Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad? • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by dyauspitr » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:16 AM UTC

TuringNYC wrote: post #20

temporallobe wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> literally every hour is accounted for I saw one company where early-career BA/PMs (often offshore) would sit alongside developers and "keep them company" almost all day via zoom.

This is kind of cool as an alternative process to develop apps with. Literally product in a zoom window telling you what to build as you go along. No standups, no refinement, no retros etc. Just a PM that really knows what the customer needs and the developer just building those as you go along.

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

#152

Post by giancarlostoro » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:17 AM UTC

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 think letting devs 2 hours a day, that they can flex so if they wanna use it on Fridays its fine, for personal projects, whether internal or otherwise. Just think of all the random tech debt that could be resolved if devs had 2 hours a day to code anything, including new projects that benefit everyone. Most people can only squeeze out about 6 hours worth of real work anyway. You burn up by the end of the day.

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

#153

Post by dyauspitr » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:20 AM UTC

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…

Disagree. Just the other day I needed someone to replace my chimney cap. The quotes from the big companies ranged from $3k-10k. Utterly ridiculous. I got some guy from an app who bought the stainless steel cap for $300 and installed it for $300 more for a total of $600 and the work is fine.

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

#154

Post by dyauspitr » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:23 AM UTC

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…

It depends. When I go to Costco and make huge purchases to last a month, I unload the cart onto the payment conveyor and the bagger bags them on the other side. By the time I’m done unloading the cart and have finished paying, the cart is ready to go. I would say that’s like a 40-50% time save. Those really add up to shorter lines and more purchases for the stores.

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

#155

Post by t-3 » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:23 AM UTC

gotoeleven wrote: post #148

t-3 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

High demand for labor can lead to better conditions, but demand for labor isn't static and without real organization and solidarity it's nearly impossible for workers to punish companies that move jobs to low-cost locales. Economic policy is also controlled by the employer class, which means policies that encourage unemployment and inflation are common.

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

#156

Post by gedy » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:24 AM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #142

bitwize wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fairl…

I think if you look at how most people lived, worked, travelled, communicated, educated, etc before WW2 - there was a huge improvement after the war that resulted in lots of development and economic opportunities for the average person.

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

#157

Post by dyauspitr » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:25 AM UTC

decimalenough wrote: post #95

rib3ye wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A low stress, easy job like that could totally be done out of choice. A big concern of seniors in my life is fearing cognitive atrophy from lack of social connections.

Retail is not "low stress". I guarantee you that senior bagger is getting chewed out every single day both by his customers and his management for being too slow hurry up already, packing the eggs at the bottom of the bag omg what are you doing you fucking idiot, etc.

Nonsense. Retail workers have a way of exaggerating how bad their jobs are. I worked retail in my teens and for years and maybe saw 2-3 bad customers in that entire time.

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

#158

Post by southernplaces7 » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:25 AM UTC

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.

>The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone.

The boomer types are now in their 70s and even 80s and mostly retired (or dead). It's the generations after them that run many of the anal-retentive, bureaucratically obsessive compulsive managerial postings today, and among those are a good number of gen z turds who are at least as toxic, while being smugly self-righteous about their habits. We'll be blaming boomers for decades after they're dead, for things long since out of their hands.

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

#159

Post by jongjong » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:26 AM UTC

jongjong wrote: post #19

The jobs are bad and people get blamed for it. We've been through a credit bubble where everything was borrowed out of debt, in the hope that it would deliver massive-scale automation in the future. 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 progr…

Also, I should add that the job-hopping is likely a feature of our inflationary monetary system; as inflation is ongoing, people find that if they change jobs after 1 or 2 years, they can get some non-trivial salary increase... In reality, changing jobs every 2 years doesn't actually give you a real salary increase; it merely allows you to maintain your buying power in the face of inflation...

The elite class is basically using the monetary system to constantly squeeze value creators by forcing them to job-hop frequently as it demoralizes them, lowers their self-esteem and thus helps to keep their salary expectations down. The manager class also contributes to the demoralization aspect of value creators by imposing unnecessary constraints on value creators.

The reason we have population collapse in the west is because value creators are systematically demoralized. It's literally the enslavement of value creators by value extractors.

I think this is why coding is increasingly seen as a low-class skill nowadays... If you possess any productive skill, it signals that you're part of the lower 'value creator' class.

There is even a belief that if you have to create value for a living, then it means that you're just not smart enough to figure out how to make other people work for you... Completely ignoring the reality that it's all about social networking; literally all about your position in the social graph and distance to money printers.

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

#160

Post by azemetre » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:30 AM UTC

alephnerd wrote: post #147

azemetre wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 underst…

I mean there is an alternative out there for making software that doesn't require profit and can still provide societal value. The alternative isn't to forage in the wilderness, please tell me you are just having a laugh and weren't being serious.