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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?

#201

Post by gsf_emergency_2 »

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…

Surprisingly bonafide slogan:

  What you can't insure against* you do not share
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_bottleneck_method

*Our Dear Thought Leader would prefer the substitution "profit from", but I'd wager that He's equally correct!

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

#202

Post by lormayna »

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but the article mentioned very low skills jobs as courier, assembler, clerk.

There is a reason why those people are doing job like these instead that better jobs. Some people are just not interested in doing their work correctly, some other are not skilled enough.

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

#203

Post by imp0cat »

saturn8601 wrote: post #194
adultcool wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fear is the mind killer.

Fear is one thing but how do you deal with regret? Regret for taking the leap as well as regret for not taking the leap? There can be regret in both paths.

Start by reading some Robert Frost.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43476154

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

#204

Post by dughnut »

jdcasale wrote: post #86
NERD_ALERT wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt this way with Github Copilot but I started using Cursor this week and it genuinely feels like a competent pair programmer.

I recently tried Cursor for about a week and I was disappointed. It was useful for generating code that someone else has definitely written before (boilerplate etc), but any time I tried to do something nontrivial, it failed no matter how much poking, prodding, and thoughtful prompting I tried. Even when I tried to ask it for stuff like refactoring a relatively simple rust file to be more idiomatic or organized, it c…

If you asked a junior developer to refactor a rust program to be more idiomatic, how long would you expect that to take? Would you expect the work to compile on the first try?

I love Cline and Copilot. If you carefully specify your task, provide context for uncommon APIs, and keep the scope limited, then the results are often very good. It’s code completion for whole classes and methods or whole utility scripts for common use cases.

Refactoring to taste may be under specified.

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

#205

Post by 84748498373 »

zeroCalories wrote: post #34
tmpz22 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I learned is to not to be afraid. Regardless of what is happening around you. Were you perhaps financially secure enough not to have to fear anything? Or tenured (Bell Labs!) that unemployment wasn't actually a threat to you? YMMV.

People acclimate to their circumstances. Do you think people in developing countries live in a constant state of panic because they don't have a seven figure retirement account?

> Do you think people in developing countries live in a constant state of panic because they don't have a seven figure retirement account?

If Brazil is anything to look at, maybe?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7111415/

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

#206

Post by jwr »

The problem is with work ethics, not with jobs.

In Japan, it's impressive to see how people perform even the most menial jobs with dedication. It's the Yoda approach: do or do not. If you do a job, do it well. So, you will see people whose job is to stand in the rain and watch over a construction site exit making sure people in the sidewalk do not get run over by trucks exiting the site, doing their job with utter dedication. Even if it rains. Even if the job is crappy. I'm sure these people would rather have a different job — but as long as this is the one they have, they will sure as anything do it well!

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

#207

Post by Ekaros »

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.

And maybe even become manager in some relatively small number of years. And then move to some other industry. Not that most of them do, but there is at least some career progression.

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

#208

Post by bflesch »

dkarl wrote: post #54
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…

He might not be doing it for economic reasons. He might be doing it to get out of the house. My mom's physician suggested volunteer work or a part time job to keep her active instead of sitting on the couch all day.

Not sure if you're joking, but volunteer work is quite different than having to stand at the checkout line packing backs in a commercial setting.

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

#209

Post by gf000 »

majormajor wrote: post #172
xg15 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What if it doesn't survive and 70% of the people who were in the Kingdom end up in worse , arbitrarily-ruled, small despotic fiefdoms instead? And only 10% end up being better off by being lucky enough to have landed in the high-trust+high-competence small group? Or, switching to consumer products vs company revenue/profit or kingdoms, and grounding in a specific example: people love to hate Windows, but how many of…

> people love to hate Windows, but how many of them would actually be better off if the options were just Mac (still expensive, still niche) or Linux?

I don't know, but Windows has becoming increasingly worse at everyday usage. I swear Linux has better suspend/sleep functionality now, doesn't sneaky restart randomly (yeah, just because you reopen an explorer window but none of my other, actually important programs will definitely make people notice), doesn't take a minute to react to an unlock attempt several times a day for no reason on even very performant hardware..

So yeah, I think many would be better off with Linux.

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

#210

Post by arvinsim »

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 developer wants to being treated as a code monkey and I bet no PM would want to waste time watching someone type out code that they don't understand.
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