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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?

#261

Post by WorldMaker »

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'…

When it comes time for layoffs, it generally isn't what your boss knows, it's what your boss's grandboss thinks to throw onto a spreadsheet at the eleventh hour before Quarterly Reports are due.

A good direct boss might keep you on track for a bonus or other "local advancement", maybe even a promotion, but many companies you are only as valued as the ant numbers you look like from the C Suite's mile high club. (Which doesn't protect your good boss, either.)

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

#262

Post by WorldMaker »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #92
the_snooze wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

> overeducated c-suite

Arguably the modern MBA has gotten so insular, with many graduating with an MBA having only the barest modicum of humanities courses and the barest foot out of the door of a business college, that despite supposedly representing a higher University degree it seems increasingly fair to call it "undereducated". MBA programs got too deep into the business of selling as many MBAs as they could as quickly as they could they forgot to check their own curriculum for things like "perverse incentives" and "regulatory capture" and "tribalism".

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

#263

Post by genewitch »

alephnerd wrote: post #147
azemetre wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this sounds necessary for the human race. Maybe David Graeber was right.

Nothing is necessary to exist besides foraging, yet you are still using an industrially manufactured product (laptop or mobile phone) to reply to someone on a VC-subsidized forum. So I'm not sure your contention has much merit, unless you wish to return to the woods and stop using HN, otherwise you're just enabling the supposed waste you appear to detest. Or alternatively, you could hop off the high horse and underst…

"And yet you partake in society. Curious.

I am very smart "

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

#264

Post by jdcasale »

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…

"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?"

The purpose of giving that task to a junior dev isn't to get the task done, it's to teach them -- I will almost always be at least an order order of magnitude faster than a junior for any given task. I don't expect juniors to be similarly productive to me, I expect them to learn.

The parent comment also referred to a 'competent pair programmer', not a junior dev.

My point was that for the tasks that I wanted to use the LLM, frequently there was no amount of specificity that could help the model solve it -- I tried for a long time, and generally if the task wasn't obvious to me, the model generally could not solve it. I'd end up in a game of trying to do nondeterministic/fuzzy programming in English instead of just writing some code to solve the problem.

Again I agree that there is significant value here, because there is a ton of SWE work that is technically trivial, boring, and just eats up time. It's also super helpful as a natural-language info-lookup interface.

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

#265

Post by l0new0lf-G »

Very good and insightful article, but suffers from a weakness: it implies that the problem can be solved by everyone just buying from the ones whose workers are doing the job well.

This is not the case. The evidence that the "free market" does not "regulate itself" (at least not in favor of the many) since the 2008 recession is beyond refutation: we need pro-worker governments stepping in.

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

#266

Post by WorldMaker »

djmips wrote: post #257
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 aga…

My father paid for college working at a grocery _part time_ and is full of stories about how a good grocer could tell a little better the ripeness of a fruit to gift that perfectly ripe one to the right customer that day who was going to eat it that night or that weekend, how there used to be an art to bagging, how they used to have real breaks and social lives, how he could get some of his homework done during work hours or do something incredible for a customer with that same kind of time.

You get the skills you pay for. When a part-time job can pay for college, imagine what the full-time regulars can do. When people have the sorts of breaks and downtime to improve themselves, think of what they can do with that time to also improve their customer's experience in little and unique ways. It is easy to wonder what all we've lost in letting companies penny pinch labor so hard, focusing on productivity numbers over anything else, minimizing the number of employees and their wages to the barest minimums.

But also, as it easy as it seems to wonder about those sorts of things, it is still fascinating how many that lived through those changes don't see the squeeze that well. My father tells those stories just as often to complain about the experience in a modern day grocery store and how quality has slipped. It does take explicit reminders like "they paid you well enough you paid for college, you know what minimum wage is like today, yeah?" The long boiled frog sometimes doesn't remember the soup wasn't always so hot.

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

#267

Post by WorldMaker »

Larrikin wrote: post #195
nixpulvis wrote: post #185

Customer service across the board is in free-fall. Just the other day I was met with a Chipotle worker who was visibly frustrated that I ordered a burrito instead of a bowl. A little thing, but holy shit. I guess when wages don't add up to a viable life, resentment and carelessness spread like wildfire.

I would be interested in knowing what Chick-Fil-A does to prevent this. Pretty much every customer facing job that doesn't hope for charity at the end of the service is pretty bad in the US currently, but somehow they achieve the level of service of what I would get in Japan. The only thing I've been able to surmise is that they probably pay the managers very well and mostly just hire smart high schoolers that may ha…

Tribalism, presumably. Chik-Fil-A has intentionally made their brand about serving a specific tribe, being part of that specific tribe. That tribe has ideals and to work for that tribe is to live up to those ideals and if you don't live up to those ideals you are fired and probably not a "real" member of that tribe. It's tautological, but so is a lot of tribalism.

Given how much of that tribalism is also explicitly religiously coded, I find it's hard not to want to apply harsher words like "cult-like" to Chik-Fil-A, specifically, but "sect-like" is probably more accurate given how predominant both their business culture tribe and religious tribe are in American politics today even if "sect-like" doesn't have quite the same harsh connotations designed to help you question the systems of power in place.

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

#268

Post by dkarl »

bflesch wrote: post #208
dkarl wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Volunteer work is a lot like part time work, in that it's mostly low skill, and the work varies from physical labor to office work, and from behind-the-scenes jobs where you only interact with other volunteers to intensely face-to-face jobs where there's no hiding from the emotions of the people you serve.

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

#269

Post by dilyevsky »

dyauspitr wrote: post #153
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…

Disagree. Just the other day I needed someone to replace my chimney cap. The quotes from the big companies ranged from $3k-10k. Utterly ridiculous. I got some guy from an app who bought the stainless steel cap for $300 and installed it for $300 more for a total of $600 and the work is fine.

The difference is when guy from an app falls and breaks something it will turn out he doesn’t have insurance so you will lose much more than 3k when he sues

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

#270

Post by scarecrowbob »

kevinventullo wrote: post #164
scarecrowbob wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the book quite a bit, and it's been formative in my politics. That said, I am not sure if the take-away is that managers need to account for these factors by allowing for illegibility- I am not reading you claim that, but contextually that's how the discussion feels to me. I do agree with Scott that enforcing perfect legibility is impossible and even attempting to do so can cause immense problems, and I agree…

Thank you for the reply! I don't want to make any strong claims here, but my gut reaction to your first comment is that what one manager calls “allowance for illegibility”, another might call “trust in my reports”.

Yes, at the end of the day it's necessary to have some amount of "trust" in the people doing the work. Which is good- you can try to avoid that but if it didn't happen very little would get done.
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