It moved from the factory floor into the office.
"If only you devs would do everything right, we could always ship on time with zero defects." -- An almost verbatim quote from a former supervisor, not ironically
Many people in management roles are woefully underprepared for it. They operate under the same flawed belief as Taylor: If only the stupid employees would do precisely what the smart people wrote down in the work instructions (NB: often not actually written down, or not matching reality if written down) then this company would be awesome. Why is it so hard to do a travel voucher (ignoring that the employee travels once every 2-3 years and the voucher forms have changed since the last time)?
> Executives are rewarded for doing things this way because it superficially looks like they are saving money, but the resulting productivity cut ends up reducing profitability.
From understanding Lean, there are costs you can cut (things which aren't value added), and costs you oughtn't cut (or shouldn't cut much). But it's easy to recognize when someone is doing work which directly adds value (writing a line of code, properly aligning the mold and the sheet metal). It's hard to recognize indirect value and costs. I had (but removed, it got long) an analysis of how much we lose in my office to time spent managing travel each year. The swing would be from losing over $100k/year to making over $100k just by hiring one full-time travel specialist (we don't charge the customers for the time spent dealing with travel agents so the engineers' time is lost revenue, a single in-house travel specialist could handle the local office with ease and free up those engineer-hours to be charged to the customer for actual work).
This is a huge problem in government and industry research labs. Rather than have dedicated staff to do things like travel expenses and purchasing, they now have each expensive researcher do it themselves, slowly. Looks like money is being saved with less staff, but now researchers are less productive.
The Dev/Ops interface is one with very little information hiding, little responsibility segregation, very little outcome independence, and nearly no knowledge differentiation.
The researcher/admin interface separates things with complete opposite qualities on each of those dimensions.
The Dev/Ops interface is one with very little information hiding, little responsibility segregation, very little outcome independence, and nearly no knowledge differentiation.
Both situations have a jack-of-all-trades problem lurking behind them.
In all my experiences with devops, I’ve had to do their jobs for them in their entirety, but by proxy: “ok, first type ‘sudo service https start’. Now type ‘cd /var/log/httpd’. Then type...” Except I have to do it all up front, and if I miss an (obvious) step, somebody who ought to have no business yelling at me yells at me for providing incomplete instructions.
I thought DevOps folks are people who take an engineering mindset to operations, i.e. with both skills of software engineering and system administration? What you're describing sounds like someone with neither skillset.
Totally agree. There is a lot of value in having everything around you going smoothly so you can focus on your work. We have to book travel ourselves but every time I do it there is some kind of problem that takes hours to resolve. It would be so nice to have somebody who knows how to navigate the corporate process. It's not only the time but it's very distracting.
> Because the former [administrative workers] are cheaper to hire than the latter [specialized workers], the result is the same work for less total staffing costs.
I worked for a small company (5 or so employees). We had an administrator who was a former VP of a very large bank. I don't know how much we paid her, but she was worth more than any other employee, in my experience. She made that place run.
I suspect that one very good administrative worker is worth their weight in gold, and has the ability to make 10x-ers out of otherwise normal employees. I'd suggest paying for really good admins, rather than viewing them as low-skilled, low-wage commodity workers.
I think there's a psychological facet at play as well.
It may well be statistically bad for the bottom line, but it's much easier for the day-to-day. Planning things is hard, decomposing work is harder still, and making sure that the things you build are architected and organized in such a way that they can be planned and decomposed is the hardest yet; it's the same reason parallel programming is hard, I think (this, granted, all from a software perspective).
So even if yes, it may be biting people in the long term, the short-termism is that it's way easier to get things done because you (as the exec) just ask one person to do the entire project, and they maintain all that complexity in their head, never needing to translate it out into shallower, noisier channels, and the 'difficulty overhead' of sound planning, architecture, management, and communication is avoided.
