alt Hacker News> This is an underrated take. If you make someone 3x faster at producing a report nobody reads, you've improved nothing
In the private market are there really so many companies delivering reports no one reads ? Why would management keep at it then ? The goal is to maximize profits. Now sure there are pockets of inefficiency even in the private sector but surely not that much - whatever the companies are doing - someone is buying it from them, otherwise they fail. That's capitalism. Yes there is perhaps 20% of employees who don't pull their weight but its not the majority.
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> In the private market are there really so many companies delivering reports no one reads ? Why would management keep at it then ?
In finance, you have to produce truly astounding amounts of regulatory reports that won't be read... until there is a crash, or a lawsuit, or an investigation etc. And then they better have been right!
The implication is that companies in a private market can't possibly be hugely inefficient for irrational reasons that can ultimately be self-harming.
An interesting take.
The goal might be to maximize profits, but that only means that managers want to make sure everyone further down the chain are doing whatever they identify to be the best way to accomplish that. How do you do that? Reports.
>In the private market are there really so many companies delivering reports no one reads ?
Just this month the hospital in my municipality submitted an application to put in a new concrete pad for a new generator beside the old one that they, per the application, intend to retire/remove and replace with a storage shed on it's pad once the new one is operational.
Full page intro about how the hospital is saving the world, such a great thing for the community and all manner of vapid buzzword bullshit. dozens of pages of re-hashing bullshit about the environmental conditions, water flows down hill, etc, etc, (i.e. basically reiterating stuff from when they built the facility), etc, etc.
God knows how many people and hours it took to compile it (we'll ignore the labor wasted in the public sector circulating and reading it).
All for a project that 50yr ago wouldn't have required 1/100th of the labor expenditure just to be kicked off. All that labor, squandered on nothing that makes anyone any richer. No goods made. No services rendered.
I don't know what to tell you aside from "just go and work at a large private company and see".
I'm not smart enough to understand the macro-economics or incentive structures that lead to this happening, but I've seen many 100+ man teams that output whose output is something you could reasonably expect from a 5 man team.