Are you paid to look busy? • Hacker News Board

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#141

Post by electronvolt » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:34 PM UTC

turnip1979 wrote: post #80

paulhauggis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds great, but you still need money to survive. This would mean that the few that did work would essentially be supporting the rest of society. Why would I ever want to start a million dollar business if I knew the majority of my earnings would be taken from me by the government to support people that didn't need to do anything?? You don't have to get a crappy job and work for someone you hate for the rest of…

I'm not someone who downvoted you but would like to discuss your points. Lets start bottom up. 1) You cannot legally collect berries in the woods. That may have been possible a few hundred years ago. For all my life, I've lived in concrete jungles where pretty much every shrub was manicured and every tree was allowed to survive for aesthetic reasons. More so that that, we don't have commons any more. In the stone age…

> If you do a bit of research, you might be surprised to learn that welfare queens don't exist in the vast numbers you think they do. Not anymore and not for a while.

I was under the impression that they never really existed in any meaningful way. The example that Reagan used, which is when most people think the idea entered the popular lexicon (although there's no record of him actually using the term) was of someone who was essentially committing identity theft on a large scale in order to collect welfare for something like 30 different people.... which just makes an argument for good oversight and unified systems to prevent that kind of fraud, which the kind of large scale networked computer systems we have now could make much more difficult.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#142

Post by maxmem » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:34 PM UTC

xr09 wrote: post #24

dsirijus wrote: post #9

My employee next to me is working hard. I'm in elinks in terminal on HN and on IRC, with vertical split of htop in tmux. He thinks I'm working hard too, with all those numbers, columns, scrolling output and blinking cursor. I feel so bad right now. I'm going to go actually work.

When reading stuff like this I wonder, how do the Windows folks manage to do the same? A browser disguised as Visual Studio? doubledesktop.exe? I'm so thankful for my *nix with all these little toys.

I work from home.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#143

Post by vidarh » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:35 PM UTC

chasing wrote: post #73

paulhauggis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds great, but you still need money to survive. This would mean that the few that did work would essentially be supporting the rest of society. Why would I ever want to start a million dollar business if I knew the majority of my earnings would be taken from me by the government to support people that didn't need to do anything?? You don't have to get a crappy job and work for someone you hate for the rest of…

You appear to be getting downvoted, but you've struck at the heart of the issue: If we want to do away with meaningless jobs, people will still need resources to survive. And that "one-in-ten-thousand" (or whatever) will need to be taxed very heavily so the wealth can be spread. We can't have all of our financial resources siloed into an increasingly small number of people's wallets. A great benefit to this system wi…

> A great benefit to this system will be that people can do important work that might not necessarily reward them financially. The downside is that, well, those who do financially well will have to share their earnings. And we'll have to detach the notion of financial success with the notion of power, which will be difficult.

You've basically restated Marx' view on what communism should be. His most famous quote on the subject is probably this from German Ideology:

"in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wished, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic."

A large part of Marx' point is that for socialism to become possible - and necessary - capitalism must first drive technological advances and production to a point where nothing near the full production capacity of humanity is needed for redistribution to be possible while eliminating poverty entirely, and in the process freeing society up to be extremely flexible about how people contributes.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#144

Post by handzhiev » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:38 PM UTC

ZenPro wrote: post #82

paulhauggis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds great, but you still need money to survive. This would mean that the few that did work would essentially be supporting the rest of society. Why would I ever want to start a million dollar business if I knew the majority of my earnings would be taken from me by the government to support people that didn't need to do anything?? You don't have to get a crappy job and work for someone you hate for the rest of…

The classic fallacy is that everyone can be an entrepreneur. They cannot. A. Entrepreneurs need employees to scale B. If everyone was an Entrepreneur there would be very few consumers for goods and services.

B doesn't make sense. Being an entrepreneur does not mean you don't need goods and services from others.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#145

Post by curiousphil » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:38 PM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #69

ryandrake wrote: post #22

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery becau…

We've had systems where not everybody had to work to eat & make a living. It was called monarchy, and you will notice it didn't go over well. The problem is one in ten thousand still leaves a very disgruntled & disenfranchised 30,000 people in America slaving away so everyone else can do as they wish. And until we can automate all the dirty work, the hard laborious work, these aren't 30,000 people working white colla…

Or, we will just reward those that do the dirty jobs MORE. I keep seeing this argument that if we didn't have to work we'd have no one to do the dirty jobs... Something tells me we'd be better off if we were in a system where those doing the dirty jobs weren't in poverty and they were doing them because they paid really well.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#146

Post by keypusher » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:41 PM UTC

paulhauggis wrote: post #86

keypusher wrote: post #23

No, I'm not, and it's one of the things I enjoy about programming. Some weeks I work 30 hours, others I work 60. But if I did the things I committed to doing this week, then I go home. Why sit in the office and pretend to be working? It makes no sense.

Most managers would not accept this. Since most developers are paid salary (as opposed to hourly), many feel like if you were leaving early, you aren't working hard enough. I've seen it at every place I've ever worked. At one place, my manager directly told me I needed to stay until 6 or 7 every night or the boss will think that I'm slacking.