The "I'll just do it myself" culture is really hard to escape from, too, because I think we feel more productive in it, even if we aren't (compared to an organization that effectively staffs work out, and has the staff to accommodate). Intuitively, you're doing all this work and your fingers are constantly flying across the keyboard. You've got so many commits in today. You feel a lot more powerful than you do writing up issues and stories, and asking for statuses. And at the same time, it's a lot easier than writing up issues and stories (ones that will be genuinely useful as planning and work items, at any rate). It's part of why hero-efforts remain pervasive, I think. And it's a kind of sunk-cost fallacy at the end of the day; you're so deep in it already that you may as well just put this one last little bit of effort in and finish it yourself, rather than waste all the time documenting and decomposing and planning so that you can better facilitate parallel, distributed work.
Picture a meeting where 6 people making 100+k are looking for a whiteboard pens that works/eraser/ etc * 5 meetings a day.
Paying somone minimum wage to just keep that from happening across say 15 conference rooms is a likely a net win even if they did nothing else. The issue is this is an invisible cost where cutting that person looks like real savings.
We have this idea that everyone needs to be actively working all day when there is such a huge discrepancy in pay scales that it’s not that important.
This is startlingly real. Or, from my own day today, 8 people that earn 100K plus/year on a call where half of them never speak. How much did that call cost?
Maybe businesses need to start treating their internal infrastructure as a real thing? There should be a diagram on some exec dashboard somewhere, saying in orange "Meeting rooms - health: 60%" (and similar things for all other trivial inconveniences). Maybe that'd prompt them to allocate some funding to fix the problem.
To me it always seemed obvious that adding more people decreases efficiency; it's just a matter of communcation:
With more people, it takes more effort for knowledge to spread, so you either spend that effort (which reduces efficiency), or you have people doing their jobs without information that could make them more efficient (which reduces efficiency).
I've heard arguments that adding administrative staff is worse than adding other sorts of staff, but that is not as immediately obvious to me.
Oh, there are many reasons we have large organizations, and one of them is that you simply cannot do some things with a small team. I think you have to bend the definition of efficiency to it's breaking point to argue that producing 15 widgets with 10 people is more efficient than producing 10 widgets with 5 people though.
A Honda Fit is clearly a more fuel efficient car than an F1 racer. This remains true whether or not the problem you are solving is "win an F1 race," which would necessitate using the latter.
Actually an F1 car is extremely fuel efficient. In absolute terms it consumes more gas but considering the generated power they are probably one of the most efficient engines around.
If I hire 15 people + 5 lower-skill workers, I can produce 30 widgets.
The problem we face is visibility. The question becomes how is it that low-skilled workers can create more efficiency, they themselves don't do anything. The reality is that high-skilled workers are now free to get creative vs having to do the annoying tasks the low skilled workers just took off their shoulders. So _indirectly_ the low-skilled workers produced 10 widgets, but really, everyone was just working at a good production level.
As with many other rules of thumb, this rule is usually true, unless there's a specific circumstance that makes it not so.
If you just add more administrative stuff together with other people and specialists that already have n*(n-1) links between them, this will be a problem due to obvious reasons.
However, if you actually spend time to work out a process and organization that will not require additional each-to-each communication and make most of the communication remain in close groups, you may avert this. You can call this a human refactoring, if you will - very similar idea to separate functionality into small, encapsulated classes with smalles possible public interface instead of one huge g-d class.
> However, if you actually spend time to work out a process and organization that will not require additional each-to-each communication and make most of the communication remain in close groups, you may avert this. You can call this a human refactoring, if you will - very similar idea to separate functionality into small, encapsulated classes with smalles possible public interface instead of one huge g-d class.
I dont think this is an exception to my rule; you can reduce the overhead significantly with good process, but any process that does not perfectly predict who needs to know what information will incur some per-person overhead as a team grows.
Perhaps you are arguing that this overhead can be reduced to the point of being close enough to zero to not matter? If so, that would be very impressive, and conflicts with my experience.
I don't think bureaucracy is bad per se -- it's an inevitable development in large organizations. Or rather, not inevitable, but better than the alternatives. Bureaucracy, with its attendant paperwork, procedures, and audit trails, retards the growth of personal fiefdoms and makes individual parts of a larger organization behave more like each other. It also retards forward progress, but I think that's part of the cost of having a large organization. Big ships are slow to turn.
