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As usual, the really interesting bits are in the comments. I especially find "bullshit jobs" -> Basic Income especially true. I've always thought the same thing
by temporallobe 9y ago
As usual, the really interesting bits are in the comments. I especially find "bullshit jobs" -> Basic Income especially true. I've always thought the same thing for as long as I've had a professional career. I worked in the aerospace industry as my first programming job and saw so much bullshit flying left and right, and identified that at least 60% of my coworkers and 80% of my bosses did exactly nothing but bullshit like reporting and summarizing on things that were already reported or summarized, or creating useless documentation that had to be created because of some arbitrary standards. We were very top-heavy and at one point I saw a hilarious org chart where there were more managers than engineers. Then one day I thought to myself that this whole project was basically equivalent to wealth redistribution and was not at all the meritocracy I had envisioned it to be. Now, 20ish years later, I'm pretty damn jaded and the bullshit has only increased, but now it's just more cleverly disguised in management methodologies like "SCRUM" and "Agile", with all of that deeply-imbedded culture and terminology baked into our everyday tools like the Atlassian toolset (Jira, Kahnban boards, etc.). Bullshit is here to stay, but in a sense it saves us from our own incompetence.
- javajosh 9y agoI see Scrum/etc as a program for people. It implies certain values, and defines new words, but in that sense it's like any program (in the machine sense). You may not like it, but it's hardly bullshit in the sense of the article.
- incompatible 9y agoThe idea that a lot of people are wasting a lot of their time on bullshit doesn't imply that there's nothing useful that they could be doing instead.
- asveikau 9y ago> Then one day I thought to myself that this whole project was basically equivalent to wealth redistribution and was not at all the meritocracy I had envisioned it to be. This is precisely why I have loathed the cult of "pay per performance". Bonuses, salary bumps and promotions become a sort of (I wish this were an exaggeration of terms but it isn't) conspiracy to pass wealth and prestige to buddies. But they fill it with phony paperwork and propaganda about how the buddies have been objectively evaluated and are all top performers. If you are an honest worker doing good things but not in a management in-crowd, this can have crippling effects on morale.
- jacques_chester 9y agoI've seen agile work and not work. It doesn't transmit well from a book or blog post. I think it's fairer to say that excitement generated by a new concept attracts dilution by bullshit artists and folks learning via the telephone game. By the time the hubbub dies down, the original sparks of insight have long since drowned in a sea of mediocrity, ranging from the shallows of well-meaning ignorance through to the dangerous deeps of machiavellianism.
- tynpeddler 9y agoI worked for a fortune 500 company that had been developing their own in house software for 30 years. They decided that they wanted to switch from their traditional waterfall approach, to scrum and agile. Honestly, the transition went pretty well. Meetings decreased, test coverage went up, feature delivery rate seemed to increase. People were spending more time working on the problem at hand, and less time creating and managing huge requirement documents. There were rough spots. Obviously requirements didn't go away, we just went to a just-in-time model instead of a heavily front loaded model, and sometimes it was difficult to manage just-in-time requirements in a way that gave everyone clear oversight as to what was being implemented (our business rules were extremely complex for regulatory). One interesting thing I noticed was that every time there was a problem, people would try to add more layers of bureaucracy to "solve" the problem. The hardest part we found was figuring out which ceremonies were useful to stop future problems and which "solutions" were just a reflexive attempt to go back to the way things were before and make things more difficult for everyone.
- ohazi 9y agoThe purpose of most corporate jobs is to provide day-care for adults.