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This story is a pretty accurate fable for the pointlessness of the modern economy and its inability to provide real value to anyone. Man spends all day playing

This story is a pretty accurate fable for the pointlessness of the modern economy and its inability to provide real value to anyone. Man spends all day playing video games, because he automated his largely superfluous job at a law firm which itself likely only exists to deal with bureaucratic or unnecessary cases (assuming this is true, as they have a single absent IT person who handles their entire infrastructure.) On top of all that, this story itself is probably made up, created to get attention from other people in pointless jobs. It’s a meta-exercise in pointlessness.

eterevsky 5y ago
He is not paid just to transfer files. He is paid to be responsible for the files being transferred. It's not quite the same thing.
- sam_lowry_ 5y ago
  I hope he read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs.
  - hogrider 5y ago
    This one is the text book definition of fall guy as a service. Anything goew wrong, it's his head, that's why the pay him.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  Are you sure the boss would agree, if he would fully know and understand the situation?
  - bonoboTP 5y ago
    This is information asymmetry that employers also weaponize to hide the true value produced by each employee. Would employees agree to their salary if they fully understood how much of the value they create is pocketed at various other levels of the org?
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    Because humans are irrational. It's the butts in seats mentality vs results. The business should be bringing in experts to regularly work out what parts of their process are slow and to streamline them. There is no incentive for an individual not in this role to make their lives harder.
- garrickvanburen 5y ago
  This. He’s being paid to be responsible for the system. If he can do that successfully a few minutes a day. Cool. If his employer still sees value. It’s all good.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    It's really on the business to have some kind of continual improvement process that looks at everyone's workflow and works out where the time/resource wastage is. If the company wanted to save money on these things they have get someone to identify that a lot of time is spent on "manual" work which could be streamlined.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
patrickk 5y ago
This description falls under the "duct tapers" category of Bullshit Jobs[1], according to David Graeber: > duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing bloated code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive; In this case, perhaps its easier and cheaper to simply pay this guy 90k per year to run this script rather than get an entire law firm, likely staffed by extreme tech Luddites, to switch to using the cloud solution properly. I've also seen worse waste in other industries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs#Summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs#Summary
- ironmagma 5y ago
  Is that really bullshit work? I seriously doubt you’d be able to completely solve the problem of lost luggage. You could cut it down, yet you can’t scale down the number of jobs dealing with it very easily (one per airport at least, and you can’t hire half a person if there’s only half a workload). A similar thing could be said of bloated code.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Riseed 5y ago
    > you can’t hire half a person if there’s only half a workload True. You can, however, hire one person to do one full workload that's made up of fractional workloads.
    - MandieD 5y ago
      Or hire someone who wants or needs to work part time. One of the things I appreciate most about Germany is that I was able to switch to part time after coming back from maternity leave, but still do the same type of work.
  - mirkules 5y ago
    I know nothing about luggage transit, and any idea of a solution for lost luggage I could come up with is more likely naive than not. Could you define why lost luggage is an unsolvable problem? What makes it so difficult?
pavel_lishin 5y ago
> the pointlessness of the modern economy and its inability to provide real value to anyone Plenty of people get value out of the modern economy. There are always outliers, and OP is a Spiders Georg.
Melatonic 5y ago
If the law firm is making significant profit and this employee is not doing anything additionally shady does it really matter? He provides value to the company regardless of whether or not he is actively working - and if one of his automations fail then he is the one who has to fix it. There are lots of jobs where we pay people for things that do not require a constant work output - think about Firemen for example. A forward thinking business would promote this guy and then involve him in other aspects of their work to try and optimize and automate wherever they can. The better small / medium size businesses recognize this and realize that IT can be thought of not just as a cost center but also a path to innovation.
repomies69 5y ago
> This story is a pretty accurate fable for the pointlessness of the modern economy and its inability to provide real value to anyone. Yeah absolute true man. In past times economy provided real value. Modern economy can't produce shit. No clean water, no medicine, no holidays... Nowadays life is just suffering and 100 years ago economy was providing real value all the time. Anyway, can you pass the bong plz
agumonkey 5y ago
The public sector is often tumor like in its structure. It's pile of bad ideas requiring more bad ideas to manage the previous one problems. They're wildly incompetent in terms of productivity all across the chain and resort to petty solutions and hiring more people (with precarious contracts) to attempt at avoiding sinking. I assume they only have 20 more years to live until the whole thing evaporates through the new generation automating it away.
imtringued 5y ago
That meaninglessness is by design. https://youtu.be/Qe4x2Fv9to4 https://youtu.be/Qe4x2Fv9to4
eclat 5y ago
That’s bollocks. He is providing huge amounts of value - consumer surplus and producer surplus. That’s like saying the creator and maintainer of a machine are useless because the machine does all the work, shall we stop using trains and employ millions of people to transport things on foot because it would employ more people doing strenuous work? As he said so himself, people were taking hours a day doing this before he came along with his skillset.

