7 ms·

It's All Bullshit

86 points by elsewhen 3y ago

heckraiser 3y ago
Ah, that’s the spirit! Yet I say unto thee: “Despise not in others what one covets for themselves, for that is hypocrisy.” I have trouble comprehending what this piece provides beyond bullshit slinging at big tech. Wishing you were the one making six fixture for 2 - 6 hour days? Business is in part strategy. Individual tech workers are in part corrupt (and incompetent), blaming leadership rather than taking initiative. Sometimes there is extreme abuse, incompetence, and misguided direction; we hear and scampuousely retell those stories, forever. We gain no wisdom or insight from these arbitrary post-mortem turd fests. Other than sensational wastes of someone else’s cash, aren’t we all ready to do it again?
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  "aren’t we all ready to do it again" As long as there is no real alternative for most people, they will stick with complaining.
- livinginfear 3y ago
  > Wishing you were the one making six fixture for 2 - 6 hour days? I am one of these people. While I do earn a stupid amount of money in the financial sector, the reality for me isn't really that enviable. I do about 3 hours of honest work per day, but the other hours of the day aren't spent with my feet up on the beach. They're spent waiting. They're spent negotiating with pointy-haired managers to unblock me, or arguing with peabrained bodyshop engineers about the utility of totally uncontroversial concepts like unit-testing. They're spent jiggling the mouse every few minutes so that my status doesn't go yellow on Microsoft Teams. If I got to take my '3 honest hours of work' in a single block, and then log off, I'd be content. Except that the few honest hours of work the bank wrings out of me are spaced out over 9 agonising hours a day, interspersed with pointless corporate garbage like "Agile"(tm) cargo-cult meetings. I pay my mortgage, but I hate my career.
  - lll-o-lll 3y ago
    You know, it’s pretty trivial to automate that mouse jiggle…
    - livinginfear 3y ago
      I know. Some people have bought "Mouse Jigglers", and so on to do this. I cringe when I see people buy weird USB devices on eBay for this purpose. Who knows what lurks in the firmware of those things. Some people even buy little hardware turntables that physically jiggle the mouse every so often. On an SOE laptop with all kinds of corporate spyware, you'd have to be pretty game to install a driver to automate the task.
      - jdefr89 3y ago
        Windows supplies an API call, SendInput() I believe lol. You can write a script in a couple minutes.
        baq 3y ago
        If it’s a bank, you can be pretty sure another bored to death IT security dude will find it and it’ll be the highlight of the month. The turntable idea is quite good imho. Could also repurpose a toy robot or something.
        pizzaknife 3y ago
        if you enjoy videogames... i have a wooden dowel that might interest you....
      - fragmede 3y ago
        USB devices purporting to be a mouse or other human interface device (HID) don't need drivers as there's a spec they follow.
        livinginfear 3y ago
- Karellen 3y ago
  > I have trouble comprehending what this piece provides beyond bullshit slinging at big tech. Wishing you were the one making six fixture for 2 - 6 hour days? I think the following paragraphs provide useful non-hypocritical/non-"jealous" commentary, and were the most thought-provoking for me: > But even with stronger regulations, the manifold problems that these tech giants create for society will persist. Unlike the industrial firms that Marx and Smith wrote about, tech firms like Google differ in one key aspect: how they turn a profit. Where industrial firms extract profits from the gap between value produced and what workers get paid in wages, internet platforms rely foremost on rents, which generate profit on the basis of existing property, intellectual or otherwise. No additional labor is needed for each unit of output; profit thus becomes fundamentally extractive, or “unproductive” as Marx, or even classical economists like Smith and Ricardo, would say. For companies like Google, rent comes from owning the infrastructure through which we live our digital lives. The vast majority of Google’s windfall profits—$60 billion in 2022—come from rents. [...] > In the end, the tech workers themselves are not responsible for the proliferation of bullshit. Nevertheless, the work they do (or don’t do) reveals that the problem, at its core, lies in the business model of the platform economy, one that depends not on productive labor but on rents. In our present economic paradigm, rents are undifferentiated from productive work where the creation of surplus value vis-à-vis the exploitation of labor lies at the heart of profitability. Making explicit these differences, however, would reveal that these platforms are not all that different from the banks of Wall Street: they are not making value, they’re taking it. And as long as this remains the underlying form of profit, tech firms’ imaginary of a technological future will be limited to the fast and cheap profits of monopoly rents. This is at the center of tech’s innovation crisis. That tech work is becoming bullshit is not the problem. The problem is that the companies themselves are bullshit. (emphasis mine) That rent-based profits allow these companies to retain vast numbers of bullshit-producing workers is less significant to me than the fact that these profits are extracted from everyday internet users. We are all made poorer from the value that Google et al are extracting from us, when they don't need that value to actually provide the services we are using. But their market dominance allows them to spend some of those profits in the service of artificially maintaining dominance, rather than on improving those services, or by extracting less value to provide the same services at a lower "cost" to us.