Admin or support staff in any job is just like those who work in logistics. They're the grease which makes the machine work. The underappreciated heroes of most orgs.
This is true. When I was more junior I arrogantly believed that project managers and marketing people and business development and customer liaisons and all those various other support staff were overhead—baggage that only cost the company money and slowed down development. I believed that software would just leap from my fingertips onto store shelves, without help from any of this administration. Only after trying one of these roles did I realize how much would grind to a halt without this overhead. I know the view sounds self-serving but these folks really are the grease that moves projects along and the duct tape that holds everything together as they move.
Adding more administration to reduce the number of management seems like a good trade, simply because management-days cost more than administrator-days. If 7 managers are each spending one day on a task that would be done twice as quickly by an administrator paid half as much, you're trading 7 manager-days for 1.75 manager-days completely disregarding the cost of manager context-switching.
And if you're that administrator, you probably don't need to justify your purpose, you should probably ask for a raise.
I'm not sure where else economies of scale are supposed to come from.
It seems to me that the people creating the processes have increased in numbers while the people doing the work have become less. In my company they try to be "lean" so you have book your travel and do a lot of other admin stuff. But there are still a ton of rules. The only difference is that now every worker needs to learn them instead of having one admin person dealing with them.
Why don't more executives hire really good programmers and analysts to be their assistants? If a tech CEO is earning $5m a year who gives a damn if their assistant is earning $500k? Right, like why not just pay for the boost in automation and understanding of abstract concepts to maximize the communication-time to useful-actions ratio between assistant and CEO?
Tech CEOs that make that kind of money have whole armies of assistants already. But their problem isn't technical, generally. They're worrying about finances, long term industry outlooks, and keeping Wall Street happy. The job of a "tech CEO" at a giant corporation is no different from the job of a "retail CEO" or "service CEO" or "manufacturing CEO".
You might be thinking of startup and small tech company CEOs that really understand the nuts and bolts of a software product, but they're not making $5M/year.
"Why don't more executives hire really good programmers and analysts to be their assistants?"
They do. Usually they have a title like "Chief of Staff" or "Speechwriter" or "Associate." My friend occupied just such a role after working in investment banking and private equity. He was paid in the low-mid six figures and ended up doing tons of research, analysis and writing for the CEO of one of the most successful private equity firms. The position was stepping stone to Harvard Business School and nobody stayed in the role for much more than a year or two, so they are constantly rotating in fresh, hungry and smart people.
I like the idea of adding automation to the mix, but realistically, if there is a task the CEO wants automated, he/she can tap any engineering manager and pull their team onto that project. The value add would be automation of tasks for the assistant rather than automation that benefits the CEO directly.
I think this makes sense. It’s consistent with the Mythical Man Month’s concept of building a supporting cast around the specialist.
In a startup it may be faster to do everything yourself. Once you operate at scale, every hour of low value activity sucks away an hour of high value activity. I don’t respect folks who are incompetent without their admins, but I also disrespect managers too stuck in the weeds to lead.
That's exactly what I thought of as well, and that seems to be something that founders sometimes struggle with as their companies grow: learning to work through people when at one point in time, you did everything yourself.
> I don’t respect folks who are incompetent without their admins
Yet this is exactly what the article is proposing.
If you don't do, say, Powerpoint, with enough frequency, you are effectively incompetent at it. Insourcing this to an admin practically guarantees you will be incompetent at it.
Steve Jobs had Apple create iPreach (Keynote) because Powerpoint wasted so much of his time ...
It’s a matter of degree. There are things that someone can do from a skills standpoint, but shouldn’t from a priority standpoint. (For many execs PowerPoint is in this bucket)
For anyone interested in this topic, I highly suggest the book Bullshit Jobs, which is basically a very in-depth (but entertaining!) ethnography of such over-specialized jobs.
I don't think that "bullshit jobs" has anything to do with any over-specialization, but instead with jobs that are actually pointless.
The article is talking about tasks that actually are necessary, because they are still being done. But instead of being done well, by a person specialized in that task, they're being done less well by people who are specialized in entirely different tasks, taking away the time they can spend on the tasks that they themselves are specialized in.
