Feel like in America the game has become "how can I make the organization work for me" rather the other way around; we're a long way off from Kennedy's speech. Just fundamental misalignment of interests everywhere: PMs gaming JIRA, so-called "senior engineers" squashing anything that exposes their mediocrity and the fact that they're just punching JIRA tickets one paycheck to the next instead of modeling the problem, even engineers and consultants padding their resume in one org building keyword architectures as a launchpad for working somewhere else with a better salary. Everyone knows it, but its impolite/immature to point out the bullshit explicitly. Shut up, shit down, and listen to yet another round of empty hand wringing about values and culture at the all-hands meeting when the truth is there aren't any; delude ourselves we're doing something at all.
These infrastructure 'managers' don't strike me as any different. It's a blight on American culture and its only getting worse the bigger the inequality gap. Everyone's trying to find the parachute to jump out of the burning plane that's in freefall diving to the ground.
The (ultimately false) class antagonism narrative of /r/WSB that the game really is rigged is a fitting end to a decade that at the outset told everyone they could be a unicorn (or enjoy part of the spoils) if they could deliver a cash cow to elite investors if they only pulled up their sleeves and grinded through.
The Governor of Texas just got on Hannity to bad mouth a New Green Deal as people died in Texas cause no one cared enough to make sure the wind turbines worked in the cold.
> The Governor of Texas just got on Hannity to bad mouth a New Green Deal as people died in Texas cause no one cared enough to make sure the wind turbines worked in the cold.
And there in lies the problem.
From what I have read the gas turbines also failed as did the nuclear power plants, yet somehow the wind turbines are to blame.
The first step to fixing any problem is to first identify the actual cause of the problem.
The fact that all of these systems failed seems to indicate the whole system was not properly designed to work in cold weather.
So Hannity spouting his propaganda won't fix anything.
But just like Hannity, I too am just speculating.
What should happen is for the problem to be investigated by someone or some body with the qualifications to do the investigation. They produce a written report outlining the problems and outlining solutions. If someone is found to be negligent then actions need to be taken and those responsible held to account.
But good luck hoping to see that. Most governments try hard to hush up these sort of issues, rather fix them and I suspect the Texas government will be no different.
All of the power sources failed because in the de-regulation of the power grid[0] allowed looser operating temperature tolerances.
The point is, as you allude to, is the wind turbine is absolutely an easy narrative to "blame someone else" instead of "us" being the problem.
So, the current party in power, blames wind/green energy, which then effectively shrinks wind's scope overall, leaving the old infrastructure which is still inadequate.
The thing that frustrates all of us is - the general public is blind that the root problem was never solved. A cold snap like this won't happen in 10-20 years and by then all the politicians will have "blamed green, successfully squashed/fixed it all" and moved on claiming they won.
There needs to be a fight, investigations are the starting point for sure.
>the de-regulation of the power grid[0] allowed looser operating temperature tolerances.
Absolutely silly tolerances, mind you. Texas was colder in 1930.
> the wind turbine is absolutely an easy narrative to "blame someone else" instead of "us" being the problem.
It's not only an easy narrative. It's an easy picture. It's easy to imagine a wind turbine frozen stuck. It's harder to imagine how extreme cold affects, say, a nuclear power plant.
It's fundamentally populist because nobody has to explain how it works. It's also obviously wrong: there are wind turbines in Canada. It's the kind of thing that allows people to think they understand, without any deference to an authoritative source of information.
It's a low-trust theory that suggests a United States in transition to a low-trust society[1], and that's the worst part.
> It's harder to imagine how extreme cold affects, say, a nuclear power plant.
From what I can tell, there are only two nuclear power plants in Texas, providing about 2.5 GW of power. But one of them is currently shut down because of a problem with a feedwater pump:
> United States in transition to a low-trust society
Trust, like rainforests, is a resource that can be exploited, sold to the highest bidder, and destroyed. Leaving those who benefited from the externlities worse off.
You say "low-trust society" like it's a bad thing. And it probably is, at least the interpersonal trust that your reference cites. But it also makes the point that trust in government is much lower, which is much more deserved and less of a problem than interpersonal trust issues.
I wonder if there's any analogy to "zero-trust" in IT security[0] that seems to be all the rage now. Put another way, is it possible that the current situations could be a crucible that re-forms trust in a better way?
(Like building some sort of "trust but verify" culture, along with whatever technology and social institutions to facilitate.)
Sorry if that seems overly philosophical - just musing.
And yet Texas has built massive amounts of windmills with government subsidies. That’s a fun narrative for people on one side of the cultural divide, but not true.
Nahh... true politicians recognize what’s needed, but they are more than happy to run a narrative that suits them and their voters.
I mean, Texas has been leading in wind energy. If they really thought it was sissy energy would they have done that?
Just like Biden talked about student loan forgiveness and now we’re what? Less than a month post inauguration and he’s like “nah, we’re not doing that”.
Indeed. The Texas nuclear power stations are the only ones to solve the US problem for the next 100.000 years. The wind would blow nuclear over the whole mid east, straight to NY. Palo Verde or Diablo are not in such a superior position.
Once upon a time, black lives were important, every death of the pandemic was the personal kill count of the president..
There used to be hilarious mask debates.
Then the elections got over, and nobody gives a shit.. some would think the real root cause of the pain of these issues was actually just not being in power..
Reader, don't mind the musings of this spectators outside perspective of American politics.. I can't vote in the US, so for all practical purposes not human from an Americans perspective..
Your observation is bang on. Biden just had a town hall on CNN where he said minority communities are more concerned with black-on-black or hispanic-on-hispanic crime than they are police violence. Had his predecessor said such a thing? We'd never hear the end of it. But few even know this town hall even happened. [0]
Well, BLM has served its purpose, elections are over. Ofcourse he doesn't want to deal with the actual issues in any real way. I think if you get a black person to be president for 2 terms that would solve everything ;)
You're being downvoted because you mischaracterized (I'm being generous with that word) what Biden said. You might refocus your attention on the word "just".