dave4420 3y ago
I thought Google had abandoned 20% time?
- manymatter 3y ago
  I think it's been described as "as good as dead" so technically not, but rare anyone gets their other time reduced to anywhere around 80% unless their side project is no longer really a side project. If it's difficult to keep people programming 2 hours a day, losing 8 a week to a side project was naturally making fuller projects than the meeting encased projects.
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
"In an anonymous online poll on how many “focused hours of work” software engineers put in each day, 71 percent of the over four thousand respondents claimed to work six hours a day or less". Written as if 6 hours is little. To get a full focused 6 hours is a pretty high number.
- nicbou 3y ago
  Back when I had billable hours, I'd measure how long I actually work (building small websites), and 6 hours was unusually long. Now I write and edit text for a living, alone, at home and without interruptions. I usually work from 10 to 16 with plenty of breaks. 8 real hours all day, every day is a pipe dream in creative professions.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    Yeah I think I found roughly 4 hours as the average over the course of a month, ranging from zero to about 10.
    - tchock23 3y ago
      At my startup we had people track time on ‘real’ work tasks and found that four hours was about the max anyone could (happily and productively) do each day, which was fairly consistent across roles as well.
      - sfn42 3y ago
        For me it depends. I'm still fairly new and trying to find good solutions to things, so some times I might get hardly anything done because I'm just thinking about what to do or trying various stuff to see how an idea ends up. But when I'm doing things I know I can spend more than 8 hours working productively. On average it's probably less than 6 hours of actually writing code per day though.
- aswegs8 3y ago
  My thoughts exactly. More than four hours of focused work seems rare or limited to some very focused individuals. They still seem to cling to the old idea that people have to work eight hours. They also seem to not be aware of the fact that this applies most of the population of knowledge workers in complex tasks everywhere, not only in the oh-so-flashy top of the crop Meta and Google. Most people I talked to learned early on that four hours is a good time, and the rest is about knowingly or unknowingly pretending to be busy, talking to coworkers, reading and such.
louwrentius 3y ago
Loved this article. > Making explicit these differences, however, would reveal that these platforms are not all that different from the banks of Wall Street: they are not making value, they’re taking it. And as long as this remains the underlying form of profit, tech firms’ imaginary of a technological future will be limited to the fast and cheap profits of monopoly rents. This is at the center of tech’s innovation crisis. That tech work is becoming bullshit is not the problem. The problem is that the companies themselves are bullshit. Also please read David Graeber s Bullshit Jobs.
- staunton 3y ago
  Seems like there's a lot of discontent people who really enjoy it when someone starts calling everything around them bullshit. Graeber's ideas/books with respect to "bullshit" are themselves cynical bullshit written as a kind of joke for maximum controversy. I'm sure he had a lot of fun though, being invited to speak and tell people all their work is bullshit...
  - drooby 3y ago
    Graeber's book hits a nerve with people because I think it touches upon a real problem that people are feeling: "Why am I working so much, doing so little, and getting so little in return? What's the point? Life should be more fulfilling, considering how wealthy our society is." It _feels_ like bullshit. Unfortunately, his book is essentially a long and unscientific blog post that builds upon weak arguments and arm chair philosophy. The irony is that his book seems to be an example of the problem.
    - staunton 3y ago
      Agreed on all points. I also don't see anything that contradicts what I said, though you phrased some of it better than me. The issue is that this feeling people have isn't really related much to Graeber's objective claims.
sunpazed 3y ago
I understand where this is coming from. I had a short 4 year stint in a mid-size tech company, and led a small 16 person team. We managed to build and scale a fairly successful product, to the surprise of the much larger and well resourced teams. Unfortunately, success attracts attention from management, and we found ourselves mired in further layers of bureaucracy. Those who had not really owned products or shipped anything significant began to call the shots.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
Actually, it is abundance and seemingly waste that produces a lot of innovation. Bell Labs was funded by AT&Ts telephone monopoly and was able to pay a bunch of really smart people to do projects that they found interesting. This resulted in innovations like the transistor, C, C++, and Unix among others. In some ways the push for productivity can actually kill innovation, since innovation requires times to think and the risk that all the effort may end up being wasted if it doesn't work out.
tempodox 3y ago
