9 ms·

The 40M dollar job

208 points by ibudiallo 8y ago

barefoot 8y ago
If the latest WEF report on employment is any indication (http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2018.pdf http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2018.pdf), a significant volume of workers are either already misemployed or are about to be misemployed. I get a strong sense of this any time I get out of my office. I'm sure part of it is because I don't prefer interacting with humans but - as the owner of a machine learning consulting company - I see few jobs that can't be automated today with current technology given enough time. Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI.
- mbreedlove 8y ago
  > Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI. I've never heard it put so bluntly, but you're right.
- ed312 8y ago
  Completely agree - we should be working to _reduce_ the number of "jobs".
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Run for office, run for office, run for office. Crafting public policy to handle the situation is the only path to success. If you're building the automation and there are no public policy guardrails and safety nets, it only makes the problem worse. Start ratcheting down the work week (40 hrs->32 hours, 5 days->4 days) for starts, considering the productivity already realized in the workplace over the last several decades, data showing how many hours a week people aren't working at their job, at that work will expand to fill the time you allow it to fill (Parkinson's law). The world does not need more incubators and startups (for the most part). It needs better public policy, governing, and a more equitable distribution of resources. "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." -- William Gibson
    - woolvalley 8y ago
      There are jobs that need to be done, but not enough funding for it. A lot of people could use some therapy or other mental health resources, but don't because of a lack of funding for it. It lacks funding because the people who need it most often are the poorest among us. Same with crumbling infrastructure, affordable housing & education and other such things in the USA.
      - toomuchtodo 8y ago
        This doesn't conflict with what I said, and I do not disagree.
    - odorousrex 8y ago
      If I were ever in such a position of power I would aggressively push for 32 hour work weeks by 2022. (Tapering down each year until then). I would loop most salaried (OT exempt) jobs into this category as well as I think a lot of "OT exempt" employees should not really be classified as such. (Including SW engineers and DevOps ppl) 32 hours a week. Every hour after 32 and before 40 would be time and half. Every hour after 40 and before 50 would be double. Hours after 50 would be billed at triple the hourly rate. I would only change the hours. Not rates, or anything else. Let the market settle out the rest. I've been working as a SWE now at 35 hours a week for almost 4 years (admittedly at a lowend SWE salary [but still much higher than average, we live pretty comfortably]) and honestly I can't even imagine going back to 40+ hours a week (or 60+ when I was a fresh out of college kid at a start up) The extra time now I spend with my family, and just getting stuff done has been so much more valuable than I ever could have imagined. It's something I wish I could spread to others. When I was at a startup I scoffed at people going home at 5-5:15. Considered them not "passionate about the product". Oh how misguided I was...but I digress.
      - harryh 8y ago
        You would make it illegal for someone else to hire me at $100/hr for a 40 hour week? What business is it of yours? Geez.
      - 8y ago
  - jniedrauer 8y ago
    I've been waiting my entire adult life for a politician to run on a platform of "less jobs." To me this seems like the patently obvious goal of all this technology we've been building. Instead, we're living in a bizarre opposite world where nothing makes sense.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      Keep your eyes out for a candidate who does run on that in the next federal election cycle.
    - harryh 8y ago
      In order to have less jobs, then people have to consume less stuff. Luckily, you don't have to wait for everyone to buy into this agenda, you can make that choice for yourself: https://www.google.com/search?q=financial+independence+retire+early https://www.google.com/search?q=financial+independence+retir... Not saying this is the right thing for everyone. Lots of people would hate it, and that's fine. The nice thing is that we all get to choose what's best for ourselves.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
      As soon as technology itself starts electing politicians without human intervention, we'll have that. Until then, well...
    - Thriptic 8y ago
      People want more things and they want to be better than other people. People want a higher quality of life. People want the social status and personal gratification that comes with performing higher status, skilled work well. It's not as easy as simple saying "you don't have to work anymore to have a decent quality of life". You would have to profoundly retool peoples' expectations and the way we view work as a society. I know several people who could retire tomorrow and never work again but they keep working away anyway. If your premise is we would all like to stop working but can't because we aren't deploying tech correctly or don't have the money to do so, why do large numbers of these people exist?
  - forty 8y ago
    I don't understand this theory. If we do that, how people that don't already have a lot of money are supposed to get money to purchase food for exemple ?
    - jtolmar 8y ago
      Don't use money to distribute things needed for basic human existence. Throw out all your ideas about economics and politics. You want as many people as possible to have a comfortable enough life to pursue things they find fulfilling without stress about survival. You're an engineer, how do you do it?
      - forty 8y ago
        Well, it's probably cultural and because I love my job, but I have a hard time imagining a fulfilling live without a job :)
- TomMarius 8y ago
  > Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI. I am not a supporter of UBI because of the commonly intended source of money, but I agree with you. IMO we will need a radical overhaul of our society pretty soon (~20-30 years).
- i_am_proteus 8y ago
  Especially given that the Organization Men[0] (and women) whose jobs can be easily obviated via technology typically enjoy better pay and working conditions than e.g. nurses and elementary school teachers. My litmus test for how actually necessary a job is: what does the organization do when the worker takes a month of parental leave?
  - woolvalley 8y ago
    Find other people to cover their job role? Or their project is put on pause until they are back.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    > My litmus test for how actually necessary a job is: what does the organization do when the worker takes a month of parental leave? this seems more or less orthogonal to how necessary a job is. really what this question tests is time sensitivity. if you're the only engineer working on a project that needs to be done within a year, you could conceivably go on leave any month other than the last one or two of the year. if you're a fast food worker and you want to take a month off, they will either need to hire someone else entirely or make you carefully coordinate getting your shifts covered by co-workers. I don't think this implies the fast food employee is more necessary than the engineer.
