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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?

#221

Post by wiether »

mschuster91 wrote: post #219
potato3732842 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And also, the programmers that got "promoted" to management are people that are here for the money/power and asked to be promoted, not because they care about coding. And absolutely not because their peers wanted for them to be promoted because they saw a good manager in them while they were working together.

So they'll definitely make it worse for everyone than a guy that doesn't know anything about tech but wanted a career in management because they care about managing.

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

#222

Post by touisteur »

fsckboy wrote: post #163
giancarlostoro wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I guess tech debt could even be increased in some cases. Some people shouldn't have too much time available :-)

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

#223

Post by anarticle »

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.

You have to accept that life is single threaded and you’re not always going to choose the most optimal path.

It’s easy to overthink, but without omniscient info, execute the plan you have.

Regret is tough because it piles up as you age. It’s easy to look back and think “dang, I did a lot of bad moves” while ignoring all the upsides and limited info you had at the time.

In many ways our easy access to info makes you think “just one more search” will make my decision 10x better when in reality it’s a huge super power you should use to drive execution, not the other way around. Think of what an advantage it is to have that much context on the scale of human existence. At least for me, this makes me more optimistic: I make less mistakes than ages before me because I’m relatively better informed. Note: this doesn’t mean the choices are always good, just that I understand them more completely.

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

#224

Post by svilen_dobrev »

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 need some slack

Definitely. If you tighten a bearing up-to 100% - to zero "play", it will stop rotating easy.. and start wearing. Which is.. in people-terms, called burnout.

Or as article below says, (too much) Efficiency is the Enemy..

https://fs.blog/slack/

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

#225

Post by lurk2 »

jt-hill wrote: post #166

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.

I always thought “soft skills” were a cope for those who didn’t learn an actual skill, until I entered the workforce. I was working mainly in customer service, construction, and facility maintenance roles, and in all three I found it was incredibly common for coworkers to have issues with anger management, emotional maturity, and basic courtesy. These jobs were all fairly terrible aside from customer service; perhaps not coincidentally, that is also where these issues were the least common.

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

#226

Post by Retric »

dughnut wrote: post #204
jdcasale wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

What matters here is the communication overhead not how long between responses. If I’m indefinitely spending more time handholding a jr dev than they save me eventually I just fire em, same with code gen.

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

#227

Post by pas »

owenversteeg wrote: post #170

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?

... that's the problem right? The big furniture factory is good at making (cheap) furniture, but they are very bad at managing local teams to deliver and assemble and ...

IKEA (at least in most of Europe) is good at this, because they spend a lot of attention and invest in their local presence (all of their big stores have pretty okay fast-food restaurant, as far as I understand)

... so of course it would make sense to let the factory do that and let some other company focus on assembly (and last-mile stuff generally).

... but there's no competition, no ratings to look up, no alternatives, they will send someone and that's it.

... and of course this spreads the negative cost all around, everyone gets a bit more of the annoyances, but keeps costs down (yay, I guess?)

and as a comment [1] in this thread mentioned this is a bad Nash equilibrium. (the post mentioned lemons already, and of course we know that due to information asymmetry bad goods crowd out good ones.[2])

there's no price information for "respect". it used to be enforced by big brands, hiring processes, unions, trade organizations, certifications, licensing requirements. but of course assembling a standardized bed is not hard, especially if someone did a few of the same. so of course none of the usual signals apply (no certification, no licensed assemblers registry maintained by some government organization, no assemblers union/guild, and so on.)

...

the possible solutions are to open up the data for these gig companies.

or fix labor laws.

or fix social security (unemployment compensation, negative income tax).

yeah, I know. good luck with any of that nowadays :/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43563248

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

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

#228

Post by orwin »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #108
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's got a name and we know that it's happening yet the overpaid overeducated c-suite demands it? What gives?

The problem is that this miserable state of affairs works at scale. Yes, on problems that exist at the scale of one or intelligent, educated, experienced, and dedicated human (or maybe up to 3-5), an individual or small team will run circles around a business. You can have a top-notch CEO and COO and HR manager and six program managers (each with zero domain experience other than running a Jira board) and four dozen…

Only revisionist history tell tales of flourishing kingdoms under a just king. In reality, the reason feodality worked for so long was the anarchy and power struggle, the cavalcades (basically raids) and a honour based justice (basically don't kill fellow nobility during war, and avoid killing militantes during cavalcades and you'll be good). The anarchical nature of the system made it particularly susceptible to organised raids, but also extremely 'agile' in it's political responses. Once power was consolidated however, the clergy and the royalty pushed their law and hierarchical order onto the mostly aristocratic feodality, it broke and you get the crusade against Alby, the war between Plantagenet and capetiens, and probably a lot of other misery inflicted to the general population. Then once the hierarchical order is set, you need an administration, which will become inefficient by nature.

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

#230

Post by Clubber »

chinchilla2020 wrote: post #186
stouset wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Also this push to measure everything means that anything that can’t be measured isn’t valued. Never thought I'd see an intelligent point made on hackernews, but there it is. You are absolutely correct. This really hit home for me.

You could have made your point better without insulting everyone on the forum.
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