You call a person who brought work and salaries to 20 people for the whole year a cancer?
Would those 20 people have enough to do and feed their families if not for that man? If he did it differently, the shareholders would be a bit richer, those (or other 20) hard-working people without income, and their families would be starving. And your and my taxes would rise to support those people not to die homeless and hungry.
Do you still want to call that manager cancer, or you may reconsider and call him a hero he really is?
Work and salaries ? Like from their own pocket ? No. That is the business money. Wasted. Time, attention, of peoples wasted.
That is the same absurd logic as for not to replace low qualified human physical work by machines (self checkout in supermarket).
Having less jobs due to technology or less stupid work should be seen as good for humanity.
Perhaps, instead, of imagining some stupid jobs and occupation, so peoples can be paid and survive. We coul reduce the total workhours of working people, so that senseful work would employ more peoples. And with no changes to the salary ofc.
I am not so good with english, so let me rephrase it. What would happen to humanity if 90 % went jobless because -let's imagine- robots and IA would efficientely replace us. Would 90 % be condemned to die in the cold when there is abondance ? Because they have no job and a 0.00001 % "owns" the robots ?
> Work and salaries ? Like from their own pocket ? No. That is the business money. Wasted. Time, attention, of peoples wasted.
It actually blows me away sometimes the willingness people w/i companies have to just spend money that isn't theirs.
It's not even the calculation of build vs buy, they'll spend exorbitant amounts of money for nothing in particular. It makes me understand the stereotypical budget constraints, because without them people would just waste money left and right.
Eventually, one comes to realize that everyone's spending money that isn't theirs. Including the CEO and the owners, who are spending the money invested by people who expect returns.
The only organization that doesn't take outside money is the federal government, and they take the consent of the people to rule instead (quite a bit more valuable).
Oh that’s not true at all. Hudson River Trading, for instance, has never taken outside money and has no outside investors, yet makes billions in profit every year. There are likewise many fully private companies that have no investors, debt, or unaffiliated shareholders. Goldman Sachs was a partnership until the mid 1990’s. Etc.
- Keep track of what's specifically been sold, to help determine re-ordering schedules
- Sometimes, put things in bags. Some stores just ask the customer to do this even if they have a cashier.
The thing about physically moving products over a barcode scanner is only for those first two purposes. Mostly the first -- if theft weren't an issue, it would be cheaper to just do manual inventory more frequently.
The customer is not preventing theft. They (mostly) aren't stealing, but they also aren't deterring anyone from stealing. The lone employee for the eight self-checkout kiosks is doing that -- with the help of scales, cameras, and (these days) a little bit of AI.
Not that I'm endorsing that of course. But if you're going to saddle me with work you don't want to pay people to do, without training and without compensation and I happen to make a mistake... well. Guess that was a bad move on your part.
The obvious benefit to the customer is that they are not stuck in a queue. If you have portable scanners for customers (eg, via an app), all items can already be scanned on the fly, speeding up things even more. Moreover, self-checkout registers take less space - roughly doubling the number of available registers. Which, again, increases throughput and reduces latency.
Less obvious benefits to the customer: you can have one employee oversee multiple registers, instead of only 1. So less employees needed, so prices can go down. Customers can more easily take distancing measures themselves, as long as there isn't a queue for self-checkout.
But sure, some asshat may forget or "forget" to scan something. That happens with regular registers as well, but is more likely to be caught. And if it isn't: lucky for the asshat, less so gor the other customers - they will end up paying for the store's losses.
> The obvious benefit to the customer is that they are not stuck in a queue. If you have portable scanners for customers (eg, via an app), all items can already be scanned on the fly, speeding up things even more.
I have never in my entire life used an arrangement like that. I've only used the ones where they have a computerized terminal with a scale and conveyor belt, basically a checkout with the computer turned backwards, along with a computer-illiterate person manning between 4 and 6 of those resolving all the dumb problems they have.
> increases throughput and reduces latency.
Until the stupid scale stops working and you need to wait for one employee manning six of the things to come over and tell the stupid computer that your stupid eggs are in fact on the stupid scale.
