At work, I often find myself questioning the value of what I do, especially around performance review cycles. The truth is, the output of most modern white-collar jobs is practically impossible to measure. Internal competition alone eats up the majority of working hours. So why do companies keep hiring?

I often compare big companies to complex machines. In the beginning, the machine is nimble and versatile — like a Swiss Army knife. A handful of creative people build the foundation and attract more creative people to join. But as different people come on board, layer after layer of makeshift components get bolted on during iteration, making the whole thing unwieldy. The founding team stops paying attention to whether the machine runs efficiently, and eventually no one dares to fix it — because nobody knows which part, if changed, would bring the entire thing crashing down. Applying the broken windows theory: everyone stops caring about actual performance. They just pile on their work, dust off their hands, and walk away. The machine gradually becomes tedious, hovering on the edge of a slow death.

As the saying goes, where there are people, there’s politics. Managing people is, in my view, one of the hardest things there is. To maintain a baseline of efficiency, big companies typically adopt a tree-structured management hierarchy — decisions cascade down from the top, and results flow back up. Leaf nodes also pass information to each other laterally, making it something like a B+ tree. Most communication happens between parent and child nodes, and as information travels downward, noise keeps getting added. By the time it reaches execution, the cost of just filtering out that noise eats up a huge chunk of effort. But reality isn’t that clean — the requirements being passed down keep changing as the noise is being removed. The real challenge for any employee is first the ability to cut through noise, and only then the ability to execute.

Everything I’ve described happens every single day, and for the people doing the actual work, it’s painful. It subtly trains them to adopt this inefficient way of working, forcing them to fit the system while grinding down their most precious resource — their mental energy. Eventually, a person becomes institutionalized, unable to break free from this low-efficiency system. For big companies, of course, this is a feature, not a bug — it eliminates potential competitors by buying up people’s mental energy and maintaining market monopoly.