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Agreed. It's why i get frustrated in a lot of the antiwork movements. The core of the antiwork movement is about respect and healthy treatment of course; but as

Agreed. It's why i get frustrated in a lot of the antiwork movements. The core of the antiwork movement is about respect and healthy treatment of course; but as a community they also fraternize (?) with people who think we shouldn't have to work at all; that it's optional and society is just asleep to this simple and obvious "fact". But of course it's bunk. Until automation "saves humanity"[1] we have to work. We can and should push for healthy balances, respectful treatment of workers, sane retirement ages, etc. But still, work needs to be done, and i find it incredibly frustrating that some people think we can all just stop working. [1]: Though i'm quite pessimistic that automation will save humanity. I suspect that while it could, it will also cause such turmoil in the beginning that we fail as a species. A nuclear winter of the working class.

ModernMech 4y ago
At the same time, a lot of us who are “working” are actually doing bullshit nonsense that is created just to keep us busy. Meanwhile a lot of people who do actual work like raising children, taking care of elder parents, or educating themselves are not considered to be “working” because they’re not generating someone else a profit. What would happen if all the bullshit work ended tomorrow? Would the world come to an end? I don’t think so. But if all the unpaid work out there went undone, yes, society would quickly fall apart. I don’t follow the “anti work” movement so I won’t pretend to know what they as a group believe. But for me, I believe we can drastically redefine the concept of work and come out ahead.
- cortesoft 4y ago
  > At the same time, a lot of us who are “working” are actually doing bullshit nonsense that is created just to keep us busy. I am not going to argue that some work is more essential than other work, but I disagree that some jobs are created just to keep people busy. Why would anyone hire someone just to make sure they stayed busy? That is simply not happening. The people who control the money aren't worried about keeping people busy, they are worried about making more money. Now, is there a large part of our economy that only exists because people who have capital will pursue anything in order to grow their capital? Yes, absolutely, but those jobs still exist because someone else will give them money to obtain what the job produces. Companies aren't sitting around thinking, "oh man, too many people in the world aren't busy... let's create some more useless jobs"
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    I would accept reasoning that on some level specially the large organizations are dysfunctional. And they don't necessarily optimize for costs on all levels. Sometimes it is just higher-ups wanting more resources and people under them. Even if it is not productive or needed... And what of the stuff people doing end up being productive? And then sometimes I really question is that new version website really needed?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    > Why would anyone hire someone just to make sure they stayed busy? That is simply not happening. I’ll give you an example. My wife worked as an intensive case manager, where the job was ostensibly to help severely ill people manage their lives. Was that her actual job though? No, her actual job was filling out reams of paper work instead of actually helping anyone. That paperwork was sent to the state and the company got paid, with the vast majority of the money going to executives. What would happen if her job were eliminated? Would the people be worse off? No, the whole point was to not help them and keep the state aid checks coming in. My wife wasn’t using her skills and was depressed and stressed all the time so she’d be better off if that job had never existed. Then there were the 3 layers of middle management coordinating all of the form filling. Their job was wholly redundant, and they didn’t do any meaningful work at all. Did they even need to exist? It’s not clear, but their existence didn’t work toward actually helping any real people. They just helped collect government checks. They were paid well though. The people who would be harmed the most by that “work” not getting done are the executives.
    - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
      Ha! I have family members who were the bureaucrats who audited that paperwork your wife sent in. The situation is exactly the same on the government side. Over qualified people doing meaningless paperwork while politically connected upper managers make tons of money joining conference calls from the golf course. It's great at crushing the spirit of anybody who actually wants to accomplish whatever the organization's mission is. And when the service being provided are also paid for by the government the taxpayers take it on both ends! Edit: Is my comment unpopular because some people think I'm endorsing the status quo or because some people find this state of affairs inconvenient to their world view?
- aleksiy123 4y ago
