I have been in the workforce for almost 30 years now and I believe that everybody is getting more squeezed so they don’t have the time or energy to do a proper job. The expectation is to get it done as quickly as possible and not do more unless told so.
In SW development in the 90s I had much more time for experimentation to figure things out. In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. So you just hurry through your tasks.
I think google had it right for a while with their 20% time where people could do wanted to do. As far as I know that’s over.
People need some slack if you want to see good work. They aren’t machines that can run constantly on 100% utilization.
> In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. So you just hurry through your tasks.
This has been my exact experience. Absolutely everything is tracked as a work item with estimates. Anything you think should be done needs to be justified and tracked the same way. If anything ever takes longer than the estimate that was invariably just pulled out of someones ass (because it's impossible to accurately estimate development unless you're already ~75% of the way through doing it, and even then it's a crapshoot) you need to justify that in a morning standup too.
The end result of all of this is every project getting bogged down by being stuck on the first version of whatever architecture was thought up right at the beginning and there being piles of tech debt that never gets fixed because nobody who actually understands what needs to be done has the political capital to get past the aforementioned justification filter.
Also this push to measure everything means that anything that can’t be measured isn’t valued.
One of your teammates consistently helps unblock everyone on the team when they get stuck? They aren’t closing as many tickets as others so they get overlooked on promotions or canned.
One of your teammates takes a bit longer to complete work, but it’s always rock solid and produces fewer outages? Totally invisible. Plus they don’t get to look like a hero when they save the company from the consequences of their own shoddy work.
The biggest mistake those employees make on their way to getting overlooked is assuming their boss knows.
Everyone needs to advocate for themselves.
A good boss will be getting feedback from everyone and staying on top of things. A mediocre boss will merely see "obvious" things like "who closed the most tickets." A bad boss may just play favorites and game the system on their own.
If you've got a bad boss who doesn't like you, you're likely screwed regardless. But most bosses are mediocre, not actively bad.
And in that case, the person who consistently helps unblock everyone needs to be advertising that to their manager. The person who's work doesn't need revisiting, who doesn't cause incidents needs to be hammering that home to their manager. You can do that without throwing your teammates under the bus, but you can't assume omnipotence or omniscience. And you can't wait until the performance review cycle to do it, you have to demonstrate it as an ongoing thing.
Your boss can know about it, but if their boss wants data on performance you’re back in the same boat.
Funny you mention engineers needing to market themselves though. That leads to its own consequences. I’ve been at a place where everyone needed to market their own work in order to get promoted, to get raises, and to stay off the chopping block.
The end result? The engineers at the company who get promoted are… good at self-promotion, not necessarily good at engineering. Many of the best engineers at the company—who were hired to do engineering—languish in obscurity while people who can game the system thrive. People get promoted who are only good at cranking out poorly-made deliverables that burden their team with excessive long-term maintenance issues. They fuck off to higher levels of the company, leaving their team to deal with the consequences of their previous work.
Run that script for five or ten years and it doesn’t seem to be working out well for the company.
You made excellent points. As someone looking to solve problems, finish tasks and go home. I just don't feel energized marketing myself if it is not during changing jobs.
And measurement has really taken over now. There is little value in getting task done well as compared to finishing more jira stories.
When it comes time for layoffs, it generally isn't what your boss knows, it's what your boss's grandboss thinks to throw onto a spreadsheet at the eleventh hour before Quarterly Reports are due.
A good direct boss might keep you on track for a bonus or other "local advancement", maybe even a promotion, but many companies you are only as valued as the ant numbers you look like from the C Suite's mile high club. (Which doesn't protect your good boss, either.)
I agree it's a mistake but one thing that's never taken into account in this discussion is that many people find it enough that they are doing their jobs. They don't want to do marketing. A lot of tech people are like that which is a real tragedy.
What you're describing was precisely our culture at the last startup.
One group plans ahead and overall do a solid job, so they're rarely swamped, never pull all-nighters. People are never promoted, they're thought of as slacking and un-startup-like. Top performers leave regularly because of that.
The other group is behind on even the "blocker"-level issues, people are stressed and overworked, weekends are barely a thing. But — they get praised for hard work. The heroes. (And then leave after burning out completely.)
(The company was eventually acquired, but employees got pennies. So it worked out well for the founders, while summarily ratfucking everyone else involved. I'm afraid this is very common.)
This was previously recommended to me on HN, so I’ll pass it along. The book “Seeing Like A State” gives a pretty reasonable explanation for why this happens: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
The basic idea is that the only viable way to administer a complex and heterogenous system like a massive corporation is to simplify by enforcing “legibility” or homogeneity. Without this, central control becomes far too complex to manage. Thus, the simplification becomes a mandate, even at the cost of great inefficiencies.
What makes the book particularly interesting is the many different historical examples of this phenomenon, across a wide array of human endeavors.
I like the book quite a bit, and it's been formative in my politics.
That said, I am not sure if the take-away is that managers need to account for these factors by allowing for illegibility- I am not reading you claim that, but contextually that's how the discussion feels to me.
I do agree with Scott that enforcing perfect legibility is impossible and even attempting to do so can cause immense problems, and I agree with his analysis of these modernist efforts and have found that it's a useful lens for understanding a lot of human enterprise.
I find a lot of hope in that view: nothing actually gets done without some horizontal, anarchist cooperation.
But I also find hope in the fact that it's structurally a issue with authoritarian organizational strategies which can't be accounted for and surmounted.
I don't want to make any strong claims here, but my gut reaction to your first comment is that what one manager calls “allowance for illegibility”, another might call “trust in my reports”.
Yes, at the end of the day it's necessary to have some amount of "trust" in the people doing the work. Which is good- you can try to avoid that but if it didn't happen very little would get done.
Investors want to know how long you're going to keep making them money. They don't like surprises.
Really, I think what we need are new ways for investors to participate and understand and structure their investments that don't have negative downward consequences for the structure of businesses.
Maybe I would have found the book more impactful if I had read it earlier in life. I felt like it put together various ideas and presented them well in a comprehensible manner. What I feel it omits is that the mechanisms of a state only have to be actionable, not rational. If you ask me how to mow a lawn and I come up with some byzantine process involving multiple steps that don't even contribute to the end goal I'm going to be labeled nuts or maybe "eccentric" if they want to be polite. The same scrutiny doesn't apply to the various bureaucratic processes of a state for whatever reason.
The problem is that this miserable state of affairs works at scale.
Yes, on problems that exist at the scale of one or intelligent, educated, experienced, and dedicated human (or maybe up to 3-5), an individual or small team will run circles around a business. You can have a top-notch CEO and COO and HR manager and six program managers (each with zero domain experience other than running a Jira board) and four dozen junior consultants who memorized just enough to pass the interviews and an art department and sales and finance and IT. For some problems, that whole $50M enterprise will be utterly demolished by a couple of determined engineers.
Likewise, a monarchy with a wise, benevolent, and just king can flourish, whereas a corrupted and bureaucratically entangled democracy is woefully inefficient.
But if you want your kingdom to last more than two generations before succumbing to a greedy monarch, or want your enterprise to solve bigger problems that don't decompose nicely to small ones, to vertically integrate huge manufacturing systems and scale out to billions of units, the only method that works is the inefficient one. And it does work!
Only revisionist history tell tales of flourishing kingdoms under a just king. In reality, the reason feodality worked for so long was the anarchy and power struggle, the cavalcades (basically raids) and a honour based justice (basically don't kill fellow nobility during war, and avoid killing militantes during cavalcades and you'll be good). The anarchical nature of the system made it particularly susceptible to organised raids, but also extremely 'agile' in it's political responses. Once power was consolidated however, the clergy and the royalty pushed their law and hierarchical order onto the mostly aristocratic feodality, it broke and you get the crusade against Alby, the war between Plantagenet and capetiens, and probably a lot of other misery inflicted to the general population. Then once the hierarchical order is set, you need an administration, which will become inefficient by nature.
What if it doesn't survive and 70% of the people who were in the Kingdom end up in worse, arbitrarily-ruled, small despotic fiefdoms instead? And only 10% end up being better off by being lucky enough to have landed in the high-trust+high-competence small group?
Or, switching to consumer products vs company revenue/profit or kingdoms, and grounding in a specific example: people love to hate Windows, but how many of them would actually be better off if the options were just Mac (still expensive, still niche) or Linux? And "well they could just learn how to [code or configure text files or whatever]" for these purposes counts as worse off, IMO - more time spent on something that used to kinda-sorta-at-least-work-predictably for them.
> people love to hate Windows, but how many of them would actually be better off if the options were just Mac (still expensive, still niche) or Linux?
I don't know, but Windows has becoming increasingly worse at everyday usage. I swear Linux has better suspend/sleep functionality now, doesn't sneaky restart randomly (yeah, just because you reopen an explorer window but none of my other, actually important programs will definitely make people notice), doesn't take a minute to react to an unlock attempt several times a day for no reason on even very performant hardware..
So yeah, I think many would be better off with Linux.
Your comparison isn't very good as Microsoft Windows undergoes perpetual change and churn for the sake of doing it. This breaks existing workflows along the way. As a product it was effectively complete by the time Windows 2000 was released, having successfully integrated what was then considered state of the art technology to develop a practical operating system based on the principals known at the time. All it ever needed from there forward was maintenance updates and kernel updates to enable new hardware level technology to be harnessed by software.
> The problem is that this miserable state of affairs works at scale.
It "works" in the sense that it can be kept going by patching the damage it causes by throwing more money at it.
What it mostly does at scale is appear to work, to those high enough above it that they can't see any of the details: only the metrics that are being optimized for.
Arguably the modern MBA has gotten so insular, with many graduating with an MBA having only the barest modicum of humanities courses and the barest foot out of the door of a business college, that despite supposedly representing a higher University degree it seems increasingly fair to call it "undereducated". MBA programs got too deep into the business of selling as many MBAs as they could as quickly as they could they forgot to check their own curriculum for things like "perverse incentives" and "regulatory capture" and "tribalism".
The last 50 years or so of managerial practice has been a recipe for overfitting with a brutal emphasis on measuring, optimizing, and stack ranking everything.
I think an argument can be made that this is an age of overfitting everywhere.
Worse yet, these are upward-censored metrics. Failing to make them hurts your career, but making or exceeding your targets doesn’t really help your career—it’s just seen as validating management’s approach.
As soon as they impose metrics, you need to bring in a union, and (to be frank) chase or bug out anyone who’s not on board with worker solidarity.
It's fascinating that you end up sort of doing the work twice, you build an excel (or jira) model of the work work along with the actual work to be done.
Often this extends to the entire organization, where you have like this parallel dimension of spreadsheets and planning existing on top of everything.
Jira is already almost like "productivity theater" where engineers chart the work for the benefit of managers, and managers of managers only. Many programmers already really resent having to deal with it. Soon it will be a total farce, as engineers using MCP Jira servers have LLMs chart the "work" and manage the tickets for them, as managers do the same in reverse, instructing LLMs to summarize the work being done in Jira.
It'll be nothing but LLMs talking to other LLMs under the guise of organizational productivity in which the only one deriving any value from this effort is the companies charging for the input and output tokens. Except, they are likely operating at a loss...
Managers (as in PMs, EMs, and C-Suite) don't like JIRA either - there just isn't an alternative.
Customers and investors ask for delivery timelines and amount of resources invested on major features or products, and you need to give an accurate-ish answer, and you as a company will be dealing with hundreds if not thousands of features depending on size.
In that kind of a situation, the only way you can get that visibility is through JIRA (or a JIRA type product), because it acts as a forcing function to get a defensible estimate, and monitor progress.
Furthermore, due to tax laws, we need to track investments into features and initiatives, and JIRA becomes the easiest way to collect that kind of amoratization data.
Once some AI Agent to automate this whole program management/JIRA hygiene process exists, it will make life for everyone so much easier.
When customers give you money, they expect a date.
When investors give you money, they want to see whether or not you are investing in the right initiatives.
When you open a company, the IRS, SEC, and other regulators expect some amount of financial compliance.
Do you want me to come to you and give you an ultimatum to give me an exact date, calculate amortization, and defend existing investments, and if any of those slips you are the fired? And do that with all the hundreds and thousands of initiatives on a daily basis?
That's the alternative.
Welcome to the industry - you're paid to make purchasers happy, not you. Purchasers don't care if you DuckDB or OracleDB - they care if the product they paid for will be delivered on time and meet the needs stipulated in their contract.
If you want to be happy and only deal with engineering problems, you sadly have to deal with the poopshow that JIRA is.
It's theater because the numbers in JIRA are, for the most part, pulled out of someone's ass, and then multiplied by various coefficients by managers along the chain (based on their pessimism and/or experience). Garbage in, garbage out.
So yes, this is theater, and it only makes someone happy for as long as they aren't aware (or can pretend to not be aware) how the sausage is made.
If you round up great engineering orgs that ship impactful stuff more of them don't use JIRA than do. Linear, Basecamp, Asana, Monday etc.
My experience is by the time an org gets hundreds of priorities and can't effectively delegate to sub orgs they're already fucked and there's no point working there if you want to do anything meaningful.
Nothing is necessary to exist besides foraging, yet you are still using an industrially manufactured product (laptop or mobile phone) to reply to someone on a VC-subsidized forum.
So I'm not sure your contention has much merit, unless you wish to return to the woods and stop using HN, otherwise you're just enabling the supposed waste you appear to detest.
Or alternatively, you could hop off the high horse and understand the headaches the people you report to at work deal with, and thus maybe learn some additional context that can help you at your current or future job, and maybe think of a way to remove the drudgery in a process that annoys everyone.
I mean there is an alternative out there for making software that doesn't require profit and can still provide societal value. The alternative isn't to forage in the wilderness, please tell me you are just having a laugh and weren't being serious.
Absolutely everything is tracked as a work item with estimates. Anything you think should be done needs to be justified and tracked the same way.
My grandpa once said something that seemed ridiculous but makes a lot of sense: that every workplace should have a “heavy” who steals a new worker’s lunch on the first day, just to see if he asserts himself. Why? Not to haze or bully but to filter out the non-fighters so that when management wants to impose quotas or tracking, they remember that they’d be enforcing this on a whole team of fighters… and suddenly they realize that squeezing the workers isn’t worth it.
The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing.
That generation had it more together as citizens, and they held on to power for a long time. Postwar all of the institutions in the US grew quickly, and the WW2 generation moved up quickly as a result. The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone.
>The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone.
The boomer types are now in their 70s and even 80s and mostly retired (or dead). It's the generations after them that run many of the anal-retentive, bureaucratically obsessive compulsive managerial postings today, and among those are a good number of gen z turds who are at least as toxic, while being smugly self-righteous about their habits. We'll be blaming boomers for decades after they're dead, for things long since out of their hands.
That's half of it. The other half is, WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower. So the war also taught lessons on a societal level about organization and cooperation, and the postwar economic boom provided the means to get great things done.
> The other half is, WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower.
The US was the leading industrial power from around 1880 or 1890, and it became the leading military power in the 1910s (by dint of entering WWI so late that it didn't exhaust its manpower fighting it). It may have been a cultural backwater as late as WWI, but its economic status would have been fairly undisputed. And by WWII, the only question anyone would have seriously asked is if the US or the UK held the throne as greatest of the great powers.
I think if you look at how most people lived, worked, travelled, communicated, educated, etc before WW2 - there was a huge improvement after the war that resulted in lots of development and economic opportunities for the average person.
One of the consequences of WWII was that everyone's plans, ideas, and work cultures were turned into direct results very quickly, in the real world. Sometimes fatally.
The people who lived through that had their feet on the ground.
Aside from its many other flaws, post-70s neoliberalism added a bizarre abstraction layer of economic delusion over everything. This suppressed the core truths of physical reality, common sense, and the basic social requirement of sane reciprocal relationships, and did its best to make consequences as indirect and deniable as possible.
Things that really, really matter - like ecological, political, and social stability - were devalued in everyday experience and replaced with economic abstractions that are more mystical than practical.
It's very culty, and the disconnect between how things should be and how they really are is getting more and more obvious to everyone.
"Aside from its many other flaws, post-70s neoliberalism added a bizarre abstraction layer of economic delusion over everything. This suppressed the core truths of physical reality, common sense, and the basic social requirement of sane reciprocal relationships, and did its best to make consequences as indirect and deniable as possible."
I think I need to print that out and put on the wall. However, did you live through it youself? I think it it hard to evaluate stuff like this with 2nd hand experience only.
> The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing.
That era also had militant labor organization and real socialist and communist parties in the US. Anticommunism killed all that and brought us to the current state of affairs where employers that respect their employees even a little bit are unicorns.
High demand for labor can lead to better conditions, but demand for labor isn't static and without real organization and solidarity it's nearly impossible for workers to punish companies that move jobs to low-cost locales. Economic policy is also controlled by the employer class, which means policies that encourage unemployment and inflation are common.
This is my experience as well. In the late 90s/early 2000s I had the luxury of a lot of time to deeply and learn Unix, Perl, Java, web development, etc., and it was all self-directed. Now with Agile, literally every hour is accounted for, though we of course have other ways of wasting time by overestimating tasks and creating unnecessary do-nothing stories in order to inflate metrics and justify dead space in the sprint.
Everyone's complaining about that as a developer, and rightly so. But that can't be easy for the PMs, either, trying to find a way to "add value" when they have no idea what's going on.
I'd expect there to be some "unexpected network outages" regularly in that kind of situation...
This is kind of cool as an alternative process to develop apps with. Literally product in a zoom window telling you what to build as you go along. No standups, no refinement, no retros etc. Just a PM that really knows what the customer needs and the developer just building those as you go along.
No developer wants to being treated as a code monkey and I bet no PM would want to waste time watching someone type out code that they don't understand.
If you're creating nothing stories to justify work life balance and avoid burnout your organization has a problem. Look into Extreme Programming and Sustainable Pace.
> People ... aren’t machines that can run constantly on 100% utilization.
You also can't run machines at 100% utilisation & expect quality results. That's when you see tail latencies blow out, hash maps lose their performance, physical machines wear supra-linearly... The list goes on.
The standard rule for CPU-bound RPC server utilization is 80%. Any less and you could use fewer machines; any more and latency starts to take a hit. This is when you're optimizing for latency. Throughput is different.
> I have been in the workforce for almost 30 years now and I believe that everybody is getting more squeezed so they don’t have the time or energy to do a proper job. The expectation is to get it done as quickly as possible and not do more unless told so.
That's my impression as well, but I'd stress that this push is not implicit or driven by metrics or Jira. This push is sold as the main trait of software projects, and what differentiates software engineering from any other engineering field.
Software projects are considered adaptable, and all projects value minimizing time to market. This means that on paper there is no requirement to eliminate the need to redesign or reimplement whole systems or features. Therefore, if you can live with a MVP that does 70% of your requirements list but can be hacked together in a few weeks, most would not opt to spend more man months only to get minor increments. You'd be even less inclined to pay all those extra man months upfront if you can quickly get that 70% in a few weeks and from that point onward gradually build up features.
I'm often reminded of that Futurama episode “A Pharaoh to Remember” (S04E07), where Bender is whipping the architects/engineers in an attempt to make them solve problems faster.