And complaining about downvotes, particularly legitimate uses of the downvote, is frowned on here.
I heard that its because Texas is one of the few (perhaps only) states that can't just get power from other grids. That, and many other reasons, but if they are set up in such a way that prevents them from leveraging other grids....woof.
> The (ultimately false) class antagonism narrative of /r/WSB that the game really is rigged is a fitting end to a decade that at the outset told everyone they could be a unicorn (or enjoy part of the spoils) if they could deliver a cash cow to elite investors if they only pulled up their sleeves and grinded through.
WSB is a subset of Reddit's bigger issue: A mix of populist ideologies and misinformation. The GME pump was fueled by misunderstandings that people could get free money and hurt corporations by pumping up the price of a stock. Anyone with a basic understanding of investing could see that the stock price was coming back down, but instead Reddit went all-in on the "diamond hands" narrative that encouraged people to hold forever and blamed conspiracy theories for the inevitable fall of the stock price.
The irony is that the barriers to entry for well-paying jobs are lower than ever before. Traditional trade jobs like plumbing or welding pay well these days, and safety standards have never been higher. Breaking into tech is as simple as loading up some free tutorials online and practicing away at any number of free websites. In 2021, you don't even need to live near these companies to get the job.
Reading the front page of Reddit, you'd be convinced the world has never been worse and we're on the verge of societal collapse. Combine this with politicians eager to fan the flames of discontent and promise easy solutions (much like this article) and of course people will be angry and disillusioned. The social media effect works to amplify the negative and dismiss the positive.
> The social media effect works to amplify the negative and dismiss the positive.
You're not wrong here, I use to look at TikTok to fill the time and my god have my emotions become more balanced since deleting that app once I realized how it was making me feel.
But this is another good example of how we're beset from all sides by forces attempting to extract value that will never be returned or re-distributed, just a bigger mess made left for the rest of us
20 years ago, televised news got people to watch by teasing outrage or fear stories. "You'll never believe what this politician said...". They did it because it worked.
Social media has evolved into people replicating that same behavior. The more outrageous or rage-inducing the content, the more engaged the viewer.
I don't put 100% of the blame on social media platforms, though. We all need to accept some responsibility for what we consume. As much as we like to blame "the algorithm", it's not very different than nicotine in cigarettes or the sugar in donuts. Placing all of the blame on social media companies almost enables the negative behavior more, by pretending that it's entirely out of our control.
> Breaking into tech is as simple as loading up some free tutorials online and practicing away at any number of free websites. In 2021, you don't even need to live near these companies to get the job.
Uh no, that’s populist. Tackling hard problems remains something for the researchers and the super-committed.
Hacking together an online version of some existing social structure is indeed easy, but then you need the right connections to play the game
> Reading the front page of Reddit, you'd be convinced the world has never been worse and we're on the verge of societal collapse. Combine this with politicians eager to fan the flames of discontent and promise easy solutions (much like this article) and of course people will be angry and disillusioned. The social media effect works to amplify the negative and dismiss the positive.
Which makes their call that we're on the verge of societal collapse kind of true, but not for the reasons they thought, right?
Reddit is big, but it's still a social media bubble.
The general sentiment and worldview of Reddit doesn't represent the general sentiment of society as a whole.
Step outside of social media, where the worst problems around the world are piped 24/7 into our senses, and you realize that the average person is still doing fairly well.
That really depends on what your conception of an average person is?
I'm not sure it's even useful to look at an average person, vs the bottom 10%? Your average person could be doing fine even with slavery taking up a reasonable portion of people
> The Governor of Texas just got on Hannity to bad mouth a New Green Deal as people died in Texas cause no one cared enough to make sure the wind turbines worked in the cold.
Of course even the wind turbine issue is a canard given that Texas installed a regime that ensured no reserve capacity. Point the finger at wind turbines is absurd since wind only account for 10% of the Texas grid, and Germany isn’t having blackouts even though they also have frozen turbines right now.
This craven scapegoating and deflection when there’s a crisis going on that, which every economist agrees is a policy failure to properly incentive reserve capacity, really pisses me off.
Yeah there's probably a wealth of people better informed than I on the matter, I merely wanted to point out an extreme case of the disavowed negligence running rampant from the top of our society on down
People who belive in government are equally bad. New York has shorted maintenance on the subway for years with Democrats in power. (Democrats for years have been the government belivers, at least when the Republicans are incomptent they are proving their point )
Grift (spelling?) happens without proper oversight and auditing.
It's said that the 4th (agency, branch?) of the US government was the press. Perhaps the destruction of a press sufficiently funded and driven only by the need to produce things people want to read, rather than entertainment people will pay to read or see, is a large factor in the dysfunction we see in the near term.
I would really love if the Government Accountability Office and some other organizations that produced reports for the library of congress...
1) By default had to publish to the public domain, with the report accessible in the public library stacks (mirrored everywhere).
2) Published a yearly report, with pretty color charts, breaking down the IRS input, which funds that goes towards, and where all of that goes (until it hits classified seal blocks; annotating when the classification is re-reviewed for extension and also when the current sunset to auto-unseal is scheduled.)
3) Also a report of all of the reports produced. (an index) Including those under seal, even if the titles are also redacted.
4) Could be directed to produce more reports by some form of citizen's initiative (maybe change.org?)
5) Should also have offices per state, mega-city (metro region), and county.