  Like with any process there is some waste (bullshit jobs), but the question is, it worth committing the extra resources to eliminate these bullshit jobs or would those resources be better used elsewhere. Essentially not all waste is actually worth eliminating.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > What would happen if all the bullshit work ended tomorrow? Would the world come to an end? Honestly, it might. It would take an extraordinary amount of work to correctly identify all the work that's actually bullshit, and there might not be any time left for anything else. There's work that's bullshit, but no-one realizes it because it's very hard to have an expansive yet detailed view of everything. There's also work that seems like bullshit, but performs an important, non-obvious function [1]. [1] Sort of like Congressional earmarks: they were attacked for a long time as corrupt waste. Now that they're gone, it seems like they might have actually been grease that helped keep polarization in check.
- wollsmoth 4y ago
  what kind of bullshit work do you mean exactly? Who is wasting their money paying people to do "bullshit work" that doesn't actually need to happen?
  - corrral 4y ago
    Tons and tons of organizations. It's extremely common. It makes more sense when you consider that companies mostly don't experience market effects internally, but operate much more like the Soviet Union, and that, especially for very large companies, the effects of external competition are rather less than ideally efficient, to put it mildly. Throw in a heaping spoonful of principal-agent problems up and down every organization, the fact that information is very far from perfectly available and distributed to managers, and more than a little good ol' incompetence, and it'd be weird if it wasn't common.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  >What would happen if all the bullshit work ended tomorrow?< It can't. Some of the bullshit work is actually just to provide a bizarro-world downtime where you can't just tell people to take extra vacation because that is unthinkable: "fairness" complaints, worries that idle time makes people more likely to consider their options, and frankly the inconceivability of the idea in and of itself. So what you do is have this kind of idle time work that doesn't actually need to be done but keeps people busy. Think of it as the workplace version of engagement tweaking. As a concrete example, in the ASIC space, the sub-teams involved routinely finish their part of the current generation, and in some cases the next generation work isn't ready to start yet. One thing startups used to do (and were still doing in my direct observation as recently as 4 years ago) was lay off their ASIC guys as they finished the current generation until they could see whether the chip was getting traction, and then they'd hurry up and hire for the next generation of so. And so on. What the companies eventually started doing by ~2000 was creating bullshit background work projects that were clearly, at least to most observers, either senseless (like bumping the generation for a low-volume ASIC where even just the mask costs would never be paid back if the project shipped) or speculative-but-not-productive projects.
- psyc 4y ago
  The number of people in this subthread who think true bullshit jobs don’t exist because they’re inefficient astonishes me. You’d have to believe that all middle managers were good at allocating effort. Or senior executives for that matter. In big companies, cash cows subsidize all manner of boondoggles. That’s why we have a term for cash cows. Ever have a long term project cancelled, either for a good reason, or just because a new VP showed up and the project didn't have his brand on it? Did that cancelled project make the company money? Companies only do things that make money, right? Never saw a high level goal in your company that was misguided? A roadmap for getting there that was misguided? Never seen a process (methodology, etc) that wasted a lot of time, but one important person swore by? I could go on.
  - powerhour 4y ago
    This is why I roll my eyes when I see people suggest that government is wasteful and should be run like a business. It's like they have never worked a job in their lives.
    - refurb 4y ago
      As someone whose done both they don’t compare. One is bad, one is even worse.
      - andriesm 4y ago
        exactly. Reason is, businesses that engage in lots of inefficiencies get outcompeted, and if the inefficiencies/mistakes are egregious they go out of business. Government has the ultimate monopoly, where the only remedy available for most "shareholders" is to vote out the "CEO" and "directors" once every couple of years. In the private market, you can take your business to a competitor if you don't like how one company treats you. Or as a shareholder you can sell your shares in company A and buy company B instead. The only real remedy against government incompetence is to emigrate, and then you find yourself in a new one that also acts like it's the only game in town for it's citizens - because it is.
        4y ago
brightball 4y ago
I have the same frustration when people conflate libertarian with anarchist.
wollsmoth 4y ago
Yeah the antiwork reddit in particular is kind of.. uncomfortable to read sometimes. I want it to be more about giving workers more of the benefit of their labor but they seem to be just anti doing anything at times.
- hirvi74 4y ago
  r/WorkReform is slightly better about this, but sometimes is plagued with the same issues.
- smiddereens 4y ago
kgwgk 4y ago