They say AI, but AI isn't eliminating programming. I've wrote a few applications with AI assistance. It probably would've been faster if I wrote it myself. The problem is that it doesn't have context and wildly assumes what your intentions are and cheats outcomes.
It will replace juniors for that one liner, it won't replace a senior developer who knows how to write code.
What work are you doing the last few days? My experience is for a very narrow range of tasks, like getting the basics of a common but new to me API working, they are moderately useful. But the overwhelming majority of the time they are useless.
Cursor Chat and autocomplete are near useless, and generate all sorts of errors, which on the whole cost more time.
However, using composer, passing in the related files explicitly in the context, and prompting small changes incrementally has been a game changer for me. It also helps if you describe the intended behaviour in excruciating detail, including how you want all the edge cases/errors handled.
I recently tried Cursor for about a week and I was disappointed. It was useful for generating code that someone else has definitely written before (boilerplate etc), but any time I tried to do something nontrivial, it failed no matter how much poking, prodding, and thoughtful prompting I tried.
Even when I tried to ask it for stuff like refactoring a relatively simple rust file to be more idiomatic or organized, it consistently generated code that did not compile and was unable to fix the compile errors on 5 or 6 repromptings.
For what it's worth, a lot of SWE work technically trivial -- it makes this much quicker so there's obviously some value there, but if we're comparing it to a pair programmer, I would definitely fire a dev who had this sort of extremely limited complexity ceiling.
It really feels to me (just vibes, obviously not scientific) like it is good at interpolating between things in its training set, but is not really able to do anything more than that. Presumably this will get better over time.
If you asked a junior developer to refactor a rust program to be more idiomatic, how long would you expect that to take? Would you expect the work to compile on the first try?
I love Cline and Copilot. If you carefully specify your task, provide context for uncommon APIs, and keep the scope limited, then the results are often very good. It’s code completion for whole classes and methods or whole utility scripts for common use cases.
"If you asked a junior developer to refactor a rust program to be more idiomatic, how long would you expect that to take? Would you expect the work to compile on the first try?"
The purpose of giving that task to a junior dev isn't to get the task done, it's to teach them -- I will almost always be at least an order order of magnitude faster than a junior for any given task. I don't expect juniors to be similarly productive to me, I expect them to learn.
The parent comment also referred to a 'competent pair programmer', not a junior dev.
My point was that for the tasks that I wanted to use the LLM, frequently there was no amount of specificity that could help the model solve it -- I tried for a long time, and generally if the task wasn't obvious to me, the model generally could not solve it. I'd end up in a game of trying to do nondeterministic/fuzzy programming in English instead of just writing some code to solve the problem.
Again I agree that there is significant value here, because there is a ton of SWE work that is technically trivial, boring, and just eats up time. It's also super helpful as a natural-language info-lookup interface.
What matters here is the communication overhead not how long between responses. If I’m indefinitely spending more time handholding a jr dev than they save me eventually I just fire em, same with code gen.
A big difference is that the jr. dev is learning compared to the AI who is stuck at whatever competence was baked in from the factory. You might be more patient with the jr if you saw positive signs that the handholding was paying off.
That was my point, though I may not have been clear.
Most people do get better over time, but for those who don’t (or LLM’s) it’s just a question of if their current skills are a net benefit.
I do expect future AI to improve. My expectation is it’s going to be a long slow slog just like with self driving cars etc, but novel approaches regularly turn extremely difficult problems into seemingly trivial exercises.
I was about to post largely the same thing. There is a saying in design: "Good, fast, cheap --- pick two." The default choice always seems to be fast and cheap nowadays. I find myself telling other people to take their time, but I too have worked jobs where the workloads were far too great to do a decent job. So this is what we get.
One time during a 1:1 with who I consider the best manager I ever had, in the context of asking now urgent something needed to get done, I said something along the llines of how I tend to throttle to around 60% of my "maximum power" to avoid burnout but I could push a bit harder if the task we were discussing was essential with to warrant it. He said that it wasn't necessary but also stressed that any time in the future that I did push myself further, I should always return to 60% power as soon as I could (even if the "turbo boost" wasn't enough to finish whatever I was working on. To this day, I'm equally amazed at both how his main concern with the idea of me only working at 60% most of the time was that I didn't let myself get pressured into doing more than that and the fact that there are probably very few managers out there who would react well to my stating the obvious truth that this is necessary
The article addresses the fact that it's more of the "job" that the software company provides as an extension of their services isn't really a "job" a la "SW development in the 90s"
It's the after effect of companies not being penalized for using the exploitation dragnet approach to use people in desperate situations to generate more profits while providing nothing in return.
People have to care about outcomes in order to get good outcomes. Its pretty difficult to get someone to work extra time, or care about the small stuff if there is a good chance that they will be gone in 6 months.
Alternatively, if leadership is going to cycle over in 6 months - then no one will remember the details.
It needs to be reflected faster in quarterly results. When the effect takes a year or two, nobody notices and there are too many other variables/externalities to place blame.
Definitely. If you tighten a bearing up-to 100% - to zero "play", it will stop rotating easy.. and start wearing. Which is.. in people-terms, called burnout.
Or as article below says, (too much) Efficiency is the Enemy..
I think letting devs 2 hours a day, that they can flex so if they wanna use it on Fridays its fine, for personal projects, whether internal or otherwise. Just think of all the random tech debt that could be resolved if devs had 2 hours a day to code anything, including new projects that benefit everyone. Most people can only squeeze out about 6 hours worth of real work anyway. You burn up by the end of the day.
>Just think of all the random tech debt that could be resolved if devs had 2 hours a day to code anything, including new projects that benefit everyone.
regardless of the potential benefits of this plan, zero tech debt would get erased.
imho net tech debt would increase by the 80 20 rule, meaning that you're not going to get more than 80% of the side projects fully wrapped in the 20% of the time that you've allotted to them.
It's almost as if people don't understand what the word "productivity" means. That's all it is, if you hear "x increase in productivity" and it sounds great, it really means : you, the worker, work harder after we fire other people and thus are "more productive" because you did the same out put that 2 people did. Sucker. And we all eat this shit up.
I've even seen this and it seems to have accelerated in the last 10 years or so. I'm seeing roles be combined, deadlines get tighter, and quality go down. Documentation has also gotten worse. This all seems pretty odd when you consider the tools to develop, test, and even document have mostly gotten more powerful/better/faster.
Same. What's crazier now is nobody in management seems to want to take a risk, when the risks are so much lower. We have better information, blogs, posts on how others solved issue, yet managers are still like "we can't risk changing our backend from dog shit to postgres". . . .when in the 90s you would literally be figuring it all out yourself, making a gut call and you'd be supported to venture into the unknown.
now it's all RSU, Stock Prices, FAANG ego stroking and mad dashes for the acquihire exit pushing out as much garbage as possible while managers shine it up like AI goodness
> In SW development in the 90s I had much more time for experimentation to figure things out. In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller.
Software development for a long time had the benefit that managers didn't get tech. They had no chance of verifying if what the nerds told them actually made sense.
Nowadays there's not just Agile, "business dashboards" (Power BI and the likes) and other forms of making tech "accountable" to clueless managers, but an awful lot of developers got bought off to C-level and turned into class traitors, forgetting where they came from.
I commend you for having an opinion so bad I can't tell if you're satirizing marxists or not.
Let me ask you this, would you rather be managed by a hierarchy made up of people who don't understand what you do? Because I assure you it is far worse than being managed by "class traitors".
well, not the original poster, but I have been managed by both kinds, and the best manager I ever had was not a former techie and the worst was a former programmer.
The worst manager did often say things that were sort of valuable and correct in a general way, like "well you don't actually know that because it hasn't been tested" which was of course true, but he also seemed to think he could tell people what the correct way to do something was without knowing the technology and the codebase. This often meant that I had to go to junior developers later, after a meeting, and say "concerning ticket X, T. didn't consider these things(listing the things), so that while it is true that we should in principle do what T. said, it will not be adequate, you will also need to do this - look at the code for this function here, it should be abstracted out in some way probably, this was my crappy way of handling the problem in desperation Y months ago."
Trying to explain to him why he was wrong was impossible in itself, he was a tech genius evidently, and you just had to give it up after a bit, and figure that at some time in the future the decisions would be reversed after "we learned" something.¨
on edit: in the example I give the manager as I said was correct in what he wanted done, but as I said it was inadequate as the bug would keep recurring if only that was done, so more things had to be done that were not as pretty or as pure as what he wanted.
I want my manager to help get the business out of my way- managing requirements, keeping external dependencies on track, fussy paperwork and such.
I don't need my manager second-guessing my every decision or weighing in on my PRs making superficial complaints about style while also bemoaning our velocity.
Hands down, the best managers I've had have all been clueless about the languages and types of work I do, and the worst managers have (or think they) have some understanding of what I do.
> Let me ask you this, would you rather be managed by a hierarchy made up of people who don't understand what you do? Because I assure you it is far worse than being managed by "class traitors".
One's direct manager should be a developer, yes. The problem is the level above that - most organisations don't have a SWE career track, so if you want a pay rise you need a promotion and that's only available for managerial roles.
The problem there is that a lot of developers make very bad managers and a lot of organisations don't give a fuck about giving their managers the proper skills training. The result is then usually a "tech director" who hasn't touched code in years but just loves to micromanage based on knowledge from half a decade ago or more. That's bad enough in Java, but in NodeJS, Go, Rust or other hipster reinvent-the-wheel stacks it's dangerous.
They come in and blather completely irrelevant, way outdated or completely wrong "advice", plan projects with way less resources than the project would actually need - despite knowing what "crunch time" entails for their staff themselves.
And also, the programmers that got "promoted" to management are people that are here for the money/power and asked to be promoted, not because they care about coding.
And absolutely not because their peers wanted for them to be promoted because they saw a good manager in them while they were working together.
So they'll definitely make it worse for everyone than a guy that doesn't know anything about tech but wanted a career in management because they care about managing.
The gig economy is way worse than the author describes.
Gig workers can't advance with the companies they work for.
Gig workers can't build a network with their coworkers because they don't have coworkers...and there's a good chance that they are competing for work with other people working for the same company.
There are dead end day jobs, and then there is gig work.
This isn't too different from most low-skill jobs. Most people don't aspire to be assistant manager at McDonalds, they do it for a while, build a resume, then move.
Gig workers are literally disposable robots. You’re part of a computer program. There is no human relationship. At least a McDonald’s worker can talk to their manager.
And maybe even become manager in some relatively small number of years. And then move to some other industry. Not that most of them do, but there is at least some career progression.
Managers at McDonalds can make $50-70K/yr. There is job security, benefits and opportunities for career advancement. Plenty of people start at the very bottom of the ladder flipping burgers and make it all the way to corporate. It's a tired meme that "McDonalds jobs are meant for teenagers". These are all incredibly in-demand jobs. And plenty of fast food chains pay significantly more, sometimes including benefits like college tuition reimbursement.
Except when it isn't, like Peter Cancro of Jersey Mikes, who started making sandwiches and then bought it in 1975, and in 2024 sold it to Blackrock for $8B.
Not to mention casual employees at least get some sort of social aspect from their work life. (A slight variation on the networking you mentioned.) Most of my friends, I have through past work environments like shared offices, etc. That would be near-impossible as a gig worker.
I think a lot of commenters here are projecting this article onto their work lives as tech office workers, but it's really more about the world of unskilled and semi-skilled service/gig workers, like handymen, furniture assemblers, delivery drivers, and so on.
All these things can be true and they reinforce each other: The jobs suck <-> The people willing to do them aren't very happy, skilled or competent <-> The pay is minuscule. And we can't seem to get out of this Nash Equilibrium.
None of those listed jobs is actually unskilled labor. Driving a big truck around narrow roads is a skill most don’t have, doing it at speed and running up and down to actually move the heavy packages is a skill most don’t have. Assembling furniture is a skill most don’t have, especially with complex engineered wood products that will break if stressed wrong. Handymen is literally just a collection of skilled labor jobs rolled into one guy that can handle small home improvement projects like carpentry, masonry, plumbing, and electrical. These are specialized jobs that have wrongly been labeled “un-skilled” or “semi-skilled” as if knowledge work is the only skill of value…
Very, very little labor is unskilled. In almost any work there is a massive difference in quality and speed between someone who has been doing it for <6 months vs. someone who has been doing it for >3 years.
My theory is that "unskilled labor" was a term of propaganda invented by an earlier generation of business leaders in order to publicly devalue many labor-intensive roles. That generation knew that it was a lie, but the business leaders that followed were taught that "unskilled labor" was axiomatic, and essentially "drank the kool-aid".
The result of this is that the labor pool for many disciplines has been hollowed out because it's no longer financially sustainable for workers to build the skills needed to excel in those roles.
I’ve had similar frustrations with gig economy services. A while ago, i hired someone from TaskRabbit to set up a standing desk. i thought it would be an easy process, but the assembler showed up late. then he had a hard time following basic instructions, and he also left halfway through, saying he had another job to go to. I finished the assembly myself at the end.
then i realize these platforms don’t support skilled, well-paid workers. they focus on cheap convenience, which often results in poor quality. the issue isn't just that people struggle with their jobs. it's that the system makes it hard for them to do good work.
Now I hire local professionals, even if they cost more. Their experience and trustworthiness save me time and frustration.
>Now I hire local professionals, even if they cost more. Their experience and trustworthiness save me time and frustration.
I've found the exact opposite. The deeper the moat the bigger the jerks. I can pick up a guy at home depot who'll bust ass as hard as I will at a very reasonable price. Can't say that (especially the first part) about most professionals. Anything with a license or high capital investment keeping upstarts out is like pulling teeth to work with. Even for brick and mortar this holds. My local upholsterer is a pleasure to work with compared to any tire and alignment shop.
That said, I'm also not hiring people to put together Ikea beds for me or bringing piles of gravy work to any given professional.
Edit: I will add, I have consistently been amazed with what concrete truck drivers will do above and beyond the bare minimum and the consistent "get it done or tear shit up trying" attitude they bring. But this might be a regional thing.
We have to learn how to DIY more things. I pretty much don't hire anyone to do anything anymore, because I always end up having to supervise them, they do the work incorrectly, and I have to double check the quality and insist they come back to do it right. So, I'm not really saving any time. At some point, you might as well just do the work yourself because you know it will be done correctly.
The buisnessmodel is speculating that your average Joe does not have the energy or knowledge to go after the shobby work.
I notice this trend a lot and while I can push back I feel sorry for the people that are not able to do so or do not know their rights.
Disagree. Just the other day I needed someone to replace my chimney cap. The quotes from the big companies ranged from $3k-10k. Utterly ridiculous. I got some guy from an app who bought the stainless steel cap for $300 and installed it for $300 more for a total of $600 and the work is fine.
The difference is when guy from an app falls and breaks something it will turn out he doesn’t have insurance so you will lose much more than 3k when he sues
They don't focus on cheap convenience. They focus on milking as much money as they can from the customer and the restaurant, and then squeeze the worker to death by transferring as many expenses and risks as possible to the worker. Then they force them to engage in race to the bottom compensation-wise.
Result? Only the desperate do it, and get out of it as soon as possible. But the pay is so bad, people are increasingly trapped in it.
> At Fred Meyer, our local Kroger-owned grocery store, a bagger in his 70s put all my frozen items in a normal bag, and my chips in the cold storage bag I’d brought from home.
A) Having to work a job (obviously not done out of passion) 70+ is really disheartening
B) I don´t understand why this even is something that has to be done by a worker.
I bought the groceries. I know where I want my stuff in my bags.
Or I just toss them back in the cart and load it properly at the car.
When visiting US I feel very weird about baggers. Bagging stuff is something I can easily do myself while the cashier scans the products. Now instead of doing something useful, I just stand there idle and awkward watching the staff working.
In general having service workers spend a good part of their lives doing things that I can trivially with minimal effort and no loss of time do myself feels actively degrading these people. Perhaps some do get sense of being useful out of it, but I'd guess a lot of them would rather be doing something else if given choice.
There was one cashier who also bagged at a local supermarket who was the mythical 10x bagger. I'm not joking when I say they were a virtuoso at scanning and bagging and I would always line up in their line just to witness it again and anyway that line moved incredibly fast. It's fascinating that even mundane activities can be executed with speed and beauty.
They've graduated college so I guess I'll never see that again.
My father paid for college working at a grocery _part time_ and is full of stories about how a good grocer could tell a little better the ripeness of a fruit to gift that perfectly ripe one to the right customer that day who was going to eat it that night or that weekend, how there used to be an art to bagging, how they used to have real breaks and social lives, how he could get some of his homework done during work hours or do something incredible for a customer with that same kind of time.
You get the skills you pay for. When a part-time job can pay for college, imagine what the full-time regulars can do. When people have the sorts of breaks and downtime to improve themselves, think of what they can do with that time to also improve their customer's experience in little and unique ways. It is easy to wonder what all we've lost in letting companies penny pinch labor so hard, focusing on productivity numbers over anything else, minimizing the number of employees and their wages to the barest minimums.
But also, as it easy as it seems to wonder about those sorts of things, it is still fascinating how many that lived through those changes don't see the squeeze that well. My father tells those stories just as often to complain about the experience in a modern day grocery store and how quality has slipped. It does take explicit reminders like "they paid you well enough you paid for college, you know what minimum wage is like today, yeah?" The long boiled frog sometimes doesn't remember the soup wasn't always so hot.
He might not be doing it for economic reasons. He might be doing it to get out of the house. My mom's physician suggested volunteer work or a part time job to keep her active instead of sitting on the couch all day.
Most likely he is doing it for economic reasons. My preferred checker is an elderly woman that is slow, but very affable and likes to chat when there is no line.
Despite her positive attitude, she is working because social security isn't enough and grocery workers also get an employee discount.
Volunteer work is a lot like part time work, in that it's mostly low skill, and the work varies from physical labor to office work, and from behind-the-scenes jobs where you only interact with other volunteers to intensely face-to-face jobs where there's no hiding from the emotions of the people you serve.
A low stress, easy job like that could totally be done out of choice. A big concern of seniors in my life is fearing cognitive atrophy from lack of social connections.
Retail is not "low stress". I guarantee you that senior bagger is getting chewed out every single day both by his customers and his management for being too slow hurry up already, packing the eggs at the bottom of the bag omg what are you doing you fucking idiot, etc.
Nonsense. Retail workers have a way of exaggerating how bad their jobs are. I worked retail in my teens and for years and maybe saw 2-3 bad customers in that entire time.
I'll generally tell the clerk that I'll bag, which speeds up the lines, and I get stuff pretty much where I want it. (My store doesn't generally have a dedicated bagger)
I bring couple reusable bags, that are more like foldable boxes than a bag. It makes bagging trivial because you just set your stuff in a box. It's organizing groceries in small and fragile plastic bags that's the hard part.
It depends. When I go to Costco and make huge purchases to last a month, I unload the cart onto the payment conveyor and the bagger bags them on the other side. By the time I’m done unloading the cart and have finished paying, the cart is ready to go. I would say that’s like a 40-50% time save. Those really add up to shorter lines and more purchases for the stores.
