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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?

#251

Post by pdimitar »

majormajor wrote: post #169
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…

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'…

I agree it's a mistake but one thing that's never taken into account in this discussion is that many people find it enough that they are doing their jobs. They don't want to do marketing. A lot of tech people are like that which is a real tragedy.

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

#252

Post by jampekka »

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…

> 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.

That kind of job existing in the first place is the problem. And that could be well called subservience instead of work ethic.

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

#253

Post by djmips »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #158
Spooky23 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That generation had it more together as citizens, and they held on to power for a long time. Postwar all of the institutions in the US grew quickly, and the WW2 generation moved up quickly as a result. The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone.

>The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone. The boomer types are now in their 70s and even 80s and mostly retired (or dead). It's the generations after them that run many of the anal-retentive, bureaucratically obsessive compulsive managerial postings today, and among those are a good number of gen z turds who are at least as toxic, while being smugly self-r…

Boomers is anyone 60 or older right now - not just 70+

That being said, Boomer has evolved to mean anyone older, established and conservative.

Like the counterculture saying from the past, don't trust anyone over 30.

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

#254

Post by djmips »

Retric wrote: post #226
dughnut wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A big difference is that the jr. dev is learning compared to the AI who is stuck at whatever competence was baked in from the factory. You might be more patient with the jr if you saw positive signs that the handholding was paying off.

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

#255

Post by stouset »

majormajor wrote: post #169
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…

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'…

Your boss can know about it, but if their boss wants data on performance you’re back in the same boat.

Funny you mention engineers needing to market themselves though. That leads to its own consequences. I’ve been at a place where everyone needed to market their own work in order to get promoted, to get raises, and to stay off the chopping block.

The end result? The engineers at the company who get promoted are… good at self-promotion, not necessarily good at engineering. Many of the best engineers at the company—who were hired to do engineering—languish in obscurity while people who can game the system thrive. People get promoted who are only good at cranking out poorly-made deliverables that burden their team with excessive long-term maintenance issues. They fuck off to higher levels of the company, leaving their team to deal with the consequences of their previous work.

Run that script for five or ten years and it doesn’t seem to be working out well for the company.

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

#256

Post by Stefan-H »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #183
Stefan-H wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While YMMV, a fear response is a choice. You can have all the rational reasons to be afraid (like the bottom of your hierarchy of needs being unmet) and choose to act out of cold rationality rather than fear. Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - if you can act without fear even when there is justified reason to be afraid, you will be able to easily do so when it isn't justified.

Where I come from, "hav[ing] all the rational reasons to be afraid" and pretending otherwise is called a delusion. I prefer to see the world as it is.

"... is called a delusion". What I am suggesting is not delusion, it is mindfulness and cutting through delusion. When one is presented with something that elicits a fear response (whether the stimulus is rational or not) the goal is to quiet all of the "lizard brain" reactions, and instead formulate a well reasoned response. "Fear is the mind-killer" - while from fiction, still rings true to me - if you react out of fear you will short-circuit internal processes that are far better at long-term reasoning even when at the expense of short-term comfort.

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

#257

Post by djmips »

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…

There was one cashier who also bagged at a local supermarket who was the mythical 10x bagger. I'm not joking when I say they were a virtuoso at scanning and bagging and I would always line up in their line just to witness it again and anyway that line moved incredibly fast. It's fascinating that even mundane activities can be executed with speed and beauty.

They've graduated college so I guess I'll never see that again.

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

#258

Post by Retric »

djmips wrote: post #254
Retric wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A big difference is that the jr. dev is learning compared to the AI who is stuck at whatever competence was baked in from the factory. You might be more patient with the jr if you saw positive signs that the handholding was paying off.

That was my point, though I may not have been clear.

Most people do get better over time, but for those who don’t (or LLM’s) it’s just a question of if their current skills are a net benefit.

I do expect future AI to improve. My expectation is it’s going to be a long slow slog just like with self driving cars etc, but novel approaches regularly turn extremely difficult problems into seemingly trivial exercises.

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

#259

Post by djmips »

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…

What if the workers decide the work is imposing on them? Maybe that's a good thing but it could go too far.

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

#260

Post by Stefan-H »

saturn8601 wrote: post #192
Stefan-H wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who is more in the middle of my career rather than the end of it, I would like to echo your sentiment. I have had plenty of roles where I was tasked with things that were out of my depth, and the answer is to just not let it be. There is always a path to get the answers/skills you need to do what is asked of you, you just might not know the path yet, so the core skill (and where I think fear comes into the…

How do you slog through something you truly hate? More than a decade ago I was hired as an intern at Colgate-Palmolive as a software developer. Turns out they were(are?) one of the largest SAP deployments in the US. The entire company revolved around SAP. Due to lack of college graduates knowing SAP, they took great pains to treat me extremely well and train me (a CS major) in ABAP using SAP Netweaver. My project was…

"How do you slog through something you truly hate?" - I don't.

When signals that a role is not aligned with my needs start cropping up, I begin searching for a new role passively, and as the situation develops I speed up my search.

"I felt like a complete failure because I didn't put in 100% and I felt like I let my mentor down" - to thine own self be true. I have failed to put in 100% at some jobs, and sometimes i regret it more than others. I have narratives that legitimize my laziness or lack of commitment based on some previous slight from the company, or a missed promise on their part, but I hold myself accountable.

"How do you overcome something like that and push on? It does not always seem like a sure thing" Resilience is a wildly varying trait of folks, and depends on your emotional and mental state. "First world problems" are a great example, one when is socialized at a certain comfort level, missing that causes distress. Some working conditions are truly untenable, in which case do what you have to do, but otherwise do the best with the situation you're given.

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