To bring this full circle back to the article, the inability to build and maintain things is a recent and uniquely American problem. The fifth largest economy in the world can’t build a train (California HSR), but much smaller countries can. New York’s maintenance and construction costs are a laughingstock with no obvious causes.[0]
Obviously something is seriously wrong, and everything needs to be looked at, but the defeatist idea that “Well, it can’t be done, and if we do it, we’d just screw it up, so don’t bother.” Only in America is there one party that refuses to look at entrenched interests, and another that sabotages things in order to make a point, or more recently to simply “trigger” the other party.
I can tolerate incompetence, but really can’t stand sabotage.
The problem isn't unique to the US. We.are the worst, but the UK isn't much better, and even France has issues to work on. Spain has great construction, but their opperations are questionable. Assian countries also have variations. There is no reason India should be so expensive to build in.
Competition between parties can only produce better results when there are at least two parties who are semi-sincerely trying. The awfulness of Republicans is a license for Democrats to let down their own standards to the bare minimum above that.
I know others have mentioned this but to make it explicit: the idea that the wind turbines are responsible for the outages is both false, and being widely spread intentionally to increase public distrust of renewable energy. I'm not suggesting you're doing that, but you should be aware.
Text quoted as a public policy PSA, if you want to see the full story and picture the link is above.
"""
"In Texas today... a helicopter, using fossil fuels, spraying de-icer, made with fossil fuels, to de-ice a wind turbine, manufactured using fossil fuels, that is supposed to produce clean energy without using fossil fuels," one Facebook post says.
But the picture actually shows ice being removed from a wind turbine in Sweden, using hot water.
BBC News traced the image back to a 2016 report published by Swedish company Alpine Helicopter, demonstrating "airborne de-icing solutions" for wind turbines.
"""
This bit is true, though, and they are also erected and maintained using fossil fuels (among other things). That much should be obvious, and pretending that this insight is somehow a new or shocking idea is over the top pretentious.
There are people full time doing lifetime analyses on these things, and have been for several decades. This is engineering people doing engineering work. Anyone can read these reports and find out exactly where the break even points are.
This is taken into account when planning large infrastructure projects like wind power parks.
The inflammatory wording of the source misinformation was designed to elicit exactly such a response.
Probably some hydrocarbons are presently used as lubricants or plastics somewhere in the design, but those needn't be the long term portions of it, and the energy supplied to forge and shape the materials and components could be provided by anything feeding the grid.
Some people see everything from the perspective of the "survival of the fittest". Seeing everything through the lenses of competition, domination, opportunism and a "winner takes all" mentality.
However, when you see opportunism at scale, you understand it doesn't work. In a society based on opportunism, you will not feel safe, and you won't be able to trust others. You will not want to spend money making your property look better, because as soon as your property looks better than the rest, it will be robbed. You will not want to spend money on nice clothes, because as soon as you look too fancy you will be mugged. If you decide to be honest and have a job, some random guy will appear each month and ask you for a large portion of your salary. Nobody will care about others, so public spaces will be dirty and lack maintenance. And that will drive off investment and tourism, making everyone poor. Would you like to live in a place like that? No.
How do societies arrive to the situation described above? By making everyone believe they're better than average, and that they're entitled to everything without ever giving back anything. A lack of humility.
Collaboration is necessary, period. No matter how much people try to convince you that collaboration is for losers... it's not. If everyone does their part in our society, everyone can enjoy the rewards. Clean public spaces, a culture of respect, safety and prosperity.
And that translates to the workplace as well. If everyone is nice, respectful, helpful and altruistic (while still making each other accountable), everyone will have a better time, everyone will be more productive and, unless your CEO is a jerk that takes all the rewards for themselves, everyone will be better off.
And that translates to engineering as well. Work as a team, support each other, treat each other with respect, don't leave tech debt behind, don't try to game the system. Create a culture of merit.
To what worries me the most is of learned helplessness.
I’ve come to accept most of what you mentioned just because no-one else seems to care, why should I?
NOTE: AFAIK them problem wasn’t in wind turbines, someone said renewables actually overdelivered on what was budgeted for them.
>To what worries me the most is of learned helplessness. I’ve come to accept most of what you mentioned just because no-one else seems to care, why should I?
Yeah I'm definitely at this point right now five years into this and this would be the import of my comment really, just, why does no one care? Cause when no one cares about the whole, there's no hope of collective, rational engagement of problem-solving. The Hannity/Texas bit could be proabably be further fact-checked.
But perhaps it all comes down to what Chépe said on _Narcos_, "being an adult means accepting things you wish weren't true"
Edit: originally wrote "there's hope of rational engagement"
For it to be worth it to care, not only does the problem need to be significant (it is), but your ability to influence it also must be (it isn't). American systems are brutally ossified and trying to change that will take millions of lifetimes of sacrifice.
Because most people just want a check every two weeks. No one wants to rock the boat. Office workers, even tech workers, are so removed from the result of their labor, it's hard to get motivated about anything except a nicer title and more money.
> Office workers, even tech workers, are so removed from the result of their labor, it's hard to get motivated about anything except a nicer title and more money.
I think there were some Germans who called this feeling “alienation“.
I agree about the learned helplessness. I observe it, and then I feel it creeping up myself when I see too many people around me have been bit. But no, we’ve got to find a plausible explanation for mass learned helplessness or we're part of the problem.
My learned helplessness was just to look at what is going on in the US, ask myself why I'm still putting up with it, and then to leave the country. Unfortunately most people don't have that option, though.
> The Governor of Texas just got on Hannity to bad mouth a New Green Deal as people died in Texas
Everyone's out here bashing him for this, but how do we know that's not what his voters really want? I mean, the constant stream of culture war is what matters to Republican voters far more than any actual policy outcomes, so he's doing what his voters insist on him doing. I'm sure there are Republicans out there shivering in the dark listening to that and cheering him on for sticking it to the environmentalists who they believe are responsible for this.
It is, in fact, very difficult to tell what the people of Texas really want, because their districts have been gerrymandered to hell and gone for decades now. It's nearly impossible for districts outside the very dense cities to elect a Democrat without some sort of massive shift because of the absolutely absurd ways the districts have been constructed, despite how many actual Democratic voters live there.