Unfortunately, around here, most of the self-checkout "lanes" are explicitly marked as "X items or less" express lanes. If you're doing a full shopping, they don't want you using them. (This seems particularly stupid at one of the stores, where they have about a dozen self-checkouts, half marked 14 items or less and half marked 20 items or less, and literally every time I'm there, at least half of them are unused. Fortunately they also have a lot of manned regular checkout lanes.)
Furthermore, because the expectation nowadays is that the cashier will bag the groceries, too, the checkout infrastructure is very much set up to support that and only that model: rather than having a short belt after the cashier to send the groceries to a bagging area, the cashier has a couple of bag slots right in front of them, and a tiny island behind them to put your bags on, along with any items that they need to hold onto to bag later (eg, chips, eggs—things they don't want to put under other things). So even if you wanted to bag for yourself, it would make it much less efficient and more awkward for the cashier.
I recently retired after 45 years in tech. I started out in 1978 at Bell Labs. I have had great jobs and terrible jobs. Great bosses and horrific bosses. And all the things in between. I did not just survive, I thrived and beyond and worked at 3 start ups and a bunch of other companies large and small. What I learned is to not to be afraid. Regardless of what is happening around you. Fear is the enemy. Don't be afraid to be weird or crazy or whatever is causing you to be timid.
This seems supremely irrelevant to the topic of the article. I doubt very much the Wayfair bed assemblyperson is being held back from fear. But hopefully they read your inspiring comment and can, I guess, stop being timid.
> What I learned is to not to be afraid. Regardless of what is happening around you.
Were you perhaps financially secure enough not to have to fear anything? Or tenured (Bell Labs!) that unemployment wasn't actually a threat to you? YMMV.
I long for the day when someone can give advice based on their own personal experience without someone else being like “well that won’t work for literally everyone”
It's obnoxious behavior. For example, I decided when I was young to live in my car and be homeless. I saved a bunch of money, and I've been frugal most my life. I was also super focused at my work and climbed the ladder making real money.
I believe most people don't have discipline to endure less than and the discipline to really listen to what power asks of them. There is a lot of great advice for people to do well in a job, but they just... don't apply it.
What's the _point_ of the anecdote, though? You're taking up everybody's time to tell a story, do us a favor to have a relevant point.
"Have no fear" doesn't apply to the article, at all. You might as well write "what I learned was to not stick legos up my nostril". Also good advice. Also not applicable.
It's fine if it doesn't work for everyone, it's annoying if it isn't relevant to anyone.
I was watching a trial the other day and the prosecutor asks "And did you often see your nephews at your mothers house when you video called her?", and the defendant, a dentists, says "Yep, watching TV, brushing their teeth.[5 second silence] Don't forget to brush your teeth. Really important." The prosecutor smiles, laughs, and says "A little dull humor never hurt, eh?"
I'm not sure your average adult would find "don't be afraid" to be "advice", or some deeply meaningful advice that only a cynic would think was anything less than excellent.
While YMMV, a fear response is a choice. You can have all the rational reasons to be afraid (like the bottom of your hierarchy of needs being unmet) and choose to act out of cold rationality rather than fear. Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - if you can act without fear even when there is justified reason to be afraid, you will be able to easily do so when it isn't justified.
"... is called a delusion". What I am suggesting is not delusion, it is mindfulness and cutting through delusion. When one is presented with something that elicits a fear response (whether the stimulus is rational or not) the goal is to quiet all of the "lizard brain" reactions, and instead formulate a well reasoned response. "Fear is the mind-killer" - while from fiction, still rings true to me - if you react out of fear you will short-circuit internal processes that are far better at long-term reasoning even when at the expense of short-term comfort.
People acclimate to their circumstances. Do you think people in developing countries live in a constant state of panic because they don't have a seven figure retirement account?
As someone who is more in the middle of my career rather than the end of it, I would like to echo your sentiment. I have had plenty of roles where I was tasked with things that were out of my depth, and the answer is to just not let it be. There is always a path to get the answers/skills you need to do what is asked of you, you just might not know the path yet, so the core skill (and where I think fear comes into the process) is accepting that not knowing something now is never a hinderance so long as once can do self-directed learning. The rest is reality testing if what you just learned is actually able to solve your problem. If it isn't, then repeat ad infinitum until it is.
More than a decade ago I was hired as an intern at Colgate-Palmolive as a software developer. Turns out they were(are?) one of the largest SAP deployments in the US. The entire company revolved around SAP. Due to lack of college graduates knowing SAP, they took great pains to treat me extremely well and train me (a CS major) in ABAP using SAP Netweaver.
My project was more ambitious than the rest of the group because I had enough courage and bravado to be assigned a project like that. In fact I made it a point to be 'brave' and make myself look really good in front of the upper level managers. I tried to know everyones name, even in other departments and to be super polite and humble around any sort of manager there. When I finally got some tasks to do, I was so miserable that I finished multiple days without getting anything done. I felt so depressed thinking that I slogged through four years of CS for this?
In the end I managed to finish last in the cohort and Colgate took the rare(at the time)decision to not extend me a full time offer. I felt like a complete failure because I didn't put in 100% and I felt like I let my mentor down.
At the same time I know that I truly hated it. To this day seeing pictures of SAP GUI gives me anxiety and makes my stomach turn. How do you overcome something like that and push on? It does not always seem like a sure thing. I sometimes think what if I had pushed through and gotten the offer? I'd probably still be at Colgate like my mentor was.
With the benefit of hindsight I have learned to be super appreciative and thankful for them treating me so well but im glad circumstances led me to not ending up there. But really who knows if it would have been better in the long run? Whenever I see Colgate it actually evokes positive memories of that time. But the biggest thing I learned was to not bite off more than you can chew and if you don't truly love what you are doing there is another path out there.
"How do you slog through something you truly hate?" - I don't.
When signals that a role is not aligned with my needs start cropping up, I begin searching for a new role passively, and as the situation develops I speed up my search.
"I felt like a complete failure because I didn't put in 100% and I felt like I let my mentor down" - to thine own self be true. I have failed to put in 100% at some jobs, and sometimes i regret it more than others. I have narratives that legitimize my laziness or lack of commitment based on some previous slight from the company, or a missed promise on their part, but I hold myself accountable.
"How do you overcome something like that and push on? It does not always seem like a sure thing"
Resilience is a wildly varying trait of folks, and depends on your emotional and mental state. "First world problems" are a great example, one when is socialized at a certain comfort level, missing that causes distress. Some working conditions are truly untenable, in which case do what you have to do, but otherwise do the best with the situation you're given.
Which Bell Labs? Are you still in the area? I’m minutes away from Murray Hill and a lot of what you’re saying resonates with me (~10 years into my career and starting to lean into what I previously thought was weird).
Fear is one thing but how do you deal with regret? Regret for taking the leap as well as regret for not taking the leap? There can be regret in both paths.
You have to accept that life is single threaded and you’re not always going to choose the most optimal path.
It’s easy to overthink, but without omniscient info, execute the plan you have.
Regret is tough because it piles up as you age. It’s easy to look back and think “dang, I did a lot of bad moves” while ignoring all the upsides and limited info you had at the time.
In many ways our easy access to info makes you think “just one more search” will make my decision 10x better when in reality it’s a huge super power you should use to drive execution, not the other way around. Think of what an advantage it is to have that much context on the scale of human existence. At least for me, this makes me more optimistic: I make less mistakes than ages before me because I’m relatively better informed. Note: this doesn’t mean the choices are always good, just that I understand them more completely.
I agree with the author's point, which basically boils down to "pay peanuts, get monkeys."
But I think another large issue is a deep lack of respect at these jobs, in every way. They are impersonal, they are short-term, you are a cog in a machine, they don't know your name, the customers don't know your name, they don't care about you, you are replaceable, you don't care about the work, why would you?
... that's the problem right? The big furniture factory is good at making (cheap) furniture, but they are very bad at managing local teams to deliver and assemble and ...
IKEA (at least in most of Europe) is good at this, because they spend a lot of attention and invest in their local presence (all of their big stores have pretty okay fast-food restaurant, as far as I understand)
... so of course it would make sense to let the factory do that and let some other company focus on assembly (and last-mile stuff generally).
... but there's no competition, no ratings to look up, no alternatives, they will send someone and that's it.
... and of course this spreads the negative cost all around, everyone gets a bit more of the annoyances, but keeps costs down (yay, I guess?)
and as a comment [1] in this thread mentioned this is a bad Nash equilibrium. (the post mentioned lemons already, and of course we know that due to information asymmetry bad goods crowd out good ones.[2])
there's no price information for "respect". it used to be enforced by big brands, hiring processes, unions, trade organizations, certifications, licensing requirements. but of course assembling a standardized bed is not hard, especially if someone did a few of the same. so of course none of the usual signals apply (no certification, no licensed assemblers registry maintained by some government organization, no assemblers union/guild, and so on.)
...
the possible solutions are to open up the data for these gig companies.
or fix labor laws.
or fix social security (unemployment compensation, negative income tax).
yeah, I know. good luck with any of that nowadays :/
Customer service across the board is in free-fall. Just the other day I was met with a Chipotle worker who was visibly frustrated that I ordered a burrito instead of a bowl. A little thing, but holy shit.
I guess when wages don't add up to a viable life, resentment and carelessness spread like wildfire.
I would be interested in knowing what Chick-Fil-A does to prevent this. Pretty much every customer facing job that doesn't hope for charity at the end of the service is pretty bad in the US currently, but somehow they achieve the level of service of what I would get in Japan.
The only thing I've been able to surmise is that they probably pay the managers very well and mostly just hire smart high schoolers that may have been passed over or didn't know about internship opportunities, and pay slightly better rates than McDonald's. They still pull the same scummy things as McDonald's with pressuring employees for goals that only benefit the manager, but maybe its not so bad if you're getting paid more than your very young peers.
Chick-Fil-A would probably try to attribute some religious meaning to the Sunday off for their adult workers, but it seems like any company could just guarantee a day off on the weekend for their workers.
Tribalism, presumably. Chik-Fil-A has intentionally made their brand about serving a specific tribe, being part of that specific tribe. That tribe has ideals and to work for that tribe is to live up to those ideals and if you don't live up to those ideals you are fired and probably not a "real" member of that tribe. It's tautological, but so is a lot of tribalism.
Given how much of that tribalism is also explicitly religiously coded, I find it's hard not to want to apply harsher words like "cult-like" to Chik-Fil-A, specifically, but "sect-like" is probably more accurate given how predominant both their business culture tribe and religious tribe are in American politics today even if "sect-like" doesn't have quite the same harsh connotations designed to help you question the systems of power in place.
Yea I don't think the 16 year old kids who know how to say thank you and smile are part of some religious cult.
Chick-fil-A corporate donates and supports some gross organizations, but none of what you said makes sense for the stores I've been to in various parts of the country
Very good and insightful article, but suffers from a weakness: it implies that the problem can be solved by everyone just buying from the ones whose workers are doing the job well.
This is not the case. The evidence that the "free market" does not "regulate itself" (at least not in favor of the many) since the 2008 recession is beyond refutation: we need pro-worker governments stepping in.
Labor laws in the US are outdated, not being updated, and not being enforced.
Companies exist to make money. If the company's environment permits it to exploit people to make money? It'll do it just to not get outcompeted.
Delivery drivers' pay should be higher - the cost of delivery should drive some percent of people choose pickup. Bed assembly being impossible due to the wrong part being sent should cause recourse for the bed assembly company/staff.
Everyone involved is doing their best, but it's a bit dire lately.
In Japan, it's impressive to see how people perform even the most menial jobs with dedication. It's the Yoda approach: do or do not. If you do a job, do it well. So, you will see people whose job is to stand in the rain and watch over a construction site exit making sure people in the sidewalk do not get run over by trucks exiting the site, doing their job with utter dedication. Even if it rains. Even if the job is crappy. I'm sure these people would rather have a different job — but as long as this is the one they have, they will sure as anything do it well!
The average level of work ethic in the areas I frequent has cratered over the last 6-7 years.
I can feel it happening to me as well. I used to get super anxious if I wasn't going to be able to respond to a work email within a few minutes. Basically chained myself to my desk at home M-F. Remember phone calls? Having to answer a ringing phone within 15 seconds or you could be perceived as delinquent? No one is responding quickly to anything anymore.
Keeping myself amped up 8 hours a day for vendors and customers who are 1000% asleep at the wheel is too much. I wait for meaningful work to accumulate now and work in bursts. This definitely contributes to the downward spiral, but I don't know what else to do. Human energy is finite. I'm willing to stick my neck out really far for really long if it seems like others are willing to do the same, but it doesn't feel like that kind of situation right now.
> So, you will see people whose job is to stand in the rain and watch over a construction site exit making sure people in the sidewalk do not get run over by trucks exiting the site, doing their job with utter dedication.
That kind of job existing in the first place is the problem. And that could be well called subservience instead of work ethic.
This makes me think of The Sort, coined by the venerable patio11.
The types soft skills it takes to to be effective in the kinda crappy jobs described by the author can command much better remuneration in any number of other roles, and society has gotten much better at efficiently allocating that human capital.
I always thought “soft skills” were a cope for those who didn’t learn an actual skill, until I entered the workforce. I was working mainly in customer service, construction, and facility maintenance roles, and in all three I found it was incredibly common for coworkers to have issues with anger management, emotional maturity, and basic courtesy. These jobs were all fairly terrible aside from customer service; perhaps not coincidentally, that is also where these issues were the least common.
The thing is if someone prepared for an interview and cracked the job, they have to be good at it. I have realised that it's often our perception of them which makes them bad at the their jobs. Similar to how we usually blame motivation when the actual problem is clarity of role or job. If we believe in the motive behind it and have clarity of our role in it, motivation does not remain an issue.
We make the jobs bad by not being able to properly share the incentive behind it, what good it brings and to whom. Most of the time people don't want to work because they don't see the ROI in it.
Except paying more for a service doesn’t guarantee better service. I have hired local handymen at $75 per hour and they have been equally bad with fake reviews.
I’m shopping for some good or service. I see different offerings. Usually I have little capacity to judge them. Companies aren’t transparent. Reviews are rigged. Recommendations are based on profit rather than quality. If I don’t have some personal knowledge of the thing, it’s really hard to tell what’s what.
What do I do? Well, I usually pick the cheapest one. Might as well. If I spend more, it’s likely to be the same or even worse, so it’s just a waste.
I remember riding along in a taxi, sitting up front, having a conversation about how he used his taxi license to get around the anti uber laws (that have since been repealed) in my state.
I talk to the guys who I hire online. We often end up working out a deal behind the platform. I once hired a bloke to help move stuff out of my garage, and we talked about how he is having a hard time saving money after moving here to study, which is why he was taking airtasker stuff.
I think we’re addressing different points. I’m talking about how difficult it is to judge quality when shopping for something. Sure, if I’m hiring a contractor I’ll get quotes and talk to them. But I’m deeply unqualified to judge their competence or work ethic. If I’m lucky I’ll go on personal recommendations from someone I know and whose judgment I trust. Otherwise it’s just vibes.
Contributing factors that I didn't see discussed yet are the increasing stratification of job descriptions, along with reduction in autonomy to break out of your stratum (combined with incentive not to). This creates workers with an extremely limited view of the whole picture, and lack of interest or ability to do anything outside their job description to fix your problem.
One thing I noticed is that the people doing airtasker full time, rushed a lot.
I really don't think the platform is for them.
The 2 - 3 people who did the best work, were already people in that trade, doing professional work (often self employed), but using the app to book up just their slack time.
One time I had a professional lawn care company come through and do all my garden maintenance, just to keep the apprentice busy. The job was just for lawn mowing. But unlike the other people on the platform, these guys never wanted to hear from me again. They dont need my business on an ongoing basis.
That Wayfair scenario is very familiar to me. I had a really similar experience with them delivering a table and chairs. They stayed for a shockingly long time to assemble them. I figured it was just really hard to assemble. That was somewhat true.
However, when I looked at them, I was shocked at how shoddy the work was. Cross braces were installed backwards. Seat bottoms had huge gaps from the underlying support. Some screws were literally just missing, with parts that would just flop. A lot of this stemmed from not paying attention to the instructions, which specified really specific sequences for putting in the screws, leveling, then tightening. Those steps were obviously engineered to minimize misalignment, but this crew thought they knew better... sigh
I didn't ask for a new crew, as I didn't trust them to send a better crew. Instead I just spent a good evening redoing quite a bit of the work.
No one ever wanted to work, we just had to in order to pay the bills. Sometimes work can be gratifying, but most of the time it's just a slog and always has been.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but the article mentioned very low skills jobs as courier, assembler, clerk.
There is a reason why those people are doing job like these instead that better jobs.
Some people are just not interested in doing their work correctly, some other are not skilled enough.
In Germany you have quite high minimum wages. Unions and works committees are quite common. Labor protected laws are quite strict. Sure, not every job is fun, but living with low income is not as bad as in the US. So, are people better at their jobs? Nope. Do people work better just because you pay them better? Nope. Should people get paid better, especially those with shirty jobs? Yes - of course. But there’s no reason to believe this would improve quality of work.
Germany in my experience is a country of too many scammers. Right from the taxi driver to the entrepreneurs, it is about cheating the customer. The funny thing is that it is native Germans who do it. Of course not everyone is like it, and there are plenty of top-notch open source developers that call Germany home.
This is a nit, but grocery bagging (one of the article's examples) is a no-win situation. I worked it as a summer job a while back--It’s the most bikeshed job in existence because (nearly) everyone understands it, but they all have their own theory of bagging.
To this day I remember a client whose entire purchase was a loaf of bread, a package of fresh raw chicken, and a bottle of liquid drain cleaner. Paper bags, of course. I don't remember how I arranged them but I remember being yelled at.
Question 1, are you fine with the chicken in with the bread?
Question 2, would you like the drain cleaner left separate rather than with the food items.
They either don't care or would suggest leaving the bread or chicken separate, same for the drain cleaner.
The worst grief you'll get is why they can't have 3 bags.
I’d be interested in a breakdown of Angi’s costs. They paid $85 for assembly and estimate the assembler was paid $25? Where could the money possibly be going, server hosting is incredibly cheap.
People mentioned they had it easier in the past. It's true, it was easier. The world was not as fast as it is now. The world needs to slow down a bit. Slowing down would benefit both the planet and the people.
I know it's dull to blame another thing on them, but I suspect it's phones/etc as a connection to a live world. There's always a pipeline of content, always something getting updated, always a notification. I remember many many years ago on the cusp of home internet (when I couldn't justify $50/m to have internet at home as well as work!), if there wasn't something interesting on TV, I'd read or have some other calm activity. If I wanted to know who won the day's NBA games, I'd have to wait until the next day's newspaper. Now, almost no matter what activity I do, there's a portal to endless distractions within arm's reach.
The jobs are bad and people get blamed for it.
We've been through a credit bubble where everything was borrowed out of debt, in the hope that it would deliver massive-scale automation in the future.
