I agree there's a lot of empire-building in large orgs, and perverse incentives for management promotion where headcount is directly related to their career ladder. At the same time I completely disagree with the "vast majority" take on it, you can't just hire consultants when needed for ramping up a project, institutional knowledge is extremely important in any large org and I haven't seen any yet that has a streamlined and efficient onboarding process for that. Experience matters and that is a reason to keep an overhead of employees that might look unnecessary in accounting/MBA terms but is a pool of workers with enough knowledge to ramp up a project at a moment's time if the organisation needs.
The other side of this would be to keep a ship that's efficient for the current moment but that can't be steered rapidly when needed, that might kill or stagnate an organisation pretty quickly when markets change and the reaction time is too long.
As I said, I don't disagree completely, I'm not fond of upper management in general, and quite tired of the whole career game that is played in large orgs but your point of view is very, very cynical.
Also, let's add another charitable explanation to this:
As people acquire more experience in the org, they become more efficient. That means someone who was maybe idling 20% of the time is now idling 50% of the time - they are simply faster and better at doing their job, but for whatever reason they haven't been promoted yet or assigned new responsibilities.
I don't know whether this is "good" or "bad".
Yes. It is also informed by a 40-year career that has included a pretty even mix of working for both small and large organizations. Cynical != wrong.
Here is another cynical but informed observation: part of the modus operandi of large organizations is specifically to prevent any one person from becoming too important to fire. So as soon as someone starts to significantly outperform their peers, the organization actively moves to squash them because an individual contributor at 3 sigma is an existential threat to good order and discipline.
This is not speculation. This actually come up many years ago when I was interviewing for a CTO position. I was asked: what would you do if you had an engineer who outperformed everyone on their team by a wide margin, but who everyone disliked. The answer it turned out they were looking for (I learned after the fact): fire them. That's not the answer I gave, and I didn't get the job.
I've also tried both strategies (work hard, and slack off) over the years when I've worked at large organizations. I've consistently gotten much better performance reviews when I slacked off.
(This is absolutely not true at small companies BTW, which is why I vastly prefer working there.)
EDIT: OK, jeez, I'm willing to admit I'm wrong; but this doesn't even remotely square with any reality I've ever seen at about a dozen companies. People just hired to... do nothing? It doesn't make any sense at all. How many of you have an empty bug tracker? How many have zero tasks waiting for you when you clock out at the end of the day?
As you approach maximum throughput, average queue size – and therefore average wait time – approaches infinity.
In order to have a quick and nimble organization you need to leave sufficient slack in your utilization of employees.
Also failure to do so results in you and your team being merge underneath another guy's bigger team, and you becoming redundant because they only need one boss and the guy with the bigger team gets to keep his job.
It's kind of like playing Civ but IRL with real people.
Companies like this can be outcompeted by others that manage to be less bloated, at least for the moment.
Can confirm. Worked for two Japanese mobile game companies that drove themselves out of business as they strove for headcount over production value.
This...does not feel performative to me?
(Interesting that English has no words to distinguish the meaning of "stage performance" from "performance metric".)
Performative work means pretending to work so others can see. If your work involves an actual performance (even for a liberal definition that includes presenting something) it's not performative work, except maybe under some silly English language loophole.
The new managers had us submit paperwork detailing what our job duties were. I saw what was coming and simply didn't turn anything in. I slipped right through the cracks.
I ended up assigning myself tasks and variously worked with IT and engineering. Each group thought I was attached to the other group. I kept myself busy most days, but some days I'd surf the internet and essentially do nothing but keep my seat warm.
Most fun were two projects I started. I convinced management that our UPS was insufficient and that our SAN was trash. At my behest, what we ended up with was gigglingly massively overspecced and overpriced. The UPS got its own room and was stunning when it was finished. The president of the company even commented on how amazing it was. He looked at the new LCD screens on my desk and I told him they save piles of electricity over CRT's. Very shortly afterwards, every desk had brand new LCD's.
Not bad for a guy with no boss and no job title.
This is the way. Anarchists wouldn’t be at all surprised.
I'm not sure why or how this ever became a workplace norm but I think by every measure it's to the detriment of any kind of innovation or even real productivity.
In Ireland we were always trying to make our job easier with tools, scripts etc , this was almost taboo when brought on site for a client company in Japan.
In my opinion, that cultural napping aspect comes from the fact that it used to be too hot to concentrate around that time of the day. And the tradition has not adapted to aircons yet.
1. Be productive
2. Lie about how much is being accomplished.
All smart employees will direct all effort away from number 1 and towards number 2." - Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle
I hate homework with passion and never understood that paradoxical word where work should be at work and not at home. But it's starting to make sense that using some of your "free" time on work is not optional in many jobs that don't pay by the hour.
Heck, if you break down 'Asia' by country, you will have a spread with a most/least country
Much like having a military or a fire department, your organization might need a lot of different people with a lot of different skills sitting around sometimes, just because you know that you will eventually need to use them.
Knowledge work is not the same as running a manufacturing line. You have people with highly specialized knowledge and skills who are needed intermittently to keep everything running smoothly. You can try firing them, but in a lot of cases it will end up costing you money in the long run.
Also, there's "kiasu" mentality - hyper competitive behavior in everything from work, school, etc.
