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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?

#161

Post by PessimalDecimal »

dyauspitr wrote: post #151
TuringNYC wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

No. It's just awful.

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

#162

Post by kevingadd »

dyauspitr wrote: post #157
decimalenough wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The retail experience now is not necessarily the same as it was when you were a kid though, is it?

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

#163

Post by fsckboy »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #152
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.

>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.

regardless of the potential benefits of this plan, zero tech debt would get erased.

imho net tech debt would increase by the 80 20 rule, meaning that you're not going to get more than 80% of the side projects fully wrapped in the 20% of the time that you've allotted to them.

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

#164

Post by kevinventullo »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #136
kevinventullo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for the reply!

I don't want to make any strong claims here, but my gut reaction to your first comment is that what one manager calls “allowance for illegibility”, another might call “trust in my reports”.

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

#166

Post by jt-hill »

This makes me think of The Sort, coined by the venerable patio11.

The types soft skills it takes to to be effective in the kinda crappy jobs described by the author can command much better remuneration in any number of other roles, and society has gotten much better at efficiently allocating that human capital.

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

#167

Post by csense »

jongjong wrote: post #159
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 basi…

If only someone invented a monetary system where the supply of money was determined by an algorithm that didn't constantly pump new money into existence all the time.

Oh wait, they did. But for some reason, most people on HN say Bitcoin is for scammers and grifters, and has no fundamental value proposition...

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

#168

Post by jayd16 »

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".

Its not _all_ theater. Sometimes something does make it into the box and out the door.

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

#169

Post by majormajor »

stouset wrote: post #57
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…

Also this push to measure everything means that anything that can’t be measured isn’t valued. One of your teammates consistently helps unblock everyone on the team when they get stuck? They aren’t closing as many tickets as others so they get overlooked on promotions or canned. One of your teammates takes a bit longer to complete work, but it’s always rock solid and produces fewer outages? Totally invisible. Plus the…

The biggest mistake those employees make on their way to getting overlooked is assuming their boss knows.

Everyone needs to advocate for themselves.

A good boss will be getting feedback from everyone and staying on top of things. A mediocre boss will merely see "obvious" things like "who closed the most tickets." A bad boss may just play favorites and game the system on their own.

If you've got a bad boss who doesn't like you, you're likely screwed regardless. But most bosses are mediocre, not actively bad.

And in that case, the person who consistently helps unblock everyone needs to be advertising that to their manager. The person who's work doesn't need revisiting, who doesn't cause incidents needs to be hammering that home to their manager. You can do that without throwing your teammates under the bus, but you can't assume omnipotence or omniscience. And you can't wait until the performance review cycle to do it, you have to demonstrate it as an ongoing thing.

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

#170

Post by owenversteeg »

I agree with the author's point, which basically boils down to "pay peanuts, get monkeys."

But I think another large issue is a deep lack of respect at these jobs, in every way. They are impersonal, they are short-term, you are a cog in a machine, they don't know your name, the customers don't know your name, they don't care about you, you are replaceable, you don't care about the work, why would you?

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