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The rise of the pointless job

theguardian.com

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Re: The rise of the pointless job

#321

Post by branchless »

expensivedrone wrote: post #80

I'm a programmer working at a big-tech company. I make ~$350k/year, even though my job could be done equally well by a college intern. I only do ~2 hours of productive work in an average day. My previous jobs were far more interesting and challenging, and I had apparently done extremely well in my interviews. Hence why I got an offer with an extremely good compensation package. However, the team that I go put into, i…

Does your company have an effective monopoly or is part an oligopoly? Normally companies can run with gross inefficiencies because of lack of competition.

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#322

Post by chongli »

lawn wrote: post #315
chongli wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't. Marvel movies could stop existing tomorrow and it wouldn't matter at all. Life goes on.

It matters to me and many many others who enjoy the marvel movies. You're essentially saying entertainment is meaningless. Which isn't right at all.

I'm not saying entertainment is meaningless, I'm merely objecting to the claim that "it has to get done." No, it doesn't. It's not mandatory, it's a luxury.

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#323

Post by osteele »

Some (not all) of these jobs provide slack to an organization. A human is effectively paid a retainer, or given an excuse to on premise and engaged, so that they have the knowledge, context, and social capital to deal with unusual or unforeseeable situations when they arise.

Giving someone a job that causes them to feel useless or disengaged, in order to maintain their readiness, is bad management. The existence of a job whose value can't be summarized on a process chart is not.

The article was entertaining enough satire, but in the end had me wishing for an alternate version that categorized the forces that create and sustain jobs. It pretended to this, but by starting from the assumption that corporations and managers are idiots or ill-intentioned, it sacrificed insight for populism.

I recommend _Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency_, Tom DeMarco, 2002.

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#325

Post by solidsnack9000 »

rossdavidh wrote: post #154

Kind of lost me when they gave military jobs as an example. By this logic, it is "pointless" for organisms to have immune systems, since if other organisms didn't cause infection it wouldn't be necessary. Maybe, but that's not the way the world is (or was, or likely will be anytime soon). It's a definition of "pointless" so remote from the real world as to seem...pointless.

I wonder if the author would also consider police pointless. Crime and warfare are both in a very real sense "outside the law" and in consequence outside the markets governed by it.

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#326

Post by nitrogen »

Clubber wrote: post #294
marcosdumay wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A smart traffic light that can count how any cars enter and exit the zone. It's perfectly possible to automate, but it may not be the best ROI around.

The system would also need to detect which direction the traffic was going. In morning rush hour, outbound would be much heaver than inbound (of your neighborhood) so it would typically be unidirectional.

I've seen such lights in remote construction sites on road trips. They do exist.

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#329

Post by OtterCoder »

dantheman wrote: post #257
tom_mellior wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Eight hours of soul-crushing boredom every day keeps people in such jobs from doing... anything they want. Like learning stuff that might help them contribute to society in other ways (in a more useful job, maybe). > Not having a job puts you in a lower social caste This is a stupid societal expectation that should be fought rather than supported in the way you say.

Work should create value and in fact most of these make work jobs destroy it by slowing things down or requiring more meetings etc. There is always valuable work that can be done. It can be improving the maintenance or cleanliness of places, etc.

Shout-out to the Civilian Conservation Corps. We should bring that program back.

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#330

Post by pjscott »

nefitty wrote: post #318
pjscott wrote: post #316

Once upon a time there was a thing to be done. Huge meetings were held, and goals were set for how much of the thing should be done per month. Metrics were set up to track how much of the thing had happened. Over a hundred people were invited to these meetings, and countless man-hours were spent on defining goals. Many more hours were spent on measuring progress toward those goals. Group emails were sent, vaguely con…

Is this an argument against the need for managers? Google tried that, and it failed. https://www.forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2013/07/17/googl...

Yes? No? Abort, retry, fail? I mentioned jobs making local sense. And it's true! If any single one of these jobs were to go away, things would get worse. The system would leave its local optimum, and many problems would ensue. And I want to get out of that Nash equilibrium -- but how?
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