But reality is that everyone has been rushing out brittle solutions, creating a brittle, fragile architecture... And now people entering the job market have to spend so much time fixing the mess that they can't make progress. Worse, they take the blame for the slow progress and they have no say over foundations. We are asked to do impossible things given the current foundations and so every job becomes about politics; how to foist the impossible/infeasible tasks onto someone else so that they will take the blame. Because it's all political, the people who can actually create value and thus aren't good at politics get wiped out of the market; then all that remains in every company are political operators.
The value creators are forced either to become political or to keep hopping between companies... Who make good use of them... for a short time until they burn out and hop on to the next company. Nobody acknowledges the value they contribute during their brief tenures; in spite of the fact that they're the only ones adding value. Only the political operator can rise through the ranks; getting credit for managing the constant churn of burnt-out value creators.
Worse, as the political operators get into positions of power; who do they help? People who are like them; also political operators who don't know how to add value.
Also, I should add that the job-hopping is likely a feature of our inflationary monetary system; as inflation is ongoing, people find that if they change jobs after 1 or 2 years, they can get some non-trivial salary increase... In reality, changing jobs every 2 years doesn't actually give you a real salary increase; it merely allows you to maintain your buying power in the face of inflation...
The elite class is basically using the monetary system to constantly squeeze value creators by forcing them to job-hop frequently as it demoralizes them, lowers their self-esteem and thus helps to keep their salary expectations down. The manager class also contributes to the demoralization aspect of value creators by imposing unnecessary constraints on value creators.
The reason we have population collapse in the west is because value creators are systematically demoralized. It's literally the enslavement of value creators by value extractors.
I think this is why coding is increasingly seen as a low-class skill nowadays... If you possess any productive skill, it signals that you're part of the lower 'value creator' class.
There is even a belief that if you have to create value for a living, then it means that you're just not smart enough to figure out how to make other people work for you... Completely ignoring the reality that it's all about social networking; literally all about your position in the social graph and distance to money printers.
If only someone invented a monetary system where the supply of money was determined by an algorithm that didn't constantly pump new money into existence all the time.
Oh wait, they did. But for some reason, most people on HN say Bitcoin is for scammers and grifters, and has no fundamental value proposition...
Bitcoin is a good store of value but unfortunately, Bitcoin doesn't scale beyond around 4 transactions per second and uses a massive amount of electricity. Also, a lot of cryptocurrencies basically turned into scams; sometimes with the backing and approval of governments.
That said, I think centralized providers acting as a layer above Bitcoin or any limited-supply crypto would still be orders of magnitude better than what we have now. Unfortunately, the boomers who benefited from the current fiat system think Bitcoin is just a fad to satisfy the fickle whims of spoiled millennials.
Excellent article, and better than I could do at generalizing the larger problem of outsourcing. From the IT perspective, companies pay far more to outsource than they would by keeping permanent employees on staff and decently compensated (as in, enough for a modest home, a car every decade, a vacation every year, and all necessary medical/dental/vision care, plus some retirement compensation of some form). Outsourcing communicates two things very loudly:
1) To the outsourcer, that you're a cheap client who will fire you as soon as someone cheaper comes along or a KPI is missed
2) To those in the know (colleagues, workers, stakeholders), that you don't intend to be here long enough to deal with the consequences of your actions
Outsourcers will never care about your infrastructure or its actual needs, and won't care about your budget either. An employee is more likely to conserve budget with smarter product choices and more in-house builds, while outsourced workers will just nod and accept whatever you point to as gospel, since they'll never have to fix it anyway. In essence, you're paying more money to have someone else handle it then you would have paid someone else to talk you professionally down or implement it properly.
Similar arguments:
* Public Cloud is a form of outsourcing that can often increase costs, especially for static or non-scaling infrastructure/resources. Yet because it's more convenient and skirts CAPEX budgets, more companies will just outsource to AWS/Azure/GCP instead of buying two to three servers, a storage array, and some network infrastructure to host their internal directories/applications/file shares.
* XaaS is also outsourcing, often doubly so. You outsource the application to an XaaS provider, and then outsource its management or setup to an outsourcing firm/MSP/consultant. Then you leave, and the company is stuck with a product they have to pay for because "it's necessary", don't know how to support it, don't understand what it's for, and can't begin to move off of or away from it for at least a year after they hire new permanent in-house technical staff.
* Outsourcing leads to a dependency on consultants, because you don't understand your own estate anymore (and fired the folks who did, so you could send the labor elsewhere) and need someone else to tell you what's needed, with the pretty slide decks to justify it to stakeholders. Now you're paying for the outsourced infra (often public cloud or XaaS), the MSP to manage out, the consultants to update/implement it, and now additional consultants to integrate it with other systems who also require consultants because - again - you outsourced your technical staff. Before long you're just blindly implementing whatever's in the upper-right Gartner quadrant without understanding function or utility, let alone ROI.
The end result is a bunch of grossly overpaid leaders, a glut of burnt-out MSP workers who only get paid to put out fires but never prevent them (and even if they were paid for prevention, they'll only be able to do it for whoever pays them the most), and a lagging domestic workforce you have to invest in upskilling when you do want to bring technical staff back in house. Congratulations, instead of leaving your engineers and architects on payroll, you've single-handedly saved the company enough money during your contract to get yourself all your KPI-tied bonuses, and left the organization on fire while you parachute off to repeat it elsewhere.
The OP is right - people aren't necessarily bad at their jobs, we've just incentivized the worst behavior as a society to the point most jobs are just bad. Now we're even doing it to technology folks (IT/IS/Devs) with LLMs, racing ahead with ever more outsourcing and banking on the fact someone else will clean up our mess.
If so many companies are such a disaster, why isn't someone founding a startup that says "We won't do any of that crap here" and eats said companies' lunch?
Might be such startups are unstable, because once the lunch starts getting eaten, the founders are instantly offered "F-you money" to sell their company, at which point it gets rolled into a disaster company. Or it loses its incentives past a certain size.
Rare indeed is a company whose founder(s) both (a) refuses to sell for a generous valuation and (b) actively put the brakes on aggressive growth out of wariness it will destroy the company yet (c) still sees the company to success.
You just answered your own incendiary question: because the systems incentivize bad behaviors for individual success over the health, longevity, or success of the organization and its members.
It takes hard work to ignore the easy exits in favor of building a healthy organization designed to withstand the temptations of the modern business cycle. You're not building a mere startup or business, you're building an institution, and that's an infinitely harder job that doesn't pay nearly as well - though it often has far more substantial impacts.
So many people are obsessed with striking it rich via individual success, that they're blind to the reality that we already have the resources and technologies to ensure everyone can enjoy modest success, if we discipline exploitation for personal gain. It's why part of founding a startup nowadays is literally developing an exit strategy, rather than a successor plan: the goal is for the founders to succeed, not the business, and definitely not its customers.
> Education worked to an extent; most will not devolve into dumb fucks.
Your inequality symbols are backwards.
There are not fewer than 1 million cops in the US there are more than 1 million.
There are indeed fewer than 700,000 politicians but I'm going to assume you meant to say "more than 700k". The majority of those persons are local representatives who have little authority beyond determining what days trash collection occurs and whether a specific plot of land can be zoned residential, commercial, or industrial.
Remember, the alligator always wants to eat the larger number.
It was the OP's choice and mistake to buy a complex design that was difficult to self-assemble. Any number of simple metal bed frames bought online can trivially be assembled by a single person. Never give up your power unnecessarily.
Even if they have a disability, it still makes sense to get a simpler bed frame. The chance of anything going wrong when someone is assembling a simple metal frame are much lower.
As for pianos, they would have to get a dedicated piano mover.
Some jobs are bad. Some people are bad at their jobs. Sometimes it's both at the same time.
This furniture assembly job sounds like shit. But also, somebody who puts in "several hours" of labor should be able to assemble some off-brand Ikea slop by simply following the instructions and using a little bit of common sense. If the pay is terrible so you don't even want to try, I get it, but you should bail quick not after "several hours", so it sounds like an earnest (albeit incompetent) attempt was made.
This job sucks, not because there isn't training, but because the pay is too low to attract competent labor.
In the software world, managers could and should be replaced by user counts. If a developer's work product doesn't have users, that is not a desirable outcome. In practice, when this happens in the real world, 9 times out of 10 it is the manager's fault.
In my neck of the woods, UPS is the absolute best, Amazon depends on which driver is doing the rounds this month, and FedEx you're lucky if your package even arrives at the right house.
UPS drivers keep crashing into my rock wall. They aren't even delivering packages to me, they just use my drive way to turn around and keep hitting the rocks.
For some reason its always UPS. Maybe some quirk of their navigation system is tacitly encouraging it.
The author dances around the real cause. It's the lack of labor unions and/or decreasing participation. In this neoliberal/neoclassical (aka "orthodox") economy, companies are maximizing profits at all costs and sacrificing quality and customer service.
Then enter "private equity" which has historically extracted/squeezed once profitable businesses for all they are worth. Saddle them with debt, load up them up on consulting fees (paid to PE, by the way), squeeze the labor force/downsize, decrease quality of items. Then when the debt cannot be paid, sell businesses for parts, layoffs across the board, cook the books, and sell to the next sucker.
Small grocery stores -- (too many to name)
Veterinary care -- (too many to name)
Health clinics -- (too many to name)
Electronics -- iRobot
Software -- (too many to name, but nearly any company bought by "Vista Equity Partners" and et al)
Appliances -- Maytag, Instapot, Electrolux
Great names in their industry with amazing benefits to employees. Reduced to numbers. Benefits cut. Pensions cut/abolished and replaced with shitty 401Ks.
Yea everything is getting shittier. Blame the billionaire class, decades of tax cuts for the wealthy that has been a parasitic drain on society as a whole.
It's a mix. Sometimes a person is bad at their job because the people who hired or trained them are bad at their jobs. But another way to look at it is that our society increasingly values only people who are "good" at the "job" of making as much money as possible while externalizing as many costs as possible.
> The exploitation (of workers, of natural resources) that made that abundant cheapness possible was largely invisible and thus ignorable.
It's not just the exploitation of workers and natural resources, it's also the exploitation of customers and our society as a whole. When you pay for a product and it's crap, you, the customer, were also exploited by the seller.
The key part to me is the invisibility. The theory of capitalism is that companies compete to better satisfy customers. But nowadays the predominant mode of competition is obfuscation: companies compete to be the best at hiding costs, dodging responsibility, and deflecting consequences. The quality of the actual products and services is secondary to the apparatus of delivering them and responding to feedback, and that apparatus is not oriented towards actually improving the products or services, just at finding somewhere to dump the negative consequences.
> But resistance is very possible. If everyone’s good at their job, shop there.
The article lists a few of these "consumer-level" modes of resistance based essentially on the idea of voting with your dollars. The problem is that it's hard to be an informed dollar-voter in this environment of deliberate obfuscation. Spending hours wading through reviews, product descriptions, and so on, just to buy one thing, effectively increases your cost, and there's no guarantee you'll make the right choice in the end anyway. I'd be willing to pay more in many cases for a better result, but there's no way to tell if something that costs a bit more is actually better, or just another clever scam cloaked in verbiage like "artisanal" and "handcrafted" to lure in people just like me, people who are willing to pay more and can be fooled into doing so while getting no benefit for the extra money.
We need more organized and deliberate resistance: laws. Laws and specific enforcement mechanisms that directly penalize, not just companies, but the individuals at the top who are good at their jobs, namely the job of squeezing value out of other people by lying, cheating, and hiding. We need laws that force competition into the realm of actual products and services, and punish engagement in the obfuscation arms race.
> As a society, we have decided that we want more for less: more convenience, more purchases, more technology, but none of it at prices that render it out of reach.
There's an Arcade Fire lyric I heard a long time ago but recently came across again, from "Windowsill": "I don't want it faster, I don't want it free". Too many people these days want things faster and free, and don't understand that the costs are still being paid, somehow, somewhere, often even by the same person who thinks they're getting something fast and free.
> The problem is that it's hard to be an informed dollar-voter in this environment of deliberate obfuscation. Spending hours wading through reviews, product descriptions, and so on, just to buy one thing, effectively increases your cost, and there's no guarantee you'll make the right choice in the end anyway. I'd be willing to pay more in many cases for a better result, but there's no way to tell if something that costs a bit more is actually better,
This is how I feel about online shopping. I used to naively dream that a retail aggregator like Amazon would crack the problem. By having large numbers of customers leave reviews (or even return unsatisfactory products), I imagined that the good products would rise to the top. To my surprise, Amazon hasn't seemed particularly interested in advancing this area. Search results are dominated by freshly minted sellers with randomly generated names. I often receive products with a piece of paper inside that begs me to let them know if I have any problems so that they can basically bribe me to keep quiet and not put a negative review on Amazon.
The obfuscation arms race, as you so aptly put it.
Huh? Productivity per worker in the US is at an all-time high and is, I believe, the highest in the world?
Can we please shit-can this notion that US workers are lazy/bad/whatever? That's not the problem. US workers are being squeezed to death. Corporations have gone from 50% tax burden to paying little taxes, the money is flowing almost entirely to the top 1% earners, C-suites, investors, private equity, etc and we're seeing record levels of corporate welfare.
Corporate welfare like..full time or nearly full time employees getting welfare because their employers refuse to give them livable wages, so taxpayers have to step in. Amazon and Walmart are the biggest welfare recipients in the country, and that doesn't begin to count all the sweetheart deals they get on property taxes, the taxpayer money they get for setting up training programs, free infrastructure improvements to support their business.
We have $8BN to give to a lumbering incompetent dinosaur like Intel, $500BN for "AI" crap (which will consume massive amounts of power, land, water...)
...but apparently we can't afford $4BN for LIHEAP which is half as much and keeps elderly people from freezing or broiling to death?
I don't understand. From what I can tell, the blog post makes the exact point that workers are being squeezed to death in a way that raises nominal productivity while lowering quality. Can you elaborate a bit more on your exact disagreement?
>Huh? Productivity per worker in the US is at an all-time high and is, I believe, the highest in the world?
Yeah, that's what happens when the latent cost of employing anyone for anything is so high all the menial stuff get shipped overseas or replaced with fewer expensive employees working with much more expensive labor saving technology/materials.
Also, I'm not sure how much I trust the numbers themselves, metrics and targets and all that.
I have been in the workforce for almost 30 years now and I believe that everybody is getting more squeezed so they don’t have the time or energy to do a proper job. The expectation is to get it done as quickly as possible and not do more unless told so.
In SW development in the 90s I had much more time for experimentation to figure things out. In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. So you just hurry through your tasks.
I think google had it right for a while with their 20% time where people could do wanted to do. As far as I know that’s over.
People need some slack if you want to see good work. They aren’t machines that can run constantly on 100% utilization.
> In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. So you just hurry through your tasks.
This has been my exact experience. Absolutely everything is tracked as a work item with estimates. Anything you think should be done needs to be justified and tracked the same way. If anything ever takes longer than the estimate that was invariably just pulled out of someones ass (because it's impossible to accurately estimate development unless you're already ~75% of the way through doing it, and even then it's a crapshoot) you need to justify that in a morning standup too.
The end result of all of this is every project getting bogged down by being stuck on the first version of whatever architecture was thought up right at the beginning and there being piles of tech debt that never gets fixed because nobody who actually understands what needs to be done has the political capital to get past the aforementioned justification filter.
Also this push to measure everything means that anything that can’t be measured isn’t valued.
One of your teammates consistently helps unblock everyone on the team when they get stuck? They aren’t closing as many tickets as others so they get overlooked on promotions or canned.
One of your teammates takes a bit longer to complete work, but it’s always rock solid and produces fewer outages? Totally invisible. Plus they don’t get to look like a hero when they save the company from the consequences of their own shoddy work.
The biggest mistake those employees make on their way to getting overlooked is assuming their boss knows.
Everyone needs to advocate for themselves.
A good boss will be getting feedback from everyone and staying on top of things. A mediocre boss will merely see "obvious" things like "who closed the most tickets." A bad boss may just play favorites and game the system on their own.
If you've got a bad boss who doesn't like you, you're likely screwed regardless. But most bosses are mediocre, not actively bad.
And in that case, the person who consistently helps unblock everyone needs to be advertising that to their manager. The person who's work doesn't need revisiting, who doesn't cause incidents needs to be hammering that home to their manager. You can do that without throwing your teammates under the bus, but you can't assume omnipotence or omniscience. And you can't wait until the performance review cycle to do it, you have to demonstrate it as an ongoing thing.
Your boss can know about it, but if their boss wants data on performance you’re back in the same boat.
Funny you mention engineers needing to market themselves though. That leads to its own consequences. I’ve been at a place where everyone needed to market their own work in order to get promoted, to get raises, and to stay off the chopping block.
The end result? The engineers at the company who get promoted are… good at self-promotion, not necessarily good at engineering. Many of the best engineers at the company—who were hired to do engineering—languish in obscurity while people who can game the system thrive. People get promoted who are only good at cranking out poorly-made deliverables that burden their team with excessive long-term maintenance issues. They fuck off to higher levels of the company, leaving their team to deal with the consequences of their previous work.
Run that script for five or ten years and it doesn’t seem to be working out well for the company.
You made excellent points. As someone looking to solve problems, finish tasks and go home. I just don't feel energized marketing myself if it is not during changing jobs.
And measurement has really taken over now. There is little value in getting task done well as compared to finishing more jira stories.
When it comes time for layoffs, it generally isn't what your boss knows, it's what your boss's grandboss thinks to throw onto a spreadsheet at the eleventh hour before Quarterly Reports are due.
A good direct boss might keep you on track for a bonus or other "local advancement", maybe even a promotion, but many companies you are only as valued as the ant numbers you look like from the C Suite's mile high club. (Which doesn't protect your good boss, either.)
> The biggest mistake those employees make on their way to getting overlooked is assuming their boss knows.
100%. You ask me to do the near impossible, I'll pull it off. But you will be very well-versed in how hard it is first.
I agree it's a mistake but one thing that's never taken into account in this discussion is that many people find it enough that they are doing their jobs. They don't want to do marketing. A lot of tech people are like that which is a real tragedy.
What you're describing was precisely our culture at the last startup.
One group plans ahead and overall do a solid job, so they're rarely swamped, never pull all-nighters. People are never promoted, they're thought of as slacking and un-startup-like. Top performers leave regularly because of that.
The other group is behind on even the "blocker"-level issues, people are stressed and overworked, weekends are barely a thing. But — they get praised for hard work. The heroes. (And then leave after burning out completely.)
(The company was eventually acquired, but employees got pennies. So it worked out well for the founders, while summarily ratfucking everyone else involved. I'm afraid this is very common.)
It's even got a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
While important, it actually misses a common problem I see: the assumption that every measurement is accurate.
It's got a name and we know that it's happening yet the overpaid overeducated c-suite demands it? What gives?
This was previously recommended to me on HN, so I’ll pass it along. The book “Seeing Like A State” gives a pretty reasonable explanation for why this happens: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
The basic idea is that the only viable way to administer a complex and heterogenous system like a massive corporation is to simplify by enforcing “legibility” or homogeneity. Without this, central control becomes far too complex to manage. Thus, the simplification becomes a mandate, even at the cost of great inefficiencies.
What makes the book particularly interesting is the many different historical examples of this phenomenon, across a wide array of human endeavors.
I like the book quite a bit, and it's been formative in my politics.
