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

annehelen.substack.com

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

#111

Post by brudgers »

Spooky23 wrote: post #91
brudgers wrote: post #13

The gig economy is way worse than the author describes. 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.

Gig workers are casual labor. Like Dickens with less coal dust.

Casual labor frequently involves working alongside other casual laborers and/or regular employees and/or the person hiring the casual labor.

The gig economy is people working alone.

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

#112

Post by brudgers »

zeroCalories wrote: post #40
brudgers wrote: post #13

The gig economy is way worse than the author describes. 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.

This isn't too different from most low-skill jobs. Most people don't aspire to be assistant manager at McDonalds, they do it for a while, build a resume, then move.

build a resume

And establish work relationships with other people who can help with future job hunting.

The Uber app doesn’t have an HR department.

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

#113

Post by xg15 »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #108
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's got a name and we know that it's happening yet the overpaid overeducated c-suite demands it? What gives?

The problem is that this miserable state of affairs works at scale. Yes, on problems that exist at the scale of one or intelligent, educated, experienced, and dedicated human (or maybe up to 3-5), an individual or small team will run circles around a business. You can have a top-notch CEO and COO and HR manager and six program managers (each with zero domain experience other than running a Jira board) and four dozen…

The question is if the Kingdom would then still be worth surviving if life for everyone there ends up being miserable.

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

#115

Post by dehrmann »

dwattttt wrote: post #50
rqtwteye wrote: post #3

I have been in the workforce for almost 30 years now and I believe that everybody is getting more squeezed so they don’t have the time or energy to do a proper job. The expectation is to get it done as quickly as possible and not do more unless told so. In SW development in the 90s I had much more time for experimentation to figure things out. In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to…

> People ... aren’t machines that can run constantly on 100% utilization. You also can't run machines at 100% utilisation & expect quality results. That's when you see tail latencies blow out, hash maps lose their performance, physical machines wear supra-linearly... The list goes on.

The standard rule for CPU-bound RPC server utilization is 80%. Any less and you could use fewer machines; any more and latency starts to take a hit. This is when you're optimizing for latency. Throughput is different.

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

#116

Post by bcoates »

This is a nit, but grocery bagging (one of the article's examples) is a no-win situation. I worked it as a summer job a while back--It’s the most bikeshed job in existence because (nearly) everyone understands it, but they all have their own theory of bagging.

To this day I remember a client whose entire purchase was a loaf of bread, a package of fresh raw chicken, and a bottle of liquid drain cleaner. Paper bags, of course. I don't remember how I arranged them but I remember being yelled at.

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

#117

Post by brudgers »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #71
zeroCalories wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't too different from most low-skill jobs. Most people don't aspire to be assistant manager at McDonalds, they do it for a while, build a resume, then move.

It’s vastly different. Gig workers are literally disposable robots. You’re part of a computer program. There is no human relationship. At least a McDonald’s worker can talk to their manager.

Hence the original gig economy job was called “mechanical turk.”

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

#118

Post by Buttons840 »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #107
thi2 wrote: post #12

> At Fred Meyer, our local Kroger-owned grocery store, a bagger in his 70s put all my frozen items in a normal bag, and my chips in the cold storage bag I’d brought from home. A) Having to work a job (obviously not done out of passion) 70+ is really disheartening B) I don´t understand why this even is something that has to be done by a worker. I bought the groceries. I know where I want my stuff in my bags. Or I just…

I'll generally tell the clerk that I'll bag, which speeds up the lines, and I get stuff pretty much where I want it. (My store doesn't generally have a dedicated bagger)

I bring couple reusable bags, that are more like foldable boxes than a bag. It makes bagging trivial because you just set your stuff in a box. It's organizing groceries in small and fragile plastic bags that's the hard part.

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

#119

Post by bcoates »

potato3732842 wrote: post #78
mschuster91 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In SW development in the 90s I had much more time for experimentation to figure things out. In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. Software development for a long time had the benefit that managers didn't get tech. They had no chance of verifying if what the nerds told them actually made sense. Nowa…

I commend you for having an opinion so bad I can't tell if you're satirizing marxists or not. Let me ask you this, would you rather be managed by a hierarchy made up of people who don't understand what you do? Because I assure you it is far worse than being managed by "class traitors".

Oh, I vastly prefer people who don’t understand and know it.

Reminds me of Frank Zappa comparing "cigar chomping old guys" to the "hip young types" that replaced them

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0

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

#120

Post by semiquaver »

TheJoeMan wrote: post #114

I’d be interested in a breakdown of Angi’s costs. They paid $85 for assembly and estimate the assembler was paid $25? Where could the money possibly be going, server hosting is incredibly cheap.

Don’t forget that Wayfair gets a cut of that $85 as well.
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