> …that the problem, at its core, lies in the business model of the platform economy, one that depends not on productive labor but on rents. all the while we are being told by the high priests of capitalism that “the market” will sort it out, that “the market” will force efficiency. Pshaw! > That tech work is becoming bullshit is not the problem. The problem is that the companies themselves are bullshit. It's refreshing to see it said so directly for a change.
epolanski 3y ago
Reason why I left my corporate job to become an independent consultant/freelancer. Can't stand being at home all day and work very little and be drafted to so many meetings, syncs while effectively seeing 15 people teams achieve the work I can confidently say can be done by two people, and better. Not only that, by working much more I get to solve many more problems, under bigger time pressure and my skills and knowledge grow many times over than those of other peers.
peteforde 3y ago
I actually had to fire a guy once who was working another job while working for me. I didn't do it because he was working two jobs; I did it because he was falling behind and being dishonest about why. While I don't think I'm evolved enough to be totally okay with knowing someone has a second full-time job... if someone working for me is delivering the goods and nice to work with and I don't have any idea, in the abstract I think I don't have a problem with it. I am hiring for results, not keeping a chair warm. Honestly, I usually do 90% of the most important creative work for a given week in a few hours. Always in a concentrated burst that I can't predict ahead of time. Allowing my brain to stop feeling guilty for that is likely going to be a life-long challenge, but it doesn't change the reality of it.
- justinclift 3y ago
  > evolved enough to be totally okay Why would an "evolved" person be ok with it?
  - peteforde 3y ago
    Word choice is hard. I know that people who succeed in non-monogamous romantic relationships often need to do a lot of work to get to the point where they are happy when their loved ones are happy, instead of eaten alive by jealousy. I'm just saying that I haven't yet fully matured in my own development such that I would be totally fine with my FTEs having other full-time engagements, even if they were completely transparent about it. Even though I believe that someone doing a great job has fulfilled their obligation to me. I should have no more say over what they do when they aren't working on my stuff than I do over who they choose to be with in their family life. I am also saying that if someone can be my best employee without me knowing that they have a whole second full-time job, I respect their game and hope that they are taking some time off for themselves, too. I just kind of don't want to hear about it. ;)
    - justinclift 3y ago
      Hmmm, if someone has another "full time" job then they're being dishonest with you and should be treated as such. Rewarding dishonesty doesn't seem like a wise plan. --- Not sure why you're equating romantic relationships to the workplace, as they're completely separate domains with no cross over of "monogamous" with "full time employment". Hopefully no-ones been playing with your head to make you think otherwise. :/
j7ake 3y ago
Assuming the author is familiar with the tech industry, this author seems to be engaging in dishonest arguments to portray tech as "bullshit". The writing is subtle to avoid interpreting the 6-hour focused work survey, but writes so that a person unfamiliar with tech would interpret the data as if 6-hour focused work is low. A person familiar with tech work would interpret 6-hour focused work to be not bullshit, but the author deliberately does not put the survey results into context. I also disagree with the author here about "bullshit projects". By listing the number of killed projects by Google, the author was trying to portray these projects as "bullshit". But when one wants to innovate, it is not about how many projects get killed, but the quality of the projects that do succeed. It would be like dismissing Edison's work as bullshit because he went through a brute-force approach to developing an incandescent lightbulb.
- mianos 3y ago
  The quality of projects that succeed is pretty odd considering youtube music.
- gniv 3y ago
  Exactly my feelings too. The reality of tech, especially big tech, is much more mundane. The vast majority of engineers work on maintaining and (slowly) upgrading the products that we use every day -- search, mail, maps, video. Each of these have thousands of engs that work on stable projects -- not wildly innovative, but not bullshit either.
donatj 3y ago
I really enjoy the flexibility of my current job - being able to set my own hours, run to a doctor appointment without any prior notice, work at my own pace. Frankly part of why I have stayed so many years. We have a person on our team that has been as best I can tell really abusing it basically since we started working from home at the beginning of the pandemic. Turns in very little work, takes literal days(!) to respond on slack, almost entirely ignores requests for code review and has a project that is now six months late. Less important but they’ve also never shown to an in-person event or even turned their camera on in a meeting - not necessary but adds to the mystery. Literally have not seen their face since the start of the pandemic. If I hadn’t worked with the guy physically in an office pre-pandemic I’d be worried he wasn’t who he said he was. It’s been beyond frustrating to see, as someone who genuinely tries to gives his all and cares. Please for the love of peat, don’t ruin this for the rest of us. Do you want metrics, because this is how we get metrics. This only continues to work if our output is good. People higher than me have begun to notice (finally) - mostly because the late project is becoming more and more of an issue. It was supposed to be his project to design and lead. Because it’s so late however, the rest of us have been getting bumped from other projects to help. Mythical man month, I know. Best of all he’s been almost entirely unavailable to answer design questions or even review code. On top of everything else and despite the goal being to get it done by the end of the year, he took almost all of December off - because there’s no review of our PTO - another wonderful freedom being abused. I am very hopeful he can just get a stern talking to and kicked back onto track, but I am not going to hold my breath.
