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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?

#131

Post by alephnerd »

g8oz wrote: post #123
alephnerd wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managers (as in PMs, EMs, and C-Suite) don't like JIRA either - there just isn't an alternative. Customers and investors ask for delivery timelines and amount of resources invested on major features or products, and you need to give an accurate-ish answer, and you as a company will be dealing with hundreds if not thousands of features depending on size. In that kind of a situation, the only way you can get that visib…

This explanation is not incompatible with calling the whole business a "theater".

How is it theater?

When customers give you money, they expect a date.

When investors give you money, they want to see whether or not you are investing in the right initiatives.

When you open a company, the IRS, SEC, and other regulators expect some amount of financial compliance.

Do you want me to come to you and give you an ultimatum to give me an exact date, calculate amortization, and defend existing investments, and if any of those slips you are the fired? And do that with all the hundreds and thousands of initiatives on a daily basis?

That's the alternative.

Welcome to the industry - you're paid to make purchasers happy, not you. Purchasers don't care if you DuckDB or OracleDB - they care if the product they paid for will be delivered on time and meet the needs stipulated in their contract.

If you want to be happy and only deal with engineering problems, you sadly have to deal with the poopshow that JIRA is.

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

#133

Post by pavel_lishin »

potato3732842 wrote: post #31
Uzmanali wrote: post #9

I’ve had similar frustrations with gig economy services. A while ago, i hired someone from TaskRabbit to set up a standing desk. i thought it would be an easy process, but the assembler showed up late. then he had a hard time following basic instructions, and he also left halfway through, saying he had another job to go to. I finished the assembly myself at the end. then i realize these platforms don’t support skille…

>Now I hire local professionals, even if they cost more. Their experience and trustworthiness save me time and frustration. I've found the exact opposite. The deeper the moat the bigger the jerks. I can pick up a guy at home depot who'll bust ass as hard as I will at a very reasonable price. Can't say that (especially the first part) about most professionals. Anything with a license or high capital investment keeping…

> > Now I hire local professionals, even if they cost more. Their experience and trustworthiness save me time and frustration.

> I've found the exact opposite. ... My local upholsterer is a pleasure to work with compared to any tire and alignment shop.

I'm confused, isn't your local upholsterer exactly an example of a local professional?

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

#134

Post by throwaway422432 »

bcoates wrote: post #116

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…

This is actually a good lesson in communication.

Question 1, are you fine with the chicken in with the bread? Question 2, would you like the drain cleaner left separate rather than with the food items.

They either don't care or would suggest leaving the bread or chicken separate, same for the drain cleaner.

The worst grief you'll get is why they can't have 3 bags.

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

#135

Post by lupusreal »

BrenBarn wrote: post #30
buckle8017 wrote: post #23

> Working for UPS is a good job — and that’s part of why UPS workers are good at their jobs. Are UPS workers really better at their jobs? FedEx and UPS seem nearly identical in my area, only DHL is competent.

In my experience UPS is better.

UPS drivers keep crashing into my rock wall. They aren't even delivering packages to me, they just use my drive way to turn around and keep hitting the rocks.

For some reason its always UPS. Maybe some quirk of their navigation system is tacitly encouraging it.

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

#136

Post by scarecrowbob »

kevinventullo wrote: post #110
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?

This was previously recommended to me on HN, so I’ll pass it along. The book “Seeing Like A State” gives a pretty reasonable explanation for why this happens: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State The basic idea is that the only viable way to administer a complex and heterogenous system like a massive corporation is to simplify by enforcing “legibility” or homogeneity. Without this, central control beco…

I like the book quite a bit, and it's been formative in my politics.

That said, I am not sure if the take-away is that managers need to account for these factors by allowing for illegibility- I am not reading you claim that, but contextually that's how the discussion feels to me.

I do agree with Scott that enforcing perfect legibility is impossible and even attempting to do so can cause immense problems, and I agree with his analysis of these modernist efforts and have found that it's a useful lens for understanding a lot of human enterprise.

I find a lot of hope in that view: nothing actually gets done without some horizontal, anarchist cooperation.

But I also find hope in the fact that it's structurally a issue with authoritarian organizational strategies which can't be accounted for and surmounted.

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

#137

Post by lumost »

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 have to care about outcomes in order to get good outcomes. Its pretty difficult to get someone to work extra time, or care about the small stuff if there is a good chance that they will be gone in 6 months.

Alternatively, if leadership is going to cycle over in 6 months - then no one will remember the details.

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

#138

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Spooky23 wrote: post #84
zusammen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely everything is tracked as a work item with estimates. Anything you think should be done needs to be justified and tracked the same way. My grandpa once said something that seemed ridiculous but makes a lot of sense: that every workplace should have a “heavy” who steals a new worker’s lunch on the first day, just to see if he asserts himself. Why? Not to haze or bully but to filter out the non-fighters so th…

That generation had it more together as citizens, and they held on to power for a long time. Postwar all of the institutions in the US grew quickly, and the WW2 generation moved up quickly as a result. The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone.

One of the consequences of WWII was that everyone's plans, ideas, and work cultures were turned into direct results very quickly, in the real world. Sometimes fatally.

The people who lived through that had their feet on the ground.

Aside from its many other flaws, post-70s neoliberalism added a bizarre abstraction layer of economic delusion over everything. This suppressed the core truths of physical reality, common sense, and the basic social requirement of sane reciprocal relationships, and did its best to make consequences as indirect and deniable as possible.

Things that really, really matter - like ecological, political, and social stability - were devalued in everyday experience and replaced with economic abstractions that are more mystical than practical.

It's very culty, and the disconnect between how things should be and how they really are is getting more and more obvious to everyone.

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

#139

Post by azemetre »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #92
the_snooze wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even got a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

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

Try to make a thread about unions on HN and read the comments, then it'll make sense.

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

#140

Post by danaris »

vunderba wrote: post #93
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 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. ... You are literally describing self checkout which is very popular in grocery chains like Kroger and Publix. (In the U.S.).

Unfortunately, around here, most of the self-checkout "lanes" are explicitly marked as "X items or less" express lanes. If you're doing a full shopping, they don't want you using them. (This seems particularly stupid at one of the stores, where they have about a dozen self-checkouts, half marked 14 items or less and half marked 20 items or less, and literally every time I'm there, at least half of them are unused. Fortunately they also have a lot of manned regular checkout lanes.)

Furthermore, because the expectation nowadays is that the cashier will bag the groceries, too, the checkout infrastructure is very much set up to support that and only that model: rather than having a short belt after the cashier to send the groceries to a bagging area, the cashier has a couple of bag slots right in front of them, and a tiny island behind them to put your bags on, along with any items that they need to hold onto to bag later (eg, chips, eggs—things they don't want to put under other things). So even if you wanted to bag for yourself, it would make it much less efficient and more awkward for the cashier.

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