Since becoming department Chair 4 years ago, I have found out that every university service – be it accounting, HR, advisement, admissions, interlibrary loans, disability services, or anything else – has one person who’s carrying the workload of the entire unit, knows how everything functions, and guarantees the smoothness of operations. In addition to that one crucial person, there’s a number of confused, bumbling individuals in each unit who know nothing and often get aggressive as a result.
Interacting with these departments always consists in identifying that one individual who actually works and addressing her directly, bypassing the 15 or 20 deadwood workers. After 4 years on the job, I have a list of the people who know what they are doing and interact with them directly. These are always the most cheerful, energetic workers who enjoy what they do and love helping others.
Nobody would even notice if the rest of the workers were fired tomorrow. So it’s not just Twitter.
Clarissa's Blog 
Imagine what tuition could be lowered to, if all that labor cost could be shed!
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“Imagine what tuition could be lowered to”
Classic neoliberal mistake.
Most jobs do not exist primarily to provide profits for an enterprise – they exist to give people something semi-productive to do (to keep them out of trouble or from vegetating at home and coming up with stupid things to do out of boredom).
The cumulative social costs of enterprises firing deadweight (ie most employees) is far higher than continuing to pay them to spend part of the day occupied in a life with some structure.
This is true now more than ever and will only be truer.
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I’m partly onboard with that, but not when it’s part of a uni system that’s being sold to gullible, financially illiterate kids as the ticket to middleclassdom, but actually what’s paying for it is a metric sh*tton of undischargeable student debt.
There are probably better ways to employ useless people.
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…perhaps we need more telephone sanitizers.
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“not when it’s part of a uni system”
What has happened to universities in the last 30 years or so economically?
When i was working (part-time) in the bureaucracy of a large land grant university it wasn’t nearly as economically ruinous – and most workers in the bureaucracy weren’t paid especially high since there were full-time employees who qualified for food stamps.
I also had access to confidential payroll information and I did snoop a bit, even research professors (top of the faculty caste system) weren’t paid that much.
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This isn’t the salaries. It’s the collapse of state funding while state demands for compliance procedures grew.
In terms of salaries, I strongly believe that there should be a 2-tier salary system where people who do nothing except teaching get paid dramatically less. Plus, tenure expectations and promotion criteria need to be revamped because we currently expect pretty much nothing in terms of research. As a result, the highest paid person at my department does literally zero in terms of service and research. How is it fair that he’s paid more than I am when I’m department Chair and I publish like crazy?
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The compliance thing is big, and hits even private colleges. My sister went to a tiny Catholic school (graduating class of less than 20 IIRC), with a bit of money from our grandparents, and some loans she was able to pay off in a couple years.
By the time I was college age, that was no longer an option. Tuition had soared. I applied to the same school, was offered an in-house scholarship, and still couldn’t dream of affording it. Best explanation for what happened, was they got hooked in with the federal student loan program, and suddenly had to be compliant with all sorts of things that’d never applied before: wheelchair access and elevators and stuff probably just the tip of the iceberg.
Certainly, you couldn’t blame the usual culprits for state education: admin bloat and lack of state funding.
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I would think that losing so much advertising revenue would be considered an impact: https://fortune.com/2023/12/12/elon-musks-x-is-seeing-ad-revenue-plunge-by-half-from-prior-years-and-is-expected-to-bring-in-just-2-5b-this-year/
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There were concerted propaganda campaigns to bully advertisers into leaving Twitter. It has nothing to do with the fired deadwood.
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Whoever was in charge of dealing with bots was apparently fired along with the dead weight
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Totally agree. Should be very interesting to know how things are really going at Twitter behind the scenes.
One item that might be costing X/Twitter, is a lot of that “dead weight” were content moderators, and now that they are gone, a lot of undesirable content is making it through, and costing Twitter advertising revenue; after all, nobody wants their brand to appear along with Neonazi, antifa, KKK, stuff.
But it is a valid point, that a lot of people there were probably not doing much. I think tech shedding a lot of jobs lately is also a symptom of the same at other tech companies.
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Yes, my account got moderated out of existence twice before Musk took over. These moderators should be roasted in hell for this kind of crap.
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“one person who’s carrying the workload of the entire unit”
During my university bureaucratic experience… I would describe staff as divided between:
a-competent people who could help outsiders
b-competent people who could not help outsiders
c-not so competent people but could sometimes help outsiders
d-horribly incompetent people
A person who might seem like d was often b but unable (for different reasons) to give information to those outside the unit while c might seem like a ….
The boss of the office I was in (kind of a nexus where we fielded questions from students, staff and even faculty at times) was adamant that we needed to know the basics of other people’s jobs so that an absence didn’t cause undo disruptions.