That said, I am not sure if the take-away is that managers need to account for these factors by allowing for illegibility- I am not reading you claim that, but contextually that's how the discussion feels to me.
I do agree with Scott that enforcing perfect legibility is impossible and even attempting to do so can cause immense problems, and I agree with his analysis of these modernist efforts and have found that it's a useful lens for understanding a lot of human enterprise.
I find a lot of hope in that view: nothing actually gets done without some horizontal, anarchist cooperation.
But I also find hope in the fact that it's structurally a issue with authoritarian organizational strategies which can't be accounted for and surmounted.
Thank you for the reply!
I don't want to make any strong claims here, but my gut reaction to your first comment is that what one manager calls “allowance for illegibility”, another might call “trust in my reports”.
Yes, at the end of the day it's necessary to have some amount of "trust" in the people doing the work. Which is good- you can try to avoid that but if it didn't happen very little would get done.
Everything rots, everything changes.
Investors want to know how long you're going to keep making them money. They don't like surprises.
Really, I think what we need are new ways for investors to participate and understand and structure their investments that don't have negative downward consequences for the structure of businesses.
Maybe I would have found the book more impactful if I had read it earlier in life. I felt like it put together various ideas and presented them well in a comprehensible manner. What I feel it omits is that the mechanisms of a state only have to be actionable, not rational. If you ask me how to mow a lawn and I come up with some byzantine process involving multiple steps that don't even contribute to the end goal I'm going to be labeled nuts or maybe "eccentric" if they want to be polite. The same scrutiny doesn't apply to the various bureaucratic processes of a state for whatever reason.
The problem is that this miserable state of affairs works at scale.
Yes, on problems that exist at the scale of one or intelligent, educated, experienced, and dedicated human (or maybe up to 3-5), an individual or small team will run circles around a business. You can have a top-notch CEO and COO and HR manager and six program managers (each with zero domain experience other than running a Jira board) and four dozen junior consultants who memorized just enough to pass the interviews and an art department and sales and finance and IT. For some problems, that whole $50M enterprise will be utterly demolished by a couple of determined engineers.
Likewise, a monarchy with a wise, benevolent, and just king can flourish, whereas a corrupted and bureaucratically entangled democracy is woefully inefficient.
But if you want your kingdom to last more than two generations before succumbing to a greedy monarch, or want your enterprise to solve bigger problems that don't decompose nicely to small ones, to vertically integrate huge manufacturing systems and scale out to billions of units, the only method that works is the inefficient one. And it does work!
Only revisionist history tell tales of flourishing kingdoms under a just king. In reality, the reason feodality worked for so long was the anarchy and power struggle, the cavalcades (basically raids) and a honour based justice (basically don't kill fellow nobility during war, and avoid killing militantes during cavalcades and you'll be good). The anarchical nature of the system made it particularly susceptible to organised raids, but also extremely 'agile' in it's political responses. Once power was consolidated however, the clergy and the royalty pushed their law and hierarchical order onto the mostly aristocratic feodality, it broke and you get the crusade against Alby, the war between Plantagenet and capetiens, and probably a lot of other misery inflicted to the general population. Then once the hierarchical order is set, you need an administration, which will become inefficient by nature.
The question is if the Kingdom would then still be worth surviving if life for everyone there ends up being miserable.
What if it doesn't survive and 70% of the people who were in the Kingdom end up in worse, arbitrarily-ruled, small despotic fiefdoms instead? And only 10% end up being better off by being lucky enough to have landed in the high-trust+high-competence small group?
Or, switching to consumer products vs company revenue/profit or kingdoms, and grounding in a specific example: people love to hate Windows, but how many of them would actually be better off if the options were just Mac (still expensive, still niche) or Linux? And "well they could just learn how to [code or configure text files or whatever]" for these purposes counts as worse off, IMO - more time spent on something that used to kinda-sorta-at-least-work-predictably for them.
> people love to hate Windows, but how many of them would actually be better off if the options were just Mac (still expensive, still niche) or Linux?
I don't know, but Windows has becoming increasingly worse at everyday usage. I swear Linux has better suspend/sleep functionality now, doesn't sneaky restart randomly (yeah, just because you reopen an explorer window but none of my other, actually important programs will definitely make people notice), doesn't take a minute to react to an unlock attempt several times a day for no reason on even very performant hardware..
So yeah, I think many would be better off with Linux.
Your comparison isn't very good as Microsoft Windows undergoes perpetual change and churn for the sake of doing it. This breaks existing workflows along the way. As a product it was effectively complete by the time Windows 2000 was released, having successfully integrated what was then considered state of the art technology to develop a practical operating system based on the principals known at the time. All it ever needed from there forward was maintenance updates and kernel updates to enable new hardware level technology to be harnessed by software.
> The problem is that this miserable state of affairs works at scale.
It "works" in the sense that it can be kept going by patching the damage it causes by throwing more money at it.
What it mostly does at scale is appear to work, to those high enough above it that they can't see any of the details: only the metrics that are being optimized for.
> overeducated c-suite
Arguably the modern MBA has gotten so insular, with many graduating with an MBA having only the barest modicum of humanities courses and the barest foot out of the door of a business college, that despite supposedly representing a higher University degree it seems increasingly fair to call it "undereducated". MBA programs got too deep into the business of selling as many MBAs as they could as quickly as they could they forgot to check their own curriculum for things like "perverse incentives" and "regulatory capture" and "tribalism".
Try to make a thread about unions on HN and read the comments, then it'll make sense.
There's chance that maybe there exists a revenue stream that increases by further applying that policy across a system that you don't have access to?
> Also this push to measure everything means that anything that can’t be measured isn’t valued.
Never thought I'd see an intelligent point made on hackernews, but there it is. You are absolutely correct. This really hit home for me.
You could have made your point better without insulting everyone on the forum.
The phenomenon being discussed here is a type of overfitting:
https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....
The last 50 years or so of managerial practice has been a recipe for overfitting with a brutal emphasis on measuring, optimizing, and stack ranking everything.
I think an argument can be made that this is an age of overfitting everywhere.
Interesting that something similar came up recently where an AI being trained might fake alignment with training goals.
Worse yet, these are upward-censored metrics. Failing to make them hurts your career, but making or exceeding your targets doesn’t really help your career—it’s just seen as validating management’s approach.
As soon as they impose metrics, you need to bring in a union, and (to be frank) chase or bug out anyone who’s not on board with worker solidarity.
It's fascinating that you end up sort of doing the work twice, you build an excel (or jira) model of the work work along with the actual work to be done.
Often this extends to the entire organization, where you have like this parallel dimension of spreadsheets and planning existing on top of everything.
Eats resources like crazy to uphold.
Jira is already almost like "productivity theater" where engineers chart the work for the benefit of managers, and managers of managers only. Many programmers already really resent having to deal with it. Soon it will be a total farce, as engineers using MCP Jira servers have LLMs chart the "work" and manage the tickets for them, as managers do the same in reverse, instructing LLMs to summarize the work being done in Jira.
It'll be nothing but LLMs talking to other LLMs under the guise of organizational productivity in which the only one deriving any value from this effort is the companies charging for the input and output tokens. Except, they are likely operating at a loss...
Managers (as in PMs, EMs, and C-Suite) don't like JIRA either - there just isn't an alternative.
Customers and investors ask for delivery timelines and amount of resources invested on major features or products, and you need to give an accurate-ish answer, and you as a company will be dealing with hundreds if not thousands of features depending on size.
In that kind of a situation, the only way you can get that visibility is through JIRA (or a JIRA type product), because it acts as a forcing function to get a defensible estimate, and monitor progress.
Furthermore, due to tax laws, we need to track investments into features and initiatives, and JIRA becomes the easiest way to collect that kind of amoratization data.
Once some AI Agent to automate this whole program management/JIRA hygiene process exists, it will make life for everyone so much easier.
This explanation is not incompatible with calling the whole business a "theater".
Its not _all_ theater. Sometimes something does make it into the box and out the door.
How is it theater?
When customers give you money, they expect a date.
When investors give you money, they want to see whether or not you are investing in the right initiatives.
When you open a company, the IRS, SEC, and other regulators expect some amount of financial compliance.
Do you want me to come to you and give you an ultimatum to give me an exact date, calculate amortization, and defend existing investments, and if any of those slips you are the fired? And do that with all the hundreds and thousands of initiatives on a daily basis?
That's the alternative.
Welcome to the industry - you're paid to make purchasers happy, not you. Purchasers don't care if you DuckDB or OracleDB - they care if the product they paid for will be delivered on time and meet the needs stipulated in their contract.
If you want to be happy and only deal with engineering problems, you sadly have to deal with the poopshow that JIRA is.
It's theater because the numbers in JIRA are, for the most part, pulled out of someone's ass, and then multiplied by various coefficients by managers along the chain (based on their pessimism and/or experience). Garbage in, garbage out.
So yes, this is theater, and it only makes someone happy for as long as they aren't aware (or can pretend to not be aware) how the sausage is made.
If you round up great engineering orgs that ship impactful stuff more of them don't use JIRA than do. Linear, Basecamp, Asana, Monday etc.
My experience is by the time an org gets hundreds of priorities and can't effectively delegate to sub orgs they're already fucked and there's no point working there if you want to do anything meaningful.
How do the great engineering orgs that ship impactful stuff organize / run a major project?
None of this sounds necessary for the human race. Maybe David Graeber was right.
Nothing is necessary to exist besides foraging, yet you are still using an industrially manufactured product (laptop or mobile phone) to reply to someone on a VC-subsidized forum.
So I'm not sure your contention has much merit, unless you wish to return to the woods and stop using HN, otherwise you're just enabling the supposed waste you appear to detest.
Or alternatively, you could hop off the high horse and understand the headaches the people you report to at work deal with, and thus maybe learn some additional context that can help you at your current or future job, and maybe think of a way to remove the drudgery in a process that annoys everyone.
"And yet you partake in society. Curious.
I am very smart "
I mean there is an alternative out there for making software that doesn't require profit and can still provide societal value. The alternative isn't to forage in the wilderness, please tell me you are just having a laugh and weren't being serious.
This is the perfect manifestation of the quote: It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism
Capitalism has become as much of a thought-terminating argument as 'the gods'. Most '-ism' words I think.
Yes but metrics! How can the CEO look like they know what's happening without understanding anything if they don't have everyone producing numbers?
This compounds with each _team_ modeling the work in jira/excel too!
Absolutely everything is tracked as a work item with estimates. Anything you think should be done needs to be justified and tracked the same way.
My grandpa once said something that seemed ridiculous but makes a lot of sense: that every workplace should have a “heavy” who steals a new worker’s lunch on the first day, just to see if he asserts himself. Why? Not to haze or bully but to filter out the non-fighters so that when management wants to impose quotas or tracking, they remember that they’d be enforcing this on a whole team of fighters… and suddenly they realize that squeezing the workers isn’t worth it.
The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing.
> steals a new worker’s lunch on the first day, just to see if he asserts himself
> to filter out the non-fighters
This is bullying and hazing.
What if the workers decide the work is imposing on them? Maybe that's a good thing but it could go too far.
That generation had it more together as citizens, and they held on to power for a long time. Postwar all of the institutions in the US grew quickly, and the WW2 generation moved up quickly as a result. The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone.
>The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone.
The boomer types are now in their 70s and even 80s and mostly retired (or dead). It's the generations after them that run many of the anal-retentive, bureaucratically obsessive compulsive managerial postings today, and among those are a good number of gen z turds who are at least as toxic, while being smugly self-righteous about their habits. We'll be blaming boomers for decades after they're dead, for things long since out of their hands.
Boomers is anyone 60 or older right now - not just 70+
That being said, Boomer has evolved to mean anyone older, established and conservative.
Like the counterculture saying from the past, don't trust anyone over 30.
Why do you think that is? I’m wondering if the shared sacrifice of WW2 has something to do with it.
Labor also has more power when a ton of young newcomers to the working force were just killed before they could ever make it there.
That's half of it. The other half is, WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower. So the war also taught lessons on a societal level about organization and cooperation, and the postwar economic boom provided the means to get great things done.
> The other half is, WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower.
The US was the leading industrial power from around 1880 or 1890, and it became the leading military power in the 1910s (by dint of entering WWI so late that it didn't exhaust its manpower fighting it). It may have been a cultural backwater as late as WWI, but its economic status would have been fairly undisputed. And by WWII, the only question anyone would have seriously asked is if the US or the UK held the throne as greatest of the great powers.
I think if you look at how most people lived, worked, travelled, communicated, educated, etc before WW2 - there was a huge improvement after the war that resulted in lots of development and economic opportunities for the average person.
Sure, but that doesn't make the original statement correct.
>WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower.
One of the consequences of WWII was that everyone's plans, ideas, and work cultures were turned into direct results very quickly, in the real world. Sometimes fatally.
The people who lived through that had their feet on the ground.
Aside from its many other flaws, post-70s neoliberalism added a bizarre abstraction layer of economic delusion over everything. This suppressed the core truths of physical reality, common sense, and the basic social requirement of sane reciprocal relationships, and did its best to make consequences as indirect and deniable as possible.
Things that really, really matter - like ecological, political, and social stability - were devalued in everyday experience and replaced with economic abstractions that are more mystical than practical.
It's very culty, and the disconnect between how things should be and how they really are is getting more and more obvious to everyone.
"Aside from its many other flaws, post-70s neoliberalism added a bizarre abstraction layer of economic delusion over everything. This suppressed the core truths of physical reality, common sense, and the basic social requirement of sane reciprocal relationships, and did its best to make consequences as indirect and deniable as possible."
I think I need to print that out and put on the wall. However, did you live through it youself? I think it it hard to evaluate stuff like this with 2nd hand experience only.
> The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing.
That era also had militant labor organization and real socialist and communist parties in the US. Anticommunism killed all that and brought us to the current state of affairs where employers that respect their employees even a little bit are unicorns.
Why do you need unions for this as opposed to just a tight labor market?
High demand for labor can lead to better conditions, but demand for labor isn't static and without real organization and solidarity it's nearly impossible for workers to punish companies that move jobs to low-cost locales. Economic policy is also controlled by the employer class, which means policies that encourage unemployment and inflation are common.
This is my experience as well. In the late 90s/early 2000s I had the luxury of a lot of time to deeply and learn Unix, Perl, Java, web development, etc., and it was all self-directed. Now with Agile, literally every hour is accounted for, though we of course have other ways of wasting time by overestimating tasks and creating unnecessary do-nothing stories in order to inflate metrics and justify dead space in the sprint.
>> literally every hour is accounted for
I saw one company where early-career BA/PMs (often offshore) would sit alongside developers and "keep them company" almost all day via zoom.
I would just terminate the call. Like... hell no.
Everyone's complaining about that as a developer, and rightly so. But that can't be easy for the PMs, either, trying to find a way to "add value" when they have no idea what's going on.
I'd expect there to be some "unexpected network outages" regularly in that kind of situation...
Yep, that would be my own personal hell.
This is kind of cool as an alternative process to develop apps with. Literally product in a zoom window telling you what to build as you go along. No standups, no refinement, no retros etc. Just a PM that really knows what the customer needs and the developer just building those as you go along.
No developer wants to being treated as a code monkey and I bet no PM would want to waste time watching someone type out code that they don't understand.
No. It's just awful.
Twice the billable hours! /s
If you're creating nothing stories to justify work life balance and avoid burnout your organization has a problem. Look into Extreme Programming and Sustainable Pace.
I think thats the observation being made. Most people respond to the organizational problem with the only tools they have, which manifests as that.
Usually management knows and doesnt care about the problem
---
And yet well over half of professional developers have productivity so low that if they get laid off the term gets the same amount done...
> People ... aren’t machines that can run constantly on 100% utilization.
You also can't run machines at 100% utilisation & expect quality results. That's when you see tail latencies blow out, hash maps lose their performance, physical machines wear supra-linearly... The list goes on.
The standard rule for CPU-bound RPC server utilization is 80%. Any less and you could use fewer machines; any more and latency starts to take a hit. This is when you're optimizing for latency. Throughput is different.
Difference is machines break and that costs lots of money.
People just quit, some businesses consider it a better outcome.
> I have been in the workforce for almost 30 years now and I believe that everybody is getting more squeezed so they don’t have the time or energy to do a proper job. The expectation is to get it done as quickly as possible and not do more unless told so.
That's my impression as well, but I'd stress that this push is not implicit or driven by metrics or Jira. This push is sold as the main trait of software projects, and what differentiates software engineering from any other engineering field.
Software projects are considered adaptable, and all projects value minimizing time to market. This means that on paper there is no requirement to eliminate the need to redesign or reimplement whole systems or features. Therefore, if you can live with a MVP that does 70% of your requirements list but can be hacked together in a few weeks, most would not opt to spend more man months only to get minor increments. You'd be even less inclined to pay all those extra man months upfront if you can quickly get that 70% in a few weeks and from that point onward gradually build up features.
You can’t brute-force insight.
I'm often reminded of that Futurama episode “A Pharaoh to Remember” (S04E07), where Bender is whipping the architects/engineers in an attempt to make them solve problems faster.
Definitely squeezed.
They say AI, but AI isn't eliminating programming. I've wrote a few applications with AI assistance. It probably would've been faster if I wrote it myself. The problem is that it doesn't have context and wildly assumes what your intentions are and cheats outcomes.
It will replace juniors for that one liner, it won't replace a senior developer who knows how to write code.
I felt this way with Github Copilot but I started using Cursor this week and it genuinely feels like a competent pair programmer.
What work are you doing the last few days? My experience is for a very narrow range of tasks, like getting the basics of a common but new to me API working, they are moderately useful. But the overwhelming majority of the time they are useless.
This has been my experience as well.
Cursor Chat and autocomplete are near useless, and generate all sorts of errors, which on the whole cost more time.
However, using composer, passing in the related files explicitly in the context, and prompting small changes incrementally has been a game changer for me. It also helps if you describe the intended behaviour in excruciating detail, including how you want all the edge cases/errors handled.
I recently tried Cursor for about a week and I was disappointed. It was useful for generating code that someone else has definitely written before (boilerplate etc), but any time I tried to do something nontrivial, it failed no matter how much poking, prodding, and thoughtful prompting I tried.
Even when I tried to ask it for stuff like refactoring a relatively simple rust file to be more idiomatic or organized, it consistently generated code that did not compile and was unable to fix the compile errors on 5 or 6 repromptings.
For what it's worth, a lot of SWE work technically trivial -- it makes this much quicker so there's obviously some value there, but if we're comparing it to a pair programmer, I would definitely fire a dev who had this sort of extremely limited complexity ceiling.
It really feels to me (just vibes, obviously not scientific) like it is good at interpolating between things in its training set, but is not really able to do anything more than that. Presumably this will get better over time.
If you asked a junior developer to refactor a rust program to be more idiomatic, how long would you expect that to take? Would you expect the work to compile on the first try?
I love Cline and Copilot. If you carefully specify your task, provide context for uncommon APIs, and keep the scope limited, then the results are often very good. It’s code completion for whole classes and methods or whole utility scripts for common use cases.
Refactoring to taste may be under specified.