It would be nice if the "free speech" complainers bothered to defend something other than racism some time. Nobody on the right was talking about that when FOSTA/SESTA swept across the US internet.
Seemingly every time someone pops up with the free speech defence, it's in favour of slurs of some kind. It's really eroded support for the abstract concept.
We already hate it enough to pair it with capitalism, where people are forced to work all hours of the day instead of getting to sit down, think, and discuss. Charging for education too, is hatred of free speech, since you gate the tools of expression behind wealth
Ditto with not providing safe spaces for people to discuss without their oppressors present.
If we can make some tradeoffs for freedom speech, we can make others
I for one don't necessarily care about free speech itself, but the benefits it brings for ensuring that new ideas are proliferated and people at the bottom of society aren't forgotten about. Free speech is an implementation detail, rather than a requirement
My org has started work on psychological safety based on “The Fearless Organization.” I think it might be a route toward an antidote for the delusions you describe.
Not yet. Just attended the first presentation two weeks ago. The org has been big on psychological safety for a while although I don't see it much since IT is ancillary, not the main biz line.
I worked with one guy who actually tried, on his yearly review, to pass of the number of Jira tickets he completed as one of his primary accomplishments. Anyone want to take a wild guess at the percentage of tickets he closed were tickets he created?
If he was finding valid issues, filing them, and solving them, that's not exactly as malicious as it sounds.
Yeah, I know people could try to game the system with small tickets, but that kind of thing is obvious to any manager who isn't completely asleep at the wheel.
Frankly, as a manager I loathe when employees try to tear each other down or diminish each others' accomplishments. Writing self-reviews and listing personal achievements is difficult, particularly for junior employees. At least this guy tried to put some metrics behind his work. Presumably the manager wasn't so clueless as to take everything at face value.
> as a manager I loathe when employees try to tear each other down or diminish each others' accomplishments
Absolutely agree, and in my job I would address it with more sophistication. My comment was somewhat simplified, perhaps even flippant, for this context.
Did you know this because he was reporting to you?
I find people who are constantly measuring some metric they're doing well on (and this metric always changes) and then making sure you know about it are covering for some sort of performance problem.
Maybe... or they are using metrics from above as drivers.
To create and monitor Jira ticket counts, there has the be Jira tickets for management to pay attention to and compare against other employees.
Maybe the employee is gaming the numbers... but there has to be a game to play - and this no different than basing performance reviews on bugs solved or LOC numbers.
management is probably looking at those numbers? Going to be people who change their focus to reflect that attention from above.
For me, it's when the metric they're proud of is always changing from quarter to quarter, and it's rarely the one we agree to focus on. Like they make a basket of six metrics and usually at least one of them is doing well, but never the same one consistently, so they're always talking about the great performance on whatever metric randomly turned up well this month.
It's kind of like the inverse problem of management obsessing too much over particular metrics that don't properly capture the bigger picture, and can also be gamed.
I agree 100%, but in this case there was no one who mattered measuring tickets closed. At least the group I worked with knew enough to avoid that kind of fallacy. In general, Goodhart's and Campbell's laws both apply.
I understand that there were likely recurring problems with him.
But, people opening jira issues on atomic tasks, refactoring todos, found bugs are generally doing good thing. Yes, you can keep it also on papers around or in .txt file, but if you dont keep it somewhere, it gets lost. And people who dont open jira tickets for these, basically never get around remembering these need to be done.
Also, people who split larger tasks into smaller ones that they track are less likely to forget some aspect of tasks.
Jira is just one way for an individual to track his or her tasks, and TBH it's such terrible software, I wouldn't use it. But, if someone wanted to show off how many deck chairs they re-arranged on the Titanic, it's a good way to track work done.
Sure. Unless there's a generous bonus on quality of work or project completion, the only rational way to play the game as a random employee is to maximize the gain and minimize the effort.
This is a consequence of society breaking down into a collection of selfish individuals, which I think is largely a result of economic theories turning into self-fulfilling prophecies. Nobody is going to take pride in their work when it's viewed as nothing more than a selfish and cynical bargain by society at large.
But what if your company ultimately acts as a selfish individual, too? Perhaps it even has a fiduciary duty to do so?
There's a good argument that most venture backed software companies are exactly "a selfish and cynical bargain".
It's been a good few years since I've met a senior technical staffer at a 'successful' Bay company who genuinely thinks they're "making the world a better place".
EDIT: Not that I disagree with your broader point that selfishness is an undesirable characteristic for an individual, society or ideology. But it seems inappropriate to attribute the problem to ICs or their managers.
This isn't actually true, but there's a lot of people invested in interpreting Ford vs Dodge that way. Pretty much the only thing you can't do is directly hand investor money to rank and file employees. Everything else can be done just fine if the management wants and is prepared to put up a decent cover story.
Yeah, the companies are what kicked this into overdrive, I think. I mean if you want to get at the historical and philosophical roots of this problem it's an enormous discussion that won't fit here, but a few broad strokes worth bringing up:
1. We're obviously materially better off than any point in history.
2. Much of modern economic theory is built on the idea of selfish individuals pursuing their own interest. It's clearly been effective in a material sense (see #1).
3. Modern companies are obviously better than some of the obscene abuses of early capitalism.
All of that said, it seems like there was a time when a person's work was connected to and respected by the society around them. You could argue that was always a sucker's game, but I don't think so. Human beings are wired to operate in social communities, and we take a lot of our cues from the people around us respecting and admiring our work.
Many companies at one point followed that model. You were "part of the team/family/whatever." What you contributed was valued. That made it possible to take pride in it. You might work your entire career at one company.
