Bullshit Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#391

Post by gowld » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:41 PM UTC

freddie_mercury wrote: post #289

TeMPOraL wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a manager, if my subordinate asks for a special chair, I will ask him to get a doctor's note, to see if he is serious or just bored, and to prevent all his colleagues from wanting a special chair the next day. And I would wonder whether you think of your employees as little children, or are you just giving into the false economy of being cheap on equipment. The latter seems common, and I've personally been in co…

> I've personally been in companies that could easily double the productivity of their developers at the one-time per-developer cost of one developer salary, by buying a decent computer, extra monitor, a pair of headphones and a good chair. This is completely pervasive myth in places like HN. I founded a startup. For the first three months we hadn't signed a lease for real office space, so there were no monitors, cra…

Why did you waste your money on unnecessary real estate, monitors, and chairs, if no one needed them?

Why not sell that stuff and hand out cash bonuses to employees?

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#392

Post by Chathamization » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:43 PM UTC

normalhuman wrote: post #65

I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things: 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of bor…

>) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress;

I don't think that's actually true. Here's a quick list I threw together on another post:

>Replication crisis? Aging infrastructure? Global warming? Cancer research? Environmental destruction? Food scarcity? Documentation and bug hunting in software? Taking care of frameworks? Early childhood education? Heck, even beyond all the problems on Earth, there are plenty of people who want to work on things like sending people to Mars.

But as people pointed out, those things need collective action and political will. Our current mentality is that we should have minimal collective action, and the vast majority of our resources should go towards what can bring us the largest personal profit returns, no matter the impact on humanity in general. I think we're seeing some of the limits to that approach.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#393

Post by skybrian » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:44 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #140

Jaruzel wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that these jobs are bullshit jobs, it's that commonly they are wrapped up in bullshit procedures . These procedures typically appear when there's an initiative to reduce costs. The easiest and cheapest way to employ an unskilled person to do a skilled job is to hand them a book of 'procedures' on their first day and say "Everything you need to do and know is in this Book". No time consuming cross-training re…

This is what frustrated me after reading the "E-myth" book. Apparently, the recipe for successful business is to enshrine everything in superdetailed Book of Procedures, and have employees follow its content like they were programmable automatons. Now maybe this works , but eliminating human agency like this doesn't sit well with me for some reason.

A while back I took flying lessons. They have a procedure and checklists for most things. This is decidedly a good thing. Checklists are great for reducing errors and should be used in more situations.

Of course there is also a question of whether these procedures can be updated. And whether you can improvise in an emergency. You need more training for that. But this doesn't mean checklists are bad.

Another example: when cooking a new dish, if you start with a recipe you'll probably get up to speed faster than just winging it. This doesn't mean there's no creativity.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#394

Post by nine_k » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

groestl wrote: post #159

Jaruzel wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that these jobs are bullshit jobs, it's that commonly they are wrapped up in bullshit procedures . These procedures typically appear when there's an initiative to reduce costs. The easiest and cheapest way to employ an unskilled person to do a skilled job is to hand them a book of 'procedures' on their first day and say "Everything you need to do and know is in this Book". No time consuming cross-training re…

I think you're right, but I have a somewhat less dire view on this. I think that large companies optimize for a fundamentally different outcome than smaller companies, like startups. Large companies became large by applying a successful business model, something that startups are still lacking. If you have a working business model and stable cashflow, any change is potentially dangerous and can take down the company.…

One problem with this model is that competition exists. It requires to adjust the business model, or give away (a part of) the market.