Automation saved humanity from spending a large chunk of their lifetimes sowing and reaping. Humanity found other works to do.
- dghughes 4y ago
  Every fall my grandfather and many others would travel to harvest wheat in the Canadian prairies. This was before tractors were a thing or common. Quite a few people were affected when one tractor could cut more hay than a dozen men could.
  - throwaway742 4y ago
    Pedantic I know (this is HN after all), but I think that would be considered straw not hay.
    - 8note 4y ago
      Looking at https://ilfbpartners.com/farm/farm-facts/hay-vs-straw-whats-the-difference/ https://ilfbpartners.com/farm/farm-facts/hay-vs-straw-whats-... Straw is inaccurate because said grandfather is doing the harvest, not cleaning up after the harvest
      - throwaway742 4y ago
        Friend you are wrong. Hay is harvested green. It says straw is the byproduct of harvesting wheat i.e. what your grandfather was doing. You could have wheat hay, but you would have to harvest early. No one is going to do that.
    - dghughes 4y ago
      It was wheat as stated. But my analogy of hay being cut by men vs machinery was just that an example.
juve1996 4y ago
For work to matter it has to help people achieve goals. If their goals are unachievable then they will not see a point in work. This is where we are.
grecy 4y ago
> people who think we shouldn't have to work at all; that it's optional and society is just asleep to this simple and obvious "fact". The evidence is clear if there were not people making $8.56 million dollars per hour, there would be plenty enough money to give everyone enough to do what they want with their lives. Yes plenty of BS jobs would vanish, and you'd have to pay people more to do "undesirable jobs" like taking the trash, but in developed countries like Australia we already do. I made $120k/year stacking boxes in a factory because it's mindless work that nobody wants to do. Instead they sit at home at get $1280 each month from the government as welfare. And that's fine.
brailsafe 4y ago
Well... if work was optional, but sufficiently and progressively rewarding, then people would choose to do the jobs that they're currently not choosing to do. So many jobs not only pay like shit while extracting so much value from that labour, but in most cases you also have no incentive to give even the slightest shit about it. No ability to buy into the company, no autonomy, very little functional leverage over increasing your fixed salary, and in most cases not even remotely knowing how much the conpany is making. My current company thought it was wierd that I basically just peaced out for a bit when they ran out of money to pay me and at the same time aren't the slightest bit transparent about details regarding potential acquisition. Likewise I learned early on that if you don't literally have either a seat at some table, or a real stake in the company, or any decision power, you might as well stop trying after your work is done with an acceptable level of quality. It ain't worth it. Lots of companies rn complaining about worker shortages, but they offer crap pay and it's fixed. You either don't get a commission, or you get maybe a gift card as a bonus from time to time. Most don't offer benefits.
- bluGill 4y ago
  Some jobs, would you clean latrines if that was somehow the only job we couldn't figure out how to automate,
  - Retric 4y ago
    We already have self cleaning public toilets. Generally jobs that suck are the easiest types of jobs to automate because novelty is interesting.
    - mLuby 4y ago
      > jobs that suck are the easiest types of jobs So no true. Human manual and emotional labor is incredibly cheap compared to the cost of automating those tasks.
      - Retric 4y ago
        A friend works as a ER surgeon which is extremely physically and emotionally demanding. It’s a really hard job, but it’s also rewarding in a way that the worst jobs just aren’t. As to manual labor, most of what’s been automated has been manual labor. Not just obvious stuff like dishwashers but heaters and cars save extreme amounts of physical effort.
JustSomeNobody 4y ago
There will be a transition where we hit 10, 20, 30, etc pct unemployment as we become more automated. Will views on work transition or will the people who are automated out of a job suffer? There won’t be an abrupt instance where half the workforce now can’t work.
- Mezzie 4y ago
  I think it will happen once genuine downward mobility becomes a very real fear for upper-middle class kids. As in once 10% unemployment or 30-40% poverty wage employment is the result of each private college class, we'll see giant shifts. Before that, we'll just keep claiming to be a meritocracy, but there will be more and more pressure build up. That's what I think. A shift on work views can't happen without there being some other way to sustain that percentage of unemployed people, and that requires political action, which probably won't happen until people who've previously been comfortable start feeling the pain.
  - toofy 4y ago
    i suspect you’re correct. this is why i find it so frustrating when people deny that society’s current iteration serves at the whims of a small class of people.
8note 4y ago
Its a useful negotiation tactic to be friendly with people who dont think work should be a thing. You're going to be compromising by the end of the negotiation, so why not ask for the moon?