- fragmede 3y ago
  What did you manager say when you told them you noticed this person has been slacking off and how it's demotivating for you to work with this person?
  - leosanchez 3y ago
    Shouldn't the manager already notice though?
  - donatj 3y ago
    My manager is well aware and pissed. I only really became aware after getting pulled onto the project a little over a month ago, seeing how little existed followed by being able to get basically zero feedback on how things should fit into the project. It was easy to not see (for me) when we were supposed to be heads down on separate projects. We’re given a lot of rope when it comes to what we’re working on so other than hearing about what others are working on in standup, often I’ll never see it. That said, I’m not sure he knows what to do about it. I’ve worked under him for over a decade and this is the first time we’ve had a real problem like this. I suspect he’s working with his own manager on how to handle it.
huqedato 3y ago
Just wait a couple of years and all these "tech workers" at big tech firms will be replaced with AI. In our company, it's all about hitting the deadlines. It's cool because no one's clocking our hours, but miss a deadline and, whoops, you could be out the door. I totally dig this style – it's modern, bendy, and keeps us on our toes. Totally different from the 19th-century industrial routine of '8 hours a day' work style.
mo_42 3y ago
> Another Meta employee, also on TikTok, posted that “Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us, and then they were just kind of like hoarding us like Pokémon cards.” This might be true. An alternative explanation might be that such an employee changing the color of a button has probably millions of times more impact than an engineer working at a B2B start-up with three clients. If I would be executive at such companies and I would have the evil intent of hoarding talented people, I'd, at least, give them a playground for experimentation. Maybe a new innovative product comes out of this. This hoarding has become a popular belief in the tech industry but I don't quite buy it.
- vasco 3y ago
  > An alternative explanation might be that such an employee changing the color of a button has probably millions of times more impact than an engineer working at a B2B start-up with three clients. There's people who certainly tell themselves that, but I've started work in a 12 person company which grew to 300, got acquired into a 1.8k behemot and I have to say the impact is a linear decrease. But people at the 1.8k people company think they are "more professional" while in one week the 12 people did more than 800 of them do in 6 months.
firtoz 3y ago
This makes me happy that I chose not to work for megacorps who have too much money. When you work with smaller companies or early stage startups you get to do real work that does get used. They may not have the budget and resources, but this is why whatever you make needs to be useful and produce value. If bullshit happens too much the company can really fail. I am also experimenting with being a freelancer through mainly Toptal. Most of the projects I got are building MVPs and prototypes that are put in production ASAP or at least used as V1s for the next thing. Then I move on to the next contract. Feels alright, but the risks of being a freelancer are indeed present. However, it does feel really great to see a project is completed and the client is happy with it. There were some "not really great" projects or customers too but mostly good anyway, you get more of a choice what to build and for whom. I'm sure there are some nice corps out there too, and I may join one at some point, but after chatting with enough people from there who can show that they build things of value, efficiently enough. I had one job where I was building bullshit that got cancelled just before launch, twice, and that was super demoralising, even though we are constantly told to not get too attached to our work, well, it happens anyway.
radar1310 3y ago
Get a helmet life’s tough kids.
mgh2 3y ago
Bullshit company in a bullshit industry...
taimurkazmi 3y ago
That was a really fun well written article; sample: In tech, bullshit jobs—which the late David Graeber defines as “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence” even though they are obliged to pretend otherwise—come mostly from bullshit projects. At Google, such projects are aplenty. According to Killed By Google, an archival project that documents discontinued Google services, products, devices, and apps, the company has discontinued nearly three hundred projects since its founding.
markfinn 3y ago
[flagged]
j7ake 3y ago
Article is easy to dismiss Google's / big tech's recent achievements, but totally ignores the significant fraction of conference papers (e.g. NeurIPS) that come from these big tech companies.
cafard 3y ago
The last time I kept a timesheet that was more than pro-forma, I was a proofreader. I think that I was managing six or six and a half hours during an eight hour day, and I was told that I kept busier than most.