Like, I can't overemphasize how bad these can get. If you're using the scale as a theft-deterrent, it doesn't work. Never in my life has the register person actually looked at what I'm bagging to see if it's correct. They would probably catch it if I ring up a 52" OLED TV as 16 pounds of avocados, but like, if I ring up organic avocados as regular ones? They're never gonna see that, and even if they did I doubt most would even care enough to do something about it given the wage they're making.
If your argument is instead efficiency, the things brutalize that too because so many purchases in an average grocery store are going to cause problems, things like cigarettes need to be kept in cases, things like alcohol require ID verification (which I've also never ever been carded at a self checkout!), some medications do too, and their constant problems and glitches require an attendant to resolve, while adding to customer frustration in general. And I just don't even try to use coupons at them, that's a complete fucking nightmare.
If your argument is instead cost cutting, everything at my grocery store is more expensive than it was 3 years ago, and it's basically all self checkouts now minus the pharmacy counter. So that clearly didn't pan the fuck out. Either that or all the theft it's now trivial to do is eating into their margins, who's to say.
Like I genuinely am fine with these, when they're well maintained and work. The ones at Home Depot come to mind; they don't use the stupid scale at all, they have nice, big displays the attendants seem better trained than most, and they use wireless scanners which makes the whole process a whole lot less of a pain in the ass. But when they're put in by some cut-rate business barely making margins? God damn do they suck.
> I have never in my entire life used an arrangement like that.
It's become the norm around here: pick up a dedicated scanner at the entrance, scan while you go, at cash register, return scanner in a reader that extracts all necessary info. Newest gimmick is you don't need the store's dedicated scanner, but can use an app from your phone.
Bonus I didn't foresee: no more need to ask an employee "how much is this?" - just scan. This also shows you if your personal discount applies (if the store does personal discounts).
> Until the stupid scale stops working
I think that's part of why they went with on-the-fly scanning. It's one thing to detect a postcard on an empty scale, quite another on a scale with a few 2L bottles of soda. Your example with eggs is also perfect: not that heavy, all but guaranteed to be last on the scale. Here, I think most stores switched from scales to doing random checks (where they scan 3-5 items).
What will happen is that either the 0.01% will order the robots to kill the 99%, or the 99% will go out and kill the 0.01% and whoever else is near them.
Or we could reform our system so it can cope with abundance. It's perfectly well known how to do it, and it helps creating that abundance too. But the 0.01% seems completely decided to fight against this to their death, so I'm not holding my breath.
Some of us want to contribute something to the world we live in, to make it a nicer place to be. I think it's great he's found a way to get all those people organized together; it's a shame he didn't give them something to do that created true value; it's waste. Not just waste of the company's money and time, but a waste of the labor of the individuals who could have done something great given real leadership.
To be fair, we don't know if the manager was using that headcount to do something impactful outside of the mandated work. Based on the story, however, it seems doubtful that the manager was thinking of anything other than their career trajectory.
Or, more likely, the entrepreneur is (perhaps negligently) allowing their managers to spend investors’ money. Only the profoundly lucky entrepreneurs generate enough positive cash flow to cover the more likely losing investments and help pad out ~15% profit to make the VC funds worth maintaining. The idea that businesses are inherently efficient is hysterical.
I've worked with plenty of managers who are entrepreneurial within large companies. Every year we have to propose new ideas and then (when approved) go deliver on them. That's not "just manage, and shuffle around value"
I have also worked with those "just manage" managers too. But one shoe does not fit all
There are some good managers out there. The problem is that the system of most large companies isn't designed for entrepreneurial or innovative managers, both the culture and incentive system means those managers are always swimming up stream and risk burnout and even being punished for making waves.
Phrased another way, these managers are getting our best and brightest and putting them in positions where they create and contribute nothing to the betterment of humanity.
Or maybe those 20 people feel insecure about their abilities after 1 year fiddling thumbs and will have to fight a battle against themselves to get in a place where they use their skills better. You know, not all of us like the idea of doing nothing for years but getting paid for that
Banksy (I'm neither for nor against him) said something similar (or is said to have said something similar):
“The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”
All that is to say, it ain't only in tech! And I take this kind of waste – of vainglorious pursuits via manipulation of image-maintenance and resource-mongering for purposes of self-aggrandizing optics (rather than actual collective advancement and good) – is not unique to just advertising and tech, but is prevalent everywhere, throughout history, etc. And only rarely do we see managers & bosses & leaders & corporations & workers come together for actual good.
