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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?

#141

Post by t-3 »

zusammen wrote: post #75
p1necone wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. So you just hurry through your tasks. This has been my exact experience. 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. If anything ever takes longer than the est…

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…

> The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing.

That era also had militant labor organization and real socialist and communist parties in the US. Anticommunism killed all that and brought us to the current state of affairs where employers that respect their employees even a little bit are unicorns.

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

#142

Post by jcranmer »

bitwize wrote: post #129
bumby wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that is? I’m wondering if the shared sacrifice of WW2 has something to do with it.

That's half of it. The other half is, WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower. So the war also taught lessons on a societal level about organization and cooperation, and the postwar economic boom provided the means to get great things done.

> The other half is, WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower.

The US was the leading industrial power from around 1880 or 1890, and it became the leading military power in the 1910s (by dint of entering WWI so late that it didn't exhaust its manpower fighting it). It may have been a cultural backwater as late as WWI, but its economic status would have been fairly undisputed. And by WWII, the only question anyone would have seriously asked is if the US or the UK held the throne as greatest of the great powers.

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

#143

Post by azemetre »

alephnerd wrote: post #131
g8oz wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

None of this sounds necessary for the human race. Maybe David Graeber was right.

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

#144

Post by zdragnar »

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".

I want my manager to help get the business out of my way- managing requirements, keeping external dependencies on track, fussy paperwork and such.

I don't need my manager second-guessing my every decision or weighing in on my PRs making superficial complaints about style while also bemoaning our velocity.

Hands down, the best managers I've had have all been clueless about the languages and types of work I do, and the worst managers have (or think they) have some understanding of what I do.

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

#145

Post by xyst »

The author dances around the real cause. It's the lack of labor unions and/or decreasing participation. In this neoliberal/neoclassical (aka "orthodox") economy, companies are maximizing profits at all costs and sacrificing quality and customer service.

Then enter "private equity" which has historically extracted/squeezed once profitable businesses for all they are worth. Saddle them with debt, load up them up on consulting fees (paid to PE, by the way), squeeze the labor force/downsize, decrease quality of items. Then when the debt cannot be paid, sell businesses for parts, layoffs across the board, cook the books, and sell to the next sucker.

Small grocery stores -- (too many to name)

Veterinary care -- (too many to name)

Health clinics -- (too many to name)

Electronics -- iRobot

Software -- (too many to name, but nearly any company bought by "Vista Equity Partners" and et al)

Appliances -- Maytag, Instapot, Electrolux

Great names in their industry with amazing benefits to employees. Reduced to numbers. Benefits cut. Pensions cut/abolished and replaced with shitty 401Ks.

Yea everything is getting shittier. Blame the billionaire class, decades of tax cuts for the wealthy that has been a parasitic drain on society as a whole.

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

#146

Post by singpolyma3 »

temporallobe wrote: post #10
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…

This is my experience as well. In the late 90s/early 2000s I had the luxury of a lot of time to deeply and learn Unix, Perl, Java, web development, etc., and it was all self-directed. Now with Agile, literally every hour is accounted for, though we of course have other ways of wasting time by overestimating tasks and creating unnecessary do-nothing stories in order to inflate metrics and justify dead space in the spr…

And yet well over half of professional developers have productivity so low that if they get laid off the term gets the same amount done...

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

#147

Post by alephnerd »

azemetre wrote: post #143
alephnerd wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

None of this sounds necessary for the human race. Maybe David Graeber was right.

Nothing is necessary to exist besides foraging, yet you are still using an industrially manufactured product (laptop or mobile phone) to reply to someone on a VC-subsidized forum.

So I'm not sure your contention has much merit, unless you wish to return to the woods and stop using HN, otherwise you're just enabling the supposed waste you appear to detest.

Or alternatively, you could hop off the high horse and understand the headaches the people you report to at work deal with, and thus maybe learn some additional context that can help you at your current or future job, and maybe think of a way to remove the drudgery in a process that annoys everyone.

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

#148

Post by gotoeleven »

t-3 wrote: post #141
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…

> The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing. That era also had militant labor organization and real socialist and communist parties in the US. Anticommunism killed all that and brought us to the current state…

Why do you need unions for this as opposed to just a tight labor market?

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

#149

Post by singpolyma3 »

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'm not sure if there's someone who will bag your groceries in all of Canada. I've always done that myself

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

#150

Post by 3abiton »

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…

I totally agree, it was a stark contrast between phd life and purely sw engineer life, in terms of doing things the way i wanted.
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