That model is obviously totally dead, and I think the companies fired the first shot. Once workers became chips in a game instead of fellow human beings, they were bound to play the game right back. So here we are, trying to scrounge out some sort of structural meaning to the work we do, when it's obvious to most people that nobody around us really cares or respects what we do. It's just "let's churn this out so we can all get paid." That's a poor way to motivate human beings and I think contributed to a lot of our malaise.
> That model is obviously totally dead, and I think the companies fired the first shot.
I'm not sure it was "companies" in general. I think a major cause was the shift in stock ownership in public companies from individuals to mutual funds and other financial institutions, over the decades after WWII.
From the standpoint of a company that actually wants to build lasting value, you want your public stock owners to be individuals, investing on long time horizons for things like their retirement. Then you can implement longer term plans and strategies without having to worry as much about immediate returns.
But if most of your stock is owned by mutual funds, then the fact that the individuals whose retirement savings are in those mutual funds are investing on a long time horizon doesn't help you; the funds themselves are looking at your short term returns, and if those don't measure up, they'll sell your stock and buy some other company's.
In short, a system that was set up with the best of intentions, to help people diversify their retirement savings and earn better average returns on them, has had the unintended consequence of putting Darwinian selection pressure on individual companies to prioritize short term returns over everything else. Which in turn has led to the demise of the "work for the company your whole career and the company will take care of you" model; no company can afford to do that in the new selective environment.
> All of that said, it seems like there was a time when a person's work was connected to and respected by the society around them. You could argue that was always a sucker's game, but I don't think so.
I think that you are idealizing historical societies here. Yes, society and values of people in it change. But that supposed connection and respect was never guaranteed to all that many people. No matter which period you talk about, past societies had large social, interpersonal and cultural problems of exactly this kind.
you would need to overcome an Occam's razored hypothesis like:
- management largely has asymmetry when it comes to remote knowledge worker output, especially high performers (contrast assembly line: easy to flag slackers)
- we don't have equity or input on direction (contrast worker cooperatives)
- and we're getting paid a lot of money to "hack" on problems (contrast e.g. whalers, dangerous as hell)
so yeah, i'm gonna let y'all rationalize all this, but i think it's just a great time to be a US computer laborer. won't last forever, but you can use your immense savings (you ARE saving, right?) for all that good stuff whenever you want or are forced out.
I would add the reflexive turn in consumer culture from the late 60s on (Bob Dylan, The Graduate, Cool Hand Luke, Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now, etc) manufactured the emotional appeal of existential individualism and the absurdity of believing in instutitions and collectivity.
We're basically in the "Beautiful Souls" phase of Hegel's Philosophy of History
Don't you see the other end? It's not game-theoretically optimal group cooperation, it's memes-as-agents, caring about individuals as much as we care about individual cells in our bodies.
Off topic, but note that Kennedy's speech about asking what you can do for your country was about getting a generation of youth to go fight in Vietnam. People recast it as though he was Gandhi-like for saying it.
I disagree slightly - people aren’t trying to make the organization work for them (in the sense of changing it), but rather, “wow the system is messed up so I’ll do what it asks for even if it makes no sense”.
> I connect this with solipsism, because this failure to acknowledge is paired with severe incuriosity about the rest of the world.
I don't know if solipsism is the right word, but the second part of that sentence ("severe incuriosity about the rest of the world") is definitely a huge part of dysfunctional / mediocre organizations. I've interfaced with a lot (think low-level government bureaucracy in developing countries), and you often hear things like:
* "X is impossible" -> "How come this other person or organization has been able to do it?" -> "Nope, impossible!" -> "But what if we tried Y?" -> "Nope, impossible!"
This so-called "impossibility" is often because someone tried something and failed years ago, and so a huge part of possibility is now impossible via an immutable, sweeping generalization. No curiosity to revisit that assumption, no willingness to question if it's wrong. No willingness to consider whether times have changed, or whether someone else has figured out something we haven't. No willingness to experiment.
What I've found recently is that the thing is impossible within the scope of the bureaucracy we're working in. For example, it's impossible to get this 3rd party hardware working in another 3rd party's network because none of the people who understand the product are being given access to the system in the ways needed to figure out what's going wrong. It's impossible to build a particular feature because that part of the tech stack is officially another team's territory, or because the process to approve the new feature hasn't itself been approved yet.
It's not necessarily incuriousity or even really fear of change. It's job security. You have a giant organization that's built for an industry at a point in time and adopting to change likely requires rewiring your entire hierarchy and turning over a lot of staff. That's a hard pill to swallow. Made much harder if your workforce is heavily unionized.
Possibly, but that ends up looking a little different. Its more like learned helplessness. "X is possible, but we could never do it." That's different than "X is literally impossible".
The role of "Management" is supposed be the oversight and allocation of human resources and other assets towards the completion of the org's stated goals.
This is the one thing that *never* seems to happen.
What does happen consistently is that management simply gatekeeps between two major classifications of subordinates, climbers and the productive.
Making sure to 'partner' with the climbers in order to share credit for their faux accomplishments and make sure that the productives stay right where they are to keep the machine from completely exploding before that manager can move up and on.
Bad management and truly poor leadership in general is just pervasive in public and private institutions.
> The role of "Management" is supposed be the oversight and allocation of human resources and other assets towards the completion of the org's stated goals.
Not really. In theory, management should be about growing your team member and maximizing the team's output. There are many ways to do so, and of course many disfunctional (sub)organizations where it is mostly about "playing the game".
Good management is hard, and indeed in many cases, doing the right thing is harder than as an IC. There is definitely some BS involved in any setup. But having a positive impact on your report's career is really a wonderful thing, that beats any project I worked on as a coder.
If you're a good engineer and good employee then you're not getting fired, but you're not getting promoted either. Welcome to being a senior engineer for the remainder of your career. Floating from one organization to the next with different levels of ineptitude above you. You pick up bigger checks and more skills. The only cost is your life.