- MSM 8y ago
  > Most jobs are bullshit jobs. This has been true for hundreds of years though. It's been shown time and time again that some kind of automation breakthrough eliminates jobs but people need work so new jobs are created. Engines were created to eliminate tons of manual labor jobs, we had looms, mills, automated mining, printing changes, etc. and here we are still working. Five years ago we started to automate the food service industry. Now instead of driving to McDonald's to get a burger made by a human we can call up Uber Eats to have a human go get us a burger that was made by a robot. Is it a bullshit task? Maybe, but I can't see how one day we'll wake up and all of a sudden there will be no jobs.
  - dv_dt 8y ago
    It's been true for hundreds of years, but we live in a civilization with higher expectations of stability now. People struggled but living conditions - and stability improved over those hundreds of years. But if you look at the overall stats, we are going in reverse on stability. More and more people are falling out of a middle class existence - will there be more jobs yes. Will there be as many, allowing a higher than subsistence living? That is very unclear even now before even more automation comes.
    - harryh 8y ago
      More and more people are falling out of a middle class existence Um, no. This is wrong. Living standards around the world are improving like they never have in human history.
      - dv_dt 8y ago
        I think what we are seeing is world wide there is improvement, but our economic system has a non-uniform performance depending on the state of the region. In a relatively undeveloped area, expansion into basically non-serviced markets is efficient and an improvement. In a relatively developed area (e.g. the US and many first world nations), it is failing. In the US for example, life expectancy has dropped three years running. More and more people fall to a median income that doesn't even let them have kids and send them to college, and seems to be falling to where they can't even pay for minor emergencies. That's not improvement.
- czbond 8y ago
  > "Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI." Disagree, for now. Your statement wasn't feasible a few years ago. It took a growing volume of practitioners, readily available tool sets, scaling technologies, and education to get to this point. Many knowledge and execution jobs will be redundant, and when appropriate automation and sensors combine, more labor jobs become redundant.
- artiscode 8y ago
  > Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI. Based on my experience - the cheaper the labor, the more bullshit jobs. If human resources are expensive, companies are very keen on adapting automation and getting rid of humans. But if a human being for 8 hours a day costs you 500 dollars per month, why bother?
- alecco 8y ago
  Yes, the next recession is going to be brutal. That's when all big corps do their cleaning. In the last one even Google, a growing company with deep pockets, got rid of hundreds of people.
- comice 8y ago
  > Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI. I've see this said similarly before but find it unbelievable. Why would any company want to employ people en masse as a benefit primarily for the employees? How would that even arise? And if it did, how wouldn't another more efficient company out-compete them? I accept that it's possible companies don't want to invest in or take the risk of automation, but that's nothing like it being some kind of conscious UBI-like policy decision.
  - harryh 8y ago
    I think this happens because a lot of people (especially younger people) have an outsized idea of how important a job needs to be in order for it to be meaningful (and hence, not bullshit). If you aren't CHANGING THE WORLD or some such, you have a bullshit job. In reality, the vast majority of things that need doing in the world are pretty mundane. Most of us just have a small part in a mundane machine. But that does't mean it's not a part that matters. It just doesn't matter very much, because you are one of 7 billion people. And that's OK.
    - dpark 8y ago
      > If you aren't CHANGING THE WORLD or some such, you have a bullshit job. Are you saying that you think any non-world-changing job is bullshit or that you think other people hold that view? Either way, this is a bullshit definition. Growing food isn't a "bullshit" job but also doesn't change the world. Most jobs don't "change the world", regardless of how important they are. Most people who think they are changing the world are just self-delusional.
      - harryh 8y ago
        I'm saying that I think other people hold that view. I do not hold that view. I'm sorry if that was unclear in my comment. I basically agree with everything you said.
    - NorthOf33rd 8y ago
      The OP references the Misemployment essay which very clearly takes this view. "He is joined in the misemployment ranks by people who make cigarettes, addictive but sterile television shows, badly designed condos, ill-fitting and shoddy clothes, deceptive advertisements, artery-clogging biscuits and highly-sugared drinks (however delicious)." I think our bullshit jobs guy is a bullshit writer, personally. Shoddy condos, you might not like, but they provide housing. Shoddy clothes provide warmth. You might not like it, you might not agree with the incentives behind it, but they can be and are important parts of some people's existence. https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/unemployment-down-at-last-misemployment-bad-as-ever/ https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/unemployment-d...
- southerndrift 8y ago
  The twist is that you have to do it that way to get the jobs done that nobody would do if UBI were available.
  - pkaye 8y ago
    The pay would have to go above the UBI threshold to get someone to do it.
- airstrike 8y ago
  > Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI. Because our educational system has remained virtually unchanged throughout the past 100+ years while the world in which it exists transformed radically. Education needs to be society's number one goal. [0] Even if you don't subscribe to the idea that AI / automation will replace [all / most / many] jobs, the world is already facing secular challenges due primarily to globalization. Cheap labor has been outsourced to developing nations, who are not going to "develop" just because of that. They will all need to agree to build institutions that enforce rule of law in order to bring about economic prosperity. This is an incredibly complex problem[1], and personally I can only think of historical examples that transpired in the form of revolutions – Industrial, American, French or otherwise. So lately I've become convinced that nothing will effectively change from the sort of incremental tweaks policy makers discuss. I'm even more cynical than that as I strongly believe policy makers in positions of power have no incentive to do anything other than that which ensures the continuation of their power. In other words, they create platforms that cater to the largest subset of potential voters by optimizing between issues that matter the most to people and issues that keep away the smallest number of potential voters, effectively landing somewhere in a wishy washy middle