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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?

#211

Post by imp0cat »

throwaway422432 wrote: post #134
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.

This is obviously a three-bag situation, who would want to have these items packed any other way?

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

#212

Post by bob1029 »

jwr wrote: post #206

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 de…

The average level of work ethic in the areas I frequent has cratered over the last 6-7 years.

I can feel it happening to me as well. I used to get super anxious if I wasn't going to be able to respond to a work email within a few minutes. Basically chained myself to my desk at home M-F. Remember phone calls? Having to answer a ringing phone within 15 seconds or you could be perceived as delinquent? No one is responding quickly to anything anymore.

Keeping myself amped up 8 hours a day for vendors and customers who are 1000% asleep at the wheel is too much. I wait for meaningful work to accumulate now and work in bursts. This definitely contributes to the downward spiral, but I don't know what else to do. Human energy is finite. I'm willing to stick my neck out really far for really long if it seems like others are willing to do the same, but it doesn't feel like that kind of situation right now.

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

#213

Post by animuchan »

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…

What you're describing was precisely our culture at the last startup.

One group plans ahead and overall do a solid job, so they're rarely swamped, never pull all-nighters. People are never promoted, they're thought of as slacking and un-startup-like. Top performers leave regularly because of that.

The other group is behind on even the "blocker"-level issues, people are stressed and overworked, weekends are barely a thing. But — they get praised for hard work. The heroes. (And then leave after burning out completely.)

(The company was eventually acquired, but employees got pennies. So it worked out well for the founders, while summarily ratfucking everyone else involved. I'm afraid this is very common.)

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

#214

Post by namaria »

pcen wrote: post #190
azemetre wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the perfect manifestation of the quote: It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

Capitalism has become as much of a thought-terminating argument as 'the gods'. Most '-ism' words I think.

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

#215

Post by namaria »

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…

> steals a new worker’s lunch on the first day, just to see if he asserts himself

> to filter out the non-fighters

This is bullying and hazing.

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

#216

Post by namaria »

dwattttt wrote: post #50
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 ... aren’t machines that can run constantly on 100% utilization. You also can't run machines at 100% utilisation & expect quality results. That's when you see tail latencies blow out, hash maps lose their performance, physical machines wear supra-linearly... The list goes on.

Difference is machines break and that costs lots of money.

People just quit, some businesses consider it a better outcome.

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

#217

Post by int_19h »

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,…

It's theater because the numbers in JIRA are, for the most part, pulled out of someone's ass, and then multiplied by various coefficients by managers along the chain (based on their pessimism and/or experience). Garbage in, garbage out.

So yes, this is theater, and it only makes someone happy for as long as they aren't aware (or can pretend to not be aware) how the sausage is made.

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

#218

Post by meander_water »

NERD_ALERT wrote: post #43
Sparkyte wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely squeezed. They say AI, but AI isn't eliminating programming. I've wrote a few applications with AI assistance. It probably would've been faster if I wrote it myself. The problem is that it doesn't have context and wildly assumes what your intentions are and cheats outcomes. It will replace juniors for that one liner, it won't replace a senior developer who knows how to write code.

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

This has been my experience as well.

Cursor Chat and autocomplete are near useless, and generate all sorts of errors, which on the whole cost more time.

However, using composer, passing in the related files explicitly in the context, and prompting small changes incrementally has been a game changer for me. It also helps if you describe the intended behaviour in excruciating detail, including how you want all the edge cases/errors handled.

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

#219

Post by mschuster91 »

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".

> 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".

One's direct manager should be a developer, yes. The problem is the level above that - most organisations don't have a SWE career track, so if you want a pay rise you need a promotion and that's only available for managerial roles.

The problem there is that a lot of developers make very bad managers and a lot of organisations don't give a fuck about giving their managers the proper skills training. The result is then usually a "tech director" who hasn't touched code in years but just loves to micromanage based on knowledge from half a decade ago or more. That's bad enough in Java, but in NodeJS, Go, Rust or other hipster reinvent-the-wheel stacks it's dangerous.

They come in and blather completely irrelevant, way outdated or completely wrong "advice", plan projects with way less resources than the project would actually need - despite knowing what "crunch time" entails for their staff themselves.

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

#220

Post by imtringued »

thi2 wrote: post #14
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…

The buisnessmodel is speculating that your average Joe does not have the energy or knowledge to go after the shobby work. I notice this trend a lot and while I can push back I feel sorry for the people that are not able to do so or do not know their rights.

You have basically described the government vs private contractor dynamic.
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