ModernMech 4y ago

At the same time, a lot of us who are “working” are actually doing bullshit nonsense that is created just to keep us busy. Meanwhile a lot of people who do actual work like raising children, taking care of elder parents, or educating themselves are not considered to be “working” because they’re not generating someone else a profit. What would happen if all the bullshit work ended tomorrow? Would the world come to an end? I don’t think so. But if all the unpaid work out there went undone, yes, society would quickly fall apart. I don’t follow the “anti work” movement so I won’t pretend to know what they as a group believe. But for me, I believe we can drastically redefine the concept of work and come out ahead.

cortesoft 4y ago
> At the same time, a lot of us who are “working” are actually doing bullshit nonsense that is created just to keep us busy. I am not going to argue that some work is more essential than other work, but I disagree that some jobs are created just to keep people busy. Why would anyone hire someone just to make sure they stayed busy? That is simply not happening. The people who control the money aren't worried about keeping people busy, they are worried about making more money. Now, is there a large part of our economy that only exists because people who have capital will pursue anything in order to grow their capital? Yes, absolutely, but those jobs still exist because someone else will give them money to obtain what the job produces. Companies aren't sitting around thinking, "oh man, too many people in the world aren't busy... let's create some more useless jobs"
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I would accept reasoning that on some level specially the large organizations are dysfunctional. And they don't necessarily optimize for costs on all levels. Sometimes it is just higher-ups wanting more resources and people under them. Even if it is not productive or needed... And what of the stuff people doing end up being productive? And then sometimes I really question is that new version website really needed?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ModernMech 4y ago
  > Why would anyone hire someone just to make sure they stayed busy? That is simply not happening. I’ll give you an example. My wife worked as an intensive case manager, where the job was ostensibly to help severely ill people manage their lives. Was that her actual job though? No, her actual job was filling out reams of paper work instead of actually helping anyone. That paperwork was sent to the state and the company got paid, with the vast majority of the money going to executives. What would happen if her job were eliminated? Would the people be worse off? No, the whole point was to not help them and keep the state aid checks coming in. My wife wasn’t using her skills and was depressed and stressed all the time so she’d be better off if that job had never existed. Then there were the 3 layers of middle management coordinating all of the form filling. Their job was wholly redundant, and they didn’t do any meaningful work at all. Did they even need to exist? It’s not clear, but their existence didn’t work toward actually helping any real people. They just helped collect government checks. They were paid well though. The people who would be harmed the most by that “work” not getting done are the executives.
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    Ha! I have family members who were the bureaucrats who audited that paperwork your wife sent in. The situation is exactly the same on the government side. Over qualified people doing meaningless paperwork while politically connected upper managers make tons of money joining conference calls from the golf course. It's great at crushing the spirit of anybody who actually wants to accomplish whatever the organization's mission is. And when the service being provided are also paid for by the government the taxpayers take it on both ends! Edit: Is my comment unpopular because some people think I'm endorsing the status quo or because some people find this state of affairs inconvenient to their world view?
aleksiy123 4y ago
Like with any process there is some waste (bullshit jobs), but the question is, it worth committing the extra resources to eliminate these bullshit jobs or would those resources be better used elsewhere. Essentially not all waste is actually worth eliminating.
tablespoon 4y ago
> What would happen if all the bullshit work ended tomorrow? Would the world come to an end? Honestly, it might. It would take an extraordinary amount of work to correctly identify all the work that's actually bullshit, and there might not be any time left for anything else. There's work that's bullshit, but no-one realizes it because it's very hard to have an expansive yet detailed view of everything. There's also work that seems like bullshit, but performs an important, non-obvious function [1]. [1] Sort of like Congressional earmarks: they were attacked for a long time as corrupt waste. Now that they're gone, it seems like they might have actually been grease that helped keep polarization in check.