I think the Parent is right, though. Bullshit Jobs was about jobs that were pointless, but, it's central thesis had to do with the efficiencies of automation and increases in productivity. This is an interesting inversion of that thesis which suggests that while there have been great productivity gains at the expense of many low-skill workers, those same low-skill workers still provide value added work to skilled employees. It is a careful balancing act between the two.
Sorry, have you read the book? (Not trying to be be condescending, actually curious.) I'm pretty sure it has everything to do with it, and more. The book even addresses arguments that such over-specialization is necessary:
> In other words, the author claims that when we speak of “bullshit jobs,” we’re really just talking about the postindustrial equivalent of factory-line workers, those with the unenviable fate of having to carry out the repetitive, mind-numbingly boring but still very necessary tasks required to manage increasingly complicated processes of production. As robots replace the factory workers, these are increasingly the only jobs left. (This position is sometimes combined with a rather condescending argument about self-importance: if so many people feel their jobs are useless, it’s really because today’s educated workforce is full of philosophy or Renaissance literature majors who believe they are cut out for better things. They consider being a mere cog in administrative machinery beneath their dignity.)
This comment is very confusing. The quote is from Graeber’s dismissive summary of an article in The Economist [1]. Here, Graeber specifically rejects the notion that his book is an ‘ethnography of such over-specialized jobs.’ In Chapter 1 he gives the following explicit definition of a bullshit job:
> Final Working Definition: a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.
This kind of reads like the idea that "High level people shouldn't be doing work that is beneath them". Which is rather offensive.
Moreover, I'd guess the overhead of communication probably means it is more efficient for a marketing director to make his own presentation and charts. After all, he is the only one that knows what he wants to present, and what data should be in the charts.
If I had to communicate that, I'd probably make a crude powerpoint and say "Like that!".
The computer systems caused secretaries to get fired while managers get to do secretarial tasks of feeding computer systems with data... There are probably much better uses of actual managers.
The thing is, managers employ person to person skills and unstructured data handling. Forcing the manager to structure their output so that the computer / bureaucracy can handle it is a waste of time. If you want this kind of accountability, hire an accountant or secretary.
Welcome lean processes and reporting based on word and thin paper trails only for very important or regulatory matters.
Or change the computer system to accept unstructured input.
True, but it is bad to say "I have a degree, therefore I feel that doing X is beneath me". Note that I distinguish that from "I cost the company a lot of money, so it would be more efficient to have someone else do X".
Indeed, it has to be said much more diplomatically, and/or carried out more strategically. The CEO doesn't say "I am a CEO, so doing X is beneath me." He simply gets X done for him, and that's that.
It's not even that. We're talking jobs, not people. It doesn't matter whether a low-skill job engages 100% of worker's skill or only 10% - the point is, someone doing a low-skill job can be a massive productivity multiplier for someone else doing a high-skill job.
I'm surprised at the hostile reception to this post, because I think it's making a very good point.
The trend in the new economy is for a large percentage of people to be discarded like rubbish, while increasingly insane workloads are placed on the remainder. Not only is this bad for all the individuals involved and for the health of society, but OP makes the point that it's actually bad for the bottom line too. Executives are rewarded for doing things this way because it superficially looks like they are saving money, but the resulting productivity cut ends up reducing profitability. A more sane and equitable distribution of workload, would be better by every metric including profit.
And even if the workloads are doable in a standard workday, the context-switching involved removes any possibility of high-quality thinking.
> The trend in the new economy is for a large percentage of people to be discarded like rubbish
This trend started over a century ago. As mass production took over, skilled labor (artisans and tradesmen) were replaced with people who may as well have been machines (for all their employers cared). Scientific management led to a hyper-micromanaged workforce (at least as a goal) where each worker was instructed in the most efficient way to do their job and weren't expected to deviate.
Interestingly, Taylor saw some of the same things Deming did but came to very different conclusions about how to resolve the issues. Taylor effectively worked to disempower workers (failing to recognize that this was also what led to their demotivation and poor performance) while Deming worked to empower workers (recognizing that this led to pride in their work and better performance).
