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Fake Hire

I read this article with interest having been a beneficiary of the allegedly fake hiring free by tech companies when the going was good. It was a hiring wave and new people kept pouring in where I worked at the time and from what I heard anecdotally from friends in similar companies. Folks were job-hopping like mad too and asking their ex-coworkers if they wanted out. 

Many did and that triggered a backfill hiring. My own observations during this time have been that the level of engineering and technology excellence in such companies is patchy at best. It is very much the story of the cobbler's son with no shoes. The level of chaos and dysfunction is quite mindboggling, I have heard this from friends, through insights gleaned from interviewing for roles in these companies and also first-hand.

The large enterprise discipline that I have seen with client organizations in my decades of consulting simply does not exist. Ad-hocism is the rule of the land. Maybe some notion of breaking things and failing fast to drive growth is at play here. The reality is there is no magic shortcut to sustainable success. My theory is a lot of this hiring spree was driven by the fact that increased demand stressed the systems to the point that these companies needed a warm body per hole that needed to be plugged as the water gushed at furious pace. 

When one body was not enough for the job, they threw in more often with some kind of manager person overseeing the hole pluggers and reporting up the food-chain along with others like them. Now imagine there are a thousand holes being blocked and and status reported - it can drive a decision-maker crazy to keep up with the chatter. So that required tiers of report aggregators to distill the essence of all the hole plugging activities in a way that was easier to digest.

Lately, there is not that much flowing through the pipes and many holes have been patched. That leaves both the hole pluggers and their tiers of overseers without an avocation. There never was a plan to fix things from the ground up or actually take organizational responsibility for the mess anyway. At the moment the problem is not quite as big and all these people are extras that need to be dropped. As long as folks understand their place in the world, none of this should come as a surprise.

Trying to bring about meaningful and enduring change requires more stamina and will-power than most folks can summon up - so while they see the futility of the hole plugging reporting, they limit their remit to what they are strictly speaking being paid to do. So ironically, things get worse over time despite the patched holes. 

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