from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is 'Fake Work' a Result of Poor Management?

by jpn on 5/6/24, 11:00 PM with 2 comments

Recent discussions, including comments from VC Keith Rabois, highlight an issue in tech where many employees are perceived to be doing "fake work" due to over-hiring and treating headcount as a vanity metric. This got me thinking: is "fake work" largely a management problem where poor management practices fail to differentiate between valuable and non-valuable work?

John Cutler's article, "TBM 271: The Biggest Untapped Opportunity," discusses how many companies fail to utilize 'skilled pragmatists'—competent but under-challenged employees who avoid office politics and don't visibly exceed expectations. These employees, while reliable, are not fully engaged by their companies, leading to potential waste of talent.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40065704

Is "fake work" a symptom of a broader management issue where companies don't effectively recognize and utilize all their human resources?

  • by BandButcher on 5/7/24, 2:01 AM

    From my experience every management leader has a (usually multiple) "OKR" or "quarterly goals" that sometimes are just a straw grab or items passed down from someone else. "Who can we give the migration project that has been in the works for 3yrs now?... Just give it to Tammy and her team she only has 3 current projects and the rest of the leaders all have 5!"

    And so Tammy's team now has to do this "important" migration project which is low priority and typically busy work. BUT the company is reeeeally counting on tammy and her team to deliver!

    Majority of the time there are real projects the company cares about but they only account for a small majority of the "resources". So the non important projects are still under OKRs and hyped up to the actual engineering teams as being important but in reality its just a check mark for end of year performance reviews.

    I was an engineer doing this "fake work" for a while and it can be soul draining pushing a stone up a mountain and everyone on the team realizing it...

    For sure innovation can happen where fake work gets eliminated but typically you have to back those initiatives around dollar values and convince the upper execs that it'll be profitable which is tough and why most managers accept whatever goals/projects land their way, thus churning the fake work machine

  • by sp332 on 5/6/24, 11:15 PM

    I don't think most people at Google are doing fake work. I think upper management keeps canceling projects and throwing work away.