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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
31 replies →
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.
16 replies →
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.
16 replies →
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.
7 replies →
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.
2 replies →
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.
9 replies →
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?)
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.
1 reply →
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".
5 replies →
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.
2 replies →
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.
1 reply →
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?
1 reply →
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.
1 reply →
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?
1 reply →
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.
1 reply →
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.
4 replies →
[flagged]
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.
9 replies →
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.
2 replies →
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?
2 replies →
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.
1 reply →
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.
2 replies →
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.
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.
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://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.
1 reply →
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?
1 reply →
[dead]
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.
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.
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.
1 reply →
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...
Gig economy employment model works great for Amazon’s end product - the other companies have just executed poorly
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.
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...
1 reply →
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.
1 reply →
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.
[dead]