86 points by elsewhen 3y ago

Ah, that’s the spirit! Yet I say unto thee: “Despise not in others what one covets for themselves, for that is hypocrisy.” I have trouble comprehending what this piece provides beyond bullshit slinging at big tech. Wishing you were the one making six fixture for 2 - 6 hour days? Business is in part strategy. Individual tech workers are in part corrupt (and incompetent), blaming leadership rather than taking initiative. Sometimes there is extreme abuse, incompetence, and misguided direction; we hear and scampuousely retell those stories, forever. We gain no wisdom or insight from these arbitrary post-mortem turd fests. Other than sensational wastes of someone else’s cash, aren’t we all ready to do it again?

hutzlibu 3y ago
"aren’t we all ready to do it again" As long as there is no real alternative for most people, they will stick with complaining.
livinginfear 3y ago
> Wishing you were the one making six fixture for 2 - 6 hour days? I am one of these people. While I do earn a stupid amount of money in the financial sector, the reality for me isn't really that enviable. I do about 3 hours of honest work per day, but the other hours of the day aren't spent with my feet up on the beach. They're spent waiting. They're spent negotiating with pointy-haired managers to unblock me, or arguing with peabrained bodyshop engineers about the utility of totally uncontroversial concepts like unit-testing. They're spent jiggling the mouse every few minutes so that my status doesn't go yellow on Microsoft Teams. If I got to take my '3 honest hours of work' in a single block, and then log off, I'd be content. Except that the few honest hours of work the bank wrings out of me are spaced out over 9 agonising hours a day, interspersed with pointless corporate garbage like "Agile"(tm) cargo-cult meetings. I pay my mortgage, but I hate my career.
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  You know, it’s pretty trivial to automate that mouse jiggle…
  - livinginfear 3y ago
    I know. Some people have bought "Mouse Jigglers", and so on to do this. I cringe when I see people buy weird USB devices on eBay for this purpose. Who knows what lurks in the firmware of those things. Some people even buy little hardware turntables that physically jiggle the mouse every so often. On an SOE laptop with all kinds of corporate spyware, you'd have to be pretty game to install a driver to automate the task.
    - jdefr89 3y ago
      Windows supplies an API call, SendInput() I believe lol. You can write a script in a couple minutes.
      - baq 3y ago
        If it’s a bank, you can be pretty sure another bored to death IT security dude will find it and it’ll be the highlight of the month. The turntable idea is quite good imho. Could also repurpose a toy robot or something.
        pizzaknife 3y ago
        if you enjoy videogames... i have a wooden dowel that might interest you....
    - fragmede 3y ago
      USB devices purporting to be a mouse or other human interface device (HID) don't need drivers as there's a spec they follow.
      - livinginfear 3y ago
Karellen 3y ago
> I have trouble comprehending what this piece provides beyond bullshit slinging at big tech. Wishing you were the one making six fixture for 2 - 6 hour days? I think the following paragraphs provide useful non-hypocritical/non-"jealous" commentary, and were the most thought-provoking for me: > But even with stronger regulations, the manifold problems that these tech giants create for society will persist. Unlike the industrial firms that Marx and Smith wrote about, tech firms like Google differ in one key aspect: how they turn a profit. Where industrial firms extract profits from the gap between value produced and what workers get paid in wages, internet platforms rely foremost on rents, which generate profit on the basis of existing property, intellectual or otherwise. No additional labor is needed for each unit of output; profit thus becomes fundamentally extractive, or “unproductive” as Marx, or even classical economists like Smith and Ricardo, would say. For companies like Google, rent comes from owning the infrastructure through which we live our digital lives. The vast majority of Google’s windfall profits—$60 billion in 2022—come from rents. [...] > In the end, the tech workers themselves are not responsible for the proliferation of bullshit. Nevertheless, the work they do (or don’t do) reveals that the problem, at its core, lies in the business model of the platform economy, one that depends not on productive labor but on rents. In our present economic paradigm, rents are undifferentiated from productive work where the creation of surplus value vis-à-vis the exploitation of labor lies at the heart of profitability. Making explicit these differences, however, would reveal that these platforms are not all that different from the banks of Wall Street: they are not making value, they’re taking it. And as long as this remains the underlying form of profit, tech firms’ imaginary of a technological future will be limited to the fast and cheap profits of monopoly rents. This is at the center of tech’s innovation crisis. That tech work is becoming bullshit is not the problem. The problem is that the companies themselves are bullshit. (emphasis mine) That rent-based profits allow these companies to retain vast numbers of bullshit-producing workers is less significant to me than the fact that these profits are extracted from everyday internet users. We are all made poorer from the value that Google et al are extracting from us, when they don't need that value to actually provide the services we are using. But their market dominance allows them to spend some of those profits in the service of artificially maintaining dominance, rather than on improving those services, or by extracting less value to provide the same services at a lower "cost" to us.

