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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And measurement has really taken over now. There is little value in getting task done well as compared to finishing more jira stories.
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.)
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.
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.)
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.
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”.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 am very smart "
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.
> to filter out the non-fighters
This is bullying and hazing.
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 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.
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.
>WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower.
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.
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.
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.
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'd expect there to be some "unexpected network outages" regularly in that kind of situation...
Usually management knows and doesnt care about the problem
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.
People just quit, some businesses consider it a better outcome.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Alternatively, if leadership is going to cycle over in 6 months - then no one will remember the details.
What, as an industry, do we need to do to learn this lesson?
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..
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?)
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.
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
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.
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".
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 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.
Reminds me of Frank Zappa comparing "cigar chomping old guys" to the "hip young types" that replaced them
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.
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.
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.
The gig economy is people working alone.
The gig economy is real, back-breaking work. No "husler" has done a single day of food or package deliveries.
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.
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
And establish work relationships with other people who can help with future job hunting.
The Uber app doesn’t have an HR department.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
They've graduated college so I guess I'll never see that again.
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.
Despite her positive attitude, she is working because social security isn't enough and grocery workers also get an employee discount.
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
... You are literally describing self checkout which is very popular in grocery chains like Kroger and Publix. (In the U.S.).
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.
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.
Yeah obviously. It’s a personal anecdote.
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.
"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'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.
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.
If Brazil is anything to look at, maybe?
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.
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.
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.
* Not super relevant.
* Gives advice that is extremely vague.
* The entire comment is essentially a humblebrag.
Would fit well on Facebook.
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?
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 :/
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.
I guess when wages don't add up to a viable life, resentment and carelessness spread like wildfire.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
That kind of job existing in the first place is the problem. And that could be well called subservience instead of work ethic.
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.
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’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.
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'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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What you can't insure against* you do not share
*Our Dear Thought Leader would prefer the substitution "profit from", but I'd wager that He's equally correct!
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What if instead of a simple furniture item it's a piano. Nobody can have pianos anymore unless they move them on their own?
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...
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.
Are UPS workers really better at their jobs?
FedEx and UPS seem nearly identical in my area, only DHL is competent.
For some reason its always UPS. Maybe some quirk of their navigation system is tacitly encouraging it.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.