It was also stressed that people (even staff) didn’t necessarily know how to ask for the information they needed so we were to engage them and find out as much as possible to figure out what they needed – which could be very different from what they thought they needed.
The result was though it was a high stress situation (we had to deal with lots of people who were upset to various degrees in various ways and meet lots of deadlines) morale and camaraderie in the office was high.
The second biggest office in the unit… was not as well run. The boss was very competent and a pleasant person but was not a good judge of who was getting their work done and didn’t like making unpopular decisions and it was not a happy place.
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All materialist explanations fail to explain why corporations deliberately do things that undermine their profits. Disney will go broke making movies about trans mermaids that bomb at the box office. But they keep doing it! Why?
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You’re not the customer.
Kids aren’t the customer. Kids’ parents aren’t even the customer. They’re just the end user. It’s the new business model for everything huge: clients are who you actually work for, and end users are just the people who *think* they’re the customer. Like Facebook, Twitter, or any other ‘free’ thing on the internet. You’re not the customer there either. You’re livestock in a market.
I think once you know who the client is, that answers the question. What makes the current economy so baffling is that the identities of clients are very opaque.
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“What makes the current economy so baffling is that the identities of clients are very opaque.”
No, not baffling at all, not even in the slightest.
Anything sufficiently opaque represents power, whether it’s front-loaded or back-loaded in its presentation.
Front-loaded power is all about getting into your face so it can manipulate you.
Back-loaded power is all about getting information about you so it can manipulate the results at macro levels.
They are not the same, and between them you can find such things as the latest of fashions, “the nudge”, in which the front and back meet in the middle to get you to believe things that are meant to replace what you’ve sought out with effort.
This is not one of those things in particular, but it probably sounds like one of those things as it is.
“Search engines” exist to ring fence ideas.
“Marketing firms” exist to ring fence existing trends.
And “big data companies” exist to ring fence emergence.
You’ll know you’re on the inside when the pointy bits are outward facing rather than being menacingly right in front of you.
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Opaque in the sense that you, the end user, do not have ready access to the identities of the clients.
But yeah. All that.
I’m old enough to remember when AltaVista ruled the roost in search engines, most of the results were porn, but it was still easy to find exactly what you were looking for by a judicious use of “”, +, and -.
Now, no matter how precise your search terms, you only get what someone else wanted you to see. Even on the slightly-better search engines. Pisses me off.
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So you think you have something going, maybe something like roots forming … and maybe, just maybe, these people will pull together and operate less like lemmings cut adrift and more like a highly motivated group?
Then you find out that this applies to two people and the rest are chiselling cheese weasels because they lack the competence to be much more than frauds or petty thieves.
But the frauds and petty thieves are world-class at faking the signals of being competent without possessing the actual competence.
You ignore this for a while because you have bigger problems, perhaps including where you dropped off a chunk of your memory, and so you push this aside.
One day, it hits you, and you realise your own competence problem is that you have been projecting competence on to people who don’t behave competently and who also wouldn’t do the same thing if roles were reversed.
Another day, you write the C-level letter of recommendation to your former competitor’s C-level people for that one person you care about who wanted to stay doing the same kind of work, and because you have met and see eye to eye, they’d be fools not to hire a linchpin, which they responded to by hiring that person with only the formality of a single short interview.
They’re taking a risk conventionally but really they’re not because you can see they are competent enough to compete with you, your wife, and your two trusted people, one of which you are offering to them post-liquidation, competition which was in spite of all the baggage you’d built up thinking it’d be an asset.
But then one day, you realise why you see eye to eye: both companies have serious drag issues even if they don’t affect the bottom line as a going concern, and you employed all of those other people because the marginal rates of over-production tended to offset their sabotage and fuckery at an individual level.
But not across an entire organisation.
This is the kind of thing that kills them off, isn’t it?
That one day, you are sitting in a room with all of the people who matter, realise that all the size and pretence is to hide the fact that it’s really just all of you doing the serious bits and the rest is window dressing.
And so you shut the thing down before anyone else notices the real fraud, that it’s so easy to be bullied into needing all of those other people and that people can be fooled into caring.
No, the C-level people just came in one day and shut everything down … and with a stack of signed NDAs plus two reasonably happy people who got out with solid vitae, who is going to say otherwise?
C-level people retire all the time, and retiring business owners close businesses all the time.
BTW, moving sucks.
Here’s a growth business in the US: Japanese-style movers who do the full packing, arranging, and settling in job for you, complete with photographs, load plans, and small armies of placement people.
What passes in the US for “executive movers” would be considered an insult anywhere else, as “executive” is just a lotion applied to the wallet to make it produce more cash.
But it turns out you can get Japanese-style movers in the US … just as long as you are contracting a Japanese moving company for your international removals.
So after all of these years, finally one excellent moving crew in the US.
Twitter’s fine, everything’s fine. 🙂
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