The problem has been that, while Taylorism has been discredited for nearly a century, his influence remains. It moved from the factory floor into the office.
"If only you devs would do everything right, we could always ship on time with zero defects." -- An almost verbatim quote from a former supervisor, not ironically
Many people in management roles are woefully underprepared for it. They operate under the same flawed belief as Taylor: If only the stupid employees would do precisely what the smart people wrote down in the work instructions (NB: often not actually written down, or not matching reality if written down) then this company would be awesome. Why is it so hard to do a travel voucher (ignoring that the employee travels once every 2-3 years and the voucher forms have changed since the last time)?
> Executives are rewarded for doing things this way because it superficially looks like they are saving money, but the resulting productivity cut ends up reducing profitability.
From understanding Lean, there are costs you can cut (things which aren't value added), and costs you oughtn't cut (or shouldn't cut much). But it's easy to recognize when someone is doing work which directly adds value (writing a line of code, properly aligning the mold and the sheet metal). It's hard to recognize indirect value and costs. I had (but removed, it got long) an analysis of how much we lose in my office to time spent managing travel each year. The swing would be from losing over $100k/year to making over $100k just by hiring one full-time travel specialist (we don't charge the customers for the time spent dealing with travel agents so the engineers' time is lost revenue, a single in-house travel specialist could handle the local office with ease and free up those engineer-hours to be charged to the customer for actual work).
This is a huge problem in government and industry research labs. Rather than have dedicated staff to do things like travel expenses and purchasing, they now have each expensive researcher do it themselves, slowly. Looks like money is being saved with less staff, but now researchers are less productive.
Sounds like DevOps to me.
No way.
The Dev/Ops interface is one with very little information hiding, little responsibility segregation, very little outcome independence, and nearly no knowledge differentiation.
The researcher/admin interface separates things with complete opposite qualities on each of those dimensions.
The Dev/Ops interface is one with very little information hiding, little responsibility segregation, very little outcome independence, and nearly no knowledge differentiation.
Both situations have a jack-of-all-trades problem lurking behind them.
In all my experiences with devops, I’ve had to do their jobs for them in their entirety, but by proxy: “ok, first type ‘sudo service https start’. Now type ‘cd /var/log/httpd’. Then type...” Except I have to do it all up front, and if I miss an (obvious) step, somebody who ought to have no business yelling at me yells at me for providing incomplete instructions.
Ah, yes, the DevOps blues... I sing it daily :(
I thought DevOps folks are people who take an engineering mindset to operations, i.e. with both skills of software engineering and system administration? What you're describing sounds like someone with neither skillset.
Totally agree. There is a lot of value in having everything around you going smoothly so you can focus on your work. We have to book travel ourselves but every time I do it there is some kind of problem that takes hours to resolve. It would be so nice to have somebody who knows how to navigate the corporate process. It's not only the time but it's very distracting.
> Because the former [administrative workers] are cheaper to hire than the latter [specialized workers], the result is the same work for less total staffing costs.
I worked for a small company (5 or so employees). We had an administrator who was a former VP of a very large bank. I don't know how much we paid her, but she was worth more than any other employee, in my experience. She made that place run.
I suspect that one very good administrative worker is worth their weight in gold, and has the ability to make 10x-ers out of otherwise normal employees. I'd suggest paying for really good admins, rather than viewing them as low-skilled, low-wage commodity workers.
I think there's a psychological facet at play as well.
It may well be statistically bad for the bottom line, but it's much easier for the day-to-day. Planning things is hard, decomposing work is harder still, and making sure that the things you build are architected and organized in such a way that they can be planned and decomposed is the hardest yet; it's the same reason parallel programming is hard, I think (this, granted, all from a software perspective).
So even if yes, it may be biting people in the long term, the short-termism is that it's way easier to get things done because you (as the exec) just ask one person to do the entire project, and they maintain all that complexity in their head, never needing to translate it out into shallower, noisier channels, and the 'difficulty overhead' of sound planning, architecture, management, and communication is avoided.
