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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?

#231

Post by Clubber »

gedy wrote: post #156
jcranmer wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure, but that doesn't make the original statement correct.

>WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower.

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

#232

Post by Clubber »

rukuu001 wrote: post #198
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…

Have we learnt nothing? 100% utilisation of practically any resource will result in problems with either quality or schedules. What, as an industry, do we need to do to learn this lesson?

It needs to be reflected faster in quarterly results. When the effect takes a year or two, nobody notices and there are too many other variables/externalities to place blame.

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

#233

Post by sidewndr46 »

the_snooze wrote: post #69
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…

It's even got a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

While important, it actually misses a common problem I see: the assumption that every measurement is accurate.

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

#234

Post by paxys »

nixpulvis wrote: post #187
brudgers wrote: post #13

The gig economy is way worse than the author describes. Gig workers can't advance with the companies they work for. Gig workers can't build a network with their coworkers because they don't have coworkers...and there's a good chance that they are competing for work with other people working for the same company. There are dead end day jobs, and then there is gig work.

The whole concept of "hustling" is frustrating to me.

These days "hustling" = independently rich people trying to build an online following and selling ads/courses/get rich quick schemes/crypto scams.

The gig economy is real, back-breaking work. No "husler" has done a single day of food or package deliveries.

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

#235

Post by sidewndr46 »

kevinventullo wrote: post #110
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?

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…

Maybe I would have found the book more impactful if I had read it earlier in life. I felt like it put together various ideas and presented them well in a comprehensible manner. What I feel it omits is that the mechanisms of a state only have to be actionable, not rational. If you ask me how to mow a lawn and I come up with some byzantine process involving multiple steps that don't even contribute to the end goal I'm going to be labeled nuts or maybe "eccentric" if they want to be polite. The same scrutiny doesn't apply to the various bureaucratic processes of a state for whatever reason.

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

#236

Post by paxys »

zeroCalories wrote: post #40
brudgers wrote: post #13

The gig economy is way worse than the author describes. Gig workers can't advance with the companies they work for. Gig workers can't build a network with their coworkers because they don't have coworkers...and there's a good chance that they are competing for work with other people working for the same company. There are dead end day jobs, and then there is gig work.

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.

Managers at McDonalds can make $50-70K/yr. There is job security, benefits and opportunities for career advancement. Plenty of people start at the very bottom of the ladder flipping burgers and make it all the way to corporate. It's a tired meme that "McDonalds jobs are meant for teenagers". These are all incredibly in-demand jobs. And plenty of fast food chains pay significantly more, sometimes including benefits like college tuition reimbursement.

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

#237

Post by jashmatthews »

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,…

If you round up great engineering orgs that ship impactful stuff more of them don't use JIRA than do. Linear, Basecamp, Asana, Monday etc.

My experience is by the time an org gets hundreds of priorities and can't effectively delegate to sub orgs they're already fucked and there's no point working there if you want to do anything meaningful.

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

#238

Post by sidewndr46 »

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…

Your comparison isn't very good as Microsoft Windows undergoes perpetual change and churn for the sake of doing it. This breaks existing workflows along the way. As a product it was effectively complete by the time Windows 2000 was released, having successfully integrated what was then considered state of the art technology to develop a practical operating system based on the principals known at the time. All it ever needed from there forward was maintenance updates and kernel updates to enable new hardware level technology to be harnessed by software.

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

#239

Post by ecocentrik »

RobRivera wrote: post #67
ecocentrik wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're creating nothing stories to justify work life balance and avoid burnout your organization has a problem. Look into Extreme Programming and Sustainable Pace.

I think thats the observation being made. Most people respond to the organizational problem with the only tools they have, which manifests as that. Usually management knows and doesnt care about the problem

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

#240

Post by os2warpman »

5w3llth3n wrote: post #32

The solution is simple; quit jobs, assemble our own shit. In the US, lean in to the 2A and tell the We peacefully assemble around jobs . Just peacefully assemble around a new meme of telling the walking dead to pound sand. Education worked to an extent; most will not devolve into dumb fucks. Pretty pathetic seeing the adults kowtowed by the ossified establishment.

> Education worked to an extent; most will not devolve into dumb fucks.

Your inequality symbols are backwards.

There are not fewer than 1 million cops in the US there are more than 1 million.

There are indeed fewer than 700,000 politicians but I'm going to assume you meant to say "more than 700k". The majority of those persons are local representatives who have little authority beyond determining what days trash collection occurs and whether a specific plot of land can be zoned residential, commercial, or industrial.

Remember, the alligator always wants to eat the larger number.

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