Tales of incompetence and sloth from the tech world

How on earth can such a dynamic industry foster such wasteful practices?

Today I’m going to share a couple more tidbits about horrible management that happen in mega-tech giant corporate operations. Both of these came from the same helpful reader I spoke of yesterday who is steeped in the ways of tech giant management.

As I said before, in a free (or even semi-free) market, these stupid and wasteful practices will eventually get whittled away. Unfortunately, our markets aren’t all that free, and these industries are brand new and constantly evolving, so the competitive forces are still trying to catch up.

The first tidbit is a real thing that happened in the world. The second tidbit is more of a reliable principle or rule of thumb. Both are fascinating.

Here’s the real-world one. As you can imagine, one of the biggest tech/budget challenges for huge tech firms is how to deal with data.

Well, one fine day, a plucky and smart team of engineers in one of these big firms figured out a non-intuitive process design change that would save the company a staggering amount of money annually, while simultaneously beefing up their data systems.

Proud and plucky, they submitted their findings and brilliant plan to the VP in charge of such things. The dude barely looked at it. “Nah.” he says, “We’re not doing that.” He then ended the meeting and our heroes tramped out of the room just flabbergasted.

Why did the VP do that? Because taking a risk on a huge change wasn’t remotely in his interests. He was in a position where he did almost nothing all day while “administering” the current process and received a huge salary for his lack of effort.

Why rock the boat?

Sure, saving the company a boatload is good for some abstract group of shareholders. But for him? “Nope, nope, nope. We aren’t changing a goddamn thing.”

A long while later, a partial competitor to this tech giant instituted a similar version of the brilliant idea these engineers came up with, and so (begrudgingly, one would suspect) the company followed suit.

But it’s shocking (and apparently not uncommon) for management to pursue their own interests rather than doing “what’s best for the company”. Eventually competition forces their hand, thankfully. But “eventually” can be annoyingly tardy.

Okay. Now for the second tidbit that is a principle. The principle is this:

“9s hire 10s, but 7s hire 5s”

This refers to the tendency for very talented people (9s) to want to hire super-talented people (10s) because they are inspired by excellence and want to get even better themselves by being in proximity to such greatness.

But people of middling ability (7s) are afraid of excellence. They are much more comfortable hiring people clearly inferior to themselves (5s). That keeps them safe. “Ain’t no way a 5 is going to take my job or leapfrog over me. But a 9 or a 10 sure might!”

It’s horrifying to consider that management in private companies operates this way, but it sure does correspond to what I know of human nature.

One might say, “Well, then only hire 9s or 10s!”. But the thing is, talent isn’t uniform in our species. At some point, you run out of excellent candidates and you still have positions to fill.

Again, in a free market, competition provides pressures and incentives to work against these base elements of our nature. And no other system offers any hope of “solving” the problem.

But jeez… hurry up, competition!

Naturally,

Adam