wollsmoth 4y ago
what kind of bullshit work do you mean exactly? Who is wasting their money paying people to do "bullshit work" that doesn't actually need to happen?
- corrral 4y ago
  Tons and tons of organizations. It's extremely common. It makes more sense when you consider that companies mostly don't experience market effects internally, but operate much more like the Soviet Union, and that, especially for very large companies, the effects of external competition are rather less than ideally efficient, to put it mildly. Throw in a heaping spoonful of principal-agent problems up and down every organization, the fact that information is very far from perfectly available and distributed to managers, and more than a little good ol' incompetence, and it'd be weird if it wasn't common.
foobiekr 4y ago
>What would happen if all the bullshit work ended tomorrow?< It can't. Some of the bullshit work is actually just to provide a bizarro-world downtime where you can't just tell people to take extra vacation because that is unthinkable: "fairness" complaints, worries that idle time makes people more likely to consider their options, and frankly the inconceivability of the idea in and of itself. So what you do is have this kind of idle time work that doesn't actually need to be done but keeps people busy. Think of it as the workplace version of engagement tweaking. As a concrete example, in the ASIC space, the sub-teams involved routinely finish their part of the current generation, and in some cases the next generation work isn't ready to start yet. One thing startups used to do (and were still doing in my direct observation as recently as 4 years ago) was lay off their ASIC guys as they finished the current generation until they could see whether the chip was getting traction, and then they'd hurry up and hire for the next generation of so. And so on. What the companies eventually started doing by ~2000 was creating bullshit background work projects that were clearly, at least to most observers, either senseless (like bumping the generation for a low-volume ASIC where even just the mask costs would never be paid back if the project shipped) or speculative-but-not-productive projects.
psyc 4y ago
The number of people in this subthread who think true bullshit jobs don’t exist because they’re inefficient astonishes me. You’d have to believe that all middle managers were good at allocating effort. Or senior executives for that matter. In big companies, cash cows subsidize all manner of boondoggles. That’s why we have a term for cash cows. Ever have a long term project cancelled, either for a good reason, or just because a new VP showed up and the project didn't have his brand on it? Did that cancelled project make the company money? Companies only do things that make money, right? Never saw a high level goal in your company that was misguided? A roadmap for getting there that was misguided? Never seen a process (methodology, etc) that wasted a lot of time, but one important person swore by? I could go on.
- powerhour 4y ago
  This is why I roll my eyes when I see people suggest that government is wasteful and should be run like a business. It's like they have never worked a job in their lives.
  - refurb 4y ago
    As someone whose done both they don’t compare. One is bad, one is even worse.
    - andriesm 4y ago
      exactly. Reason is, businesses that engage in lots of inefficiencies get outcompeted, and if the inefficiencies/mistakes are egregious they go out of business. Government has the ultimate monopoly, where the only remedy available for most "shareholders" is to vote out the "CEO" and "directors" once every couple of years. In the private market, you can take your business to a competitor if you don't like how one company treats you. Or as a shareholder you can sell your shares in company A and buy company B instead. The only real remedy against government incompetence is to emigrate, and then you find yourself in a new one that also acts like it's the only game in town for it's citizens - because it is.
      - 4y ago

brightball 4y ago

I have the same frustration when people conflate libertarian with anarchist.

wollsmoth 4y ago

Yeah the antiwork reddit in particular is kind of.. uncomfortable to read sometimes. I want it to be more about giving workers more of the benefit of their labor but they seem to be just anti doing anything at times.

hirvi74 4y ago
r/WorkReform is slightly better about this, but sometimes is plagued with the same issues.
smiddereens 4y ago

kgwgk 4y ago

Automation saved humanity from spending a large chunk of their lifetimes sowing and reaping. Humanity found other works to do.