This sometimes produces waves of change (seen as painful and haphazard by the old staff), when new ways to run the company are invented to keep up with the competition. Then, with new stability, a new calcification phase comes, etc.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#395

Post by rajacombinator » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:47 PM UTC

Keep in mind, most of tech is bullshit jobs that have no impact on product, business or customers. Tech for tech’s sake.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#396

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:49 PM UTC

lovich wrote: post #373

TeMPOraL wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying the competition shouldn't exist - just that we should put brakes on some of the negative-sum games it causes, once the market is saturated and things turn into a fight for a fixed pie. As you say, at this point it's all wasted labour, and it can eat pretty much all your profits. I tried to refrain from mentioning government regulation here, but the brakes need to be put on everyone simultaneously - dec…

I get what you're saying, but I wanted to point out that lower profits can be better for society if due to competition. Every dollar a company earns in profit is a little more of efficiency that could be eked out of the business

I think we need to be cautious here, though. A perfect market would bring perfect efficiency, but perfect efficiency is a disaster for humans who depend on the market to live. Happiness and quality of life today happen in places where market is not efficient yet.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#397

Post by swah » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:54 PM UTC

normalhuman wrote: post #65

I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things: 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of bor…

Isn't my smartphone redistribution of wealth?

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#398

Post by stale2002 » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:55 PM UTC

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #356

lmm wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doesn't matter how rich and powerful you are, you have to hire layers of managements to run your organization. These managers get their share of status, power & money by managing more people. The people they manage also want to get into management, so more layers and departments will be created. You are also competing with other companies to keep your employees happy so that they keep making you richer, and for thi…

> If you can figure out how to achieve the same results with fewer layers of management, or have your management act more efficiently, you'll reap the rewards. So any bullshit managerial position is inherently unstable: as soon as one company figures out they can do without it, it'll vanish from the industry. On the contrary, what is not stable is your more "efficient" situation, because it is only preferable from th…

> You want empirical evidence of what I am saying? Remember the excitement around "let's teach everyone to code and they will become app-making entrepreneurs"? How did that go?

This is going extremely well, actually. There are more software engineers than ever in the world, and these software engineers are getting paid more than ever.

These efforts have been wildly successful, and this consistent progress just keeps marching on, even today (as more as more people choose to become successful engineers.).

You might counter by saying something like "but we taught a million people to code and only 100K of them became software engineer!".

And this is the wrong line of thinking because getting 100% of them to become software engineers was never the goal.

It was never the goal in the same way that teaching people to read and write never had the goal of causing 100% of literate people to become fiction writers, and yet we all agree that reading and writing is a good thing to teach people.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#399

Post by slimshady94 » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:55 PM UTC

guskel wrote: post #325

sophistication wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An angle that appears to be underexplored, is what happens if you let males compete for sustainability. We might be underestimating the effect of classical (or perhaps even biological) provider roles of males, i.e. the amassment of resources to attract a mate. If we could transform this in competition in sustainability, then it might make a huge difference. Current approaches to sustainability might exactly fail beca…

I've made this observation as well. It goes further than diet, of course. Cars and clothes is another example. The only thing that could change this behavior is if women selected for mates practicing sustainability.

I agree. If the women in my generation viewed sustainability and a low ecological footprint as attractive, all I'd do is work on global warming and poverty rather than study algorithms to make money.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#400

Post by logfromblammo » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:56 PM UTC

CalRobert wrote: post #368

ksdale wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of tangential, but I have a similar thought whenever someone says they don't want to have kids because they don't want to "give up their freedom." No one bats an eye at the idea of spending 60 hours a week between work and commuting. A lot of young people don't even particularly care that much where they work, as long as the pay is ok, as opposed to say, starting their own business and making less money but havi…

I just had a kid, and I understand this idea completely. I like being a parent but among other things, it means that major life decisions are MUCH more constrained. Want to live somewhere else? Hope the schools are decent. Want to live in the city? Hope you can afford a bigger flat. Want to go on a holiday? Hope you're ok with a pissed off kid (and neighbours) on a flight, or lots of time spent entertaining them on a…

"It gets easier" is a lie that the longer-serving parents tell the fresh meat, so they have some hope to cling to whenever they start to go crazy. Maybe it gets easier after they get a stable job and move out; I'll let you know after my anecdata results come in.

Sure, you eventually stop changing diapers, but that chore gets replaced by something else. And that one by something else, over and over. You're a debugger and fixer for a general-purpose natural intelligence project, and you have to strike a balance between two goals: it won't get destroyed by the world, and it won't destroy the world.