The "I'll just do it myself" culture is really hard to escape from, too, because I think we feel more productive in it, even if we aren't (compared to an organization that effectively staffs work out, and has the staff to accommodate). Intuitively, you're doing all this work and your fingers are constantly flying across the keyboard. You've got so many commits in today. You feel a lot more powerful than you do writing up issues and stories, and asking for statuses. And at the same time, it's a lot easier than writing up issues and stories (ones that will be genuinely useful as planning and work items, at any rate). It's part of why hero-efforts remain pervasive, I think. And it's a kind of sunk-cost fallacy at the end of the day; you're so deep in it already that you may as well just put this one last little bit of effort in and finish it yourself, rather than waste all the time documenting and decomposing and planning so that you can better facilitate parallel, distributed work.
Picture a meeting where 6 people making 100+k are looking for a whiteboard pens that works/eraser/ etc * 5 meetings a day.
Paying somone minimum wage to just keep that from happening across say 15 conference rooms is a likely a net win even if they did nothing else. The issue is this is an invisible cost where cutting that person looks like real savings.
We have this idea that everyone needs to be actively working all day when there is such a huge discrepancy in pay scales that it’s not that important.
This is startlingly real. Or, from my own day today, 8 people that earn 100K plus/year on a call where half of them never speak. How much did that call cost?
Maybe businesses need to start treating their internal infrastructure as a real thing? There should be a diagram on some exec dashboard somewhere, saying in orange "Meeting rooms - health: 60%" (and similar things for all other trivial inconveniences). Maybe that'd prompt them to allocate some funding to fix the problem.
It's an attractive concept but I have seen that adding more administrative folks does sometimes just add more bureaucracy.
People want to justify their purpose in an org, so they will create approval or audit processes where they aren't needed.
To me it always seemed obvious that adding more people decreases efficiency; it's just a matter of communcation:
With more people, it takes more effort for knowledge to spread, so you either spend that effort (which reduces efficiency), or you have people doing their jobs without information that could make them more efficient (which reduces efficiency).
I've heard arguments that adding administrative staff is worse than adding other sorts of staff, but that is not as immediately obvious to me.
It depends how you measure efficiency.
5 people can produce 10 widgets in a year.
10 people can product 15 widgets in a year.
Are the 10 people less efficient than the 5?
If you need 15 widgets, the team of 5 has 0% efficiency.
Oh, there are many reasons we have large organizations, and one of them is that you simply cannot do some things with a small team. I think you have to bend the definition of efficiency to it's breaking point to argue that producing 15 widgets with 10 people is more efficient than producing 10 widgets with 5 people though.
A Honda Fit is clearly a more fuel efficient car than an F1 racer. This remains true whether or not the problem you are solving is "win an F1 race," which would necessitate using the latter.
Actually an F1 car is extremely fuel efficient. In absolute terms it consumes more gas but considering the generated power they are probably one of the most efficient engines around.
The difference is this:
If I hire 15 people, I can produce 20 widgets
If I hire 15 people + 5 lower-skill workers, I can produce 30 widgets.
The problem we face is visibility. The question becomes how is it that low-skilled workers can create more efficiency, they themselves don't do anything. The reality is that high-skilled workers are now free to get creative vs having to do the annoying tasks the low skilled workers just took off their shoulders. So _indirectly_ the low-skilled workers produced 10 widgets, but really, everyone was just working at a good production level.
People being less busy lets them be creative.
(N(N-1))/2
As with many other rules of thumb, this rule is usually true, unless there's a specific circumstance that makes it not so.
If you just add more administrative stuff together with other people and specialists that already have n*(n-1) links between them, this will be a problem due to obvious reasons.
However, if you actually spend time to work out a process and organization that will not require additional each-to-each communication and make most of the communication remain in close groups, you may avert this. You can call this a human refactoring, if you will - very similar idea to separate functionality into small, encapsulated classes with smalles possible public interface instead of one huge g-d class.
> However, if you actually spend time to work out a process and organization that will not require additional each-to-each communication and make most of the communication remain in close groups, you may avert this. You can call this a human refactoring, if you will - very similar idea to separate functionality into small, encapsulated classes with smalles possible public interface instead of one huge g-d class.