This sounds very negative, but to be fair it's probably a lot more than the grand majority of people get for their life. Especially if the work is interesting to you.
entire blogs have been written about this, but the easiest way is to never, ever cross someone (to include embarrassing, etc) with power. that includes compromising social/team situations as well.
that means that even if the scrum lord is a complete fool, the staffing choices made by your boss are horrible, your team is the worst, and you hate node.js but have to use it, just do your tickets and keep moving. do not suggest big "improvements" or things to "think about" as they will flag you as a class of person that is a potential rival or insubordinate, which may bode horribly for you. keep engaged but lightly so: no heroism.
and trust me, if you're asking this question, you have shown you are not prepared to go toe to toe with "them" on their turf, so don't even try. you will get annihilated. as an engineer you probably aren't sensitive to how power dynamics manifest in day to day interactions - that's why you /must/ lay low and see what's up, despite any drive to do otherwise.
And if you're like me, you never follow this advice. It's probably not in your DNA. And if you're like me, you've probably never had a management position. And if you're like me, you've never seen much change take place. So maybe be more like what this person said and less like me.
I struggle with that too. What gets me is that these places are such a shitshow that it’s a net negative for everyone: it ducks for customers because they get shitty software, late. It sucks for engineers and everyone else because you’re always working quick and dirty, always in an emergency, always stressed. What kills me is that we know ways to make things better and more relaxed for everyone with little to no OT required: fix bugs before new features, automated tests, code reviews, well specced features/tickets... but nope, the moment you try and use these tools to get better outcomes at a lower human and financial cost you become public enemy number one.
I have not been able to keep a job longer than 18 months because this drives me nuts and I eventually have to quit and start somewhere else until I quit again out of frustration and exhaustion.
I dunno, generally you can find different jobs. I was at a FAANG for five years, and it was incredibly good for years 1-3. Over years 4-5 it became more and more political, to the point where this kind of crap started happening.
I left, bounced around two other companies and am now back in a place that reminds me of the early days of FAANG.
If you hate what you need to do in a job, start looking for another one, and make sure that you like talking to all the people who interview you. Every time I've broken this rule, I've regretted it.
Your name says disgruntledphd. I had two PhD advisors quit on me and go to worse schools after stringing me along about working for them (ie giving me low quality projects they themselves didn’t believe in so they could make it look like they were advising me while they polished their grants and looked for jobs elsewhere).
Ok you win. My hat off to you. Even if I include supervisor that quit on my previous PhD attempt (I worked in industry in between) and my current grantless supervisor who would have happily graduated me with a copy of his last student’s project with some numbers changes if I hadn’t put my foot down and insisted on my own project. And the fact that my school strongly discourages examiners unless the supervisor wants them.
This kind of attitude is just as unhealthy as the sociopathic management style it assumes is universal. It’s hard to hire good software engineers. You have more power to leave toxic situations than you might think.
This is an excellent article and spot on. One of the things we have yet to achieve in "the west," as it were, is to create a viable feedback mechanism that improves the functioning or efficiency of a bureaucracy rather than optimizing for tenure.
I ran into it early on when I was trying to pry costs out of the San Jose light rail agency. It is so frustrating.
Early in my career, I worked for a company that was run by the British. The CEO was a fairly classic "toff." Erudite, aloof, sarcastic and remote.
The management was terrible.
At that time, TQM was a new buzzwürd du jour, and the company decided to do a TQM exercise that involved the CEO, sitting down for "frank and open" conversations with employees.
This was a data processing company. The product was engineering. I was a [fairly junior] software engineer.
During our "fireside chat," he asked us to mention the problems that we saw with the way management was working.
Most gave mealy-mouthed drivel that amounted to "Everything you're doing is fine. No need to change."
Then it got to me. I mentioned that, from where I sat, engineers were treated as "second-class citizens," despite being the bread and butter of the company. Managers were treated as exalted, flawless beings (I was probably a bit -but not much- more polite. It was a long time ago). I indicated that all we really needed was a tiny bit of respect.
What I do remember, is him, taking off his glasses, which was always considered an awful sign, and admitting that he did, indeed think of engineers as "second-class citizens." Absolutely not a word, indicating he considered that a problem.
The TQM exercise didn't survive much longer, after that, and quelle surprize, nothing changed.
> and admitting that he did, indeed think of engineers as "second-class citizens."
Lol that's classic. TBH though I think I prefer an old school British manager that will tell you the truth instead of an American one bullsh*tting you. Maybe he revised his view or took some of your ideas on.
In the US, our bureaucracies seem to attract some of the least intelligent people who have no interest in improving their institutions, just in riding the gravy train forever. I think that this is an outcome of how we treat all bureaucrats as equal. There are no entrance exams, or university -level courses for being a bureaucrat. There's no national standard. There's no pride or recognition in being a good bureaucrat, and few if any consequences of being a mediocre one. IMO it seems like a problem with what the US views is the acceptable structure of government, with many overlapping state and federal agencies and endless finger-pointing. There's rarely a "the buck stops here" moment, and so no need to ever improve. If you're familiar with the bozo theory, basically the entire bureaucracy is already full of bozos and thus irredeemable.
Being a bureaucrat in the US doesn’t pay especially well, probably because US taxpayers are price conscious in a sort of penny-wise-pound-foolish way. (In most states the highest paid public official is the coach of the football team of the flagship public university.)
Unfortunately this gets (partially) offset by job security and a pension. So there’s a very strong incentive to not rock the boat. And to let your buddies’ misfeasance or malfeasance slide because they’re only a few years away from retirement.
Ideally we would trade of higher pay for more accountability and reward some degree of risk taking.
Instead what happens is some kind of inevitable high-profile failure happens, a bunch of rules are put in place, and funding is reduced. I don’t know that there are any easy ways to get from where we are now to a better-functioning system. It seems like at some point we have to penalize opportunity costs of not taking risks or learning from other organizations.