eterevsky 5y ago

He is not paid just to transfer files. He is paid to be responsible for the files being transferred. It's not quite the same thing.

sam_lowry_ 5y ago
I hope he read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs.
- hogrider 5y ago
  This one is the text book definition of fall guy as a service. Anything goew wrong, it's his head, that's why the pay him.
Sebb767 5y ago
Are you sure the boss would agree, if he would fully know and understand the situation?
- bonoboTP 5y ago
  This is information asymmetry that employers also weaponize to hide the true value produced by each employee. Would employees agree to their salary if they fully understood how much of the value they create is pocketed at various other levels of the org?
- Gigachad 5y ago
  Because humans are irrational. It's the butts in seats mentality vs results. The business should be bringing in experts to regularly work out what parts of their process are slow and to streamline them. There is no incentive for an individual not in this role to make their lives harder.
garrickvanburen 5y ago
This. He’s being paid to be responsible for the system. If he can do that successfully a few minutes a day. Cool. If his employer still sees value. It’s all good.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  It's really on the business to have some kind of continual improvement process that looks at everyone's workflow and works out where the time/resource wastage is. If the company wanted to save money on these things they have get someone to identify that a lot of time is spent on "manual" work which could be streamlined.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

patrickk 5y ago

This description falls under the "duct tapers" category of Bullshit Jobs[1], according to David Graeber: > duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing bloated code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive; In this case, perhaps its easier and cheaper to simply pay this guy 90k per year to run this script rather than get an entire law firm, likely staffed by extreme tech Luddites, to switch to using the cloud solution properly. I've also seen worse waste in other industries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs#Summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs#Summary

ironmagma 5y ago
Is that really bullshit work? I seriously doubt you’d be able to completely solve the problem of lost luggage. You could cut it down, yet you can’t scale down the number of jobs dealing with it very easily (one per airport at least, and you can’t hire half a person if there’s only half a workload). A similar thing could be said of bloated code.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Riseed 5y ago
  > you can’t hire half a person if there’s only half a workload True. You can, however, hire one person to do one full workload that's made up of fractional workloads.
  - MandieD 5y ago
    Or hire someone who wants or needs to work part time. One of the things I appreciate most about Germany is that I was able to switch to part time after coming back from maternity leave, but still do the same type of work.
- mirkules 5y ago
  I know nothing about luggage transit, and any idea of a solution for lost luggage I could come up with is more likely naive than not. Could you define why lost luggage is an unsolvable problem? What makes it so difficult?

pavel_lishin 5y ago

> the pointlessness of the modern economy and its inability to provide real value to anyone Plenty of people get value out of the modern economy. There are always outliers, and OP is a Spiders Georg.

Melatonic 5y ago

If the law firm is making significant profit and this employee is not doing anything additionally shady does it really matter? He provides value to the company regardless of whether or not he is actively working - and if one of his automations fail then he is the one who has to fix it. There are lots of jobs where we pay people for things that do not require a constant work output - think about Firemen for example. A forward thinking business would promote this guy and then involve him in other aspects of their work to try and optimize and automate wherever they can. The better small / medium size businesses recognize this and realize that IT can be thought of not just as a cost center but also a path to innovation.

repomies69 5y ago

> This story is a pretty accurate fable for the pointlessness of the modern economy and its inability to provide real value to anyone. Yeah absolute true man. In past times economy provided real value. Modern economy can't produce shit. No clean water, no medicine, no holidays... Nowadays life is just suffering and 100 years ago economy was providing real value all the time. Anyway, can you pass the bong plz

agumonkey 5y ago

The public sector is often tumor like in its structure. It's pile of bad ideas requiring more bad ideas to manage the previous one problems. They're wildly incompetent in terms of productivity all across the chain and resort to petty solutions and hiring more people (with precarious contracts) to attempt at avoiding sinking. I assume they only have 20 more years to live until the whole thing evaporates through the new generation automating it away.

imtringued 5y ago

That meaninglessness is by design. https://youtu.be/Qe4x2Fv9to4 https://youtu.be/Qe4x2Fv9to4

eclat 5y ago

That’s bollocks. He is providing huge amounts of value - consumer surplus and producer surplus. That’s like saying the creator and maintainer of a machine are useless because the machine does all the work, shall we stop using trains and employ millions of people to transport things on foot because it would employ more people doing strenuous work? As he said so himself, people were taking hours a day doing this before he came along with his skillset.