shuppy

You see, he was used to people doing pretty much nothing when left unmolested. Of course, from the employer’s point of view, this habit is straightforwardly wasteful, because you’re still paying their salaries. To weed out such do-nothing people, competent management sets up a performance evaluation process, so that we always know what every person has done for us every year, and who should get outsized rewards and who should get fired.

This system leaves people very worried if they don’t have clear goals to work towards. However, even a competent organization cannot set actually useful goals for everyone at all times, just like you generally need your legs, but you don’t really have a use for them at every moment. And thus, you have people with spare bandwidth making up their own goals, so that they have something to show in the performance review.

If we now revisit the situation from the employer’s point of view, it is no longer trivially wasteful, because everyone is always busy. However, it’s likely more wasteful than before, because people are building stuff you didn’t really need, and yet you almost certainly need now, because actually productive activities are hopelessly intertwined with this stuff.

This is a big reason why successful software companies end up with mountains of code. The cycle repeats and branches out exponentially, as every team who’s built the once-needless and now-necessary thing asks for more headcount, gets it, and inevitably ends up with some of it idle some of the time. Then these new people invent more goals to pursue, persuade everyone that these fake goals are actual sub-goals of the real goals, and entangle existing systems with their new systems.

from another entry into the canon of managers realizing capitalism doesn’t work without actually realizing it