dave4420 3y ago

I thought Google had abandoned 20% time?

manymatter 3y ago
I think it's been described as "as good as dead" so technically not, but rare anyone gets their other time reduced to anywhere around 80% unless their side project is no longer really a side project. If it's difficult to keep people programming 2 hours a day, losing 8 a week to a side project was naturally making fuller projects than the meeting encased projects.

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago

"In an anonymous online poll on how many “focused hours of work” software engineers put in each day, 71 percent of the over four thousand respondents claimed to work six hours a day or less". Written as if 6 hours is little. To get a full focused 6 hours is a pretty high number.

nicbou 3y ago
Back when I had billable hours, I'd measure how long I actually work (building small websites), and 6 hours was unusually long. Now I write and edit text for a living, alone, at home and without interruptions. I usually work from 10 to 16 with plenty of breaks. 8 real hours all day, every day is a pipe dream in creative professions.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Yeah I think I found roughly 4 hours as the average over the course of a month, ranging from zero to about 10.
  - tchock23 3y ago
    At my startup we had people track time on ‘real’ work tasks and found that four hours was about the max anyone could (happily and productively) do each day, which was fairly consistent across roles as well.
    - sfn42 3y ago
      For me it depends. I'm still fairly new and trying to find good solutions to things, so some times I might get hardly anything done because I'm just thinking about what to do or trying various stuff to see how an idea ends up. But when I'm doing things I know I can spend more than 8 hours working productively. On average it's probably less than 6 hours of actually writing code per day though.
aswegs8 3y ago
My thoughts exactly. More than four hours of focused work seems rare or limited to some very focused individuals. They still seem to cling to the old idea that people have to work eight hours. They also seem to not be aware of the fact that this applies most of the population of knowledge workers in complex tasks everywhere, not only in the oh-so-flashy top of the crop Meta and Google. Most people I talked to learned early on that four hours is a good time, and the rest is about knowingly or unknowingly pretending to be busy, talking to coworkers, reading and such.

louwrentius 3y ago

Loved this article. > Making explicit these differences, however, would reveal that these platforms are not all that different from the banks of Wall Street: they are not making value, they’re taking it. And as long as this remains the underlying form of profit, tech firms’ imaginary of a technological future will be limited to the fast and cheap profits of monopoly rents. This is at the center of tech’s innovation crisis. That tech work is becoming bullshit is not the problem. The problem is that the companies themselves are bullshit. Also please read David Graeber s Bullshit Jobs.

staunton 3y ago
Seems like there's a lot of discontent people who really enjoy it when someone starts calling everything around them bullshit. Graeber's ideas/books with respect to "bullshit" are themselves cynical bullshit written as a kind of joke for maximum controversy. I'm sure he had a lot of fun though, being invited to speak and tell people all their work is bullshit...
- drooby 3y ago
  Graeber's book hits a nerve with people because I think it touches upon a real problem that people are feeling: "Why am I working so much, doing so little, and getting so little in return? What's the point? Life should be more fulfilling, considering how wealthy our society is." It _feels_ like bullshit. Unfortunately, his book is essentially a long and unscientific blog post that builds upon weak arguments and arm chair philosophy. The irony is that his book seems to be an example of the problem.
  - staunton 3y ago
    Agreed on all points. I also don't see anything that contradicts what I said, though you phrased some of it better than me. The issue is that this feeling people have isn't really related much to Graeber's objective claims.

