[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.

[kakacik]

People are not as much stupid as selfish. Nobody is going to threaten their own revenue stream just because their job is bullshit, in fact most double down and see themselves above others.

And another layer I've seen frequently - people somehow need to make their work meaningful to make it part of their core identity, even if its literally moving one pile of dirt to next pile and then reverse, or just adding friction to progress. Strong ego game.

[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.