"If you asked a junior developer to refactor a rust program to be more idiomatic, how long would you expect that to take? Would you expect the work to compile on the first try?"
The purpose of giving that task to a junior dev isn't to get the task done, it's to teach them -- I will almost always be at least an order order of magnitude faster than a junior for any given task. I don't expect juniors to be similarly productive to me, I expect them to learn.
The parent comment also referred to a 'competent pair programmer', not a junior dev.
My point was that for the tasks that I wanted to use the LLM, frequently there was no amount of specificity that could help the model solve it -- I tried for a long time, and generally if the task wasn't obvious to me, the model generally could not solve it. I'd end up in a game of trying to do nondeterministic/fuzzy programming in English instead of just writing some code to solve the problem.
Again I agree that there is significant value here, because there is a ton of SWE work that is technically trivial, boring, and just eats up time. It's also super helpful as a natural-language info-lookup interface.
What matters here is the communication overhead not how long between responses. If I’m indefinitely spending more time handholding a jr dev than they save me eventually I just fire em, same with code gen.
A big difference is that the jr. dev is learning compared to the AI who is stuck at whatever competence was baked in from the factory. You might be more patient with the jr if you saw positive signs that the handholding was paying off.
That was my point, though I may not have been clear.
Most people do get better over time, but for those who don’t (or LLM’s) it’s just a question of if their current skills are a net benefit.
I do expect future AI to improve. My expectation is it’s going to be a long slow slog just like with self driving cars etc, but novel approaches regularly turn extremely difficult problems into seemingly trivial exercises.
I was about to post largely the same thing. There is a saying in design: "Good, fast, cheap --- pick two." The default choice always seems to be fast and cheap nowadays. I find myself telling other people to take their time, but I too have worked jobs where the workloads were far too great to do a decent job. So this is what we get.
One time during a 1:1 with who I consider the best manager I ever had, in the context of asking now urgent something needed to get done, I said something along the llines of how I tend to throttle to around 60% of my "maximum power" to avoid burnout but I could push a bit harder if the task we were discussing was essential with to warrant it. He said that it wasn't necessary but also stressed that any time in the future that I did push myself further, I should always return to 60% power as soon as I could (even if the "turbo boost" wasn't enough to finish whatever I was working on. To this day, I'm equally amazed at both how his main concern with the idea of me only working at 60% most of the time was that I didn't let myself get pressured into doing more than that and the fact that there are probably very few managers out there who would react well to my stating the obvious truth that this is necessary
The article addresses the fact that it's more of the "job" that the software company provides as an extension of their services isn't really a "job" a la "SW development in the 90s"
It's the after effect of companies not being penalized for using the exploitation dragnet approach to use people in desperate situations to generate more profits while providing nothing in return.
People have to care about outcomes in order to get good outcomes. Its pretty difficult to get someone to work extra time, or care about the small stuff if there is a good chance that they will be gone in 6 months.
Alternatively, if leadership is going to cycle over in 6 months - then no one will remember the details.
Have we learnt nothing? 100% utilisation of practically any resource will result in problems with either quality or schedules.
What, as an industry, do we need to do to learn this lesson?
It needs to be reflected faster in quarterly results. When the effect takes a year or two, nobody notices and there are too many other variables/externalities to place blame.
> People need some slack
Definitely. If you tighten a bearing up-to 100% - to zero "play", it will stop rotating easy.. and start wearing. Which is.. in people-terms, called burnout.
Or as article below says, (too much) Efficiency is the Enemy..
https://fs.blog/slack/
I've always thought if I gave better estimates about how long things would take, my schedule would support a decent job.
But black swans seem to be more common than anticipated.
(I also wonder - over your career, do you naturally move up to jobs with higher salaries and higher expectations?)
Capitalism eventually ends up in those with capital making those without capital work until they drop. We are in that eventuality right now.
Only 20 years for me, but this is my observation also.
I think letting devs 2 hours a day, that they can flex so if they wanna use it on Fridays its fine, for personal projects, whether internal or otherwise. Just think of all the random tech debt that could be resolved if devs had 2 hours a day to code anything, including new projects that benefit everyone. Most people can only squeeze out about 6 hours worth of real work anyway. You burn up by the end of the day.
>Just think of all the random tech debt that could be resolved if devs had 2 hours a day to code anything, including new projects that benefit everyone.
regardless of the potential benefits of this plan, zero tech debt would get erased.
imho net tech debt would increase by the 80 20 rule, meaning that you're not going to get more than 80% of the side projects fully wrapped in the 20% of the time that you've allotted to them.
I guess tech debt could even be increased in some cases. Some people shouldn't have too much time available :-)
It's almost as if people don't understand what the word "productivity" means. That's all it is, if you hear "x increase in productivity" and it sounds great, it really means : you, the worker, work harder after we fire other people and thus are "more productive" because you did the same out put that 2 people did. Sucker. And we all eat this shit up.
I totally agree, it was a stark contrast between phd life and purely sw engineer life, in terms of doing things the way i wanted.
I've even seen this and it seems to have accelerated in the last 10 years or so. I'm seeing roles be combined, deadlines get tighter, and quality go down. Documentation has also gotten worse. This all seems pretty odd when you consider the tools to develop, test, and even document have mostly gotten more powerful/better/faster.
How much more expensive is your time for the company now vs the 90s?
counting in cost of living increases? Probably about the same.
sounds like bit of a death spiral
as tech gets commoditized the companies are worse, more funding but worse
Same. What's crazier now is nobody in management seems to want to take a risk, when the risks are so much lower. We have better information, blogs, posts on how others solved issue, yet managers are still like "we can't risk changing our backend from dog shit to postgres". . . .when in the 90s you would literally be figuring it all out yourself, making a gut call and you'd be supported to venture into the unknown.
now it's all RSU, Stock Prices, FAANG ego stroking and mad dashes for the acquihire exit pushing out as much garbage as possible while managers shine it up like AI goodness
> In SW development in the 90s I had much more time for experimentation to figure things out. In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller.
Software development for a long time had the benefit that managers didn't get tech. They had no chance of verifying if what the nerds told them actually made sense.
Nowadays there's not just Agile, "business dashboards" (Power BI and the likes) and other forms of making tech "accountable" to clueless managers, but an awful lot of developers got bought off to C-level and turned into class traitors, forgetting where they came from.
I commend you for having an opinion so bad I can't tell if you're satirizing marxists or not.
Let me ask you this, would you rather be managed by a hierarchy made up of people who don't understand what you do? Because I assure you it is far worse than being managed by "class traitors".
well, not the original poster, but I have been managed by both kinds, and the best manager I ever had was not a former techie and the worst was a former programmer.
The worst manager did often say things that were sort of valuable and correct in a general way, like "well you don't actually know that because it hasn't been tested" which was of course true, but he also seemed to think he could tell people what the correct way to do something was without knowing the technology and the codebase. This often meant that I had to go to junior developers later, after a meeting, and say "concerning ticket X, T. didn't consider these things(listing the things), so that while it is true that we should in principle do what T. said, it will not be adequate, you will also need to do this - look at the code for this function here, it should be abstracted out in some way probably, this was my crappy way of handling the problem in desperation Y months ago."
Trying to explain to him why he was wrong was impossible in itself, he was a tech genius evidently, and you just had to give it up after a bit, and figure that at some time in the future the decisions would be reversed after "we learned" something.¨
on edit: in the example I give the manager as I said was correct in what he wanted done, but as I said it was inadequate as the bug would keep recurring if only that was done, so more things had to be done that were not as pretty or as pure as what he wanted.
I want my manager to help get the business out of my way- managing requirements, keeping external dependencies on track, fussy paperwork and such.
I don't need my manager second-guessing my every decision or weighing in on my PRs making superficial complaints about style while also bemoaning our velocity.
Hands down, the best managers I've had have all been clueless about the languages and types of work I do, and the worst managers have (or think they) have some understanding of what I do.
Oh, I vastly prefer people who don’t understand and know it.
Reminds me of Frank Zappa comparing "cigar chomping old guys" to the "hip young types" that replaced them
https://youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0
> Let me ask you this, would you rather be managed by a hierarchy made up of people who don't understand what you do? Because I assure you it is far worse than being managed by "class traitors".
One's direct manager should be a developer, yes. The problem is the level above that - most organisations don't have a SWE career track, so if you want a pay rise you need a promotion and that's only available for managerial roles.
The problem there is that a lot of developers make very bad managers and a lot of organisations don't give a fuck about giving their managers the proper skills training. The result is then usually a "tech director" who hasn't touched code in years but just loves to micromanage based on knowledge from half a decade ago or more. That's bad enough in Java, but in NodeJS, Go, Rust or other hipster reinvent-the-wheel stacks it's dangerous.
They come in and blather completely irrelevant, way outdated or completely wrong "advice", plan projects with way less resources than the project would actually need - despite knowing what "crunch time" entails for their staff themselves.
And also, the programmers that got "promoted" to management are people that are here for the money/power and asked to be promoted, not because they care about coding. And absolutely not because their peers wanted for them to be promoted because they saw a good manager in them while they were working together.
So they'll definitely make it worse for everyone than a guy that doesn't know anything about tech but wanted a career in management because they care about managing.
The gig economy is way worse than the author describes.
Gig workers can't advance with the companies they work for.
Gig workers can't build a network with their coworkers because they don't have coworkers...and there's a good chance that they are competing for work with other people working for the same company.
There are dead end day jobs, and then there is gig work.
Gig workers are casual labor. Like Dickens with less coal dust.
Casual labor frequently involves working alongside other casual laborers and/or regular employees and/or the person hiring the casual labor.
The gig economy is people working alone.
The whole concept of "hustling" is frustrating to me.
These days "hustling" = independently rich people trying to build an online following and selling ads/courses/get rich quick schemes/crypto scams.
The gig economy is real, back-breaking work. No "husler" has done a single day of food or package deliveries.
This isn't too different from most low-skill jobs. Most people don't aspire to be assistant manager at McDonalds, they do it for a while, build a resume, then move.
It’s vastly different.
Gig workers are literally disposable robots. You’re part of a computer program. There is no human relationship. At least a McDonald’s worker can talk to their manager.
Hence the original gig economy job was called “mechanical turk.”
And maybe even become manager in some relatively small number of years. And then move to some other industry. Not that most of them do, but there is at least some career progression.
Managers at McDonalds can make $50-70K/yr. There is job security, benefits and opportunities for career advancement. Plenty of people start at the very bottom of the ladder flipping burgers and make it all the way to corporate. It's a tired meme that "McDonalds jobs are meant for teenagers". These are all incredibly in-demand jobs. And plenty of fast food chains pay significantly more, sometimes including benefits like college tuition reimbursement.
But there’s a difference between “don’t want” and “structurally locked out”.
Except when it isn't, like Peter Cancro of Jersey Mikes, who started making sandwiches and then bought it in 1975, and in 2024 sold it to Blackrock for $8B.
Or more here: https://www.businessinsider.com/ceos-started-entry-level-at-...
Now, not all people at Jack in the Box are destined to be the CEO, but they do have more opportunities than someone working DoorDash
build a resume
And establish work relationships with other people who can help with future job hunting.
The Uber app doesn’t have an HR department.
Not to mention casual employees at least get some sort of social aspect from their work life. (A slight variation on the networking you mentioned.) Most of my friends, I have through past work environments like shared offices, etc. That would be near-impossible as a gig worker.
I think a lot of commenters here are projecting this article onto their work lives as tech office workers, but it's really more about the world of unskilled and semi-skilled service/gig workers, like handymen, furniture assemblers, delivery drivers, and so on.
All these things can be true and they reinforce each other: The jobs suck <-> The people willing to do them aren't very happy, skilled or competent <-> The pay is minuscule. And we can't seem to get out of this Nash Equilibrium.
None of those listed jobs is actually unskilled labor. Driving a big truck around narrow roads is a skill most don’t have, doing it at speed and running up and down to actually move the heavy packages is a skill most don’t have. Assembling furniture is a skill most don’t have, especially with complex engineered wood products that will break if stressed wrong. Handymen is literally just a collection of skilled labor jobs rolled into one guy that can handle small home improvement projects like carpentry, masonry, plumbing, and electrical. These are specialized jobs that have wrongly been labeled “un-skilled” or “semi-skilled” as if knowledge work is the only skill of value…
Very, very little labor is unskilled. In almost any work there is a massive difference in quality and speed between someone who has been doing it for <6 months vs. someone who has been doing it for >3 years.
My theory is that "unskilled labor" was a term of propaganda invented by an earlier generation of business leaders in order to publicly devalue many labor-intensive roles. That generation knew that it was a lie, but the business leaders that followed were taught that "unskilled labor" was axiomatic, and essentially "drank the kool-aid".
The result of this is that the labor pool for many disciplines has been hollowed out because it's no longer financially sustainable for workers to build the skills needed to excel in those roles.
I’ve had similar frustrations with gig economy services. A while ago, i hired someone from TaskRabbit to set up a standing desk. i thought it would be an easy process, but the assembler showed up late. then he had a hard time following basic instructions, and he also left halfway through, saying he had another job to go to. I finished the assembly myself at the end.
then i realize these platforms don’t support skilled, well-paid workers. they focus on cheap convenience, which often results in poor quality. the issue isn't just that people struggle with their jobs. it's that the system makes it hard for them to do good work.
Now I hire local professionals, even if they cost more. Their experience and trustworthiness save me time and frustration.
>Now I hire local professionals, even if they cost more. Their experience and trustworthiness save me time and frustration.
I've found the exact opposite. The deeper the moat the bigger the jerks. I can pick up a guy at home depot who'll bust ass as hard as I will at a very reasonable price. Can't say that (especially the first part) about most professionals. Anything with a license or high capital investment keeping upstarts out is like pulling teeth to work with. Even for brick and mortar this holds. My local upholsterer is a pleasure to work with compared to any tire and alignment shop.
That said, I'm also not hiring people to put together Ikea beds for me or bringing piles of gravy work to any given professional.
Edit: I will add, I have consistently been amazed with what concrete truck drivers will do above and beyond the bare minimum and the consistent "get it done or tear shit up trying" attitude they bring. But this might be a regional thing.
> > Now I hire local professionals, even if they cost more. Their experience and trustworthiness save me time and frustration.
> I've found the exact opposite. ... My local upholsterer is a pleasure to work with compared to any tire and alignment shop.
I'm confused, isn't your local upholsterer exactly an example of a local professional?
Yes but its not one with "with a license or high capital investment" needed.
We have to learn how to DIY more things. I pretty much don't hire anyone to do anything anymore, because I always end up having to supervise them, they do the work incorrectly, and I have to double check the quality and insist they come back to do it right. So, I'm not really saving any time. At some point, you might as well just do the work yourself because you know it will be done correctly.
Bringing back woodshop, metalshop etc to schools could help with that.
there are probably other factors than "how much are they"
The buisnessmodel is speculating that your average Joe does not have the energy or knowledge to go after the shobby work. I notice this trend a lot and while I can push back I feel sorry for the people that are not able to do so or do not know their rights.
You have basically described the government vs private contractor dynamic.
Disagree. Just the other day I needed someone to replace my chimney cap. The quotes from the big companies ranged from $3k-10k. Utterly ridiculous. I got some guy from an app who bought the stainless steel cap for $300 and installed it for $300 more for a total of $600 and the work is fine.
The difference is when guy from an app falls and breaks something it will turn out he doesn’t have insurance so you will lose much more than 3k when he sues
Were the quotes from the big companies also for a metal cap and not a poured cap?
Yep, stainless steel cap
They don't focus on cheap convenience. They focus on milking as much money as they can from the customer and the restaurant, and then squeeze the worker to death by transferring as many expenses and risks as possible to the worker. Then they force them to engage in race to the bottom compensation-wise.
Result? Only the desperate do it, and get out of it as soon as possible. But the pay is so bad, people are increasingly trapped in it.
> At Fred Meyer, our local Kroger-owned grocery store, a bagger in his 70s put all my frozen items in a normal bag, and my chips in the cold storage bag I’d brought from home.
A) Having to work a job (obviously not done out of passion) 70+ is really disheartening B) I don´t understand why this even is something that has to be done by a worker. I bought the groceries. I know where I want my stuff in my bags. Or I just toss them back in the cart and load it properly at the car.
When visiting US I feel very weird about baggers. Bagging stuff is something I can easily do myself while the cashier scans the products. Now instead of doing something useful, I just stand there idle and awkward watching the staff working.
In general having service workers spend a good part of their lives doing things that I can trivially with minimal effort and no loss of time do myself feels actively degrading these people. Perhaps some do get sense of being useful out of it, but I'd guess a lot of them would rather be doing something else if given choice.
There was one cashier who also bagged at a local supermarket who was the mythical 10x bagger. I'm not joking when I say they were a virtuoso at scanning and bagging and I would always line up in their line just to witness it again and anyway that line moved incredibly fast. It's fascinating that even mundane activities can be executed with speed and beauty.
They've graduated college so I guess I'll never see that again.
My father paid for college working at a grocery _part time_ and is full of stories about how a good grocer could tell a little better the ripeness of a fruit to gift that perfectly ripe one to the right customer that day who was going to eat it that night or that weekend, how there used to be an art to bagging, how they used to have real breaks and social lives, how he could get some of his homework done during work hours or do something incredible for a customer with that same kind of time.
You get the skills you pay for. When a part-time job can pay for college, imagine what the full-time regulars can do. When people have the sorts of breaks and downtime to improve themselves, think of what they can do with that time to also improve their customer's experience in little and unique ways. It is easy to wonder what all we've lost in letting companies penny pinch labor so hard, focusing on productivity numbers over anything else, minimizing the number of employees and their wages to the barest minimums.
But also, as it easy as it seems to wonder about those sorts of things, it is still fascinating how many that lived through those changes don't see the squeeze that well. My father tells those stories just as often to complain about the experience in a modern day grocery store and how quality has slipped. It does take explicit reminders like "they paid you well enough you paid for college, you know what minimum wage is like today, yeah?" The long boiled frog sometimes doesn't remember the soup wasn't always so hot.
He might not be doing it for economic reasons. He might be doing it to get out of the house. My mom's physician suggested volunteer work or a part time job to keep her active instead of sitting on the couch all day.
Most likely he is doing it for economic reasons. My preferred checker is an elderly woman that is slow, but very affable and likes to chat when there is no line.
Despite her positive attitude, she is working because social security isn't enough and grocery workers also get an employee discount.
Not sure if you're joking, but volunteer work is quite different than having to stand at the checkout line packing backs in a commercial setting.
Volunteer work is a lot like part time work, in that it's mostly low skill, and the work varies from physical labor to office work, and from behind-the-scenes jobs where you only interact with other volunteers to intensely face-to-face jobs where there's no hiding from the emotions of the people you serve.
Agreed. It’s so sad to have to work at that age.
I know some people choose to but to have to is a pretty sad state of affairs and damning of how the country allows it’s citizens to prosper
A low stress, easy job like that could totally be done out of choice. A big concern of seniors in my life is fearing cognitive atrophy from lack of social connections.
Retail is not "low stress". I guarantee you that senior bagger is getting chewed out every single day both by his customers and his management for being too slow hurry up already, packing the eggs at the bottom of the bag omg what are you doing you fucking idiot, etc.
