[zwaps]

Many large corporations in Europe, especially in sectors of prior consistent growth and profit, are chock full of too many managers.

These are people who primarily create work for themselves and each other. I have sat in meetings about meetings for actions that, ultimately, have zero impact, in teams where managers involve outnumber people who actually execute anything three to one. It's staggering.

I believe the best way to kill a company is to have middle management beyond the absolute minimum you might need.

So, ASML is extremely on point here.

[chronid]

I work for a very big US company. My team (10 people) has something like 4 PMs and every task is essentially priority 0. They're coming up with a new way to split tasks that seems inspired to a gatcha to prioritize between priority 0 tasks, this is their contribution and solution to the issue, any attempt to make them see how crazy that is has failed.

There are daily syncs for things that take weeks to do due to compliance, endless war rooms to solve things that would be done offline in half the time, and random bullshit process and committees introduced by management which generate even more meetings...

It's common all over the world, motion instead of progress. It's incredible to me how all those companies don't realize where their money is spent. But alas you cannot make people see a problem if their salary depends on it, and I may be no different.

[anal_reactor]

It suddenly starts making sense when you realize that most people are stupid. My strategy here is that I just adjust my schedule to have tasks take literally 10x time than they should and enjoy my free time while managers argue about shit.

[WarmWash]

The reality is that once you reach a high enough level, your worth can be justified in smaller windows of time. The higher your role, the more impact your decisions have, and the more money small (but important) decisions can generate.

Think of a dev paid $250k/yr that comes up with a clever database scheme that saves the company $5m/yr in cloud costs. If nothing else, the company is in the green for years on that investment in that dev even if the dev just piddle paddles along with small fixes 99% of the time.

The part that sucks though is the general optics of these positions. Humans just instinctively want to correlate high pay with high busy work load, rather than high pay with high impact, which is how it actually works.

[apexalpha]

>Many large corporations in Europe, especially in sectors of prior consistent growth and profit, are chock full of too many managers.

As an engineer who 'jumped' to middle management: yes. 100% yes.

It's kinda disheartening and also a little bit insane to sit in a room with 12 people who learned CISSP and ISO27001 by heart but could not explain what SSH is or what a container does.

Everything has to first be abstracted away from tech into 'risks' and then 'controls' and then these controls have to be re-translated into actual changes in IT systems.

However, at every layer and every abstraction so much detail is lost that they're essentially steering blind.

Last week one of them suggested that we should whitelist the entire IPv4 range of AWS to allow some SaaS (Jira?) to connect to our internal Git.

The policy said to do whitelisting and so they all approved it until I challenged it.

Crazy to watch and honestly so disheartening that I might go do something else. Trying to affect change feels like leaning against a wall.

[consp]

Pretty much due to there being no path forward with h respect to earnings if you are "just an engineer". There are some niches but mostly to make money you have to be management. Resulting in a massive Peter-principle issue and bloated layers of middle management to handle the extra managers. For what i know this is solidly entrenched into Dutch working culture.

[moffkalast]

As soon as you let some Germans into your company they will turn the bureaucracy up to 12 if allowed to, tale as old as time. It's a national culture more or less.

[zwaps]

While you are not wrong, many of the cases I observed had managers from all over the world.

I think it's just a symptom. As a manager, you contribute nothing by yourself. You are useful if you have a useful team (ICs) with a good project. To have that, you need to defend yourself against other managers who will take this from you. If you then also want to get prompted, your task is also to vacuum in all sorts of soft power, visibility, decision rights and being-in-the-roomness. It's even efficient, in that case, to destroy efficiency with processes (under your involvement)

As an IC, you are always valuable as you can always create value.

Hence, by having enough managers, you ensure that their competition will destroy the company.