Direct pay may be so-so, but indirect pay is stellar. Look at how most everyone in Congress & Senate become significantly richer during their tenure, how frequently bureaucrats get hired as high level management in the industries they were overseeing, etc
There is an exam for some positions [1], and others have many months of training (think 3 letter agencies) and extremely competitive application processes.
Other positions receive a ton of applicants because they are a "gravy train" (e.g. they have great benefits, great work-life balance, and a stable pension). So they are competitive. That said, it is very hard to get fired, but is is part of the draw that attracts a lot of applicants.
The competition has driven an increase in education in the public sector, with many people getting Master's and PhDs for positions that might not need them as a differentiator among the pool of applicants. So no, while there isn't some broad standard exam if you want to work for the US Gov't, it's not a free for all of knuckle draggers.
None of this surprises me. I've worked for a federal contractor for the last year and I am not impressed with management at all. It has to be one of the worst run projects I've ever seen. It's so bad that if other federal contracts look this way that I question what chance this government actual has. Some days I sit back and wonder how much Uncle Sam (and me and you) is paying for this ineptitude. On a personal level, it makes me wonder what I am doing wrong where I am clearly more capable than this individual, yet I am stuck under them trying to clean up their messes. It would be better if this person did zero work instead of the little work they do. I hope this project is an outlier.
The managers the author describes are enforcers of the status quo. Their role even if they will never admit it is to keep the gravy train flowing until it eventually dies of neglect. This has happened in two companies I worked for. One was a major airline who could not care less about customer service. The other was a construction company whose sheer incompetence was off the charts. One example was that a Director was fired after he and his team of consultants laid a huge pile of crap. It was discovered that the project manager he hired only previous work experience was as a hair stylist and she was in charge of a multi million dollar fiasco. It was unreal.
> This gets more important the more complex a project gets. It is possible, for example, to build high-speed rail between Boston and Washington for a cost in the teens of billions and not tens, let alone hundreds, but not a single person involved in any of the present effort can do that
With bold claims of being able to build high-speed rail at fractions of the cost of official estimates, I expected the author to be somehow trained in large-scale construction or other civic issues. From their bio, it appears they are a pure mathematician who took up a side interest in urban issues.
While American (and a handful of other countries) do have unreasonably high construction costs for transit projects, I doubt the cost issue can be reduced to a simple problem with complacent middle management. I also seriously doubt that we can fix it all by simply swapping in new managers who promise to do it cheaper.
If we're going to be serious about this, we need to examine why American costs are so much higher than other countries, rather than simply taking costs out of context from other countries with very different infrastructure, geographical, and regulatory situations.
> If we're going to be serious about this, we need to examine why American costs are so much higher than other countries, rather than simply taking costs out of context from other countries with very different infrastructure, geographical, and regulatory situations.
That is precisely what Alon is doing. They probably have the most comprehensive comparative database of transit project costs, and they have actually drilled down into the line item budgets to figure out why some projects are so bloody expensive.
The author has been looking into this for years. The problem is of course complex.
However in the end there are two possible problems : a fundamental difference, or bad management. New York has more complex rock and slightly higher wages vs Spain, thus fundamentally it should cost about 1.2x more to build in new York, but we have direct comparisons so we.know new York is about 7x more expensive.
> we need to examine why American costs are so much higher than other countries
I read a paper on the cost of building tunnels. I remember two factors. The percentage cost of labor is higher than you might expect. And labor costs more in the US. And the US bids out contracts to place the risk if something goes wrong on the contractor. End result, fewer bids by only the largest contractors. And contractors pad their bids so they won't lose money no matter what goes wrong.
There is a passage in Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver where a noble describes the absurd cost of moving timber across France to shipyards.
Each petty aristocrat along the route levies a percentage tax on the shipment; the result is that a shipment must always be greater than 100% of itself because that is the effective net tax rate.
I did a trip to NY last year, exactly 10 years after my first. What struck me is how little things have changed, I had the feeling a lot of infrastructures are outdated, comparing to other places I've lived or been (Europe, China, East Asia). I didn't have a sense of modernity at all.
It's just my personal observation, but I wonder if others share this view?
Yep. America feels like a "has been" for the most part. Short-termism and debt servicing woes has ensured there is nothing new happening.
Oh wait, there's still some development happening. Razing of woods and praires for more cookie cutter housing still happens quite often but even that appears to be slowing.
> All of this is possible, it just requires elected officials who have the ambition to take risks to effect tangible change rather than play petty office politics every day.
Airline crash investigation, medical training. These all show we can extract best practise and identify improvements.
Have open reviews on everything. How did that year long project go? Was it properly thought out in first place? we're expectations matched with funding?
We can improve.
Edit: (Good) Journalism is a rough proxy for this mechanism - and one could make a case for countries that have better free press have better results (and that's not just limited to dictatorships - compare say US press to say Norway). Anyway - why do we leave such an important jobs to haphazard civilian publishers ?
The operative problem is that usually the primary output of an investigation is blame, and the primary method of improvement is punishing the people who are to blame. It's retributive justice as process improvement, and that's directly at odds with proper root cause analysis and process improvement.
Which is why air crash investigations are a good model - they don't often blame the pilots (solely) and have the force to implement fixes (mostly because federal agencies have sway over Boeing and the large US market).
But it has worked well for a very long time even if 737-Max suggests it's weakening.
Management has little to do with these types of issues. The Governor appoints the heads of the various state agencies and these people then hire their own cronies into key management roles. As a group, they protect and enable whoever it is that's is funding the Governor's campaign and hiring his or her relatives and cronies. Whether it's purchasing or maintenance contracts, there's a reason those managers are doing what they are doing and it's not stupidity.