I dont think this is an exception to my rule; you can reduce the overhead significantly with good process, but any process that does not perfectly predict who needs to know what information will incur some per-person overhead as a team grows.
Perhaps you are arguing that this overhead can be reduced to the point of being close enough to zero to not matter? If so, that would be very impressive, and conflicts with my experience.
I don't think bureaucracy is bad per se -- it's an inevitable development in large organizations. Or rather, not inevitable, but better than the alternatives. Bureaucracy, with its attendant paperwork, procedures, and audit trails, retards the growth of personal fiefdoms and makes individual parts of a larger organization behave more like each other. It also retards forward progress, but I think that's part of the cost of having a large organization. Big ships are slow to turn.
Big ships are slow to turn.
Small ships can't handle big cargo.
Admin or support staff in any job is just like those who work in logistics. They're the grease which makes the machine work. The underappreciated heroes of most orgs.
This is true. When I was more junior I arrogantly believed that project managers and marketing people and business development and customer liaisons and all those various other support staff were overhead—baggage that only cost the company money and slowed down development. I believed that software would just leap from my fingertips onto store shelves, without help from any of this administration. Only after trying one of these roles did I realize how much would grind to a halt without this overhead. I know the view sounds self-serving but these folks really are the grease that moves projects along and the duct tape that holds everything together as they move.
Adding more administration to reduce the number of management seems like a good trade, simply because management-days cost more than administrator-days. If 7 managers are each spending one day on a task that would be done twice as quickly by an administrator paid half as much, you're trading 7 manager-days for 1.75 manager-days completely disregarding the cost of manager context-switching.
And if you're that administrator, you probably don't need to justify your purpose, you should probably ask for a raise.
I'm not sure where else economies of scale are supposed to come from.
It seems to me that the people creating the processes have increased in numbers while the people doing the work have become less. In my company they try to be "lean" so you have book your travel and do a lot of other admin stuff. But there are still a ton of rules. The only difference is that now every worker needs to learn them instead of having one admin person dealing with them.
The thing I never understood was this:
Why don't more executives hire really good programmers and analysts to be their assistants? If a tech CEO is earning $5m a year who gives a damn if their assistant is earning $500k? Right, like why not just pay for the boost in automation and understanding of abstract concepts to maximize the communication-time to useful-actions ratio between assistant and CEO?
Tech CEOs that make that kind of money have whole armies of assistants already. But their problem isn't technical, generally. They're worrying about finances, long term industry outlooks, and keeping Wall Street happy. The job of a "tech CEO" at a giant corporation is no different from the job of a "retail CEO" or "service CEO" or "manufacturing CEO".
You might be thinking of startup and small tech company CEOs that really understand the nuts and bolts of a software product, but they're not making $5M/year.
"Why don't more executives hire really good programmers and analysts to be their assistants?"
They do. Usually they have a title like "Chief of Staff" or "Speechwriter" or "Associate." My friend occupied just such a role after working in investment banking and private equity. He was paid in the low-mid six figures and ended up doing tons of research, analysis and writing for the CEO of one of the most successful private equity firms. The position was stepping stone to Harvard Business School and nobody stayed in the role for much more than a year or two, so they are constantly rotating in fresh, hungry and smart people.
I like the idea of adding automation to the mix, but realistically, if there is a task the CEO wants automated, he/she can tap any engineering manager and pull their team onto that project. The value add would be automation of tasks for the assistant rather than automation that benefits the CEO directly.
I think this makes sense. It’s consistent with the Mythical Man Month’s concept of building a supporting cast around the specialist.
In a startup it may be faster to do everything yourself. Once you operate at scale, every hour of low value activity sucks away an hour of high value activity. I don’t respect folks who are incompetent without their admins, but I also disrespect managers too stuck in the weeds to lead.
That's exactly what I thought of as well, and that seems to be something that founders sometimes struggle with as their companies grow: learning to work through people when at one point in time, you did everything yourself.
