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It is general true for any big organization. In my own firm, I could see the rush into machine learning direction as a door way to a promotion. Any engineer or

It is general true for any big organization. In my own firm, I could see the rush into machine learning direction as a door way to a promotion. Any engineer or PM who works on a ML related project and is able to ship it would have a higher chance of getting promoted. I could also say the same for the usage of AWS products. In the end, I often see projects resembling the messy mashup of AWS products to form a unnecessary complex ML solution to a mosquito problem. It’s a waste yes, but sure will make it looks challenging and boost people to promotions.

asark 8y ago
I increasingly see this as the next level of alienation from work-product. Carpenter makes and sells chairs to people who need chairs, farmer grows and sells apples to people who want apples. Then there's the line worker making just chair legs for people they'll never meet, and the farmer selling their entire apple crop to a big company that'll do who-knows-what with them—sell them, turn them into apple sauce, use them as input to some process that turns out a "natural ingredient" that's some pure, extracted chemical contained in the apples. Then there's the sort of crap we're talking about here. Projects that obviously never should have existed in the first place, and/or that would have been better if done in a simpler, faster, cheaper way, but a ton of make-work was thrown in due to agency problems and perverse incentives. How much of the benefit of computers is being eaten by this kind of thing? The most effective things we do with them may provide 1000x the economic output of that apple farmer, or more, but then we spend a bunch of time doing useless or negative-value stuff, without even getting into a lot of the actually-lucrative work having large negative externalities—spyware-enabled advertising, say, or even just advertising, full stop. What does it do to someone's psyche to spend 90+% of their time doing harmful or useless stuff? Hell some people end up doing nothing of actual value for years on end. What are we doing?

asark 8y ago

I increasingly see this as the next level of alienation from work-product. Carpenter makes and sells chairs to people who need chairs, farmer grows and sells apples to people who want apples. Then there's the line worker making just chair legs for people they'll never meet, and the farmer selling their entire apple crop to a big company that'll do who-knows-what with them—sell them, turn them into apple sauce, use them as input to some process that turns out a "natural ingredient" that's some pure, extracted chemical contained in the apples. Then there's the sort of crap we're talking about here. Projects that obviously never should have existed in the first place, and/or that would have been better if done in a simpler, faster, cheaper way, but a ton of make-work was thrown in due to agency problems and perverse incentives. How much of the benefit of computers is being eaten by this kind of thing? The most effective things we do with them may provide 1000x the economic output of that apple farmer, or more, but then we spend a bunch of time doing useless or negative-value stuff, without even getting into a lot of the actually-lucrative work having large negative externalities—spyware-enabled advertising, say, or even just advertising, full stop. What does it do to someone's psyche to spend 90+% of their time doing harmful or useless stuff? Hell some people end up doing nothing of actual value for years on end. What are we doing?