Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?

Gig workers can't advance with the companies they work for.

Gig workers can't build a network with their coworkers because they don't have coworkers...and there's a good chance that they are competing for work with other people working for the same company.

There are dead end day jobs, and then there is gig work.

Can we please shit-can this notion that US workers are lazy/bad/whatever? That's not the problem. US workers are being squeezed to death. Corporations have gone from 50% tax burden to paying little taxes, the money is flowing almost entirely to the top 1% earners, C-suites, investors, private equity, etc and we're seeing record levels of corporate welfare.

Corporate welfare like..full time or nearly full time employees getting welfare because their employers refuse to give them livable wages, so taxpayers have to step in. Amazon and Walmart are the biggest welfare recipients in the country, and that doesn't begin to count all the sweetheart deals they get on property taxes, the taxpayer money they get for setting up training programs, free infrastructure improvements to support their business.

We have $8BN to give to a lumbering incompetent dinosaur like Intel, $500BN for "AI" crap (which will consume massive amounts of power, land, water...)

...but apparently we can't afford $4BN for LIHEAP which is half as much and keeps elderly people from freezing or broiling to death?

Were you perhaps financially secure enough not to have to fear anything? Or tenured (Bell Labs!) that unemployment wasn't actually a threat to you? YMMV.

But reality is that everyone has been rushing out brittle solutions, creating a brittle, fragile architecture... And now people entering the job market have to spend so much time fixing the mess that they can't make progress. Worse, they take the blame for the slow progress and they have no say over foundations. We are asked to do impossible things given the current foundations and so every job becomes about politics; how to foist the impossible/infeasible tasks onto someone else so that they will take the blame. Because it's all political, the people who can actually create value and thus aren't good at politics get wiped out of the market; then all that remains in every company are political operators.

The value creators are forced either to become political or to keep hopping between companies... Who make good use of them... for a short time until they burn out and hop on to the next company. Nobody acknowledges the value they contribute during their brief tenures; in spite of the fact that they're the only ones adding value. Only the political operator can rise through the ranks; getting credit for managing the constant churn of burnt-out value creators.

Worse, as the political operators get into positions of power; who do they help? People who are like them; also political operators who don't know how to add value.