> What are the bosses above your boss are doing if resources are allocated on useless projects

You're very clever, young man, very clever. But it's bosses all the way up!

You jest, but once a company goes public, the hierarchy of bosses loops on itself - the company bosses answer to shareholders, many of whom answer to, or themselves are, regular people with regular jobs and regular bosses...

That's not a proper loop, because those the regular people who are shareholders don't answer to their work-bosses about any vote they might do as a shareholder.

(Of course, in practice regular people by and large don't vote their shares.)

I've in fact always been afraid to vote my shares against the recommendations of the board. What if someone finds out and takes it personally? I need the job much more than I need any potential upside of the shares I own, so even if all the proposals amount to "let the executives steal whatever isn't nailed down", I figure I'm better off going along with it or just throwing my proxy card away.

Because of the implication. Yes. It's always better in aggregate if people fight back, in order to prevent the inevitable slide towards power consolidation, but it really requires leadership because it's frequently good for the group but bad for the individual, and it's the first through the wall who gets bloodied.

Are you talking about shares of the company you work for, or shares of random companies you have stocks of?

For the former, if at all possible, you should sell those, and invest in the general market: your job already gives you plenty of excess exposure to the fortunes of your employer, and your career gives you excess exposure to the general industry you are in. No need to concentrate your effective investments even more. Diversify.

For the latter: don't bother picking stocks as an individual investor. Just go with a low cost index fund (and they can vote the shares for you).

I mean shares in the company I work for. I don't /want/ to be heavily invested in it, but I get grants in the form of RSUs periodically, and also we have an ESPP which is essentially free money in that I get to buy shares at a discount. I get a better tax deal if I keep them at least a year after I buy the shares/exercise the RSUs, (long-term capital gains vs short-term capital gains). I absolutely sell them as soon as they are considered long-term but in the meantime I'm a shareholder and I could vote those shares if I wanted to.

I'm not sure why I would care about what the board/management of some /other/ public company (that I don't work for) thinks about my vote. Almost certainly they won't think about it at all.

IIRC voting rules for the company I hold the most equity in are that a board-opposed measure does not pass unless more than half of all voting shares vote in favor. Which is a significantly different measure than half of all votes cast. (Essentially any unvoted shares vote with the board.) Imagine if we needed half of all eligible voters to vote for a new candidate before we could change the president. (U.S.A)

In the US regular voters can't change the president at all, I thought? Once they are in for the term, they are in for the term.

(There's an impeachment process. But that's not available for regular voters.)

Correct, but I'm trying to draw a parallel between regular, scheduled shareholder votes and regular, scheduled votes for elected officials. In the U.S we typically have around 60% of eligible voters participating in presidential elections. My analogy assumes that voting against the incumbent follows the same rules as voting against the board, in which case we would need something like 84% of cast votes to be for the challenger to avoid re-electing the incumbent. (Assuming I haven't gotten my math wrong.) I'll also go so far as to suggest voter participation is low in both cases but it isn't a very effective tool for changing policy. :-)

I regret that I have but one upvote to give.

Most of those bosses have zero technical knowledge, straight out of pure business school, probably the only software they used during their degree was Office or similar.

Then there are those from other backgrounds that somehow landed a position in management as well.

It is like politics, as long as the boat is going forward and not letting them do a bad figure in whatever evaluation meetings are taking place, all is fine.

Worse still, the bosses brought in from the outside who appear to have technical knowledge from their previous political victories at other employers. And they know someone at your company, thus they are “trusted”.

It's much more lucrative to fake/fail upwards and try to suck the company dry. After all you're working to get paid. Making meaningful contributions to the society at large is at very best secondary.

Then comes the disruption, the catharsis, the big revenge, the complete destruction of old systems and arrival of techno-utopia where everything is done and done right and done correct, we're all told, or...the "young man" comment is quite apt here.

> After all you're working to get paid. Making meaningful contributions to the society at large is at very best secondary.

I think how true this is varies from person to person.

You work to get paid so that you can use the money to make the world a more pleasant place to live in. The pay is really the secondary thing once the scales fall from your eyes. This holds true at all levels of society.

"Sucking the company dry" is a really shortsighted way to optimize for your own best life. You're going to have a better life if you use your resources to actually accomplish something that contributes.

They are also working hard to grow their unit's headcount and budget.

It's turtles all the way up

I can only speculate.

But I think that beyond a certain level management probably doesn't have a clear idea of how long things should take. If they've worked in a company for 20 years, and have always been told that creating a corporate website requires a team of 20 people for 2 years, they'll just assume that's the way it is? I mean you may argue it is their job to know such things, and that might be right, but maybe they're just not competent and their managers aren't competent either?

Or maybe they don't really care as it's not their money?

Or maybe it really doesn't matter and there is higher-impact stuff for that level of manager to focus on? I mean if the company is making $100m a year and they can do something that will drive a 10% increase in that, would foregoing that activity to reduce spending on a website down from $1m be the right call?

> have always been told that creating a corporate website requires a team of 20 people for 2 years, they'll just assume that's the way it is.

I think the older and more experienced I get the more I realise that the suits giving overly large estimates are generally just correct. They're a lot better than the suits that want unrealistically short deadlines, at least!

In academia it's very easy to wander into a field adjacent, see a bunch of maths you feel like you ought to understand but don't, spend a bit of time trying to understand and failing, and then making the leap to thinking that everyone in the field is overcomplicating things and wasting their time. Often in actuality there are a bunch of subtleties to the problem you just don't see without spending time working through it.

It's clearly in principle possible to waste time doing unproductive reinventing, but when people set up complicated projects, you really gotta be sure you understand the self-professed reasons people felt like they had to do it that way before being at all convincing in arguing for another course of action. This will require patience and humility.

Financial and HR management is more often than not decoupled from engineering management. So on one hand, yes, you need to allocate your resources to deliver important projects most of all. But also in good times it might be easier to justify your need for more resources to finance, and increase the total number of your subordinates. And don't forget that in the times of plenty public companies might be rewarded for increasing their headcount too.