Advantages of incompetent management

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Managers who aggressively optimize budgets, headcount, or CPU use can unintentionally create perverse incentives that discourage bug fixing, efficiency improvements, and honest reporting. Commenters contrast this with “incompetent” or hands‑off management, where vague goals and loose controls sometimes let intrinsically motivated engineers improve systems organically, though this breaks down at scale or across teams with conflicting incentives. The thread explores how resource allocation, KPIs, and internal politics drive behavior in large organizations, and highlights alternative models such as consensus-based or “cellular” structures that try—often unsuccessfully—to align local initiative with overall economic goals.

Optimization, efficiency, and perverse incentives

  • Many distinguish “improving things” from strict optimization toward a single metric.
  • Over-optimization is likened to strip-mining: it boosts one metric while leaving systems brittle and hollow.
  • Compile-time optimizations are called out as a special case where you can prove safety; most real-world optimization lacks that safety.
  • Several tie this to Goodhart’s law: once a measure becomes a target, people game it, e.g., adding bugs to “fix,” or creating waste to later “optimize.”

Budgets, constraints, and resource hoarding

  • Strong support for the article’s claim that “spend-or-lose” budgeting and CI/resource baselining incentivize hoarding.
  • Analogies: western water rights, airline “ghost flights,” satellite slots, government and corporate end-of-year spending sprees.
  • Some argue tighter constraints can improve outcomes (discipline, creativity), but only when self-imposed or under leaders who can flex rules in emergencies.
  • Others note leadership rarely “shrinks its own budget,” reinforcing misaligned incentives.

Compute resources, embedded systems, and waste

  • Embedded developers describe extreme optimization under hard limits (KBs of RAM) vs “somewhat constrained” devices with hundreds of MB, where bloat creeps in.
  • In server/cloud contexts, individual teams often see CPU/RAM as effectively unlimited (“just pay the cloud more”), encouraging inefficient code and architectures.
  • Counterpoint: compute is not truly unlimited; it consumes land, energy, and water, so the “infinite cloud” is a damaging myth.

CI systems and infrastructure “efficiency”

  • Widespread frustration that CI is often far slower than local machines despite more cores in the cloud.
  • Causes cited: slow networked storage, security/IT “crapware,” cold-start times, excessive clean builds, oversized test suites, and “cloud best practices” that recreate expensive state each run.
  • Some advocate running tests locally by default; others point to autoscaling runners and better caching as partial fixes.
  • Consensus: the bottleneck is usually organizational/process decisions, not raw compute scarcity.

Management competence, hierarchy, and culture

  • Several argue both “competent” and “incompetent” examples in the article are actually bad management: one over-processes and over-metrics, the other abdicates.
  • Disagreement over defining managerial competence:
    • One side: “sets and achieves objectives” is too weak; you must also choose the right objectives and use resources efficiently.
    • Other side: under bounded rationality, “setting and achieving objectives” is a pragmatic definition, and some ugly behaviors follow naturally from that.
  • Multiple comments note that as organizations grow, hierarchies and politics reassert themselves, even after idealistic starts.

Alternative organizational models and their fragility

  • Detailed anecdotes about companies that used:
    • Strong shared mission and “economic thinking” (everyone considers ROI).
    • Consensus decision making, distributed authority, profit sharing, and peer-based compensation.
    • “Unit presidency” or “cellular” models where small units own their economics.
  • These environments are remembered as highly effective and motivating, but often collapsed when:
    • Acquisitions brought in incompatible cultures.
    • New leadership abandoned core principles, reintroduced hierarchy, and tolerated politics.
  • Many conclude such heterodox models can work, but are fragile, require unusually strong leadership, and are hard to scale or sustain.

Metrics, KPIs, and gaming

  • Broad agreement that fixed KPIs and quotas quickly get gamed (bug counts, cost reductions, call times, etc.).
  • One proposal: vary which real business metric is rewarded each period, chosen unpredictably, to make gaming harder and reward general good work.
  • Others report similar schemes in call centers leading to confusion, demoralization, and perceived bad faith rather than better behavior.

Autonomy, “laziness,” and delegation

  • Several defend “healthy laziness”: avoiding pointless work, resisting micromanagement, and leaving room to think.
  • Historical and military examples are used to argue for mission-level goals with strong delegation: people closest to the information should decide details.
  • Counterpoint: many leaders lack the trust or courage to delegate, fearing blame for subordinate mistakes, so they pull decisions upward and add process.