It's All Bullshit
thebaffler.com
It's All Bullshit
1–10 of 87 posts
Re: It's All Bullshit
#2Ah, that’s the spirit!
Yet I say unto thee: “Despise not in others what one covets for themselves, for that is hypocrisy.”
I have trouble comprehending what this piece provides beyond bullshit slinging at big tech. Wishing you were the one making six fixture for 2 - 6 hour days?
Business is in part strategy.
Individual tech workers are in part corrupt (and incompetent), blaming leadership rather than taking initiative.
Sometimes there is extreme abuse, incompetence, and misguided direction; we hear and scampuousely retell those stories, forever.
We gain no wisdom or insight from these arbitrary post-mortem turd fests. Other than sensational wastes of someone else’s cash, aren’t we all ready to do it again?
Re: It's All Bullshit
#3I thought Google had abandoned 20% time?
Re: It's All Bullshit
#4Ah, that’s the spirit! Yet I say unto thee: “Despise not in others what one covets for themselves, for that is hypocrisy.” I have trouble comprehending what this piece provides beyond bullshit slinging at big tech. Wishing you were the one making six fixture for 2 - 6 hour days? Business is in part strategy. Individual tech workers are in part corrupt (and incompetent), blaming leadership rather than taking initiativ…
"aren’t we all ready to do it again"
As long as there is no real alternative for most people, they will stick with complaining.
Re: It's All Bullshit
#5"In an anonymous online poll on how many “focused hours of work” software engineers put in each day, 71 percent of the over four thousand respondents claimed to work six hours a day or less".
Written as if 6 hours is little. To get a full focused 6 hours is a pretty high number.
Re: It's All Bullshit
#6Loved this article.
> Making explicit these differences, however, would reveal that these platforms are not all that different from the banks of Wall Street: they are not making value, they’re taking it. And as long as this remains the underlying form of profit, tech firms’ imaginary of a technological future will be limited to the fast and cheap profits of monopoly rents. This is at the center of tech’s innovation crisis. That tech work is becoming bullshit is not the problem. The problem is that the companies themselves are bullshit.
Also please read David Graeber s Bullshit Jobs.
Re: It's All Bullshit
#7Ah, that’s the spirit! Yet I say unto thee: “Despise not in others what one covets for themselves, for that is hypocrisy.” I have trouble comprehending what this piece provides beyond bullshit slinging at big tech. Wishing you were the one making six fixture for 2 - 6 hour days? Business is in part strategy. Individual tech workers are in part corrupt (and incompetent), blaming leadership rather than taking initiativ…
> Wishing you were the one making six fixture for 2 - 6 hour days?
I am one of these people. While I do earn a stupid amount of money in the financial sector, the reality for me isn't really that enviable. I do about 3 hours of honest work per day, but the other hours of the day aren't spent with my feet up on the beach. They're spent waiting. They're spent negotiating with pointy-haired managers to unblock me, or arguing with peabrained bodyshop engineers about the utility of totally uncontroversial concepts like unit-testing. They're spent jiggling the mouse every few minutes so that my status doesn't go yellow on Microsoft Teams. If I got to take my '3 honest hours of work' in a single block, and then log off, I'd be content. Except that the few honest hours of work the bank wrings out of me are spaced out over 9 agonising hours a day, interspersed with pointless corporate garbage like "Agile"(tm) cargo-cult meetings.
I pay my mortgage, but I hate my career.
Re: It's All Bullshit
#8"In an anonymous online poll on how many “focused hours of work” software engineers put in each day, 71 percent of the over four thousand respondents claimed to work six hours a day or less". Written as if 6 hours is little. To get a full focused 6 hours is a pretty high number.
Back when I had billable hours, I'd measure how long I actually work (building small websites), and 6 hours was unusually long.
Now I write and edit text for a living, alone, at home and without interruptions. I usually work from 10 to 16 with plenty of breaks.
8 real hours all day, every day is a pipe dream in creative professions.
Re: It's All Bullshit
#9I understand where this is coming from. I had a short 4 year stint in a mid-size tech company, and led a small 16 person team. We managed to build and scale a fairly successful product, to the surprise of the much larger and well resourced teams.
Unfortunately, success attracts attention from management, and we found ourselves mired in further layers of bureaucracy. Those who had not really owned products or shipped anything significant began to call the shots.
Re: It's All Bullshit
#10"In an anonymous online poll on how many “focused hours of work” software engineers put in each day, 71 percent of the over four thousand respondents claimed to work six hours a day or less". Written as if 6 hours is little. To get a full focused 6 hours is a pretty high number.
My thoughts exactly. More than four hours of focused work seems rare or limited to some very focused individuals. They still seem to cling to the old idea that people have to work eight hours. They also seem to not be aware of the fact that this applies most of the population of knowledge workers in complex tasks everywhere, not only in the oh-so-flashy top of the crop Meta and Google. Most people I talked to learned early on that four hours is a good time, and the rest is about knowingly or unknowingly pretending to be busy, talking to coworkers, reading and such.