dghughes 4y ago
Every fall my grandfather and many others would travel to harvest wheat in the Canadian prairies. This was before tractors were a thing or common. Quite a few people were affected when one tractor could cut more hay than a dozen men could.
- throwaway742 4y ago
  Pedantic I know (this is HN after all), but I think that would be considered straw not hay.
  - 8note 4y ago
    Looking at https://ilfbpartners.com/farm/farm-facts/hay-vs-straw-whats-the-difference/ https://ilfbpartners.com/farm/farm-facts/hay-vs-straw-whats-... Straw is inaccurate because said grandfather is doing the harvest, not cleaning up after the harvest
    - throwaway742 4y ago
      Friend you are wrong. Hay is harvested green. It says straw is the byproduct of harvesting wheat i.e. what your grandfather was doing. You could have wheat hay, but you would have to harvest early. No one is going to do that.
  - dghughes 4y ago
    It was wheat as stated. But my analogy of hay being cut by men vs machinery was just that an example.

juve1996 4y ago

For work to matter it has to help people achieve goals. If their goals are unachievable then they will not see a point in work. This is where we are.

grecy 4y ago

> people who think we shouldn't have to work at all; that it's optional and society is just asleep to this simple and obvious "fact". The evidence is clear if there were not people making $8.56 million dollars per hour, there would be plenty enough money to give everyone enough to do what they want with their lives. Yes plenty of BS jobs would vanish, and you'd have to pay people more to do "undesirable jobs" like taking the trash, but in developed countries like Australia we already do. I made $120k/year stacking boxes in a factory because it's mindless work that nobody wants to do. Instead they sit at home at get $1280 each month from the government as welfare. And that's fine.

brailsafe 4y ago

Well... if work was optional, but sufficiently and progressively rewarding, then people would choose to do the jobs that they're currently not choosing to do. So many jobs not only pay like shit while extracting so much value from that labour, but in most cases you also have no incentive to give even the slightest shit about it. No ability to buy into the company, no autonomy, very little functional leverage over increasing your fixed salary, and in most cases not even remotely knowing how much the conpany is making. My current company thought it was wierd that I basically just peaced out for a bit when they ran out of money to pay me and at the same time aren't the slightest bit transparent about details regarding potential acquisition. Likewise I learned early on that if you don't literally have either a seat at some table, or a real stake in the company, or any decision power, you might as well stop trying after your work is done with an acceptable level of quality. It ain't worth it. Lots of companies rn complaining about worker shortages, but they offer crap pay and it's fixed. You either don't get a commission, or you get maybe a gift card as a bonus from time to time. Most don't offer benefits.

bluGill 4y ago
Some jobs, would you clean latrines if that was somehow the only job we couldn't figure out how to automate,
- Retric 4y ago
  We already have self cleaning public toilets. Generally jobs that suck are the easiest types of jobs to automate because novelty is interesting.
  - mLuby 4y ago
    > jobs that suck are the easiest types of jobs So no true. Human manual and emotional labor is incredibly cheap compared to the cost of automating those tasks.
    - Retric 4y ago
      A friend works as a ER surgeon which is extremely physically and emotionally demanding. It’s a really hard job, but it’s also rewarding in a way that the worst jobs just aren’t. As to manual labor, most of what’s been automated has been manual labor. Not just obvious stuff like dishwashers but heaters and cars save extreme amounts of physical effort.

JustSomeNobody 4y ago

There will be a transition where we hit 10, 20, 30, etc pct unemployment as we become more automated. Will views on work transition or will the people who are automated out of a job suffer? There won’t be an abrupt instance where half the workforce now can’t work.

Mezzie 4y ago
I think it will happen once genuine downward mobility becomes a very real fear for upper-middle class kids. As in once 10% unemployment or 30-40% poverty wage employment is the result of each private college class, we'll see giant shifts. Before that, we'll just keep claiming to be a meritocracy, but there will be more and more pressure build up. That's what I think. A shift on work views can't happen without there being some other way to sustain that percentage of unemployed people, and that requires political action, which probably won't happen until people who've previously been comfortable start feeling the pain.
- toofy 4y ago
  i suspect you’re correct. this is why i find it so frustrating when people deny that society’s current iteration serves at the whims of a small class of people.

8note 4y ago

Its a useful negotiation tactic to be friendly with people who dont think work should be a thing. You're going to be compromising by the end of the negotiation, so why not ask for the moon?