that's profoundly devoid of purpose. In order for humanity to overcome its current obstacles, it will need a paradigm shift. In developing nations, the population needs to be educated enough to want to create institutions that enforce rule of law. In developed nations, the population needs to be educated enough to be able to take on more complex, specialized, service-type jobs. The problem is that this population is already very well educated compared to the rest of the world and we haven't yet devised a way to level up our education system, probably because this would require the whole of society to care for this topic at least an order of magnitude more than it currently does. Unfortunately, I don't think people are incentivized to change their perspectives on the topic until the economic wheels (i.e. prosperity levels) grind to a screeching halt. –––––––––– ⁰ https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/28340/9781464810961.pdf https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/2... [PDF] ¹ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305750X10002317 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03057...
- fanzhang 8y ago
  I had to look this up, and the term "misemployed" seems silly. Is a job only a "true job" only if it met some millennial definition of fulfillment and "flourishing"? In the article, someone dressed as a hot dog doing marketing is misemployed because it's not "contributing to human welfare and flourishing". If that's the case, then the century-long history of employment in post-industrial-revolution society is a story of misemployment. Is tightening a nut repeatedly 40 hours a week under the job guarantee of a 1950s GM true "flourishing"? And is the 1850s Irish farmer racing to harvest blighted potatoes misemployed as well? (Perhaps not, since the survival state creates an certain "authenticity" versus the "banality" of guaranteed life?)
- hoaw 8y ago
  I don't disagree with your point, but I do at least slightly disagree with your perspective. This isn't something like an unavoidable feature of the future that is going to affect a subset of society. It is that we are fundamentally doing the wrong things. Even in your own, and many of ours, situation there are people struggling with education, housing and stability. So even if you are keeping up with the future in the positive sense, you aren't protected from the negatives. Something like UBI isn't going to fix that stability has increasingly become something valuable to be traded. This isn't however something unique. It happens at least to some degree every time there is a shift. People start capitalizing on the positives and the negatives eventually catches up. When the greatest shift is in how to handle the negatives. That is really how to keep up with the future. Once there is a solution to how people e.g. can get education, housing and stability you can automate everything you want. But it often requires giving up the former for the latter. You can't have a high cost of living and automate all the bullshit jobs without consequences. Because the bullshit jobs are paying for that.
- conanbatt 8y ago
  If only engineers didn't confuse their craft with economics. Higher productivity will decrease the amount of labor that goes to those now productive endeavors, and go to those that arent as productive, like the service industry in general, healthcare, entertainment, etc. Much how like all of that started when less labor was required for farming.
- jjtheblunt 8y ago
  UBI ?
  - earenndil 8y ago
    Universal Basic Income.
- RA_Fisher 8y ago
  Ah but here's the caveat: "given enough time." For most jobs the time line is much longer than you'd think. Also, we're always discovering new jobs. Misemployment misunderstands what it is employees do. Employees help a business economize (produce value for folks better, cheaper, faster). The worker did a fantastic job and should be very proud of their $40M acomplishment. Ever notice how the best employees are always being given new jobs? That's because they're finding new jobs. Doing exactly the same task for many years is risky business because the repetitive nature lends itself to automation. The good news is that employees can avoid this. The recipe is finding new ways to create value for the business (and hence customers).
csours 8y ago
Re: manual health checks - I worked in an automobile factory in the mid-2000's. When I started, the healthcheck was a checklist on a website. Some of the items were grouped on websites or application pages, but many of them were spread out. A year before I started, there wasn't even a checklist on a webpage. After a while, I started scripting as much of the checklist as I could. My point of view being: my job is to improve the tools needed to do my job. I thought that the apps should be able to quickly and easily provide their statuses. What I wanted was something like spring boot's /health endpoint(s). I don't know if I would ever have invented a health endpoint, but once I found out about it, it's obvious. --- This wasn't my only job in the plant, I did quite a bit more: desktop support, application support, hosting, app scripting, plant floor support, internet of manufacturing things (PLC support). Anyway, that job is gone now. Some of it is spread to other teams and ticket queues, but some of it is just gone. Part of that is politics, part is bullshit, part is misemployment, a large part was contract structure.
franzb 8y ago
I found this story particularly well written so I looked for the author's name. Ibrahim Diallo... That name ringed a bell... Fired by a machine! That was him too, a recommended read: https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me
- jmiserez 8y ago
  An instant internet classic...! Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645
  - ibudiallo 8y ago
    Thank you all. I may just quote you on that.
    - syndacks 8y ago
      I came here to say the author is a good writer. So yea, you have a way of saying saying something complex/deep in an eloquent, even simple way. I've been reading a lot of Raymond Carver lately. You should read some of him if you're keen. I like his WWTAWWTAL collection of short stories.
      - ibudiallo 8y ago
        Thank you so much. I'll check out Raymond Carver, thanks for the recommendation.
LeonM 8y ago
If so many people are being misemployed, why were they hired in the first place? Did they start off doing important work, and then slowly became irrelevant, or do big corporates just hire people without having a clear task for them (yet). I'm genuinely curious, I've been self employed for about my entire career, so I have no experience with corporate lifestyle.
- thesandlord 8y ago
  > do big corporates just hire people without having a clear task for them Not all of them, but in my experience, yes.
- LanceH 8y ago
  Big companies definitely hire people -- at all levels -- who are completely irrelevant. Managers have a big incentive to hire more people because they will then have more direct reports. Directors want more managers. VP's want more directors, etc... I was on a small team at a big company in 1998. Due to recent mergers there were duplicated teams across the company. A big initiative came out that our team was in line to respond to. We (about 10 of us) put together a highly functional prototype in a couple months, put it forward showing we could take it on. Another team went out and hired 200 people and had no other presentation than an org structure. They won, and I learned a lesson.
