Bullshit Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#431

Post by AlexanderNull » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 6:09 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #402

skybrian wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A while back I took flying lessons. They have a procedure and checklists for most things. This is decidedly a good thing. Checklists are great for reducing errors and should be used in more situations. Of course there is also a question of whether these procedures can be updated. And whether you can improvise in an emergency. You need more training for that. But this doesn't mean checklists are bad. Another example:…

Totally not against checklists, especially in aviation. It's just something is rubbing me with the recipe for business involving such degree of micromanagement. > Another example: when cooking a new dish, if you start with a recipe you'll probably get up to speed faster than just winging it. This doesn't mean there's no creativity. Fair, but a recipe is about as far from a checklist as you can get while still retaini…

Former chef here, the variance in balances of different chemical constituents can be so massive between two pieces of fruit picked from the same tree that precise recipes would be useless without requiring each reader to have access to a mass spectrometer (and any clue as to what its readout means). This is largely where the "art" in culinary arts comes in. While you could teach someone to read a mass spectrometer to determine the exact chemical result that a given mixture of different ingredients applied to a specified heat curve, it's more likely that they'll just have to learn how to approximate it via taste, smell, and sight.

Good baking books will actually get a lot closer to having specifics in them. They can do this however because a lot of the ingredients that are used in baking are rated based off of various levels of one or more of the chemicals that will significantly affect the result of your baked product (ash level, acidity, sugar content).

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#432

Post by Thriptic » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 6:16 PM UTC

geezerjay wrote: post #164

TeMPOraL wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what frustrated me after reading the "E-myth" book. Apparently, the recipe for successful business is to enshrine everything in superdetailed Book of Procedures, and have employees follow its content like they were programmable automatons. Now maybe this works , but eliminating human agency like this doesn't sit well with me for some reason.

The main reason why organizations evolve to a bureaucratic mess is human agency, in particular the fact that each individual has personal interests and is motivated to achieve their personal goals. Bureaucracy is designed to restrict personal initiatives that favour the individual worker at the expense of the organization. For example, in Greece public sector workers abuse their position by expecting grafts to do the…

Exactly this. The procedures are put in place to prevent abuse of the system by the individual. The problem is that they rarely have the intended effect. First, frequently the policies are put in place to prevent an abuse which performed by an individual at some point. As time goes on, not only do conditions in the world / org change but the people who were part of the org when the abuse happened leave. This creates a situation where people can't remember why a rule exists, but follow it blindly just because it exists, even if in current circumstances it hampers the organization.

Second, inevitably there will be a series of edge cases which any rule is poorly suited to address. These edge cases require a thoughtful application of regulatory authority, which itself requires a thorough understanding of the current context and the purpose of the rule. This thoughtfulness requires intelligence or deep domain expertise, which is often not found in the regulators because if they had these things then they wouldn't be in boring regulatory jobs like HR to begin with. Evaluation of edge cases also requires work, and it's far easier for someone to simply say no than it is to actually investigate the request.

Third, everyone knows that some employees are more valuable to the organization than others and should be allowed to bend or break simple rules as long as permission is sought. However, this will inevitably invite a bullshit lawsuit and so companies have a huge incentive to codify policies and be rigid about them.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#433

Post by microcolonel » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

Awful that people have to wait until after they develop back pain before they can be allowed to bring in a chair of their own. I bought a Herman Miller Embody (used, I'm not insane) in my... fifth month of working full time (in my life), and just won't work in an office where I'm asked to sit in their deathtrap chairs.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#434

Post by jpttsn » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 6:25 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #154

dantheman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard similar opinions to this before, and I don't think it makes sense. It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would. I think technological progress is slow process and these jobs exist because they provide some competitive advantage or provide surge capacity. If they're truly bullshit and in the private sector they will eventually disappear. It can take a…

One, bullshit jobs may exist as loops that can be hard to spot if they're multi-step. Department A generates work for department B, which generates work for department C, which - after couple more steps - generates work for department A. Second, "bullshit" in "bullshit jobs" doesn't mean useless from market's short-sighted POV. A competitive market is prone to formation of negative-sum games between companies, and fu…

The external point of view is dubiously helpful.

Lions eat antelope; when they die their bodies become grass; the antelope eat the grass.