Probably not true at all.
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Nonsense. Retail workers have a way of exaggerating how bad their jobs are. I worked retail in my teens and for years and maybe saw 2-3 bad customers in that entire time.
The retail experience now is not necessarily the same as it was when you were a kid though, is it?
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I'll generally tell the clerk that I'll bag, which speeds up the lines, and I get stuff pretty much where I want it. (My store doesn't generally have a dedicated bagger)
I'm not sure if there's someone who will bag your groceries in all of Canada. I've always done that myself
I bring couple reusable bags, that are more like foldable boxes than a bag. It makes bagging trivial because you just set your stuff in a box. It's organizing groceries in small and fragile plastic bags that's the hard part.
It depends. When I go to Costco and make huge purchases to last a month, I unload the cart onto the payment conveyor and the bagger bags them on the other side. By the time I’m done unloading the cart and have finished paying, the cart is ready to go. I would say that’s like a 40-50% time save. Those really add up to shorter lines and more purchases for the stores.
> I don´t understand why this even is something that has to be done by a worker. I bought the groceries. I know where I want my stuff in my bags.
... You are literally describing self checkout which is very popular in grocery chains like Kroger and Publix. (In the U.S.).
Unfortunately, around here, most of the self-checkout "lanes" are explicitly marked as "X items or less" express lanes. If you're doing a full shopping, they don't want you using them. (This seems particularly stupid at one of the stores, where they have about a dozen self-checkouts, half marked 14 items or less and half marked 20 items or less, and literally every time I'm there, at least half of them are unused. Fortunately they also have a lot of manned regular checkout lanes.)
Furthermore, because the expectation nowadays is that the cashier will bag the groceries, too, the checkout infrastructure is very much set up to support that and only that model: rather than having a short belt after the cashier to send the groceries to a bagging area, the cashier has a couple of bag slots right in front of them, and a tiny island behind them to put your bags on, along with any items that they need to hold onto to bag later (eg, chips, eggs—things they don't want to put under other things). So even if you wanted to bag for yourself, it would make it much less efficient and more awkward for the cashier.
I recently retired after 45 years in tech. I started out in 1978 at Bell Labs. I have had great jobs and terrible jobs. Great bosses and horrific bosses. And all the things in between. I did not just survive, I thrived and beyond and worked at 3 start ups and a bunch of other companies large and small. What I learned is to not to be afraid. Regardless of what is happening around you. Fear is the enemy. Don't be afraid to be weird or crazy or whatever is causing you to be timid.
This seems supremely irrelevant to the topic of the article. I doubt very much the Wayfair bed assemblyperson is being held back from fear. But hopefully they read your inspiring comment and can, I guess, stop being timid.
> What I learned is to not to be afraid. Regardless of what is happening around you.
Were you perhaps financially secure enough not to have to fear anything? Or tenured (Bell Labs!) that unemployment wasn't actually a threat to you? YMMV.
I long for the day when someone can give advice based on their own personal experience without someone else being like “well that won’t work for literally everyone”
Yeah obviously. It’s a personal anecdote.
It's obnoxious behavior. For example, I decided when I was young to live in my car and be homeless. I saved a bunch of money, and I've been frugal most my life. I was also super focused at my work and climbed the ladder making real money.
I believe most people don't have discipline to endure less than and the discipline to really listen to what power asks of them. There is a lot of great advice for people to do well in a job, but they just... don't apply it.
These people are best to be ignored.
What's the _point_ of the anecdote, though? You're taking up everybody's time to tell a story, do us a favor to have a relevant point.
"Have no fear" doesn't apply to the article, at all. You might as well write "what I learned was to not stick legos up my nostril". Also good advice. Also not applicable.
It's fine if it doesn't work for everyone, it's annoying if it isn't relevant to anyone.
You are reading Hacker News. You are literally here to waste time.
I long for the day when people don't try to pass off vapid generic advice for likes. Waste of bandwidth.
A bit cynical, no?
Giving generic feel-good advice is a decent strategy to farm likes from the naive. Some people have no shame.
Don't be afraid is excellent advice, sorry but you're coming off as very cynical.
I was watching a trial the other day and the prosecutor asks "And did you often see your nephews at your mothers house when you video called her?", and the defendant, a dentists, says "Yep, watching TV, brushing their teeth.[5 second silence] Don't forget to brush your teeth. Really important." The prosecutor smiles, laughs, and says "A little dull humor never hurt, eh?"
I'm not sure your average adult would find "don't be afraid" to be "advice", or some deeply meaningful advice that only a cynic would think was anything less than excellent.
It’s not just a personal anecdote. It’s telling people what they should do.
A personal anecdote would be saying this is what worked for me. Not this is how you should do it.
It comes off as telling you what your problem is and how you should fix it.
While YMMV, a fear response is a choice. You can have all the rational reasons to be afraid (like the bottom of your hierarchy of needs being unmet) and choose to act out of cold rationality rather than fear. Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - if you can act without fear even when there is justified reason to be afraid, you will be able to easily do so when it isn't justified.
Where I come from, "hav[ing] all the rational reasons to be afraid" and pretending otherwise is called a delusion. I prefer to see the world as it is.
"... is called a delusion". What I am suggesting is not delusion, it is mindfulness and cutting through delusion. When one is presented with something that elicits a fear response (whether the stimulus is rational or not) the goal is to quiet all of the "lizard brain" reactions, and instead formulate a well reasoned response. "Fear is the mind-killer" - while from fiction, still rings true to me - if you react out of fear you will short-circuit internal processes that are far better at long-term reasoning even when at the expense of short-term comfort.
People acclimate to their circumstances. Do you think people in developing countries live in a constant state of panic because they don't have a seven figure retirement account?
This. Just gotta live within your means. It's so easy with a developer salary unless you're 1 year in and haven't had time to save for a rainy day.
> Do you think people in developing countries live in a constant state of panic because they don't have a seven figure retirement account?
If Brazil is anything to look at, maybe?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7111415/
As someone who is more in the middle of my career rather than the end of it, I would like to echo your sentiment. I have had plenty of roles where I was tasked with things that were out of my depth, and the answer is to just not let it be. There is always a path to get the answers/skills you need to do what is asked of you, you just might not know the path yet, so the core skill (and where I think fear comes into the process) is accepting that not knowing something now is never a hinderance so long as once can do self-directed learning. The rest is reality testing if what you just learned is actually able to solve your problem. If it isn't, then repeat ad infinitum until it is.
How do you slog through something you truly hate?
More than a decade ago I was hired as an intern at Colgate-Palmolive as a software developer. Turns out they were(are?) one of the largest SAP deployments in the US. The entire company revolved around SAP. Due to lack of college graduates knowing SAP, they took great pains to treat me extremely well and train me (a CS major) in ABAP using SAP Netweaver.
My project was more ambitious than the rest of the group because I had enough courage and bravado to be assigned a project like that. In fact I made it a point to be 'brave' and make myself look really good in front of the upper level managers. I tried to know everyones name, even in other departments and to be super polite and humble around any sort of manager there. When I finally got some tasks to do, I was so miserable that I finished multiple days without getting anything done. I felt so depressed thinking that I slogged through four years of CS for this?
In the end I managed to finish last in the cohort and Colgate took the rare(at the time)decision to not extend me a full time offer. I felt like a complete failure because I didn't put in 100% and I felt like I let my mentor down.
At the same time I know that I truly hated it. To this day seeing pictures of SAP GUI gives me anxiety and makes my stomach turn. How do you overcome something like that and push on? It does not always seem like a sure thing. I sometimes think what if I had pushed through and gotten the offer? I'd probably still be at Colgate like my mentor was.
With the benefit of hindsight I have learned to be super appreciative and thankful for them treating me so well but im glad circumstances led me to not ending up there. But really who knows if it would have been better in the long run? Whenever I see Colgate it actually evokes positive memories of that time. But the biggest thing I learned was to not bite off more than you can chew and if you don't truly love what you are doing there is another path out there.
"How do you slog through something you truly hate?" - I don't.
When signals that a role is not aligned with my needs start cropping up, I begin searching for a new role passively, and as the situation develops I speed up my search.
"I felt like a complete failure because I didn't put in 100% and I felt like I let my mentor down" - to thine own self be true. I have failed to put in 100% at some jobs, and sometimes i regret it more than others. I have narratives that legitimize my laziness or lack of commitment based on some previous slight from the company, or a missed promise on their part, but I hold myself accountable.
"How do you overcome something like that and push on? It does not always seem like a sure thing" Resilience is a wildly varying trait of folks, and depends on your emotional and mental state. "First world problems" are a great example, one when is socialized at a certain comfort level, missing that causes distress. Some working conditions are truly untenable, in which case do what you have to do, but otherwise do the best with the situation you're given.
Which Bell Labs? Are you still in the area? I’m minutes away from Murray Hill and a lot of what you’re saying resonates with me (~10 years into my career and starting to lean into what I previously thought was weird).
Fear is the mind killer.
Fear is one thing but how do you deal with regret? Regret for taking the leap as well as regret for not taking the leap? There can be regret in both paths.
You have to accept that life is single threaded and you’re not always going to choose the most optimal path.
It’s easy to overthink, but without omniscient info, execute the plan you have.
Regret is tough because it piles up as you age. It’s easy to look back and think “dang, I did a lot of bad moves” while ignoring all the upsides and limited info you had at the time.
In many ways our easy access to info makes you think “just one more search” will make my decision 10x better when in reality it’s a huge super power you should use to drive execution, not the other way around. Think of what an advantage it is to have that much context on the scale of human existence. At least for me, this makes me more optimistic: I make less mistakes than ages before me because I’m relatively better informed. Note: this doesn’t mean the choices are always good, just that I understand them more completely.
Start by reading some Robert Frost.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43476154
Did anyone else’s boss ask them to stick your hand in a box or just me?
This is such a boomer style comment.
* Not super relevant.
* Gives advice that is extremely vague.
* The entire comment is essentially a humblebrag.
Would fit well on Facebook.
I agree with the author's point, which basically boils down to "pay peanuts, get monkeys."
But I think another large issue is a deep lack of respect at these jobs, in every way. They are impersonal, they are short-term, you are a cog in a machine, they don't know your name, the customers don't know your name, they don't care about you, you are replaceable, you don't care about the work, why would you?
... that's the problem right? The big furniture factory is good at making (cheap) furniture, but they are very bad at managing local teams to deliver and assemble and ...
IKEA (at least in most of Europe) is good at this, because they spend a lot of attention and invest in their local presence (all of their big stores have pretty okay fast-food restaurant, as far as I understand)
... so of course it would make sense to let the factory do that and let some other company focus on assembly (and last-mile stuff generally).
... but there's no competition, no ratings to look up, no alternatives, they will send someone and that's it.
... and of course this spreads the negative cost all around, everyone gets a bit more of the annoyances, but keeps costs down (yay, I guess?)
and as a comment [1] in this thread mentioned this is a bad Nash equilibrium. (the post mentioned lemons already, and of course we know that due to information asymmetry bad goods crowd out good ones.[2])
there's no price information for "respect". it used to be enforced by big brands, hiring processes, unions, trade organizations, certifications, licensing requirements. but of course assembling a standardized bed is not hard, especially if someone did a few of the same. so of course none of the usual signals apply (no certification, no licensed assemblers registry maintained by some government organization, no assemblers union/guild, and so on.)
...
the possible solutions are to open up the data for these gig companies.
or fix labor laws.
or fix social security (unemployment compensation, negative income tax).
yeah, I know. good luck with any of that nowadays :/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43563248
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
Customer service across the board is in free-fall. Just the other day I was met with a Chipotle worker who was visibly frustrated that I ordered a burrito instead of a bowl. A little thing, but holy shit.
I guess when wages don't add up to a viable life, resentment and carelessness spread like wildfire.
Yeah, this is prevalent everywhere. It’s pretty crazy. I’m glad I’m not the only one that has noticed this.
I would be interested in knowing what Chick-Fil-A does to prevent this. Pretty much every customer facing job that doesn't hope for charity at the end of the service is pretty bad in the US currently, but somehow they achieve the level of service of what I would get in Japan.
The only thing I've been able to surmise is that they probably pay the managers very well and mostly just hire smart high schoolers that may have been passed over or didn't know about internship opportunities, and pay slightly better rates than McDonald's. They still pull the same scummy things as McDonald's with pressuring employees for goals that only benefit the manager, but maybe its not so bad if you're getting paid more than your very young peers.
Chick-Fil-A would probably try to attribute some religious meaning to the Sunday off for their adult workers, but it seems like any company could just guarantee a day off on the weekend for their workers.
Tribalism, presumably. Chik-Fil-A has intentionally made their brand about serving a specific tribe, being part of that specific tribe. That tribe has ideals and to work for that tribe is to live up to those ideals and if you don't live up to those ideals you are fired and probably not a "real" member of that tribe. It's tautological, but so is a lot of tribalism.
Given how much of that tribalism is also explicitly religiously coded, I find it's hard not to want to apply harsher words like "cult-like" to Chik-Fil-A, specifically, but "sect-like" is probably more accurate given how predominant both their business culture tribe and religious tribe are in American politics today even if "sect-like" doesn't have quite the same harsh connotations designed to help you question the systems of power in place.
Yea I don't think the 16 year old kids who know how to say thank you and smile are part of some religious cult.
Chick-fil-A corporate donates and supports some gross organizations, but none of what you said makes sense for the stores I've been to in various parts of the country
Very good and insightful article, but suffers from a weakness: it implies that the problem can be solved by everyone just buying from the ones whose workers are doing the job well.
This is not the case. The evidence that the "free market" does not "regulate itself" (at least not in favor of the many) since the 2008 recession is beyond refutation: we need pro-worker governments stepping in.
Labor laws in the US are outdated, not being updated, and not being enforced.
Companies exist to make money. If the company's environment permits it to exploit people to make money? It'll do it just to not get outcompeted.
Delivery drivers' pay should be higher - the cost of delivery should drive some percent of people choose pickup. Bed assembly being impossible due to the wrong part being sent should cause recourse for the bed assembly company/staff.
Everyone involved is doing their best, but it's a bit dire lately.
The problem is with work ethics, not with jobs.
In Japan, it's impressive to see how people perform even the most menial jobs with dedication. It's the Yoda approach: do or do not. If you do a job, do it well. So, you will see people whose job is to stand in the rain and watch over a construction site exit making sure people in the sidewalk do not get run over by trucks exiting the site, doing their job with utter dedication. Even if it rains. Even if the job is crappy. I'm sure these people would rather have a different job — but as long as this is the one they have, they will sure as anything do it well!
The average level of work ethic in the areas I frequent has cratered over the last 6-7 years.
I can feel it happening to me as well. I used to get super anxious if I wasn't going to be able to respond to a work email within a few minutes. Basically chained myself to my desk at home M-F. Remember phone calls? Having to answer a ringing phone within 15 seconds or you could be perceived as delinquent? No one is responding quickly to anything anymore.
Keeping myself amped up 8 hours a day for vendors and customers who are 1000% asleep at the wheel is too much. I wait for meaningful work to accumulate now and work in bursts. This definitely contributes to the downward spiral, but I don't know what else to do. Human energy is finite. I'm willing to stick my neck out really far for really long if it seems like others are willing to do the same, but it doesn't feel like that kind of situation right now.
> So, you will see people whose job is to stand in the rain and watch over a construction site exit making sure people in the sidewalk do not get run over by trucks exiting the site, doing their job with utter dedication.
That kind of job existing in the first place is the problem. And that could be well called subservience instead of work ethic.
> That kind of job existing in the first place is the problem.
Why? You don't think that job is important? To prevent injuries around a construction site?
In most of the world that job is done by a traffic light.
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This makes me think of The Sort, coined by the venerable patio11.
The types soft skills it takes to to be effective in the kinda crappy jobs described by the author can command much better remuneration in any number of other roles, and society has gotten much better at efficiently allocating that human capital.
I always thought “soft skills” were a cope for those who didn’t learn an actual skill, until I entered the workforce. I was working mainly in customer service, construction, and facility maintenance roles, and in all three I found it was incredibly common for coworkers to have issues with anger management, emotional maturity, and basic courtesy. These jobs were all fairly terrible aside from customer service; perhaps not coincidentally, that is also where these issues were the least common.
The thing is if someone prepared for an interview and cracked the job, they have to be good at it. I have realised that it's often our perception of them which makes them bad at the their jobs. Similar to how we usually blame motivation when the actual problem is clarity of role or job. If we believe in the motive behind it and have clarity of our role in it, motivation does not remain an issue.
We make the jobs bad by not being able to properly share the incentive behind it, what good it brings and to whom. Most of the time people don't want to work because they don't see the ROI in it.
Except paying more for a service doesn’t guarantee better service. I have hired local handymen at $75 per hour and they have been equally bad with fake reviews.
North Americans (my exp only) value cheap goods and services so highly, they don't care how the sausage is made.
It’s very difficult to know how it’s made.
I’m shopping for some good or service. I see different offerings. Usually I have little capacity to judge them. Companies aren’t transparent. Reviews are rigged. Recommendations are based on profit rather than quality. If I don’t have some personal knowledge of the thing, it’s really hard to tell what’s what.
What do I do? Well, I usually pick the cheapest one. Might as well. If I spend more, it’s likely to be the same or even worse, so it’s just a waste.
>It’s very difficult to know how it’s made.
Do people not talk to the contractor?
I remember riding along in a taxi, sitting up front, having a conversation about how he used his taxi license to get around the anti uber laws (that have since been repealed) in my state.
I talk to the guys who I hire online. We often end up working out a deal behind the platform. I once hired a bloke to help move stuff out of my garage, and we talked about how he is having a hard time saving money after moving here to study, which is why he was taking airtasker stuff.
I think we’re addressing different points. I’m talking about how difficult it is to judge quality when shopping for something. Sure, if I’m hiring a contractor I’ll get quotes and talk to them. But I’m deeply unqualified to judge their competence or work ethic. If I’m lucky I’ll go on personal recommendations from someone I know and whose judgment I trust. Otherwise it’s just vibes.
Contributing factors that I didn't see discussed yet are the increasing stratification of job descriptions, along with reduction in autonomy to break out of your stratum (combined with incentive not to). This creates workers with an extremely limited view of the whole picture, and lack of interest or ability to do anything outside their job description to fix your problem.
I've heard that Ritz-Carlton does the opposite: they empower employees at all levels to address any customer's concern. This, I believe, is how it should be. https://ritzcarltonleadershipcenter.com/2019/03/19/the-power...
I used to use airtasker a lot.
One thing I noticed is that the people doing airtasker full time, rushed a lot.
I really don't think the platform is for them.
The 2 - 3 people who did the best work, were already people in that trade, doing professional work (often self employed), but using the app to book up just their slack time.
One time I had a professional lawn care company come through and do all my garden maintenance, just to keep the apprentice busy. The job was just for lawn mowing. But unlike the other people on the platform, these guys never wanted to hear from me again. They dont need my business on an ongoing basis.
Gig economy employment model works great for Amazon’s end product - the other companies have just executed poorly
That Wayfair scenario is very familiar to me. I had a really similar experience with them delivering a table and chairs. They stayed for a shockingly long time to assemble them. I figured it was just really hard to assemble. That was somewhat true.