- chocolatebunny 8y ago
  Some middle managers will overestimate how much time and people they need for a project just so they can be on time and under budget. And once you hire someone it's really hard to get rid of them until there is a layoff cycle. And usually on layoff time there's plenty of people who are actually actively making things harder for people that need firing (they try to do work but are bad at it, which causes more work for the people that are actually productive) that you don't really get around to fire the people that are just useless.
draw_down 8y ago
It's almost always a mistake to view your work as important, at least if you work in a typical corporation. Shovel shit and get paid, try to find a better pile of shit to shovel, and/or a better paycheck. That's all there is.
- hathym 8y ago
  +1000
CrowFly 8y ago
"40M dollars" is $40,000. When talking finance, it's $40MM. @dang, please fix title https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181917/mixing-use-of-k-for-thousands-and-mm-for-millions https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181917/mixing-us...
- p1necone 8y ago
  What? That might be the case in a specific industry (finance, in certain places, apparently), but the Hacker News community is not a finance company. Common parlance is that M means millions and being pedantic in the wrong context doesn't help anyone.
- tumahimikka 8y ago
  That's for finance you pedant. Non-finance people never use those
paulcole 8y ago
If you don't think your job is a bullshit job, you just haven't thought about it long enough.
mswen 8y ago
In a related note. I had a new client in fall of 2018. The purpose was to build a system that collected and tracked competitors prices across a portfolio of enterprise products. When we first started talking the Director of Operations indicated that they were looking at hiring an entry level pricing analyst who would track competitors prices and use that market information plus other internal information to set appropriate prices for their own company. This was across about 4000 model/part numbers. About 40 to 50 hours into the project I have a show and tell demo on what I had developed so far. At the end of the meeting the Director of Operations leans back and says. "What I envisioned as the never ending, never caught up task of collecting and organizing competitive pricing is now going to be 1 or 2 hours a day for someone." Developer me was proud to hear that. I heard/understood the real business requirements and developed a system that automates away 90% of the repetitive drudgery of the overall task leaving someone better able to spend time on edge cases and what is changing in the market. On the other hand I felt slightly guilty that maybe now someone who is already too busy will get this added to their plate because it is just an hour or two a day. And, that someone else who could really use an entry level analysis job, won't get one because I automated it away before they could even get started. In the end developer me will keep building stuff like this because that is what is valued and helps pay my bills.
- harryh 8y ago
  And, that someone else who could really use an entry level analysis job, won't get one because I automated it away before they could even get started. You didn't take a job away from anyone. You freed up someone from drudgery so that they could do more valuable work instead. This is EXACTLY how society gets richer. We have hundreds of years of evidence that this is the case.
  - mswen 8y ago
    Yes. I mostly believe this as well. I have little or no guilt about it. Especially since the person was not yet hired. But when I think about stuff like this happening at scale across tens of thousands of small private companies it starts to add up to a lot of missing entry level jobs. I will keep automating away the drudgery in part because it is inevitable and I might as well be someone who profits from the master trend rather than be trampled by the trend.
ianbicking 8y ago
Reading the story, there's lots of possible reasons here: 1. He was being told something was important, and it simply wasn't. They lied to him to make him feel good. Probably not? 2. He was doing something that was important to other people, and those people incorrectly believed they were important. Given that the department was closed, this might go several levels up. 3. The approach of the department or group was misaligned. "Misaligned" being a way to say that either (a) it wasn't a very good approach when the full picture was taken into account (the picture from an altitude higher than the department), or (b) it was a good approach, but someone else was able to convince people higher up that it wasn't. 4. It was important, and whoever cancelled it didn't realize it. The chickens may eventually come to roost. 5. It was an important thing embedded in an unimportant thing. Maybe the department really was ready to be disbanded, dispersed, eliminated. It's likely that the department had many duties. Did someone actually look carefully at each one, and decide where they all should go? 6. Someone needed the project (or whatever larger project his project was embedded in), but didn't know it. This is a danger of a proactive project: if the person who gets the value from it isn't asking for the thing, they might not appreciate the value of the thing itself. 7. It's a valuable project, but the cost (real or perceived) of carrying it through other organizational change is considered excessive. 8. Management was simply too lazy to decide if it was important. Maybe they didn't have the resource leeway to keep it running without a fight, which makes it easier to be lazy. And there's yet more possibilities than that. I'm thinking about this right now, as I'm in the process of tearing down a large amount of my own work. I could believe it's just a sunk cost, a failed investment... but I'm pretty sure it's not. It might be the right choice to throw stuff away. Strategies change. Old theories work themselves out until they don't seem to offer much potential, and then everything based on the old theory is in question. We've never really known what the underlying ROI on anything is, though we're throwing it away so we can make room for other similar things; the organization is trading a known unknown for an unknown unknown. And none of us will really know what the right decision was. If I was making the decision, I wouldn't know either.
sailfast 8y ago
Random editing feedback for the OP: was “closet” pronounced in a particular accent? In US English it would probably sound more like “claw set” than “Cool Set” so it took me a second to get that reference (in the end this detail didn’t add much to the management’s character so I’d either refine it or relate to the firing or overall narrative arc a bit more) A good read - how the author will novelize this anecdote into a larger story will be interesting!
- ibudiallo 8y ago
  Thank you for catching that. Let's blame it on the guy that is not too versed in sed[1] but still used it to find and replace a pattern and it all went wrong. [1]: https://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/x23170.html https://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/x23170.html
dugluak 8y ago
Nice little story. I was kinda wondering what happened to Jason. At the start I felt like Jason was the lead character and at the end the story would return to him. Where is Jason ???
- ibudiallo 8y ago
  Jason is doing just fine.

