If your firefighters are spending more than ~10% of their time doing their actual job, then the odds of them needing to be in two places at once reaches unacceptable levels.

Old fashioned secretaries are similar, if less extreme. An executive secretary's main job is not to do secretarial work, but to be available at a moment's notice. If they're busy, they're not generally available.

I feel like the tech industry has spend the last year or so over-correcting and is now burning the furniture to heat the cabin. Slashing headcount is fine if you're also willing to scale back the things that headcount was expected to build/maintain. Now you have teams that are stretched thin just keeping the lights on. It's not an environment that's going to be conducive to innovation.

The only positive I see in all this is that many of these big companies are now much more vulnerable to competition. Unfortunately I feel like the appetite to take on the big guys just isn't there right now - it's definitely a muscle that's atrophied in the startup space over the last decade.

Is that supposed to sound like a bad thing?

> tangible improvements, process cranking, or institutional knowledge, the most valuable people are the admins

Valuable like a splinter in your big toe. "It hurts when I move it!"

or you might say the culinary analogy turns into a biological analogy

You'd expect that a VC of all people would appreciate the fact that in high-tech spaces, many new ventures are required to find one unicorn, with absolute failure rates of about 90%,[1] and Angellist giving 1:40 odds (2.5%) likelihood of seed-stage startups reaching US$1b valuation ("unicorn").[2]

Google has hit paydirt once with advertising, and spent most of its subsequent life either reinforcing that status (with varying levels of legality) or seeking out alternative hits, with ... stunningly little success. But then, nobody else has had any real success there either, save Facebook.

There are also the roles within organisations which are principally risk mitigation. I had the insight a few years back that ops is essentially a risk-management role.[3] In one of my earlier mentions of this on HN someone responded that that is in fact how Google treats its SRE role, and is a point emphasised in its fairly well-known book on the topic.

Another point that's become glaringly clear over the past few years is that efficiency and resilience are contrasting points on the optimisation space. I'm not sure if that's one-dimensional or multi (think "fast, cheap, good"), but it does have multiple optima depending on the specified criteria.

And ... in some spaces, notably pharmaceuticals (very large search space, very high search costs, long-term exploration), a business model which has emerged is to spin out new-molecule / treatment development indepenently of the majors (Pfizer, J&J, Roche, Novartis, Merck, AstrZeneca, GSK, etc.), either as controlled subsidiaries or independent ventures, and then aquire the successes. Contrast other R&D-heavy models such as 3M, Edison Mfg. Co., DuPont, etc. There's also the hit-factory / tentpole model of film, music,[4] and print (a small number of hits supports a much larger mid-list). I'd argue that much of the start-up and established-firm tech space has come to resemble these models, for much the same underlying dynamic logic.

--------------------------------

Notes:

1. <https://explodingtopics.com/blog/startup-failure-stats> <https://www.luisazhou.com/blog/startup-failure-statistics/>

2. <https://web.archive.org/web/20210716175009/https://www.angel...>

3. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27701929>, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29152832>, and <https://archive.is/HknlO>

4. I've discussed this and referenced Charles Perrow's excellent treatment here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31254795>. Perrow's discussion is in Complex Organizations (1972, 1985), pp. 186--187. <https://archive.org/search.php?query=Complex+organizations+:...>

In my opinion the money is better placed in the pockets of workers not investors.

Also, the supreme irony of a VC saying this.

I can think of ways I would have approached some specific instances differently (e.g Waymo), but the existence of speculative projects isn't evidence of waste. The specific callout of retirement accounts is strange too. I'm sure many institutional investors are backed by 401ks but is that actually representative? As a wealthy investor I'm guessing he's thinking more about himself and his dividend than other's retirement accounts.

Very few people work on weekend which tells you you need way less people to keep lights on - so keeping lights on with 20% of eng is not surprising.

A lot of smart people spent years trying to make a resilient system and then everyone claims they aren't needed when it doesn't immediately crumble.

There are also many examples of huge gaps in content moderation, customer reps, and other "useless" functions that has lead to it's decay other than just it's unhinged CEO.

Twitter swallowed a poison pill, and we're just seeing some of the onset of sickness.

I doubt they're referring to engineers.

<https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/314049/scale-by-geo...>

Seems like a common fallacy to just jump in like Elon Musk and start trimming out the perceived false jobs and end up with a company that is weaker than it was originally. I've no doubt the VC is has a case but it's a lot hairer than a simple sentence alludes to. I feel like I end up back where I started -- in that I simply don't know or lack the info to make that call -- many jobs could simply be redundant but redundancy isn't always a bad thing -- espeically in massive tech companies with staff leaving for greener pastures on a whim.

/s

What bothers me more is how they fumbled repeatedly on conventional projects like chat apps.

Maybe Google needs to invest in crystal balls?

Even if you don't own Google stock (or even any stock) directly, you likely have exposure to it because it's in the S&P 500, which is used as foundational financial product in many contexts.

Management isn't involved in actual functioning of the company, just in how it's organized. And of course, their main skill always turns out to be "organizing" it to their own advantage. Actual good ideas WILL lead to reorganizing work, and rearranging the management deck chairs. So management always turns out to be radically against those.

The engineers at the bottom are not just a necessity, they're THE source of revenue.

But guess what happens when you "trim the fat". Management is really good at keeping themselves in a job, and don't care about sacrificing the bottom. Meaning the worst possible outcome, according to these investors, and I'm 100% sure this happened at Google: the proportion of managers goes up when the layoffs happen. MORE organizing, less work.

A system in which every resource is 100% utilized has no slack or adaptability.