[HN Gopher] The Flying Wedge ___________________________________________________________________ The Flying Wedge Author : imartin2k Score : 22 points Date : 2022-11-14 06:22 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (lethain.com) (TXT) w3m dump (lethain.com) | avmich wrote: | "Sluga Narodu", a series where current Ukrainian president, | Volodymyr Zelenskyy, plays the main character, is about a man who | became a president, and wants to do things right. One of his | problems is where to find a good team in the country not known | for established working procedures to find government | professionals. After some attempts he settles on bringing his | former colleagues - in fact, high school mates - who might be not | the best professionally suited, but have other useful | characteristics. | | It's a movie, sure, but the problem of creating a good team | doesn't look particularly obvious. | GartzenDeHaes wrote: | Managers are often hired with the expectation that they will | bring in a team with them, or that they have an extended network | to pull people from. A lot of people in tech like to believe in | meritocracy, but that's not how humans and their organizations | really work much of the time. | nigerian1981 wrote: | Worked at a company where a new manager who also happened to be a | partner at a recruitment agency joined. Wasn't long before we had | a whole bunch of contractors joining from this agency. | buran77 wrote: | There are many reasons to do this, some more legitimate than | others. This is the standard practice in many public | institutions. The process looks like the standard recruitment | process but the result is predetermined. Waste and inefficiency | aren't really concerns so I've seen it more times than I can | count. | | Entire departments created for family and friends of the manager. | Or where they slowly infiltrate and displace the legitimate | employees until there's a small core (maybe 20-25%) of people | delivering on the work, and the rest are moochers who just hang | around, go through motions, and collect a paycheck. And no, I am | not exaggerating even a little bit. | rexreed wrote: | This approach only works when there's a lot of fat and churn in | hiring where projects get spun up and hiring processes are | blocks. This doesn't work well in environments of hiring freezes, | project cancellations, and divisional spin-down. The Flying Wedge | in artifact of excess and a symptom of organizational hiring and | project management dysfunction. | OkayPhysicist wrote: | A lot of hiring process is less about finding the best candidate, | and more about finding a "good enough" candidate with as high a | success rate as possible. Hiring is expensive, so minimizing risk | is pretty highly valued. People you already know are at least | perceived as the lowest risk hires there are. So you hire people | you already know, if you can. | | One man's cronyism is another's CYA. | hitekker wrote: | Another management article, another comfortable metaphor that | doesn't say much more than uncomfortable terms like | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepotism. | | The image of "a formation of enemies smashing through your lines" | is fun but doesn't offer more than a sensation of gradually being | overwhelmed. It implies more coordination and competency than | exists, doesn't convey strategies against the maneuver, and also | doesn't describe the consequences. Like the article said, it only | applies to big companies and not really to smaller ones. | | I think the more fitting metaphor for nepotism is cancer. Friends | hiring friends who hire friends often cannot manage their | friends; let alone fire their friends. It's unconscious, easy to | spread, easy to grow, all natural with bad long-term prospects | for the host. Like the author implies, it's not a strategy for | the "long game". Too bad management articles can't speak | straightly for fear of losing readers who can't handle ethical | quandaries. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-11-15 23:01 UTC)