208 points by ibudiallo 8y ago

If the latest WEF report on employment is any indication (http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2018.pdf http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2018.pdf), a significant volume of workers are either already misemployed or are about to be misemployed. I get a strong sense of this any time I get out of my office. I'm sure part of it is because I don't prefer interacting with humans but - as the owner of a machine learning consulting company - I see few jobs that can't be automated today with current technology given enough time. Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI.

mbreedlove 8y ago
> Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI. I've never heard it put so bluntly, but you're right.
ed312 8y ago
Completely agree - we should be working to _reduce_ the number of "jobs".
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Run for office, run for office, run for office. Crafting public policy to handle the situation is the only path to success. If you're building the automation and there are no public policy guardrails and safety nets, it only makes the problem worse. Start ratcheting down the work week (40 hrs->32 hours, 5 days->4 days) for starts, considering the productivity already realized in the workplace over the last several decades, data showing how many hours a week people aren't working at their job, at that work will expand to fill the time you allow it to fill (Parkinson's law). The world does not need more incubators and startups (for the most part). It needs better public policy, governing, and a more equitable distribution of resources. "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." -- William Gibson
  - woolvalley 8y ago
    There are jobs that need to be done, but not enough funding for it. A lot of people could use some therapy or other mental health resources, but don't because of a lack of funding for it. It lacks funding because the people who need it most often are the poorest among us. Same with crumbling infrastructure, affordable housing & education and other such things in the USA.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      This doesn't conflict with what I said, and I do not disagree.
  - odorousrex 8y ago
    If I were ever in such a position of power I would aggressively push for 32 hour work weeks by 2022. (Tapering down each year until then). I would loop most salaried (OT exempt) jobs into this category as well as I think a lot of "OT exempt" employees should not really be classified as such. (Including SW engineers and DevOps ppl) 32 hours a week. Every hour after 32 and before 40 would be time and half. Every hour after 40 and before 50 would be double. Hours after 50 would be billed at triple the hourly rate. I would only change the hours. Not rates, or anything else. Let the market settle out the rest. I've been working as a SWE now at 35 hours a week for almost 4 years (admittedly at a lowend SWE salary [but still much higher than average, we live pretty comfortably]) and honestly I can't even imagine going back to 40+ hours a week (or 60+ when I was a fresh out of college kid at a start up) The extra time now I spend with my family, and just getting stuff done has been so much more valuable than I ever could have imagined. It's something I wish I could spread to others. When I was at a startup I scoffed at people going home at 5-5:15. Considered them not "passionate about the product". Oh how misguided I was...but I digress.
    - harryh 8y ago
      You would make it illegal for someone else to hire me at $100/hr for a 40 hour week? What business is it of yours? Geez.
    - 8y ago
- jniedrauer 8y ago
  I've been waiting my entire adult life for a politician to run on a platform of "less jobs." To me this seems like the patently obvious goal of all this technology we've been building. Instead, we're living in a bizarre opposite world where nothing makes sense.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Keep your eyes out for a candidate who does run on that in the next federal election cycle.
  - harryh 8y ago
    In order to have less jobs, then people have to consume less stuff. Luckily, you don't have to wait for everyone to buy into this agenda, you can make that choice for yourself: https://www.google.com/search?q=financial+independence+retire+early https://www.google.com/search?q=financial+independence+retir... Not saying this is the right thing for everyone. Lots of people would hate it, and that's fine. The nice thing is that we all get to choose what's best for ourselves.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
    As soon as technology itself starts electing politicians without human intervention, we'll have that. Until then, well...
  - Thriptic 8y ago
    People want more things and they want to be better than other people. People want a higher quality of life. People want the social status and personal gratification that comes with performing higher status, skilled work well. It's not as easy as simple saying "you don't have to work anymore to have a decent quality of life". You would have to profoundly retool peoples' expectations and the way we view work as a society. I know several people who could retire tomorrow and never work again but they keep working away anyway. If your premise is we would all like to stop working but can't because we aren't deploying tech correctly or don't have the money to do so, why do large numbers of these people exist?
- forty 8y ago
  I don't understand this theory. If we do that, how people that don't already have a lot of money are supposed to get money to purchase food for exemple ?
  - jtolmar 8y ago
    Don't use money to distribute things needed for basic human existence. Throw out all your ideas about economics and politics. You want as many people as possible to have a comfortable enough life to pursue things they find fulfilling without stress about survival. You're an engineer, how do you do it?
    - forty 8y ago
      Well, it's probably cultural and because I love my job, but I have a hard time imagining a fulfilling live without a job :)
TomMarius 8y ago
> Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI. I am not a supporter of UBI because of the commonly intended source of money, but I agree with you. IMO we will need a radical overhaul of our society pretty soon (~20-30 years).
i_am_proteus 8y ago
Especially given that the Organization Men[0] (and women) whose jobs can be easily obviated via technology typically enjoy better pay and working conditions than e.g. nurses and elementary school teachers. My litmus test for how actually necessary a job is: what does the organization do when the worker takes a month of parental leave?
- woolvalley 8y ago
  Find other people to cover their job role? Or their project is put on pause until they are back.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  > My litmus test for how actually necessary a job is: what does the organization do when the worker takes a month of parental leave? this seems more or less orthogonal to how necessary a job is. really what this question tests is time sensitivity. if you're the only engineer working on a project that needs to be done within a year, you could conceivably go on leave any month other than the last one or two of the year. if you're a fast food worker and you want to take a month off, they will either need to hire someone else entirely or make you carefully coordinate getting your shifts covered by co-workers. I don't think this implies the fast food employee is more necessary than the engineer.
MSM 8y ago
> Most jobs are bullshit jobs. This has been true for hundreds of years though. It's been shown time and time again that some kind of automation breakthrough eliminates jobs but people need work so new jobs are created. Engines were created to eliminate tons of manual labor jobs, we had looms, mills, automated mining, printing changes, etc. and here we are still working. Five years ago we started to automate the food service industry. Now instead of driving to McDonald's to get a burger made by a human we can call up Uber Eats to have a human go get us a burger that was made by a robot. Is it a bullshit task? Maybe, but I can't see how one day we'll wake up and all of a sudden there will be no jobs.
- dv_dt 8y ago
  It's been true for hundreds of years, but we live in a civilization with higher expectations of stability now. People struggled but living conditions - and stability improved over those hundreds of years. But if you look at the overall stats, we are going in reverse on stability. More and more people are falling out of a middle class existence - will there be more jobs yes. Will there be as many, allowing a higher than subsistence living? That is very unclear even now before even more automation comes.
  - harryh 8y ago
    More and more people are falling out of a middle class existence Um, no. This is wrong. Living standards around the world are improving like they never have in human history.
    - dv_dt 8y ago
      I think what we are seeing is world wide there is improvement, but our economic system has a non-uniform performance depending on the state of the region. In a relatively undeveloped area, expansion into basically non-serviced markets is efficient and an improvement. In a relatively developed area (e.g. the US and many first world nations), it is failing. In the US for example, life expectancy has dropped three years running. More and more people fall to a median income that doesn't even let them have kids and send them to college, and seems to be falling to where they can't even pay for minor emergencies. That's not improvement.
