What is really going on under the hood is this: in large companies, the vast majority of employees are unnecessary. They are kept on because having a lot of people underneath you in the org chart is a status symbol. The more people report to you, directly or indirectly (the latter being preferable because managing direct reports requires actual work) the more power and influence you have, and so people with a lot of people reporting to them tend to command the resources to allow them to accumulate more people who report to them. Actual productivity is a secondary consideration. Being docile and obedient are the primary qualifying factors because most employees are essentially pets for the powerful few, not much different from maintaining a ranch or an aviary or a stable of race horses.
After working in large corporations I only partially agree with this, if I take "unnecessary" to its literal meaning. It's impossible to keep everyone at a 80-90% busy rate at any large company just due to the inefficiencies a large system accrues, idling is embedded due to the many layers of communication, coordination requirements, etc.
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.
> It's impossible to keep everyone at a 80-90% busy rate at any large company just due to the inefficiencies a large system accrues, idling is embedded due to the many layers of communication, coordination requirements, etc.
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.
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.)
I agree with this. Maybe I've been very fortunate in choice of employers, but every company I've ever worked at, large FAANG to small startup, has had far more work in the queue than staff to do that work. Like MULTIPLES more: 4-10X as many bugs than staff available to fix. 4-10X as many possible features to implement than staff could possible do. So everyone has to prioritize, and the list of bugs and list of potential features always grows faster than it shrinks. People fight for headcount not just to grow their empire, but because there is so much work to do, and they (as managers) are accountable for getting that work done. Of course, not everyone is actually 100% utilized--there's some slack, but as you say, 80-90% utilization seems right. The vast majority of people don't just sit there, twiddling their thumbs for the majority of the time.
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?
Alphabet's Google and Facebook owner Meta had thousands of employees who don't do anything.
"There's nothing for these people to do — they're really — it's all fake work," he said. "Now that's being exposed, what do these people actually do, they go to meetings."
Google, he continued, had intentionally over-hired engineers and tech talent to stop them from moving to other companies, a strategy he described as "pretty coherent." But, he added, that meant engineers had been happy to "be entitled, sit at their desks, and do nothing."
You’re not wrong. But HNers have decided that their employers are terrible tyrants, companies are awful entities that are both efficiently Machiavellian but also incredibly stupid and unproductive, and managers and executives are just foolish people who work for status and have no idea how to do actual real work.
And yet, somehow, these companies have existed for decades and the only time they’ve died out is usually because of technological leaps implemented by a competitor that looks very much like them.
> People fight for headcount not just to grow their empire, but because there is so much work to do, and they (as managers) are accountable for getting that work done.
How does this square with a company like Google that is famous for having multiple teams competing with each other on the same product categories, ie the disaster that is their chat platform? Sure, there's work to do - because they're creating frivolous work intentionally. It's nothing but empire building. And the end result is a worse product!
I get that my topic is a bit of a tangent because you're talking mostly about IC productivity and the gist of my comment is on managerial incompetence. But ultimately my point is people are doing meaningless work and the system is designed for it. I've never worked somewhere that valued productivity over politics when it came time to promote people.
Even beyond ramping up a new project, it can be important for maintaining existing ones. If a service outage costs a company millions of dollars a minute, it can be worth it to keep a team around that can resolve the occasional outage a few minutes faster even if they have almost nothing to do the rest of the year.
>The more people report to you, directly or indirectly (the latter being preferable because managing direct reports requires actual work) the more power and influence you have
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.
that assumes the market is competitive: this is not always the case and is less and less so, every year that goes by. there are so many products out there that used over and over by the same companies for no other reason than it's too painful to switch.
Based on querying theory alone, there’s no way the nodes (people) in your organization are going to be fully utilized at all times without introducing other issues like making all the work factory like and repetitive and inflexible, or increasing latency (I forget the term, average time from a job entering the system to when it’s done) to ridiculous degrees
I did performative work for a while. The company I worked for was purchased by another company, a huge national company.
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.
It's a bit clickbaity and disingenuous to say "employees in Asia", when South Korea comes in at the bottom, and the difference between Singapore and France/UK and the rest is just a few percentage points on a small sample (What's the error on the sampling?)
I put sometimes a mechanical watch under my mouse too. I wish, I don’t need to do this at my next job. It’s bad, but the work of my last 2 years was dumped into thrash by clever managers.
But the best and most successful do #1 well and use the results from it to exaggerate or emphasise their work. Spend the first 60-70% of your day on the latter and the rest+afterwork doing work.
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.
Yeah, after seeing it first hand it triggered me so much that real talent was being hurt out purely on time submitted.
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.
I was coming here to say something similar. I couldn't wrap my head around the performative work nap that is prevalent in East Asia at first. "Just go home earlier, get a good night's sleep, you won't need to nap at work", but then it's not really about sleep.
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.
What makes it performative is that this type of nap is taken in a conspicuous spot, so you will be seen to be napping at work as apposed to finding some out of the way place. This is what struck me initially, not that people were napping at work, but where they were doing it.
I used to work for Huawei where taking a nap at your desk was the norm. If I'm taking ~15 minutes to recharge, why the hell would I waste any time searching for an out of the way place? And given that napping isn't frowned upon, there won't be any such places left because everyone would be doing it.
This is a bizzare take. The work nap prevalent in East Asia is taken post lunch. People feel dozey after a meal and a short rest is physically and mentally refreshing. Calling it performative is ridiculous.
I never claimed that every nap taken in East Asia was performative, just that performative naps are prevalent there. For instance much ink has been spilled about "inemuri" in Japan and all the related social dynamics that drive it.
One of the scary realizations of adulthood was how little work most white collar workers do and consequently how much they get paid to contribute nothing. After earning a PhD and being a "professional" for a while, I developed a deep respect for blue collar workers.
Yes, I wish there was a way to make it a social norm of everyone going through some month long ringer in a variety of positions like military, restaurant staff, and body-aching manual labor.
Universal conscription? (Okay, that's usually more than a month and technically only military, but its pretty easy to ibcorporate food service and body-aching manual labor, along with other stuff, under the umbrella of military service.)
> Performative work includes “spending a lot of time in meetings where ‘teams present achievements’ rather than making decisions or addressing issues,” said Derek Laney, Slack’s “technology evangelist” for Asia-Pacific.
I don't think it is either. Performative work to me is the compulsive self-debasing activity I engage in when there is line of sight to a superior member of the business hierarchy.
You can say it is neccesary, but presenting achievements is performance, therefore performative. Powerpoint theatrics are not a bad thing, unless you spend most if your time on it.
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.
Performative work is still very important work. It’s that which keeps those who actually matter happy, entertained, and feeling safe, secure, and comfortable. Dance monkey dance.
The thing a lot of organizations do not appreciate is the distinction between needed labour capacity versus needed daily labour output.
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.
I can't speak to other Asian countries, but in Singapore, it's frowned upon to leave the office before your boss leaves. You may be done with your work, but you don't leave until your boss has left.
Also, there's "kiasu" mentality - hyper competitive behavior in everything from work, school, etc.
