> Just because you don't understand the necessity of middle management or "paper pushers" doesn't mean they're not necessary.
This is presumptuous. Having worked in groups where I understood my job and the jobs of my coworkers who held the same position as me at least as well as they understood their jobs themselves: unnecessary paper pushers exist.
> As a rule, businesses exist to make a profit, and make gigantic efforts to eliminate unnecessary positions, such as mass layoffs after mergers.
People say stuff like this all the time—Paul Graham famously trotted it out as a retort to the existence of a gender pay gap—but it doesn't comport with observations. From some of my personal notes on this topic last week:
There's a widespread belief that capitalism seeks out efficiency. With most organizations being capitalist enterprises, so the belief continues, they are an extension of this. You can see this show up in arguments about the gender pay gap. If we could cut costs just by hiring women to do the same job, they say, then we would. The veracity of the claims about the size of the pay gap notwithstanding, the claim that corporations would seize the opportunity to cut costs like this doesn't jibe with reality. Corporations are not observed to be a perfect extension of the law of capitalist efficiency. A corporation as an entity is not a perfectly rational actor operating in its own self interest, following both from the irrationality of the people who make it up and from instances of where they do behave rationally operating in their own individual self interests, counter to the organization's.
There is hardly ever a Taylor-like figure [around].
... i.e., someone tasked with stamping out the sorts of inefficiency in the way that these arguments demand it is being addressed.
We need to coin some sort of shorthand akin "the Gell–Mann amnesia effect", where we comment upon the tendency of people to automatically ascribe e.g. competence and efficiency to institutions, on the basis that they are institutions, while ignoring immediately available evidence to the contrary.
I didn't say unnecessary paper-pushers don't exist. I said corporations make gigantic efforts to eliminate them.
Management isn't and never will be perfect. But just because some small percentage of existing positions are actually unnecessary doesn't mean that's a primary or even secondary explanation for preventing mass unemployment, which was the original topic.
Obviously corporations aren't perfectly rational. Nobody is. But the fact remains that rational profit-seeking is a systemic incentive pushing corporate behavior in a particular direction -- e.g. to eliminate useless jobs. There is no similar general systemic incentive that rewards keeping useless jobs around.
Contrary to your personal notes, capitalism absolutely seeks out efficiency. It isn't perfect, and it isn't the only force. But it is by far the strongest force. In other words, there is an extremely strong trend where the most efficient companies stick around, and the rest go out of business.
I was specific in my criticism. Your retort that 'you don't understand the necessity of middle management or "paper pushers"' is a common, just-so, casual dismissal that pops up all the time, and when it does, it bristles.
Right, which is why it's so odd when people respond to criticism about a business's practices with the institutional bias that I referred to.
[EDIT: FWIW, I don't agree with either you _or_ the person you're responding to about "the real reason we avoid unemployment". I don't think they're more right about it than you are, but they're aren't more wrong, either. Not really interested in discussing that, though. I am (was) narrowly interested in the existence or non-existence of paper pushers, and where they're tolerated.]
It seems to me that you're taking this too personally. First of all, the person you're responding to wasn't even talking to you or about you when they wrote the "Just because you don't understand..." line, so you're out here taking offense on behalf of everyone who posits the existence of unnecessary jobs. (#NotAllPeopleWhoPositUnnecessaryJobs?)
Taking "personal truth" out of the equation, as an impartial observer, reading the assertion on the part of a username on HN I don't recognize that useless jobs exist is insignificant evidence in support of that hypothesis - exactly the same as if I heard someone I don't know claiming they saw bigfoot or UFOs. To improve the situation, you could provide supporting details about the examples of useless jobs you have seen.
> It seems to me that you're taking this too personally.
Assume that I'm not. (I'm not, and it seems surprising to me that it seems that way.)
> "personal truth"
I don't recognize this as a term, and really, I'm just not interested in any discussion about the other things you've mentioned: usernames not recognized, who was talking to whom, advice about improving my situation, and so on. This is both too meta and in a direction that doesn't pique my curiosity.
> Assume that I'm not. (I'm not, and it seems surprising to me that it seems that way.)
Fine - maybe I misread simple annoyance as personal offense.
> I'm just not interested in any discussion about the other things you've mentioned: usernames not recognized, who was talking to whom, advice about improving my situation, and so on.
What I said wasn't really about any of those things, so let me try again.
Your response here
> > Just because you don't understand the necessity of middle management or "paper pushers" doesn't mean they're not necessary.
> This is presumptuous. Having worked in groups where I understood my job and the jobs of my coworkers who held the same position as me at least as well as they understood their jobs themselves: unnecessary paper pushers exist.
struck me as a thoroughly unproductive way to debate. You made a bare claim to have seen something that others allege to be rare. Obviously the fact that you have seen it is enough evidence for you, but it shouldn't move the needle on anyone else's state of belief. Therefore, IMHO, it's not a useful contribution.
When I said improve the situation, I was not giving "advice about improving [your] situation"; I meant improving the quality of discussion.
You decided to persist, but this is still too meta with respect to the actual topic at hand, and still not interesting. [And there's too much logical inconsistency (and blind hostility) here besides.] This is my last comment here.
This is presumptuous. Having worked in groups where I understood my job and the jobs of my coworkers who held the same position as me at least as well as they understood their jobs themselves: unnecessary paper pushers exist.
> As a rule, businesses exist to make a profit, and make gigantic efforts to eliminate unnecessary positions, such as mass layoffs after mergers.
People say stuff like this all the time—Paul Graham famously trotted it out as a retort to the existence of a gender pay gap—but it doesn't comport with observations. From some of my personal notes on this topic last week:
There's a widespread belief that capitalism seeks out efficiency. With most organizations being capitalist enterprises, so the belief continues, they are an extension of this. You can see this show up in arguments about the gender pay gap. If we could cut costs just by hiring women to do the same job, they say, then we would. The veracity of the claims about the size of the pay gap notwithstanding, the claim that corporations would seize the opportunity to cut costs like this doesn't jibe with reality. Corporations are not observed to be a perfect extension of the law of capitalist efficiency. A corporation as an entity is not a perfectly rational actor operating in its own self interest, following both from the irrationality of the people who make it up and from instances of where they do behave rationally operating in their own individual self interests, counter to the organization's.
There is hardly ever a Taylor-like figure [around].
... i.e., someone tasked with stamping out the sorts of inefficiency in the way that these arguments demand it is being addressed.
We need to coin some sort of shorthand akin "the Gell–Mann amnesia effect", where we comment upon the tendency of people to automatically ascribe e.g. competence and efficiency to institutions, on the basis that they are institutions, while ignoring immediately available evidence to the contrary.