czbond 8y ago
> "Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI." Disagree, for now. Your statement wasn't feasible a few years ago. It took a growing volume of practitioners, readily available tool sets, scaling technologies, and education to get to this point. Many knowledge and execution jobs will be redundant, and when appropriate automation and sensors combine, more labor jobs become redundant.
artiscode 8y ago
> Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI. Based on my experience - the cheaper the labor, the more bullshit jobs. If human resources are expensive, companies are very keen on adapting automation and getting rid of humans. But if a human being for 8 hours a day costs you 500 dollars per month, why bother?
alecco 8y ago
Yes, the next recession is going to be brutal. That's when all big corps do their cleaning. In the last one even Google, a growing company with deep pockets, got rid of hundreds of people.
comice 8y ago
> Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI. I've see this said similarly before but find it unbelievable. Why would any company want to employ people en masse as a benefit primarily for the employees? How would that even arise? And if it did, how wouldn't another more efficient company out-compete them? I accept that it's possible companies don't want to invest in or take the risk of automation, but that's nothing like it being some kind of conscious UBI-like policy decision.
- harryh 8y ago
  I think this happens because a lot of people (especially younger people) have an outsized idea of how important a job needs to be in order for it to be meaningful (and hence, not bullshit). If you aren't CHANGING THE WORLD or some such, you have a bullshit job. In reality, the vast majority of things that need doing in the world are pretty mundane. Most of us just have a small part in a mundane machine. But that does't mean it's not a part that matters. It just doesn't matter very much, because you are one of 7 billion people. And that's OK.
  - dpark 8y ago
    > If you aren't CHANGING THE WORLD or some such, you have a bullshit job. Are you saying that you think any non-world-changing job is bullshit or that you think other people hold that view? Either way, this is a bullshit definition. Growing food isn't a "bullshit" job but also doesn't change the world. Most jobs don't "change the world", regardless of how important they are. Most people who think they are changing the world are just self-delusional.
    - harryh 8y ago
      I'm saying that I think other people hold that view. I do not hold that view. I'm sorry if that was unclear in my comment. I basically agree with everything you said.
  - NorthOf33rd 8y ago
    The OP references the Misemployment essay which very clearly takes this view. "He is joined in the misemployment ranks by people who make cigarettes, addictive but sterile television shows, badly designed condos, ill-fitting and shoddy clothes, deceptive advertisements, artery-clogging biscuits and highly-sugared drinks (however delicious)." I think our bullshit jobs guy is a bullshit writer, personally. Shoddy condos, you might not like, but they provide housing. Shoddy clothes provide warmth. You might not like it, you might not agree with the incentives behind it, but they can be and are important parts of some people's existence. https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/unemployment-down-at-last-misemployment-bad-as-ever/ https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/unemployment-d...
southerndrift 8y ago
The twist is that you have to do it that way to get the jobs done that nobody would do if UBI were available.
- pkaye 8y ago
  The pay would have to go above the UBI threshold to get someone to do it.
airstrike 8y ago
> Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI. Because our educational system has remained virtually unchanged throughout the past 100+ years while the world in which it exists transformed radically. Education needs to be society's number one goal. [0] Even if you don't subscribe to the idea that AI / automation will replace [all / most / many] jobs, the world is already facing secular challenges due primarily to globalization. Cheap labor has been outsourced to developing nations, who are not going to "develop" just because of that. They will all need to agree to build institutions that enforce rule of law in order to bring about economic prosperity. This is an incredibly complex problem[1], and personally I can only think of historical examples that transpired in the form of revolutions – Industrial, American, French or otherwise. So lately I've become convinced that nothing will effectively change from the sort of incremental tweaks policy makers discuss. I'm even more cynical than that as I strongly believe policy makers in positions of power have no incentive to do anything other than that which ensures the continuation of their power. In other words, they create platforms that cater to the largest subset of potential voters by optimizing between issues that matter the most to people and issues that keep away the smallest number of potential voters, effectively landing somewhere in a wishy washy middle that's profoundly devoid of purpose. In order for humanity to overcome its current obstacles, it will need a paradigm shift. In developing nations, the population needs to be educated enough to want to create institutions that enforce rule of law. In developed nations, the population needs to be educated enough to be able to take on more complex, specialized, service-type jobs. The problem is that this population is already very well educated compared to the rest of the world and we haven't yet devised a way to level up our education system, probably because this would require the whole of society to care for this topic at least an order of magnitude more than it currently does. Unfortunately, I don't think people are incentivized to change their perspectives on the topic until the economic wheels (i.e. prosperity levels) grind to a screeching halt. –––––––––– ⁰ https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/28340/9781464810961.pdf https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/2... [PDF] ¹ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305750X10002317 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03057...
fanzhang 8y ago
I had to look this up, and the term "misemployed" seems silly. Is a job only a "true job" only if it met some millennial definition of fulfillment and "flourishing"? In the article, someone dressed as a hot dog doing marketing is misemployed because it's not "contributing to human welfare and flourishing". If that's the case, then the century-long history of employment in post-industrial-revolution society is a story of misemployment. Is tightening a nut repeatedly 40 hours a week under the job guarantee of a 1950s GM true "flourishing"? And is the 1850s Irish farmer racing to harvest blighted potatoes misemployed as well? (Perhaps not, since the survival state creates an certain "authenticity" versus the "banality" of guaranteed life?)
hoaw 8y ago
I don't disagree with your point, but I do at least slightly disagree with your perspective. This isn't something like an unavoidable feature of the future that is going to affect a subset of society. It is that we are fundamentally doing the wrong things. Even in your own, and many of ours, situation there are people struggling with education, housing and stability. So even if you are keeping up with the future in the positive sense, you aren't protected from the negatives. Something like UBI isn't going to fix that stability has increasingly become something valuable to be traded. This isn't however something unique. It happens at least to some degree every time there is a shift. People start capitalizing on the positives and the negatives eventually catches up. When the greatest shift is in how to handle the negatives. That is really how to keep up with the future. Once there is a solution to how people e.g. can get education, housing and stability you can automate everything you want. But it often requires giving up the former for the latter. You can't have a high cost of living and automate all the bullshit jobs without consequences. Because the bullshit jobs are paying for that.
conanbatt 8y ago
If only engineers didn't confuse their craft with economics. Higher productivity will decrease the amount of labor that goes to those now productive endeavors, and go to those that arent as productive, like the service industry in general, healthcare, entertainment, etc. Much how like all of that started when less labor was required for farming.
jjtheblunt 8y ago
UBI ?
- earenndil 8y ago
  Universal Basic Income.
RA_Fisher 8y ago
Ah but here's the caveat: "given enough time." For most jobs the time line is much longer than you'd think. Also, we're always discovering new jobs. Misemployment misunderstands what it is employees do. Employees help a business economize (produce value for folks better, cheaper, faster). The worker did a fantastic job and should be very proud of their $40M acomplishment. Ever notice how the best employees are always being given new jobs? That's because they're finding new jobs. Doing exactly the same task for many years is risky business because the repetitive nature lends itself to automation. The good news is that employees can avoid this. The recipe is finding new ways to create value for the business (and hence customers).