> I don’t respect folks who are incompetent without their admins
Yet this is exactly what the article is proposing.
If you don't do, say, Powerpoint, with enough frequency, you are effectively incompetent at it. Insourcing this to an admin practically guarantees you will be incompetent at it.
Steve Jobs had Apple create iPreach (Keynote) because Powerpoint wasted so much of his time ...
It’s a matter of degree. There are things that someone can do from a skills standpoint, but shouldn’t from a priority standpoint. (For many execs PowerPoint is in this bucket)
For anyone interested in this topic, I highly suggest the book Bullshit Jobs, which is basically a very in-depth (but entertaining!) ethnography of such over-specialized jobs.
I don't think that "bullshit jobs" has anything to do with any over-specialization, but instead with jobs that are actually pointless.
The article is talking about tasks that actually are necessary, because they are still being done. But instead of being done well, by a person specialized in that task, they're being done less well by people who are specialized in entirely different tasks, taking away the time they can spend on the tasks that they themselves are specialized in.
I think the Parent is right, though. Bullshit Jobs was about jobs that were pointless, but, it's central thesis had to do with the efficiencies of automation and increases in productivity. This is an interesting inversion of that thesis which suggests that while there have been great productivity gains at the expense of many low-skill workers, those same low-skill workers still provide value added work to skilled employees. It is a careful balancing act between the two.
Sorry, have you read the book? (Not trying to be be condescending, actually curious.) I'm pretty sure it has everything to do with it, and more. The book even addresses arguments that such over-specialization is necessary:
> In other words, the author claims that when we speak of “bullshit jobs,” we’re really just talking about the postindustrial equivalent of factory-line workers, those with the unenviable fate of having to carry out the repetitive, mind-numbingly boring but still very necessary tasks required to manage increasingly complicated processes of production. As robots replace the factory workers, these are increasingly the only jobs left. (This position is sometimes combined with a rather condescending argument about self-importance: if so many people feel their jobs are useless, it’s really because today’s educated workforce is full of philosophy or Renaissance literature majors who believe they are cut out for better things. They consider being a mere cog in administrative machinery beneath their dignity.)
This comment is very confusing. The quote is from Graeber’s dismissive summary of an article in The Economist [1]. Here, Graeber specifically rejects the notion that his book is an ‘ethnography of such over-specialized jobs.’ In Chapter 1 he gives the following explicit definition of a bullshit job:
> Final Working Definition: a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.
[1]: https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/08/21/on-bullsh...
This kind of reads like the idea that "High level people shouldn't be doing work that is beneath them". Which is rather offensive.
Moreover, I'd guess the overhead of communication probably means it is more efficient for a marketing director to make his own presentation and charts. After all, he is the only one that knows what he wants to present, and what data should be in the charts. If I had to communicate that, I'd probably make a crude powerpoint and say "Like that!".
Shouldn't be forced to do such job.
The computer systems caused secretaries to get fired while managers get to do secretarial tasks of feeding computer systems with data... There are probably much better uses of actual managers.
The thing is, managers employ person to person skills and unstructured data handling. Forcing the manager to structure their output so that the computer / bureaucracy can handle it is a waste of time. If you want this kind of accountability, hire an accountant or secretary.
Welcome lean processes and reporting based on word and thin paper trails only for very important or regulatory matters.
Or change the computer system to accept unstructured input.
It's not offensive to put people to work in a way that generates the best results for the team.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
True, but it is bad to say "I have a degree, therefore I feel that doing X is beneath me". Note that I distinguish that from "I cost the company a lot of money, so it would be more efficient to have someone else do X".
Indeed, it has to be said much more diplomatically, and/or carried out more strategically. The CEO doesn't say "I am a CEO, so doing X is beneath me." He simply gets X done for him, and that's that.
> Which is rather offensive.
If something is offensive, it doesn't mean that it's not true. People differ in ability: some have valuable skills and others don't.
It's not even that. We're talking jobs, not people. It doesn't matter whether a low-skill job engages 100% of worker's skill or only 10% - the point is, someone doing a low-skill job can be a massive productivity multiplier for someone else doing a high-skill job.