Managers are bad and make the jobs bad and then the people get bad. Shit flows downhill
Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?
61–70 of 318 posts
Re: Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?
#62People mentioned they had it easier in the past. It's true, it was easier. The world was not as fast as it is now. The world needs to slow down a bit. Slowing down would benefit both the planet and the people.
Re: Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?
#63I 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…
Same. What's crazier now is nobody in management seems to want to take a risk, when the risks are so much lower. We have better information, blogs, posts on how others solved issue, yet managers are still like "we can't risk changing our backend from dog shit to postgres". . . .when in the 90s you would literally be figuring it all out yourself, making a gut call and you'd be supported to venture into the unknown.
now it's all RSU, Stock Prices, FAANG ego stroking and mad dashes for the acquihire exit pushing out as much garbage as possible while managers shine it up like AI goodness
Re: Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?
#64I 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…
I've always thought if I gave better estimates about how long things would take, my schedule would support a decent job.
But black swans seem to be more common than anticipated.
(I also wonder - over your career, do you naturally move up to jobs with higher salaries and higher expectations?)
Re: Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?
#65I’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…
>Now I hire local professionals, even if they cost more. Their experience and trustworthiness save me time and frustration. I've found the exact opposite. The deeper the moat the bigger the jerks. I can pick up a guy at home depot who'll bust ass as hard as I will at a very reasonable price. Can't say that (especially the first part) about most professionals. Anything with a license or high capital investment keeping…
there are probably other factors than "how much are they"
Re: Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is my experience as well. In the late 90s/early 2000s I had the luxury of a lot of time to deeply and learn Unix, Perl, Java, web development, etc., and it was all self-directed. Now with Agile, literally every hour is accounted for, though we of course have other ways of wasting time by overestimating tasks and creating unnecessary do-nothing stories in order to inflate metrics and justify dead space in the spr…
>> literally every hour is accounted for I saw one company where early-career BA/PMs (often offshore) would sit alongside developers and "keep them company" almost all day via zoom.
Everyone's complaining about that as a developer, and rightly so. But that can't be easy for the PMs, either, trying to find a way to "add value" when they have no idea what's going on.
I'd expect there to be some "unexpected network outages" regularly in that kind of situation...
Re: Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is my experience as well. In the late 90s/early 2000s I had the luxury of a lot of time to deeply and learn Unix, Perl, Java, web development, etc., and it was all self-directed. Now with Agile, literally every hour is accounted for, though we of course have other ways of wasting time by overestimating tasks and creating unnecessary do-nothing stories in order to inflate metrics and justify dead space in the spr…
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
Re: Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?
#68Earlier 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…
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 phenomenon being discussed here is a type of overfitting:
https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....
The last 50 years or so of managerial practice has been a recipe for overfitting with a brutal emphasis on measuring, optimizing, and stack ranking everything.
I think an argument can be made that this is an age of overfitting everywhere.
Re: Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?
#69Earlier 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…
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
Re: Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What I learned is to not to be afraid. Regardless of what is happening around you. Were you perhaps financially secure enough not to have to fear anything? Or tenured (Bell Labs!) that unemployment wasn't actually a threat to you? YMMV.
I long for the day when someone can give advice based on their own personal experience without someone else being like “well that won’t work for literally everyone” Yeah obviously. It’s a personal anecdote.
What's the _point_ of the anecdote, though? You're taking up everybody's time to tell a story, do us a favor to have a relevant point.
"Have no fear" doesn't apply to the article, at all. You might as well write "what I learned was to not stick legos up my nostril". Also good advice. Also not applicable.
It's fine if it doesn't work for everyone, it's annoying if it isn't relevant to anyone.