csours 8y ago

Re: manual health checks - I worked in an automobile factory in the mid-2000's. When I started, the healthcheck was a checklist on a website. Some of the items were grouped on websites or application pages, but many of them were spread out. A year before I started, there wasn't even a checklist on a webpage. After a while, I started scripting as much of the checklist as I could. My point of view being: my job is to improve the tools needed to do my job. I thought that the apps should be able to quickly and easily provide their statuses. What I wanted was something like spring boot's /health endpoint(s). I don't know if I would ever have invented a health endpoint, but once I found out about it, it's obvious. --- This wasn't my only job in the plant, I did quite a bit more: desktop support, application support, hosting, app scripting, plant floor support, internet of manufacturing things (PLC support). Anyway, that job is gone now. Some of it is spread to other teams and ticket queues, but some of it is just gone. Part of that is politics, part is bullshit, part is misemployment, a large part was contract structure.

franzb 8y ago

I found this story particularly well written so I looked for the author's name. Ibrahim Diallo... That name ringed a bell... Fired by a machine! That was him too, a recommended read: https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me

jmiserez 8y ago
An instant internet classic...! Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645
- ibudiallo 8y ago
  Thank you all. I may just quote you on that.
  - syndacks 8y ago
    I came here to say the author is a good writer. So yea, you have a way of saying saying something complex/deep in an eloquent, even simple way. I've been reading a lot of Raymond Carver lately. You should read some of him if you're keen. I like his WWTAWWTAL collection of short stories.
    - ibudiallo 8y ago
      Thank you so much. I'll check out Raymond Carver, thanks for the recommendation.

LeonM 8y ago

If so many people are being misemployed, why were they hired in the first place? Did they start off doing important work, and then slowly became irrelevant, or do big corporates just hire people without having a clear task for them (yet). I'm genuinely curious, I've been self employed for about my entire career, so I have no experience with corporate lifestyle.

thesandlord 8y ago
> do big corporates just hire people without having a clear task for them Not all of them, but in my experience, yes.
LanceH 8y ago
Big companies definitely hire people -- at all levels -- who are completely irrelevant. Managers have a big incentive to hire more people because they will then have more direct reports. Directors want more managers. VP's want more directors, etc... I was on a small team at a big company in 1998. Due to recent mergers there were duplicated teams across the company. A big initiative came out that our team was in line to respond to. We (about 10 of us) put together a highly functional prototype in a couple months, put it forward showing we could take it on. Another team went out and hired 200 people and had no other presentation than an org structure. They won, and I learned a lesson.
chocolatebunny 8y ago
Some middle managers will overestimate how much time and people they need for a project just so they can be on time and under budget. And once you hire someone it's really hard to get rid of them until there is a layoff cycle. And usually on layoff time there's plenty of people who are actually actively making things harder for people that need firing (they try to do work but are bad at it, which causes more work for the people that are actually productive) that you don't really get around to fire the people that are just useless.

