I know exactly how it happens. Engineering projects take a long time. 90% of the effort lives in the basement where nobody can see it; getting data from some other system, optimizing queries, spinning up the servers... nothing at all user-facing. So to the untrained eye, 90% of the time, programmers are doing nothing. And that 90% can be weeks, months, even years.
I don't think any of this is unique to software engineering, either. You don't just one day decide to build a bridge and show up at the bank of the river with a cement mixer tomorrow. To someone that wants to drive over the river, it looks like no progress is being made on the project. Hence, lots of meetings (delaying the project further) to make sure everyone is working hard enough. (Because there is always "that one guy" who actually isn't doing anything. And it looks the same as someone who is working hard to an outsider.)
As for why we spend money hiring people that don't actually do anything, tracking the progress of other people's work... I think it's just loss aversion in action. If you spend 10% of the day working on timesheets and pay an additional employee to check up on them... you know where your money's going. But if someone just shows up to work and does nothing, then they're stealing from you and must be punished! It is human nature.
I don't know what we did in the past that's different from today. Somehow we got to the moon. But now companies are so bloated that even doing nothing seems like it requires 30,000 employees. I don't have much hope for the future generation of megaprojects. And, you know, we're not really doing them anymore. I wonder what changed. Or maybe looking back at the all the achievements of the entire human race at once makes it difficult to put the present day into perspective.
I don't think any of this is unique to software engineering, either. You don't just one day decide to build a bridge and show up at the bank of the river with a cement mixer tomorrow. To someone that wants to drive over the river, it looks like no progress is being made on the project. Hence, lots of meetings (delaying the project further) to make sure everyone is working hard enough. (Because there is always "that one guy" who actually isn't doing anything. And it looks the same as someone who is working hard to an outsider.)
As for why we spend money hiring people that don't actually do anything, tracking the progress of other people's work... I think it's just loss aversion in action. If you spend 10% of the day working on timesheets and pay an additional employee to check up on them... you know where your money's going. But if someone just shows up to work and does nothing, then they're stealing from you and must be punished! It is human nature.
I don't know what we did in the past that's different from today. Somehow we got to the moon. But now companies are so bloated that even doing nothing seems like it requires 30,000 employees. I don't have much hope for the future generation of megaprojects. And, you know, we're not really doing them anymore. I wonder what changed. Or maybe looking back at the all the achievements of the entire human race at once makes it difficult to put the present day into perspective.