Suppose they all agreed not to do this.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#435

Post by coffeemug » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 6:25 PM UTC

freddie_mercury wrote: post #289

TeMPOraL wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a manager, if my subordinate asks for a special chair, I will ask him to get a doctor's note, to see if he is serious or just bored, and to prevent all his colleagues from wanting a special chair the next day. And I would wonder whether you think of your employees as little children, or are you just giving into the false economy of being cheap on equipment. The latter seems common, and I've personally been in co…

> I've personally been in companies that could easily double the productivity of their developers at the one-time per-developer cost of one developer salary, by buying a decent computer, extra monitor, a pair of headphones and a good chair. This is completely pervasive myth in places like HN. I founded a startup. For the first three months we hadn't signed a lease for real office space, so there were no monitors, cra…

I founded a startup too, and my intuition (early on) would have been to agree with you. But it's wrong.

Big things are easy to notice because they're big. Little things are difficult to notice because they're little. Doubly so if they aren't immediate.

In my experience the little things are at least as important to productivity as the big things.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#436

Post by Spakman » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 6:25 PM UTC

chrisBob wrote: post #385

stirlo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was like WTF at this and had to google it. From Wikipedia... "Academic staff: 2,219 Administrative staff: 12,508 excluding SHC Students: 16,430" Oh how far western civilisation as fallen to end up with the statistics above. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University

I am a research support programmer at the University of Michigan. My job is to help research labs solve programming problems that they can't handle internally. I write interactive Psych experiments, create data processing scripts based on a professors notes, assist with computer controls for new research hardware, ... If I were at Stanford I would fall into that "Admin Staff" bucket. Am I an example of wasteful growt…

That sounds like an interesting and varied role. Are you enjoying it and getting much from it? Anything you don't like about it?

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#437

Post by ionwake » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

ksdale wrote: post #376

CalRobert wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just had a kid, and I understand this idea completely. I like being a parent but among other things, it means that major life decisions are MUCH more constrained. Want to live somewhere else? Hope the schools are decent. Want to live in the city? Hope you can afford a bigger flat. Want to go on a holiday? Hope you're ok with a pissed off kid (and neighbours) on a flight, or lots of time spent entertaining them on a…

Yeah definitely, I didn't mean to be flippant about the amount of time it takes to raise a child, I have 3 myself, just that people don't hesitate to give up a similar amount of time to a job they don't care about, so I don't think it's really about freedom, it's really about priorities. My wife and I own our own business so we're both home with the kids. For my own "freedom", working from home has been far more posi…

I could be wrong but I believe homeschooling reduces the ability of the children to experience social situations which have an impact later on with their development

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#438

Post by browsercoin » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 6:29 PM UTC

jakidud wrote: post #279

Okay, I wasn't going to comment, but I thought this would be extremely relevant : I've been getting paid for free for the past four months. I've been turning up to work, reading novels all fucking day, eating at the company cafeteria, and leaving. I generally spend 4-6 hours at the office. For 4 months now. Let that sink in. What happened is that I transferred from a 'public' team to a 'private' team, which means tha…

I just would like to add a bit of a warning to anybody reading parent's comment and thinking it's the life-it really isn't what it's cracked up to be.

After like a year of doing nothing, like around the 9th month mark, it starts to take a toll. Since my manager was constantly telling me there's not much I need to do other than explain lines of code and what they do in business terms. Often I would prepare something because I'm so fucking bored and then it would be brushed off as "cool but yeah no need".

The reason is that it feels too much like unemployment. Checking reddit, HN, github, eating company snack and getting fat, starts to develop impulsive gambling/day trading....

basically I was spending money to escape the fact how bored I was...it's really fucked up....I'm not sure what the dynamics are but honestly, it sure beats doing manual labor.

the lack of product market fit was painfully obvious by the volume of opportunities we were getting.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#439

Post by MadcapJake » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 6:30 PM UTC

normalhuman wrote: post #65

I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things: 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of bor…

> This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of boredom and meaninglessness.

Such an interesting moment that we find ourselves in:

Humans have taken over the planet and are upset that daily lives now revolve around trite and petty bs rather than predators, scarcity and violence.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#440

Post by rmetzler » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 6:31 PM UTC

Regarding the back pain from sitting to much: IKEA has an electrical standing desk called BEKANT for a little more than 500 EUR. This was life changing for me.