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It's All Bullshit

thebaffler.com

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Re: It's All Bullshit

#41

Post by mo_42 »

> Another Meta employee, also on TikTok, posted that “Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us, and then they were just kind of like hoarding us like Pokémon cards.”

This might be true. An alternative explanation might be that such an employee changing the color of a button has probably millions of times more impact than an engineer working at a B2B start-up with three clients.

If I would be executive at such companies and I would have the evil intent of hoarding talented people, I'd, at least, give them a playground for experimentation. Maybe a new innovative product comes out of this. This hoarding has become a popular belief in the tech industry but I don't quite buy it.

Re: It's All Bullshit

#42

Post by drooby »

staunton wrote: post #20
louwrentius wrote: post #6

Loved 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 c…

Seems like there's a lot of discontent people who really enjoy it when someone starts calling everything around them bullshit. Graeber's ideas/books with respect to "bullshit" are themselves cynical bullshit written as a kind of joke for maximum controversy. I'm sure he had a lot of fun though, being invited to speak and tell people all their work is bullshit...

Graeber's book hits a nerve with people because I think it touches upon a real problem that people are feeling:

"Why am I working so much, doing so little, and getting so little in return? What's the point? Life should be more fulfilling, considering how wealthy our society is."

It _feels_ like bullshit. Unfortunately, his book is essentially a long and unscientific blog post that builds upon weak arguments and arm chair philosophy. The irony is that his book seems to be an example of the problem.

Re: It's All Bullshit

#43

Post by zemvpferreira »

ghusto wrote: post #32
wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #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.

I had the interesting experience of working with a non-tech team for a short period a while ago. I could not believe the pace and lax attitude to work these people had. When work _was_ done, it was done in the most unoptimised, short-term-thinking way possible. There was seemingly no concern for quality of output (almost presumed that they'd have to do the task again), and deadlines were a vague fairy tale. Most of t…

It's not split at tech/non-tech.

I'm happy to recommend construction crews you can tag along with for a day that will leave you a broken mess of a man with how hard they work. You won't get out of bed for a forthnight after one day of work with proper roofers.

My maid works 16-hour days at breakneck speed as well, with a smile on her face. Sleeps 3 hours, gets on with life. I don't know how she does it.

Likewise I've seen plenty of tech teams adding negative value. Their bosses would be better off paying them to play xbox all day.

I'd call it pride, but that's not the root cause either.

Re: It's All Bullshit

#44

Post by cyrillite »

ghusto wrote: post #32
wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #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.

I had the interesting experience of working with a non-tech team for a short period a while ago. I could not believe the pace and lax attitude to work these people had. When work _was_ done, it was done in the most unoptimised, short-term-thinking way possible. There was seemingly no concern for quality of output (almost presumed that they'd have to do the task again), and deadlines were a vague fairy tale. Most of t…

“We like what we do.” Bingo! Well, that’s half the story, at least.

I think there are three factors: passion, traction, and friction. There are plenty of passionate people in less technical domains. They tend to be slowed down because either it’s hard for them to get traction on an idea that doesn’t have a clear and concrete benefit (which technical outputs often do) and then because they expect friction in the form of rewrites, edits, and back and forths based largely on aesthetics, vibes, or a manager’s need to feel like they’ve made a mark too.

Re: It's All Bullshit

#45

Post by firtoz »

This makes me happy that I chose not to work for megacorps who have too much money.

When you work with smaller companies or early stage startups you get to do real work that does get used. They may not have the budget and resources, but this is why whatever you make needs to be useful and produce value. If bullshit happens too much the company can really fail.

I am also experimenting with being a freelancer through mainly Toptal. Most of the projects I got are building MVPs and prototypes that are put in production ASAP or at least used as V1s for the next thing. Then I move on to the next contract. Feels alright, but the risks of being a freelancer are indeed present. However, it does feel really great to see a project is completed and the client is happy with it. There were some "not really great" projects or customers too but mostly good anyway, you get more of a choice what to build and for whom.

I'm sure there are some nice corps out there too, and I may join one at some point, but after chatting with enough people from there who can show that they build things of value, efficiently enough. I had one job where I was building bullshit that got cancelled just before launch, twice, and that was super demoralising, even though we are constantly told to not get too attached to our work, well, it happens anyway.