To add to the other replies, the issue isn’t the manager wasted some corporation or billionaires money.
The issue is that if the manager had grown the team in a way that grew revenues and value they manager could have created more than 20 roles in the entire organization. Sometimes the manager with 5 engineers and a strong vision can create enough value to hire hundreds or thousands of people throughout the company.
The manager who empire builds often creates negative value. So they create jobs for 20 people. But these jobs contribute nothing. Someone’s work in the org went to pay for those 20 jobs, and they got sucked into a black hole. Worse they require support, interact throughout the company, distract from real valuable work. In the end they contribute negative value, and the manager employed 20 people at the cost of 3 people’s jobs that could have been created but never were, their employment cost -23 people’s worth of value and contributed zero.
Now in many organizations this leads to a promotion because they seem important for having so many employees. They create a role model for other less effective leaders. As they hire managers to work for them, they hire those that add people as fast as possible regardless of value production. Now they’ve created 200 jobs, at a cost of 30. But their emergent doppelgängers have formed 10 of them with 20 people, contributing -30 jobs as well. Now there are 400 created jobs, but -60 net jobs.
Eventually the company is overrun with empire builders. It’s a big company. There are a few highly profitable cash cow teams that are extremely competitive to get into and are largely left alone. The profits though of the entire enterprise are flat and inline with peers of similar size. Headcount makes the comping look like a giant of industry. But it’s half the size it could be if there had been focus on creating new and better value.
In my experience this is why Amazon employs nearly 2 million people and is hyperbolic in its growth over such a long time. While empire building certainly exists there is a lot of process to control for it. Hiring (generally) is well metered, and leaders (sometimes) are rewarded for their dynamism in business growth (not always, YMMV). It adds new businesses constantly and a lot (not all!) businesses do pretty well and if they don’t get shut down and people reassigned.
Google, well, listen. It’s got great benefits and the managers have some impressive empires with high salaries and a stable of smart people to tally up for their biography. But there are only a few successful businesses and god bless you if you can name one that’s launched in the last 10 years. But it is killing them.
Many companies don’t have the luxury of a wildly profitable cash cow like Google. They get overrun and whither away, sometimes really fast.
That’s how it’s like cancer. Not literal cancer, and cancer is a horrible disease not to make light of, but empire building represses job growth over the long term in exchange for rapid short term growth that ultimately kills the host entirely.
I don't disagree with most of what you've written, but to set the record straight:
> In my experience this is why Amazon employs nearly 2 million people and is hyperbolic in its growth over such a long time.
Amazon employs millions of people to staff their warehouses, not to write software.
From their 2021 report, of their 1.1 million employees, 760 thousand were "laborers & helpers". That doesn't even count the managers for those hundreds of thousands of employees (probably a good chunk of the 62 thousand "first/mid officials & mgrs"), customer service, etc. (Or temps / contractors, if that's fueling the "2 million" figure you cited -- their latest earnings report indicated they had 1.5 million employees.)
Actually not true - it’s mostly grocery store employees. But that’s my point entirely - not that Amazon would employ 2mm software engineers but that Amazon created enough value that it could scale to millions of employees each of whom are marginally contributing. A person stocking shelves or packaging boxes is a person with a job that creates value. The software engineers being deployed smartly created enough value in a virtuous cycle to allow Amazon to productively employ millions of people.
(And yes my 2mm is net of non full time employees while the I9 population is 1.5mm)
If as a book seller they had built empires they would be struggling against Barnes and noble still.
Would those 20 people have enough to do and feed their families if not for that man? If he did it differently, the shareholders would be a bit richer, those (or other 20) hard-working people without income, and their families would be starving. And your and my taxes would rise to support those people not to die homeless and hungry.
Do you still want to call that manager cancer, or you may reconsider and call him a hero he really is?