[taway_1212]

> The thing I find really hard to understand from a business perspective is that bullshit jobs are the low hanging fruit from a cost saving perspective. Why do they persist? What drives managers, teams, companies and cultures to accept bullshit in their environment.

Typically, at least in large organizations, the manager is interested in increasing, not decreasing, his budget. Since everything that happens in modern companies is very opaque (i.e. how much actual value is created is not clear for people outside a given business unit), the budget size/headcount is often used as a proxy for value. So, according to this logic, the bigger the headcount, the more important for the company the manager must be, so he can then negotiate a raise, bonus, or a promotion for himself. I agree with Michael O. Church here - managers in tech are mostly one-man PR firms (managing their own reputation). That sucks, but that's the result of our current workplaces in tech getting so complex that judging actual merit is close to impossible.

[repolfx]

It's not really impossible but it's not always worth the costs.

It's common for really large companies to use internal billing. So the IT department for example might charge other departments for their services and have to show it's a profit center. The problem with this of course is that it's also a monopoly, so this hardly incentivises better behaviour. In a situation where other departments can go outside the firm to get what they need, this is almost like outsourcing or divesting that department and it can act as a check on really bad cost:benefit ratios internally.

[wjnc]

'But': I've not once met a manager that was thinking about his budget first and foremost. Budget thinking is always implicit and couched in other objectives of a firm. So there must be some mechanism that fails holding said manager accountable for attaining the business goals he gets his budget for. So should I then look at the controllers for failing to control? I'm really at a loss (professionally) why some managers get away with no results and growing budgets and project portfolios, even within a culture that values delivery.

[badpun]

Such incompetent manager (let's call him manager A) is in turn a part of his manager (one level above, let's call him B) "empire". B admitting that A's department is incompetent and is actually not doing much, and thus could really be disbanded, is not in B's interest, as it would shrink the size of his empire.