This is a linkpost for https://www.humaninvariant.com/blog/working
No One is Really Working
14leerylizard
2humaninvariant
13Ben
8Brendan Long
2Viliam
4Brendan Long
1humaninvariant
1frontier64
1humaninvariant
New Comment
I don't necessarily know the answer, but I don't find any of the explanations compelling. In my experience as a manager of ~10 employees, some of whom are young knowledge workers:
- The knowledge workers reporting to me and also on my broader team are putting in long hours, doing grunt work in the lab, developing scientific processes, and writing them up. This is in R&D, where the value comes from expected value of future products.
- Some people are less than fully utilized, but between 25% and 75% utilization at worst, and varying from week to week. Having the capacity available is probably enough reason to keep them aboard. For example, Alice is trained on a set of tasks. Her utilization might be low some weeks, but it would strain Bob to learn her tasks and be available to fulfill them even though Bob isn't fully utilized every week either. Bob would have to keep track of too much, and would also have to work overtime some weeks. These are not necessarily knowledge workers though.
- For the underutilized people, the impact that each person has in maintaining the company's ability to continue production / expected value of new products being developed is far higher than their cost to keep around.
Overall, I expect that the answer is that under-utilization is not as extreme as indicated in the article, and that the value of the knowledge and skill sets of the under-utilized people is valuable enough to keep around.
Slack is certainly a factor and having contextually-aware competent people you can call at a moment's notice is important. I would counter by saying the utilization rate is far below an equilibrium that people are capable of working at for sustained periods of time.
Overall, I expect that the answer is that under-utilization is not as extreme as indicated in the article, and that the value of the knowledge and skill sets of the under-utilized people is valuable enough to keep around.
In an R&D context, I would attribute a sizable amount of being "valuable enough to keep around" to (3) talent is finite and firms are paying everyone so someone doesn't start or join a competitor.
How many hour of fully focused time from a knowledge worker do we need for them to pay for themselves? Until we have answered this question, we cannot possibly answer the question of whether employers are getting enough hours.
The linked post seems to implicitly accept that the number of deep-focus hours that employers need from their employees is comparable to the number of hours they are contracted to work. (So, like, most of a 9am to 5pm day for example.)
But I think this is kind of backwards. It is more likely that the number of hours "spent at work" has already been chosen with some knowledge of human behavior, and that the employers are perfectly aware that the number of hours of deep concentration they are buying is a considerably lower number.
2I think part of this is that even 1x engineers produce so much value that they're still worth it. Spending a few hours a week keeping critical systems working while occasionally producing additional value is a decent deal.
I think the question for software engineers is the reverse: why do more productive engineers get paid so little (typically no more than 150% of low-productivity engineers)? It seems to be because companies can't tell the difference, and it's not worth paying low-productivity engineers significantly more on average.
Seems to me that many companies are organized in a way that makes individual productivity less important.
Examples (based on real life):
A company wants to develop a software system. Architects split the design to three parts, and assign each part to a different team. All three teams are given four months to complete their part. One team actually completes their part in a month. It doesn't make a difference, because it still takes the company four months to complete the product. When the product is completed, it turns out that there was a mistake in the analysis, so they send two more months changing the product. Customers complain because one of the three parts was coded by incompetent developers, and occasionally corrupts the data.
A company has four developers. One is a database expert, one is a back end expert, one is a front end expert, and one is an expert on web design. The company insists that they are doing (their version of) scrum and all tasks have to be assigned at random; so the database guy often gets to create the responsive web design, and the front end guy gets to design a partitioned table with triggers. The overall development is slow, and the quality is low.
Why would companies do this? I don't have an answers; my guesses range from "incompetence on the side of management" to "strategic decision to make it impossible for the 1000x developers to negotiate for even 10x salary".
A company wants to develop a software system. Architects split the design to three parts, and assign each part to a different team. All three teams are given four months to complete their part. One team actually completes their part in a month. It doesn't make a difference, because it still takes the company four months to complete the product. When the product is completed, it turns out that there was a mistake in the analysis, so they send two more months changing the product. Customers complain because one of the three parts was coded by incompetent developers, and occasionally corrupts the data.
I think this supports the idea that companies can't tell who's productive. If they could pay all of these engineers twice as much and complete the product in a month (all teams doing their part at the same speed as the best team), that would totally be worth it, but given that they can't do that and they're slowed down by the slowest team, there's no point.
strategic decision to make it impossible for the 1000x developers to negotiate for even 10x salary
I don't think companies need to do anything strategic to prevent developers from negotiating for 10x salary. I work at a company where it's pretty common for individual engineers to increase the company's profits by $10M/yr or more, but almost no one gets $10M/yr bonuses. Part of this is presumably that the one engineer saving tons of money is supported by a bunch of other people, but I don't think it's the case that there's 100 support staff for every engineer doing this[1]. I think the bigger part is something something rent-seeking[2], where the company owns the IP and the users, and high-performing engineers can't create the necessary conditions to save this kind of money, and the company has plenty of options for high-performing engineers, so shareholders capture most of the profits.
- ^
Although honestly they should hire a lot more assistants.
- ^
This is probably the most-negative way of phrasing this and another way of saying it is that the company's founders did the hardest part of the job (getting customers) and it really is worth 99% of the profits. If people disagree they can always start their own startup. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle.
OP here.
Companies in maintenance mode do not need nearly the engineering headcount they employ to keep their systems running. Furthermore, engineers working at these companies are overwhelmingly not incentivized or sometimes even allowed to take actions that would accrue significant equity value.
I think the question for software engineers is the reverse: why do more productive engineers get paid so little (typically no more than 150% of low-productivity engineers)? It seems to be because companies can't tell the difference, and it's not worth paying low-productivity engineers significantly more on average.
This will become more transparent in short order with quantitative tooling to measure output, but people already have a directionally correct sense of who is productive and who isn't, but social and financial incentives keep that knowledge from surfacing and/or being acted on.