However, when I looked at them, I was shocked at how shoddy the work was. Cross braces were installed backwards. Seat bottoms had huge gaps from the underlying support. Some screws were literally just missing, with parts that would just flop. A lot of this stemmed from not paying attention to the instructions, which specified really specific sequences for putting in the screws, leveling, then tightening. Those steps were obviously engineered to minimize misalignment, but this crew thought they knew better... sigh
I didn't ask for a new crew, as I didn't trust them to send a better crew. Instead I just spent a good evening redoing quite a bit of the work.
"no one wants to work anymore"
No one ever wanted to work, we just had to in order to pay the bills. Sometimes work can be gratifying, but most of the time it's just a slog and always has been.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but the article mentioned very low skills jobs as courier, assembler, clerk.
There is a reason why those people are doing job like these instead that better jobs. Some people are just not interested in doing their work correctly, some other are not skilled enough.
In Germany you have quite high minimum wages. Unions and works committees are quite common. Labor protected laws are quite strict. Sure, not every job is fun, but living with low income is not as bad as in the US. So, are people better at their jobs? Nope. Do people work better just because you pay them better? Nope. Should people get paid better, especially those with shirty jobs? Yes - of course. But there’s no reason to believe this would improve quality of work.
Germany in my experience is a country of too many scammers. Right from the taxi driver to the entrepreneurs, it is about cheating the customer. The funny thing is that it is native Germans who do it. Of course not everyone is like it, and there are plenty of top-notch open source developers that call Germany home.
This is a nit, but grocery bagging (one of the article's examples) is a no-win situation. I worked it as a summer job a while back--It’s the most bikeshed job in existence because (nearly) everyone understands it, but they all have their own theory of bagging.
To this day I remember a client whose entire purchase was a loaf of bread, a package of fresh raw chicken, and a bottle of liquid drain cleaner. Paper bags, of course. I don't remember how I arranged them but I remember being yelled at.
This is actually a good lesson in communication.
Question 1, are you fine with the chicken in with the bread? Question 2, would you like the drain cleaner left separate rather than with the food items.
They either don't care or would suggest leaving the bread or chicken separate, same for the drain cleaner.
The worst grief you'll get is why they can't have 3 bags.
This is obviously a three-bag situation, who would want to have these items packed any other way?
I’d be interested in a breakdown of Angi’s costs. They paid $85 for assembly and estimate the assembler was paid $25? Where could the money possibly be going, server hosting is incredibly cheap.
Check out their financial statements. Half their revenue is eaten up by sales and marketing.
https://ir.angi.com/
Don’t forget that Wayfair gets a cut of that $85 as well.
People mentioned they had it easier in the past. It's true, it was easier. The world was not as fast as it is now. The world needs to slow down a bit. Slowing down would benefit both the planet and the people.
I know it's dull to blame another thing on them, but I suspect it's phones/etc as a connection to a live world. There's always a pipeline of content, always something getting updated, always a notification. I remember many many years ago on the cusp of home internet (when I couldn't justify $50/m to have internet at home as well as work!), if there wasn't something interesting on TV, I'd read or have some other calm activity. If I wanted to know who won the day's NBA games, I'd have to wait until the next day's newspaper. Now, almost no matter what activity I do, there's a portal to endless distractions within arm's reach.
Amazing I left almost this exact question as a comment a couple weeks ago!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43427615
The jobs are bad and people get blamed for it. We've been through a credit bubble where everything was borrowed out of debt, in the hope that it would deliver massive-scale automation in the future.
But reality is that everyone has been rushing out brittle solutions, creating a brittle, fragile architecture... And now people entering the job market have to spend so much time fixing the mess that they can't make progress. Worse, they take the blame for the slow progress and they have no say over foundations. We are asked to do impossible things given the current foundations and so every job becomes about politics; how to foist the impossible/infeasible tasks onto someone else so that they will take the blame. Because it's all political, the people who can actually create value and thus aren't good at politics get wiped out of the market; then all that remains in every company are political operators.
The value creators are forced either to become political or to keep hopping between companies... Who make good use of them... for a short time until they burn out and hop on to the next company. Nobody acknowledges the value they contribute during their brief tenures; in spite of the fact that they're the only ones adding value. Only the political operator can rise through the ranks; getting credit for managing the constant churn of burnt-out value creators.
Worse, as the political operators get into positions of power; who do they help? People who are like them; also political operators who don't know how to add value.
Surprisingly bonafide slogan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_bottleneck_method*Our Dear Thought Leader would prefer the substitution "profit from", but I'd wager that He's equally correct!
Also, I should add that the job-hopping is likely a feature of our inflationary monetary system; as inflation is ongoing, people find that if they change jobs after 1 or 2 years, they can get some non-trivial salary increase... In reality, changing jobs every 2 years doesn't actually give you a real salary increase; it merely allows you to maintain your buying power in the face of inflation...
The elite class is basically using the monetary system to constantly squeeze value creators by forcing them to job-hop frequently as it demoralizes them, lowers their self-esteem and thus helps to keep their salary expectations down. The manager class also contributes to the demoralization aspect of value creators by imposing unnecessary constraints on value creators.
The reason we have population collapse in the west is because value creators are systematically demoralized. It's literally the enslavement of value creators by value extractors.
I think this is why coding is increasingly seen as a low-class skill nowadays... If you possess any productive skill, it signals that you're part of the lower 'value creator' class.
There is even a belief that if you have to create value for a living, then it means that you're just not smart enough to figure out how to make other people work for you... Completely ignoring the reality that it's all about social networking; literally all about your position in the social graph and distance to money printers.
If only someone invented a monetary system where the supply of money was determined by an algorithm that didn't constantly pump new money into existence all the time.
Oh wait, they did. But for some reason, most people on HN say Bitcoin is for scammers and grifters, and has no fundamental value proposition...
Bitcoin is a good store of value but unfortunately, Bitcoin doesn't scale beyond around 4 transactions per second and uses a massive amount of electricity. Also, a lot of cryptocurrencies basically turned into scams; sometimes with the backing and approval of governments.
That said, I think centralized providers acting as a layer above Bitcoin or any limited-supply crypto would still be orders of magnitude better than what we have now. Unfortunately, the boomers who benefited from the current fiat system think Bitcoin is just a fad to satisfy the fickle whims of spoiled millennials.
Sturgeons's Law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
Yes.
Excellent article, and better than I could do at generalizing the larger problem of outsourcing. From the IT perspective, companies pay far more to outsource than they would by keeping permanent employees on staff and decently compensated (as in, enough for a modest home, a car every decade, a vacation every year, and all necessary medical/dental/vision care, plus some retirement compensation of some form). Outsourcing communicates two things very loudly:
1) To the outsourcer, that you're a cheap client who will fire you as soon as someone cheaper comes along or a KPI is missed
2) To those in the know (colleagues, workers, stakeholders), that you don't intend to be here long enough to deal with the consequences of your actions
Outsourcers will never care about your infrastructure or its actual needs, and won't care about your budget either. An employee is more likely to conserve budget with smarter product choices and more in-house builds, while outsourced workers will just nod and accept whatever you point to as gospel, since they'll never have to fix it anyway. In essence, you're paying more money to have someone else handle it then you would have paid someone else to talk you professionally down or implement it properly.
Similar arguments:
* Public Cloud is a form of outsourcing that can often increase costs, especially for static or non-scaling infrastructure/resources. Yet because it's more convenient and skirts CAPEX budgets, more companies will just outsource to AWS/Azure/GCP instead of buying two to three servers, a storage array, and some network infrastructure to host their internal directories/applications/file shares.
* XaaS is also outsourcing, often doubly so. You outsource the application to an XaaS provider, and then outsource its management or setup to an outsourcing firm/MSP/consultant. Then you leave, and the company is stuck with a product they have to pay for because "it's necessary", don't know how to support it, don't understand what it's for, and can't begin to move off of or away from it for at least a year after they hire new permanent in-house technical staff.
* Outsourcing leads to a dependency on consultants, because you don't understand your own estate anymore (and fired the folks who did, so you could send the labor elsewhere) and need someone else to tell you what's needed, with the pretty slide decks to justify it to stakeholders. Now you're paying for the outsourced infra (often public cloud or XaaS), the MSP to manage out, the consultants to update/implement it, and now additional consultants to integrate it with other systems who also require consultants because - again - you outsourced your technical staff. Before long you're just blindly implementing whatever's in the upper-right Gartner quadrant without understanding function or utility, let alone ROI.
The end result is a bunch of grossly overpaid leaders, a glut of burnt-out MSP workers who only get paid to put out fires but never prevent them (and even if they were paid for prevention, they'll only be able to do it for whoever pays them the most), and a lagging domestic workforce you have to invest in upskilling when you do want to bring technical staff back in house. Congratulations, instead of leaving your engineers and architects on payroll, you've single-handedly saved the company enough money during your contract to get yourself all your KPI-tied bonuses, and left the organization on fire while you parachute off to repeat it elsewhere.
The OP is right - people aren't necessarily bad at their jobs, we've just incentivized the worst behavior as a society to the point most jobs are just bad. Now we're even doing it to technology folks (IT/IS/Devs) with LLMs, racing ahead with ever more outsourcing and banking on the fact someone else will clean up our mess.
If so many companies are such a disaster, why isn't someone founding a startup that says "We won't do any of that crap here" and eats said companies' lunch?
Might be such startups are unstable, because once the lunch starts getting eaten, the founders are instantly offered "F-you money" to sell their company, at which point it gets rolled into a disaster company. Or it loses its incentives past a certain size.
Rare indeed is a company whose founder(s) both (a) refuses to sell for a generous valuation and (b) actively put the brakes on aggressive growth out of wariness it will destroy the company yet (c) still sees the company to success.
You just answered your own incendiary question: because the systems incentivize bad behaviors for individual success over the health, longevity, or success of the organization and its members.
It takes hard work to ignore the easy exits in favor of building a healthy organization designed to withstand the temptations of the modern business cycle. You're not building a mere startup or business, you're building an institution, and that's an infinitely harder job that doesn't pay nearly as well - though it often has far more substantial impacts.
So many people are obsessed with striking it rich via individual success, that they're blind to the reality that we already have the resources and technologies to ensure everyone can enjoy modest success, if we discipline exploitation for personal gain. It's why part of founding a startup nowadays is literally developing an exit strategy, rather than a successor plan: the goal is for the founders to succeed, not the business, and definitely not its customers.
The solution is simple; quit jobs, assemble our own shit. In the US, lean in to the 2A and tell the <1 million cops, <700k politicians to eat it.
We peacefully assemble around jobs. Just peacefully assemble around a new meme of telling the walking dead to pound sand.
Education worked to an extent; most will not devolve into dumb fucks. Pretty pathetic seeing the adults kowtowed by the ossified establishment.
> Education worked to an extent; most will not devolve into dumb fucks.
Your inequality symbols are backwards.
There are not fewer than 1 million cops in the US there are more than 1 million.
There are indeed fewer than 700,000 politicians but I'm going to assume you meant to say "more than 700k". The majority of those persons are local representatives who have little authority beyond determining what days trash collection occurs and whether a specific plot of land can be zoned residential, commercial, or industrial.
Remember, the alligator always wants to eat the larger number.
Did you read the part where the OP was unable to assemble her own shit, and thus had to get help?
It was the OP's choice and mistake to buy a complex design that was difficult to self-assemble. Any number of simple metal bed frames bought online can trivially be assembled by a single person. Never give up your power unnecessarily.
What if they have a physical disability or affect like they're pregnant or recovering from surgery?
What if instead of a simple furniture item it's a piano. Nobody can have pianos anymore unless they move them on their own?
Even if they have a disability, it still makes sense to get a simpler bed frame. The chance of anything going wrong when someone is assembling a simple metal frame are much lower.
As for pianos, they would have to get a dedicated piano mover.
I mean, if just hire somebody without any sort of training it should just be expected that they're bad?
Like show me where in the Apple training they teach how to set ringtones?
UPS straight up flies people to training [1]. Of course their drivers are going to be better.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/UPS/comments/16oizrm/hiring_and_tra...
Some jobs are bad. Some people are bad at their jobs. Sometimes it's both at the same time.
This furniture assembly job sounds like shit. But also, somebody who puts in "several hours" of labor should be able to assemble some off-brand Ikea slop by simply following the instructions and using a little bit of common sense. If the pay is terrible so you don't even want to try, I get it, but you should bail quick not after "several hours", so it sounds like an earnest (albeit incompetent) attempt was made.
This job sucks, not because there isn't training, but because the pay is too low to attract competent labor.
Karl Pilkington, how art thy welcomed.
In the software world, managers could and should be replaced by user counts. If a developer's work product doesn't have users, that is not a desirable outcome. In practice, when this happens in the real world, 9 times out of 10 it is the manager's fault.
> Working for UPS is a good job — and that’s part of why UPS workers are good at their jobs.
Are UPS workers really better at their jobs?
FedEx and UPS seem nearly identical in my area, only DHL is competent.
In my experience UPS is better.
In my neck of the woods, UPS is the absolute best, Amazon depends on which driver is doing the rounds this month, and FedEx you're lucky if your package even arrives at the right house.
UPS drivers keep crashing into my rock wall. They aren't even delivering packages to me, they just use my drive way to turn around and keep hitting the rocks.
For some reason its always UPS. Maybe some quirk of their navigation system is tacitly encouraging it.
The author dances around the real cause. It's the lack of labor unions and/or decreasing participation. In this neoliberal/neoclassical (aka "orthodox") economy, companies are maximizing profits at all costs and sacrificing quality and customer service.
Then enter "private equity" which has historically extracted/squeezed once profitable businesses for all they are worth. Saddle them with debt, load up them up on consulting fees (paid to PE, by the way), squeeze the labor force/downsize, decrease quality of items. Then when the debt cannot be paid, sell businesses for parts, layoffs across the board, cook the books, and sell to the next sucker.
Small grocery stores -- (too many to name)
Veterinary care -- (too many to name)
Health clinics -- (too many to name)
Electronics -- iRobot
Software -- (too many to name, but nearly any company bought by "Vista Equity Partners" and et al)
Appliances -- Maytag, Instapot, Electrolux
Great names in their industry with amazing benefits to employees. Reduced to numbers. Benefits cut. Pensions cut/abolished and replaced with shitty 401Ks.
Yea everything is getting shittier. Blame the billionaire class, decades of tax cuts for the wealthy that has been a parasitic drain on society as a whole.
Managers are bad and make the jobs bad and then the people get bad. Shit flows downhill
It's a mix. Sometimes a person is bad at their job because the people who hired or trained them are bad at their jobs. But another way to look at it is that our society increasingly values only people who are "good" at the "job" of making as much money as possible while externalizing as many costs as possible.
> The exploitation (of workers, of natural resources) that made that abundant cheapness possible was largely invisible and thus ignorable.
It's not just the exploitation of workers and natural resources, it's also the exploitation of customers and our society as a whole. When you pay for a product and it's crap, you, the customer, were also exploited by the seller.
The key part to me is the invisibility. The theory of capitalism is that companies compete to better satisfy customers. But nowadays the predominant mode of competition is obfuscation: companies compete to be the best at hiding costs, dodging responsibility, and deflecting consequences. The quality of the actual products and services is secondary to the apparatus of delivering them and responding to feedback, and that apparatus is not oriented towards actually improving the products or services, just at finding somewhere to dump the negative consequences.
> But resistance is very possible. If everyone’s good at their job, shop there.
The article lists a few of these "consumer-level" modes of resistance based essentially on the idea of voting with your dollars. The problem is that it's hard to be an informed dollar-voter in this environment of deliberate obfuscation. Spending hours wading through reviews, product descriptions, and so on, just to buy one thing, effectively increases your cost, and there's no guarantee you'll make the right choice in the end anyway. I'd be willing to pay more in many cases for a better result, but there's no way to tell if something that costs a bit more is actually better, or just another clever scam cloaked in verbiage like "artisanal" and "handcrafted" to lure in people just like me, people who are willing to pay more and can be fooled into doing so while getting no benefit for the extra money.
We need more organized and deliberate resistance: laws. Laws and specific enforcement mechanisms that directly penalize, not just companies, but the individuals at the top who are good at their jobs, namely the job of squeezing value out of other people by lying, cheating, and hiding. We need laws that force competition into the realm of actual products and services, and punish engagement in the obfuscation arms race.
> As a society, we have decided that we want more for less: more convenience, more purchases, more technology, but none of it at prices that render it out of reach.
There's an Arcade Fire lyric I heard a long time ago but recently came across again, from "Windowsill": "I don't want it faster, I don't want it free". Too many people these days want things faster and free, and don't understand that the costs are still being paid, somehow, somewhere, often even by the same person who thinks they're getting something fast and free.
> The problem is that it's hard to be an informed dollar-voter in this environment of deliberate obfuscation. Spending hours wading through reviews, product descriptions, and so on, just to buy one thing, effectively increases your cost, and there's no guarantee you'll make the right choice in the end anyway. I'd be willing to pay more in many cases for a better result, but there's no way to tell if something that costs a bit more is actually better,
This is how I feel about online shopping. I used to naively dream that a retail aggregator like Amazon would crack the problem. By having large numbers of customers leave reviews (or even return unsatisfactory products), I imagined that the good products would rise to the top. To my surprise, Amazon hasn't seemed particularly interested in advancing this area. Search results are dominated by freshly minted sellers with randomly generated names. I often receive products with a piece of paper inside that begs me to let them know if I have any problems so that they can basically bribe me to keep quiet and not put a negative review on Amazon.
The obfuscation arms race, as you so aptly put it.
Huh? Productivity per worker in the US is at an all-time high and is, I believe, the highest in the world?
Can we please shit-can this notion that US workers are lazy/bad/whatever? That's not the problem. US workers are being squeezed to death. Corporations have gone from 50% tax burden to paying little taxes, the money is flowing almost entirely to the top 1% earners, C-suites, investors, private equity, etc and we're seeing record levels of corporate welfare.
Corporate welfare like..full time or nearly full time employees getting welfare because their employers refuse to give them livable wages, so taxpayers have to step in. Amazon and Walmart are the biggest welfare recipients in the country, and that doesn't begin to count all the sweetheart deals they get on property taxes, the taxpayer money they get for setting up training programs, free infrastructure improvements to support their business.
We have $8BN to give to a lumbering incompetent dinosaur like Intel, $500BN for "AI" crap (which will consume massive amounts of power, land, water...)
...but apparently we can't afford $4BN for LIHEAP which is half as much and keeps elderly people from freezing or broiling to death?
I don't understand. From what I can tell, the blog post makes the exact point that workers are being squeezed to death in a way that raises nominal productivity while lowering quality. Can you elaborate a bit more on your exact disagreement?
>Huh? Productivity per worker in the US is at an all-time high and is, I believe, the highest in the world?
Yeah, that's what happens when the latent cost of employing anyone for anything is so high all the menial stuff get shipped overseas or replaced with fewer expensive employees working with much more expensive labor saving technology/materials.
Also, I'm not sure how much I trust the numbers themselves, metrics and targets and all that.
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