draw_down 8y ago

It's almost always a mistake to view your work as important, at least if you work in a typical corporation. Shovel shit and get paid, try to find a better pile of shit to shovel, and/or a better paycheck. That's all there is.

hathym 8y ago
+1000

CrowFly 8y ago

"40M dollars" is $40,000. When talking finance, it's $40MM. @dang, please fix title https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181917/mixing-use-of-k-for-thousands-and-mm-for-millions https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181917/mixing-us...

p1necone 8y ago
What? That might be the case in a specific industry (finance, in certain places, apparently), but the Hacker News community is not a finance company. Common parlance is that M means millions and being pedantic in the wrong context doesn't help anyone.
tumahimikka 8y ago
That's for finance you pedant. Non-finance people never use those

paulcole 8y ago

If you don't think your job is a bullshit job, you just haven't thought about it long enough.

mswen 8y ago

In a related note. I had a new client in fall of 2018. The purpose was to build a system that collected and tracked competitors prices across a portfolio of enterprise products. When we first started talking the Director of Operations indicated that they were looking at hiring an entry level pricing analyst who would track competitors prices and use that market information plus other internal information to set appropriate prices for their own company. This was across about 4000 model/part numbers. About 40 to 50 hours into the project I have a show and tell demo on what I had developed so far. At the end of the meeting the Director of Operations leans back and says. "What I envisioned as the never ending, never caught up task of collecting and organizing competitive pricing is now going to be 1 or 2 hours a day for someone." Developer me was proud to hear that. I heard/understood the real business requirements and developed a system that automates away 90% of the repetitive drudgery of the overall task leaving someone better able to spend time on edge cases and what is changing in the market. On the other hand I felt slightly guilty that maybe now someone who is already too busy will get this added to their plate because it is just an hour or two a day. And, that someone else who could really use an entry level analysis job, won't get one because I automated it away before they could even get started. In the end developer me will keep building stuff like this because that is what is valued and helps pay my bills.

harryh 8y ago
And, that someone else who could really use an entry level analysis job, won't get one because I automated it away before they could even get started. You didn't take a job away from anyone. You freed up someone from drudgery so that they could do more valuable work instead. This is EXACTLY how society gets richer. We have hundreds of years of evidence that this is the case.
- mswen 8y ago
  Yes. I mostly believe this as well. I have little or no guilt about it. Especially since the person was not yet hired. But when I think about stuff like this happening at scale across tens of thousands of small private companies it starts to add up to a lot of missing entry level jobs. I will keep automating away the drudgery in part because it is inevitable and I might as well be someone who profits from the master trend rather than be trampled by the trend.

ianbicking 8y ago

Reading the story, there's lots of possible reasons here: 1. He was being told something was important, and it simply wasn't. They lied to him to make him feel good. Probably not? 2. He was doing something that was important to other people, and those people incorrectly believed they were important. Given that the department was closed, this might go several levels up. 3. The approach of the department or group was misaligned. "Misaligned" being a way to say that either (a) it wasn't a very good approach when the full picture was taken into account (the picture from an altitude higher than the department), or (b) it was a good approach, but someone else was able to convince people higher up that it wasn't. 4. It was important, and whoever cancelled it didn't realize it. The chickens may eventually come to roost. 5. It was an important thing embedded in an unimportant thing. Maybe the department really was ready to be disbanded, dispersed, eliminated. It's likely that the department had many duties. Did someone actually look carefully at each one, and decide where they all should go? 6. Someone needed the project (or whatever larger project his project was embedded in), but didn't know it. This is a danger of a proactive project: if the person who gets the value from it isn't asking for the thing, they might not appreciate the value of the thing itself. 7. It's a valuable project, but the cost (real or perceived) of carrying it through other organizational change is considered excessive. 8. Management was simply too lazy to decide if it was important. Maybe they didn't have the resource leeway to keep it running without a fight, which makes it easier to be lazy. And there's yet more possibilities than that. I'm thinking about this right now, as I'm in the process of tearing down a large amount of my own work. I could believe it's just a sunk cost, a failed investment... but I'm pretty sure it's not. It might be the right choice to throw stuff away. Strategies change. Old theories work themselves out until they don't seem to offer much potential, and then everything based on the old theory is in question. We've never really known what the underlying ROI on anything is, though we're throwing it away so we can make room for other similar things; the organization is trading a known unknown for an unknown unknown. And none of us will really know what the right decision was. If I was making the decision, I wouldn't know either.

sailfast 8y ago

Random editing feedback for the OP: was “closet” pronounced in a particular accent? In US English it would probably sound more like “claw set” than “Cool Set” so it took me a second to get that reference (in the end this detail didn’t add much to the management’s character so I’d either refine it or relate to the firing or overall narrative arc a bit more) A good read - how the author will novelize this anecdote into a larger story will be interesting!

ibudiallo 8y ago
Thank you for catching that. Let's blame it on the guy that is not too versed in sed[1] but still used it to find and replace a pattern and it all went wrong. [1]: https://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/x23170.html https://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/x23170.html

dugluak 8y ago

Nice little story. I was kinda wondering what happened to Jason. At the start I felt like Jason was the lead character and at the end the story would return to him. Where is Jason ???

ibudiallo 8y ago
Jason is doing just fine.