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Notes -
This is about layoffs in tech and what they underscore about modern economy.
https://blog.interviewing.io/how-much-have-2022-layoffs-affected-engineers-vs-other-departments-we-dug-into-the-data-to-find-out/
This passage feels obvious. Of course companies will let go those employees first who contribute little to the bottom line. Of course companies will hold onto their critical resources--engineers and salespeople in this case--until the very worst moment.
But underneath this is a statement about how many bullshit jobs are there in our economy. Jobs that are merely simple busywork. Jobs that exist solely as a way to redistribute the fruits of capitalism from those who have found a way to way to produce for society and those who didn't. It's basically a giant social contract about providing for a rather large part of society that would not otherwise be able to sustain itself.
If anything, this speaks of how deep our humanism runs. Instead of sawing off the sickly branch, we embrace it with care, doing so in a way that doesn't over-infringe on the patient's dignity (Consider how powerful a mark of status it is to provide for the weak and poor--now this status-marker has been democratized).
Thus we learn something practical: don't take anything HR says or does too seriously. They play an unpopular, minor role in the fabric of a company, relegated to the equivalent of keeping the litter box clean: ensuring legal compliance, tackling on/off-boarding paperwork, and organizing company celebrations. That, and be wary of HR departments that seem to outgrow their function. A fat, active HR department is a sign that a company isn't allocating its funds efficiently. Or that it usurps power from more important departments, eg. the power to design and run the hiring process (they should only take care of the mechanical parts; the candidate qualification process should be in the hands of subject-matter experts). Either way, it's a bad sign.
I wonder if a lot of bullshit jobs are acting as a sort of... I'm not even sure what word to use here... emotional/comfort embezzlement? A principal agent problem in which Middle managers, or even upper management and CEOs with plenty of slack that aren't worried about shareholders, hire or keep around people who make their work lives slightly more pleasant because that maximizes their own utility, not the company's. If a middle manager has a choice between a friendly face who hangs out around the office, chats with them, brings donuts to work, and is generally friendly, or a stoic competent worker drone who gets stuff done, the optimal choice for the business is the worker drone, but the rationally selfish choice for the manager is going to depend on how much slack they have and how important it is for them to maximize productivity. If the choice is between the friendly face in a bullshit job or removing the job and saving the company $50k, the rationally selfish choice is probably to the keep the friendly face around. Having an extra friend around at the office isn't worth $50k, and the manager wouldn't spend that out of their own pocket. But if it's just a number of a spreadsheet? That's worth paying. If the manager could take $50k of the company's money at put it into their own pocket, and get away with it, they would. But they can't. But spending $50k of the company's money to improve their lives and make their job slightly easier at an equivalent of $5k? If they can get away with it then it's worth it, because the cost is measured in company-utility and the benefit is in personal-utility.
Any time you give someone control over someone else's money, inefficiencies are bound to happen in one way or another. It's just a question of to what degree.
A more concise way to put it is that managers are judged in importance partly on the number of direct reports they have, and some departments select for people who are good at getting more direct reports whether they need them or not, and that in bad times CFO's and the like keep a much closer eye on them.
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Another explanation for this is the following: it's really hard for a CEO to maintain focus across an organization, and most can only do it with very simple messaging.
"This year is about growth!"
After several years of :arrowup: "This year is about good growth, we won't lose more than $X per new customer."
2022: "This year is about cash flow positivity/profitability/not dying."
I work at a company where I'm dead certain the CEO and many execs understand all this at a very quantitative level. Nevertheless, the actual messaging that reaches us regular workers is just the bullet point. And the net result is that the way it plays out, $1 from CEO bullet point > $1 from other method. If you're pushing "get $1 via careful cost cutting" in a growth year, your project isn't funded and if you do it yourself it doesn't look as good in a promo packet.
Net result is that me and my manager - two PhDs of Quantitative Subject on a Quantitatively Make Money Team - pick our projects based as much on alignment with CEO messaging as we do on an estimate of how much money we'd make. Or alternately, we do the same projects (make the growth vs ROA efficiency frontier move outward) but our summary slide reports a horizontal shift (more of profit per customer-ish metric) instead of a vertical one (more growth at the same profit per customer).
And everyone does this. A year ago at my work, Internal Bureaucracy Team saved some money by building a no-code app in AirCodaJiraForce instead of renting the relevant SAAS product. No one cared. Also a year ago, Engineering Platform Team picked a >$100k hosted SAAS product with cool visualizations over OSS Project that only renders tables. As far as I know no one has used any visualizations. Now the latter choice is being rethought mainly because messaging changed.
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Iirc this is exactly the source of Bullshit Jobs that David Graeber suggested: managers bolstering their own egos (or one might less charitably say bolstering their own megalomania) by incrementing the "how many underlings do I have" counter. Whether or not those underlings actually do anything is (apparently) not relevant to the modal human sense of self-aggrandizement: this type of people just wants Number Goes Up.
I would further expect some departments, like HR and recruiting, to be full of people who know how to make it look like they need more employees even if they don't, while the business end of most businesses hires people who aren't so good at that skill.
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I have many friends in management. Having lots of employees under them is the opposite of what they are trying to do.
HR is useful because so many modern workers are litigious, need a lot of TLC to do even basic things like turn up to work regularly and get off their phones while working, and employment regulations are a nightmare. The days of having a plucky young men lined up outside the building site who can be employed with less than a handshake and who are desperate to be hired the next day are gone in the (legal part of) the developed world.
On the other hand, HR people reduce risks but they are often not essential. Low-level managers themselves can do a lot of HR work, though the opportunity costs can be high. Thus, I wouldn't be surprised if HR folk tend to be first to go.
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