Re: It's All Bullshit

#46

Post by joseda-hg »

livinginfear wrote: post #14
lll-o-lll wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, it’s pretty trivial to automate that mouse jiggle…

I know. Some people have bought "Mouse Jigglers", and so on to do this. I cringe when I see people buy weird USB devices on eBay for this purpose. Who knows what lurks in the firmware of those things. Some people even buy little hardware turntables that physically jiggle the mouse every so often. On an SOE laptop with all kinds of corporate spyware, you'd have to be pretty game to install a driver to automate the tas…

You could just plug it into something like a USB Data Blocker, or to a powerbank, that way you don't even have to plug it anywhere in the office

Re: It's All Bullshit

#47

Post by donatj »

ShamelessC wrote: post #40
donatj wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My manager is well aware and pissed. I only really became aware after getting pulled onto the project a little over a month ago, seeing how little existed followed by being able to get basically zero feedback on how things should fit into the project. It was easy to not see (for me) when we were supposed to be heads down on separate projects. We’re given a lot of rope when it comes to what we’re working on so other t…

Generally the employee should be given a warning, then reprimanded on repeat behavior, then fired. Ideally the manager would have noticed this without you having to "rat out" the employee - that's the manager's job, not yours. This stuff isn't really unheard of outside of tech. It's common even. Is it shitty? Sure. But the rest of the world deals with it and makes far less money on average. I've seen this same inabil…

For what it is worth I did not have to rat them out. By the time I got pulled onto the project my manager had figured it out.

I didn’t know the extent though before complaining about lack of reply/feedback from the dev, at which point I started looking at the commits across projects see what he had been doing. Not much so it seems.

In the time I have been here we’ve fired three people, but it was all for much worse. We’re not untouchable but it takes a lot. I would honestly far rather he just get back on track. We’re already short staffed and it’s becoming harder and harder to hire devs in our tech stack.

Re: It's All Bullshit

#48

Post by vasco »

mo_42 wrote: post #41

> Another Meta employee, also on TikTok, posted that “Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us, and then they were just kind of like hoarding us like Pokémon cards.” This might be true. An alternative explanation might be that such an employee changing the color of a button has probably millions of times more impact than an engineer working at a B2B start-up with three clients. If I would be ex…

> An alternative explanation might be that such an employee changing the color of a button has probably millions of times more impact than an engineer working at a B2B start-up with three clients.

There's people who certainly tell themselves that, but I've started work in a 12 person company which grew to 300, got acquired into a 1.8k behemot and I have to say the impact is a linear decrease. But people at the 1.8k people company think they are "more professional" while in one week the 12 people did more than 800 of them do in 6 months.

Re: It's All Bullshit

#49

Post by gniv »

j7ake wrote: post #26

Assuming the author is familiar with the tech industry, this author seems to be engaging in dishonest arguments to portray tech as "bullshit". The writing is subtle to avoid interpreting the 6-hour focused work survey, but writes so that a person unfamiliar with tech would interpret the data as if 6-hour focused work is low. A person familiar with tech work would interpret 6-hour focused work to be not bullshit, but…

Exactly my feelings too.

The reality of tech, especially big tech, is much more mundane. The vast majority of engineers work on maintaining and (slowly) upgrading the products that we use every day -- search, mail, maps, video. Each of these have thousands of engs that work on stable projects -- not wildly innovative, but not bullshit either.

Re: It's All Bullshit

#50

Post by moonshinefe »

donatj wrote: post #27

I really enjoy the flexibility of my current job - being able to set my own hours, run to a doctor appointment without any prior notice, work at my own pace. Frankly part of why I have stayed so many years. We have a person on our team that has been as best I can tell really abusing it basically since we started working from home at the beginning of the pandemic. Turns in very little work, takes literal days(!) to re…

Sounds eerily familiar. We've got someone who has done almost no work in their first 10 months. They were already assigned to a project I was on once, lied about progress repeatedly forcing me to pick up the work when it came time for us to integrate that piece. I made the situation well known to managers and they acknowledged it and even apologized. Yet this person is still somehow around and doing the same old, despite their kanban not moving for months and it being glaringly obvious. This worker abuses the low oversight, flexible hours and time off, and disappears on Slack all the time.

I kind of gave up caring and expecting anything will get done about it; it's way beyond ridiculous or any personal / health issue excuse at this point (and the company has a leave of absence policy for this stuff).

I think this actually might just happen sometimes in the industry, but it was the first time I've seen it and it's absolutely baffling. I just hope to not be on the same project as this person again, because if I am I'm going to have to have an awkward conversation with my manager about it since I'm not there to do 2 people's jobs. I really like the job in every other regard and don't typically work with that person, so it's a weird situation to say the least..

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