That seems completely backwards. You are being paid salary but treated as if you were hourly. If your managers think it's important for you to be in the office 9-5 every day, why don't they just set up an hourly rate and make you punch a timecard? To me, the reason to have salary is that you are paying a worker to do a job. Highly paying jobs usually require highly skilled workers, and those workers should be judged on their results. Completion of the job and all of its duties is worth $XXX,000 per year, and it is up to the employee to determine how best to allocate their time and resources. The fundamental mistake of the approach you describe is that software development is not a profession in which merely showing up and putting in labor is of great value. I can pay Jim the Janitor $10/hour to show up and sit in front of a computer. He is never going to write me a distributed map-reduce powered vectorized graph search in Erlang (or whatever).

Let's say my boss tells me to write a TPS report collector. So I come in for 10 hours every day for a month and slave away on a bunch of crufty repetitive boilerplate code which is low on creativity and high on required hours. I eventually manage to hack together a custom report finder and parser, and generate the necessary solution as described by his email. What if my coworker wakes up after a good night's sleep, comes into the office and talks to everyone involved about the project, then realizes that what the VP of MarketResources really wants is some nice graphs of the TPS trends? He finds an open source TPS report analysis framework, spends a couple days integrating it into the workflow, learns a great solution for dynamically generating graphs while out for drinks after a local dev meetup, submits it all to the boss after two weeks and then takes a vacation. Who has really provided more value to the company here? My point isn't about frameworks vs custom software, it's about good solutions to hard problems. Salary employees, especially software developers, should be evaluated on their ability to come up with great solutions to hard problems and provide value to the team and company. Not whether they showed up at 7am or 10am.

Programming is not like digging a ditch, where 17 man hours are required to dig a ditch of length 14 and width 5. It is quite possible and even common to spend a lot of time working on widgets, features, and implementations which are completely unnecessary, non-optimal, or completely wrong. It is well understood that one great programmer can be worth many, many novice programmers because even 20 novice programmers given twice the time will not come up with the brilliantly simple and elegant solution of the veteran expert. So the more you can do to make the programmers you do have happy and as effective as possible, the better.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#147

Post by ScottBurson » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:46 PM UTC

paulhauggis wrote: post #55

ryandrake wrote: post #22

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery becau…

This sounds great, but you still need money to survive. This would mean that the few that did work would essentially be supporting the rest of society. Why would I ever want to start a million dollar business if I knew the majority of my earnings would be taken from me by the government to support people that didn't need to do anything?? You don't have to get a crappy job and work for someone you hate for the rest of…

> You don't have to get a crappy job and work for someone you hate for the rest of your life.

Indeed. I think you and Bucky are more in agreement than you realize. Bucky isn't suggesting that people go home and drink beer and watch TV for the rest of their lives. He is urging them to think, to be creative, to find themselves. Starting a business, for those so inclined, would be an outcome I think he would celebrate. Others might invent, or compose music, or write, or paint, etc.

I think we are moving toward an economy like what Bucky envisioned, where there may be fewer jobs, but many more people find their true work.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#148

Post by frik » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:47 PM UTC

Office Space (1999) is a great and rather funny movie about this topic: [7,9 stars on IMDb]

* IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/

* Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IwzZYRejZQ

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#149

Post by readme » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:55 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #127

turnip1979 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not someone who downvoted you but would like to discuss your points. Lets start bottom up. 1) You cannot legally collect berries in the woods. That may have been possible a few hundred years ago. For all my life, I've lived in concrete jungles where pretty much every shrub was manicured and every tree was allowed to survive for aesthetic reasons. More so that that, we don't have commons any more. In the stone age…

> Starting any business requires capital. Not really. A large number of businesses can be started with essentially nothing. Rowling wrote "Harry Potter" on a yellow pad, for one example.

You're forgetting the capital which was used to educate Rowling thus enabling her to read and write.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#150

Post by electronvolt » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:57 PM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #69

ryandrake wrote: post #22

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery becau…

We've had systems where not everybody had to work to eat & make a living. It was called monarchy, and you will notice it didn't go over well. The problem is one in ten thousand still leaves a very disgruntled & disenfranchised 30,000 people in America slaving away so everyone else can do as they wish. And until we can automate all the dirty work, the hard laborious work, these aren't 30,000 people working white colla…

>The problem is one in ten thousand still leaves a very disgruntled & disenfranchised 30,000 people in America slaving away so everyone else can do as they wish.

Presumably those who were enabling the leisure of others would be reasonably economically rewarded. I think the idea is that you should ensure that everyone has their basic needs met, so that they can use their time solely on things that increase their quality of life in some way, not that you should force 1 in 10,000 people to work. If that means that some "necessary" jobs don't get done because they're so unpleasant that only people who need the money from them to survive would do them? Then that just puts even more pressure on automating them away, which is a net win for everyone, because those are /exactly/ the jobs that we should be automating away first.

I think that 1 in 10,000 might be a bit unrealistic at this point in time, but I think the level of automation in our society could easily be increased greatly... and probably will be. We've already started doing just that: a super easy example that comes to mind is automated checkout, which replaces 6-10 workers with one person making sure the checkout line is running and checking identification and the like. Even if the economy still more or less needs 1 in 10 people contributing, that enables 9 people to learn, make art, or just sleep all day. If whatever they're doing instead of the unnecessary job improves society? Then that's a net win, and presumably they would then receive economic benefits because of that. If it wasn't? Then they would still have a place to sleep, access to healthcare, enough food, etc.