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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?

#71

Post by kayodelycaon »

zeroCalories wrote: post #40
brudgers wrote: post #13

The gig economy is way worse than the author describes. Gig workers can't advance with the companies they work for. Gig workers can't build a network with their coworkers because they don't have coworkers...and there's a good chance that they are competing for work with other people working for the same company. There are dead end day jobs, and then there is gig work.

This isn't too different from most low-skill jobs. Most people don't aspire to be assistant manager at McDonalds, they do it for a while, build a resume, then move.

It’s vastly different.

Gig workers are literally disposable robots. You’re part of a computer program. There is no human relationship. At least a McDonald’s worker can talk to their manager.

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

#72

Post by MikeTheGreat »

TuringNYC wrote: post #20
temporallobe wrote: post #10

Earlier 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.

Twice the billable hours! /s

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

#73

Post by squiggleblaz »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #47
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…

It's fascinating that you end up sort of doing the work twice, you build an excel (or jira) model of the work work along with the actual work to be done. Often this extends to the entire organization, where you have like this parallel dimension of spreadsheets and planning existing on top of everything. Eats resources like crazy to uphold.

Yes but metrics! How can the CEO look like they know what's happening without understanding anything if they don't have everyone producing numbers?

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

#74

Post by saulpw »

5w3llth3n wrote: post #32

The solution is simple; quit jobs, assemble our own shit. In the US, lean in to the 2A and tell the We peacefully assemble around jobs . Just peacefully assemble around a new meme of telling the walking dead to pound sand. Education worked to an extent; most will not devolve into dumb fucks. Pretty pathetic seeing the adults kowtowed by the ossified establishment.

Did you read the part where the OP was unable to assemble her own shit, and thus had to get help?

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

#75

Post by zusammen »

p1necone wrote: post #28
rqtwteye wrote: post #3

I 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…

> 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 that when management wants to impose quotas or tracking, they remember that they’d be enforcing this on a whole team of fighters… and suddenly they realize that squeezing the workers isn’t worth it.

The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing.

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

#76

Post by lesuorac »

I mean, if just hire somebody without any sort of training it should just be expected that they're bad?

Like show me where in the Apple training they teach how to set ringtones?

UPS straight up flies people to training [1]. Of course their drivers are going to be better.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/UPS/comments/16oizrm/hiring_and_tra...

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

#77

Post by cnasc »

zw123456 wrote: post #8

I recently retired after 45 years in tech. I started out in 1978 at Bell Labs. I have had great jobs and terrible jobs. Great bosses and horrific bosses. And all the things in between. I did not just survive, I thrived and beyond and worked at 3 start ups and a bunch of other companies large and small. What I learned is to not to be afraid. Regardless of what is happening around you. Fear is the enemy. Don't be afrai…

Which Bell Labs? Are you still in the area? I’m minutes away from Murray Hill and a lot of what you’re saying resonates with me (~10 years into my career and starting to lean into what I previously thought was weird).

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

#78

Post by potato3732842 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #16
rqtwteye wrote: post #3

I 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…

> 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 justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. Software development for a long time had the benefit that managers didn't get tech. They had no chance of verifying if what the nerds told them actually made sense. Nowa…

I commend you for having an opinion so bad I can't tell if you're satirizing marxists or not.

Let me ask you this, would you rather be managed by a hierarchy made up of people who don't understand what you do? Because I assure you it is far worse than being managed by "class traitors".

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

#79

Post by zusammen »

api wrote: post #68
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 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.

[dead]

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

#80

Post by kayodelycaon »

dartos wrote: post #35
tmpz22 wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

It’s not just a personal anecdote. It’s telling people what they should do.

A personal anecdote would be saying this is what worked for me. Not this is how you should do it.

It comes off as telling you what your problem is and how you should fix it.

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