21–30 of 206 posts
Maybe we should start treating law and bylaws as code and fight the complexity with decoupling, encapsulation, no side effects, etc?
I can't say I'm surprised and I much agree with this. I've held many positions in both the private and public sector. While the public sector was always inefficient (honestly it was significantly worse than I pictured before starting...far far worse like you could easily eliminate hundreds of jobs without impact worse) private sector is pretty bad in many places as well. It's also amazing what networking can do to ge…
> It's also amazing what networking can do to get around many processes that people normally go through which kinda shows how worthless they are. So many times I've been told something that would take weeks or months ended up taking days or hours because I knew someone who could put me on "the rush list" which typically bypassed much of what was required in the first place. Thus perfectly illustrating the concept of…
Takes Here's another. Getting a work visa to the USA. Takes about 6 month, average. There is no background check or what not. Nothing more than a 5 minutes interview (non-exagerated - sometimes it's in fact faster) with a real person and someone to push the print button in the automated printing facility. 5 minutes, made into 6 month...
The examples are countless.
Most people who criticize "bullshit jobs" simply lack the perspective to see how these jobs are critically important for society. Take the list from the article itself, one of the "bullshit jobs" listed is actuary. Well, without actuaries, insurance would not be priced correctly, and would be prohibitively expensive or too cheap and insurance companies would go out of business. Either way, insurance would be less ava…
>Most people who criticize "bullshit jobs" simply lack the perspective to see how these jobs are critically important for society. Ok, so that's one that you cherry picked. How about these? * Private equity CEOs * Lobbyists * PR researchers * Telemarketers * Bailiffs Tell us how the world would be worse off without them. You could argue that some of these are doing actual harm to society, actually.
My takeaway from the article and also based on personal experiences is that governments have shielded themselves from automation. There's just insane fat wherever you look
Since employment is the key growth factor/number that is regarded (you need money to live), it is vitally important to make sure companies will hire as many people as possible, thus giving benefits going into that direction.
So even if you sit on your butt browsing HN, imgur, what not all day long (which many do), you'll get paid at the end of the month, and that's "all that matters".
Seems to be rather inefficient use of time, use of life.
I can't say I'm surprised and I much agree with this. I've held many positions in both the private and public sector. While the public sector was always inefficient (honestly it was significantly worse than I pictured before starting...far far worse like you could easily eliminate hundreds of jobs without impact worse) private sector is pretty bad in many places as well. It's also amazing what networking can do to ge…
> While the public sector was always inefficient (honestly it was significantly worse than I pictured before starting...far far worse like you could easily eliminate hundreds of jobs without impact worse) private sector is pretty bad in many places as well. I've worked in a public sector department that was run like a business. It was a contact centre that provided information and assistance with various government f…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's also amazing what networking can do to get around many processes that people normally go through which kinda shows how worthless they are. So many times I've been told something that would take weeks or months ended up taking days or hours because I knew someone who could put me on "the rush list" which typically bypassed much of what was required in the first place. Thus perfectly illustrating the concept of…
Or minutes, seconds. Simple example. Bank transfers. Take a few days. People actually are involved to push a freaking button in the US. Takes Here's another. Getting a work visa to the USA. Takes about 6 month, average. There is no background check or what not. Nothing more than a 5 minutes interview (non-exagerated - sometimes it's in fact faster) with a real person and someone to push the print button in the automa…
The world is run by gigantic bureaucracies and owners of capital - who all value continuity and predictability above all else. Given that the world has historically been a madhouse of crazy, and most of us are doing materially better than before, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what would be wrong with these priorities. "May you live in interesting times" is a curse, and for a good reason.
Sadly, a specific vehicle of stability and predictability is disengaging most adults from the majority of their waking hours. After the maslovian needs of food, sex and shelter are fullfilled the average 9-5 desk job does not seem to provide in average fulfillment for the higher level needs.
One element of establishing stablity is organizing work in the large scale in industrial taylorian fashion where the labor input of the individual position is predictable. The easiest way to do this is to divide the work of the organization to small enough pieces so that individual work responsibilities are easy to communicate, transfer and, perhaps even more important, measure. Small, piecemeal duties are often felt as non-important since they are so simple to perform and thus not mentally fulfilling.
The three stages of engagement from best to worst are commitment, compliance, conflict - most employers are satisfied by compliance, and one of the easiest ways to statistically enforce compliance is through observing the work directly or through reports: thus we get the endless reporting. The reason this works even if no-one is reading the reports 24/7 is that most people are extremely uncomfortable with cognitive dissonance of doing one thing and saying the other, and usually align their actions with their reporting.
Thus we get the disengaged, prozac-crunching desk jokey of the early 21st century.
I think the best leaders recognize the critical difference between commitment and compliance for organizational output. Thus we get the start-ups "we want only passionate people here" spiel - they aim for organizational commitment from composing the organization from atomic committed individuals. But this does not work in the long run unless the organization culture as a whole is dedicated to maintaining commitment. There are various cultural tactics to achieve this. Most of them are about maintaining a team spirit and there are agressive and compassionate ways in which to achieve this. But since it's about culture and human condition I'm not sure if there are any text-book approaches to maximizing organizational commitment unless one engages in full-scale brain washing as employed by cults and historically by some states.
Since there is no ethically recognized textbook-standardizable sure-fire "commitment tactic" it is understandable to me most choose the "compliance tactic".
I don't believe these are necessarily conscious choices, but rather a product of cultural evolution of various industrial management memes.
Most people who criticize "bullshit jobs" simply lack the perspective to see how these jobs are critically important for society. Take the list from the article itself, one of the "bullshit jobs" listed is actuary. Well, without actuaries, insurance would not be priced correctly, and would be prohibitively expensive or too cheap and insurance companies would go out of business. Either way, insurance would be less ava…
I expect he wants the world to change more fundamentally than that - per your example, if you have a good state-provided health service then the health insurance question is simply no longer an issue. There are of course countries that do this already. I think motor insurance would be a more difficult one to do away with - the question being if people didn't have to pay for any accidents they caused (via insurance pr…
Aside from economies of scale and protection from risk this was also incredibly useful in that one could (if qualified) legally drive any vehicle displaying a valid windscreen ticket.
We are living in a post-industrial service economy. Many jobs are not unnecessary, just routine and unglamorous.
You order fast food from a touch screen, you buy your train tickets from a machine and the supermarket cashier is being replaced with a self-checkout.
Meanwhile I still have about 50+ working hours every week. I pay about 65% of the money I make in tax so the people that were laid off through service automation can receive unemployment benefits.
I think there is room for improvement within this economic system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> While the public sector was always inefficient (honestly it was significantly worse than I pictured before starting...far far worse like you could easily eliminate hundreds of jobs without impact worse) private sector is pretty bad in many places as well. I've worked in a public sector department that was run like a business. It was a contact centre that provided information and assistance with various government f…
I wonder how much of that "interference" was the other ministers getting tapped by their private industry friends trying to do something about the government competition.
Why? Because it didn't work. Especially not when they tried to make 100 people use Citrix over a 10Mbit connection to servers situated on another _island_.
Even worse, we were allowed to install Firefox, gasp (This was back in the days when IE6 was the go-to corporate browser). Such untried and unproven software! But we had a killer argument for tabs, so we got it.
But it earned us the enmity of a reasonably powerful bureaucrat in head office.