Bad managers == unaccountable managers. If decision makers aren’t liable for decisions, they tend to get worse.
There is been a serious misunderstanding circulating around the office for as long as I can remember - management isn’t the same as leadership, no matter how many times someone is referred to as “senior leadership”.
Well unfortunately for humanity, people who are "curious learners and experts" are most of the time bad managers :)
But the way this works over the long term is there is a cycle...a sort of ebb and flow of who gets in and out of authority positions.
The Novelty Seekers/Curious/Neurotic personality types are quite bad at anything as boring as herding cats day in day out for years and years. It just drives them nuts. The Conscientiousness personality types love it. Its what they do best and it works out great with problems that have known solutions. Its when problems get more complex/ambiguous where curiosity and imagination matter that they start blundering and looking incompetent, and thats when the doors open for the neurotics to reenter the arena. This is where they shine. After they find imaginative solutions if you keep them incharge of day to day ops they start blundering away too.
'Well unfortunately for humanity, people who are "curious learners and experts" are most of the time bad managers'
Why do you say that? All my best managers have loved to learn, and been expert in some areas. They just -also- were sufficiently self aware to recognize that having the people under them all be out learning things, and owning the decision, was far more efficient than them trying to learn and become an expert, and then dictating decisions. You need the latter to be good; I'd argue the former is entirely orthogonal (except maybe being an added benefit, in being able to recognize who is going to be aggressively learning).
MOST work involves exploit, as in once your scout finds a gold mine on the map what do you do with him?
Do you send him off to go look for new ones or do you make him mine manager and task him with hiring people who spend the whole day digging.
The more experience a person gains doing one thing (explore) or the other (exploit), the harder it is for them to switch when conditions change.
A good explorer has a itch to constantly explore. A good mine manager knows how to sit in one place and keep the spice flowing. You can find people who have a mix but they will always be outclassed by specialists in both camps.
Its always hard when the time come to manage transitions from one mode to another. Once in a while the weather is good and resources exist to keep people of both camps on payroll. But thats rare cause weather conditions are always changing.
> Do you send him off to go look for new ones or do you make him mine manager and task him with hiring people who spend the whole day digging.
This is a false dichotomy. If he is excellent at finding mining locations, the best fit to help him scale out his capabilities is to give him larger responsibilities over the mine finding operation. If he's inclined to lead, that means potentially managing the team who finds mines so he can mentor them and pass along what makes him great at finding those locations and effectively multiplying his impact. The explorers will have more respect for their manager since he's been out there finding effective mines and has demonstrated that he has skills to teach them.
I know nothing about this area, but I'm not actually sure why the author is so sure the American managers are wrong that there is a big difference between what they can do and what can be done in other countries? Labor laws and availability, safety standards, material costs, etc. seem like plausible things to be very different.
Can someone who knows something about this domain chime in?
We get freeway projects done because they’re sufficiently popular that the administrator who gets a freeway completed can use that as the good star on his or her resume forever. But Americans don’t seem to care much about any other kind of infrastructure, so it doesn’t get done.
Spot on. By the way, one can purchase multiple units (brand new) for 1.2M€ per car, and that’s before negotiating. 2.5 is really expensive. And I am talking European price, not Indian or Chinese.
>the main barrier to good US infrastructure construction, or at least one of the main barriers, is personal incompetence on behalf of decisionmakers. Those decisionmakers can be elected officials
The real message here is that this guy thinks he is too good for democracy and has found a better way. That scares me more than our infrastructure problems (which are pretty terrifying)
You cutoff the end of a sentence to make it sound like the opposite of what the author wrote. WTF?
> Those decisionmakers can be elected officials, with levels of authority ranging from governors down to individual city council members; political appointees of said officials; quasi-elected power brokers who sit on boards and are seen as representative of some local interest group; public-sector planners; or consultants, usually ones who are viewed as an extension of the public sector and may be run by retired civil servants who get a private-sector salary and a public-sector pension. In this post I’d like to zoom in on the managers more than on the politicians,
Those other actors all seem like direct reports of the democratically elected leadership. You don't elect people to literally pick up shovels and build infrastructure. You elect them to delegate.
And? He's "zooming in on the managers more than the politicians" because they can be easily replaced by any politician who gives a damn about infrastructure, and the whole point of the project is to give an idea of cost so politicians who give a damn can determine when a manager is bad.
He's not trying to address what to do if a politician doesn't care about infrastructure.
Democratically elected leadership can be replaced democratically. Appointed leadership can be replaced with public pressure on democratically elected leadership.
I don’t understand why the author mentions the $200K salaries paid to those managers. As if there is a threshold that has been crossed. That sort of thinking is problematic.
TFA is not about "management". It is about government. Government will always be inefficient, since it is spending looted money. You can't fix this problem by firing managers or some other micro-management strategy. You fix it by limiting government's scope and field of influence.
Yes, because private companies don't "loot" whatsoever. They definitely don't respond to accusations of obviously unethical and damaging but legal behaviour with "but it's legal!(continues looting)".
Doesn't government suck because our best and brightest often do not choose to work in government? Isn't that what we should really change?
The first thing that came to my mind when I saw this headline was not corporations/companies, but administrations for public school districts and universities.
These infrastructure 'managers' don't strike me as any different. It's a blight on American culture and its only getting worse the bigger the inequality gap. Everyone's trying to find the parachute to jump out of the burning plane that's in freefall diving to the ground.
The (ultimately false) class antagonism narrative of /r/WSB that the game really is rigged is a fitting end to a decade that at the outset told everyone they could be a unicorn (or enjoy part of the spoils) if they could deliver a cash cow to elite investors if they only pulled up their sleeves and grinded through.
The Governor of Texas just got on Hannity to bad mouth a New Green Deal as people died in Texas cause no one cared enough to make sure the wind turbines worked in the cold.