sunpazed 3y ago

I understand where this is coming from. I had a short 4 year stint in a mid-size tech company, and led a small 16 person team. We managed to build and scale a fairly successful product, to the surprise of the much larger and well resourced teams. Unfortunately, success attracts attention from management, and we found ourselves mired in further layers of bureaucracy. Those who had not really owned products or shipped anything significant began to call the shots.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

Actually, it is abundance and seemingly waste that produces a lot of innovation. Bell Labs was funded by AT&Ts telephone monopoly and was able to pay a bunch of really smart people to do projects that they found interesting. This resulted in innovations like the transistor, C, C++, and Unix among others. In some ways the push for productivity can actually kill innovation, since innovation requires times to think and the risk that all the effort may end up being wasted if it doesn't work out.

tempodox 3y ago

> …that the problem, at its core, lies in the business model of the platform economy, one that depends not on productive labor but on rents. all the while we are being told by the high priests of capitalism that “the market” will sort it out, that “the market” will force efficiency. Pshaw! > That tech work is becoming bullshit is not the problem. The problem is that the companies themselves are bullshit. It's refreshing to see it said so directly for a change.

epolanski 3y ago

Reason why I left my corporate job to become an independent consultant/freelancer. Can't stand being at home all day and work very little and be drafted to so many meetings, syncs while effectively seeing 15 people teams achieve the work I can confidently say can be done by two people, and better. Not only that, by working much more I get to solve many more problems, under bigger time pressure and my skills and knowledge grow many times over than those of other peers.

peteforde 3y ago

I actually had to fire a guy once who was working another job while working for me. I didn't do it because he was working two jobs; I did it because he was falling behind and being dishonest about why. While I don't think I'm evolved enough to be totally okay with knowing someone has a second full-time job... if someone working for me is delivering the goods and nice to work with and I don't have any idea, in the abstract I think I don't have a problem with it. I am hiring for results, not keeping a chair warm. Honestly, I usually do 90% of the most important creative work for a given week in a few hours. Always in a concentrated burst that I can't predict ahead of time. Allowing my brain to stop feeling guilty for that is likely going to be a life-long challenge, but it doesn't change the reality of it.

justinclift 3y ago
> evolved enough to be totally okay Why would an "evolved" person be ok with it?
- peteforde 3y ago
  Word choice is hard. I know that people who succeed in non-monogamous romantic relationships often need to do a lot of work to get to the point where they are happy when their loved ones are happy, instead of eaten alive by jealousy. I'm just saying that I haven't yet fully matured in my own development such that I would be totally fine with my FTEs having other full-time engagements, even if they were completely transparent about it. Even though I believe that someone doing a great job has fulfilled their obligation to me. I should have no more say over what they do when they aren't working on my stuff than I do over who they choose to be with in their family life. I am also saying that if someone can be my best employee without me knowing that they have a whole second full-time job, I respect their game and hope that they are taking some time off for themselves, too. I just kind of don't want to hear about it. ;)
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Hmmm, if someone has another "full time" job then they're being dishonest with you and should be treated as such. Rewarding dishonesty doesn't seem like a wise plan. --- Not sure why you're equating romantic relationships to the workplace, as they're completely separate domains with no cross over of "monogamous" with "full time employment". Hopefully no-ones been playing with your head to make you think otherwise. :/

j7ake 3y ago

Assuming the author is familiar with the tech industry, this author seems to be engaging in dishonest arguments to portray tech as "bullshit". The writing is subtle to avoid interpreting the 6-hour focused work survey, but writes so that a person unfamiliar with tech would interpret the data as if 6-hour focused work is low. A person familiar with tech work would interpret 6-hour focused work to be not bullshit, but the author deliberately does not put the survey results into context. I also disagree with the author here about "bullshit projects". By listing the number of killed projects by Google, the author was trying to portray these projects as "bullshit". But when one wants to innovate, it is not about how many projects get killed, but the quality of the projects that do succeed. It would be like dismissing Edison's work as bullshit because he went through a brute-force approach to developing an incandescent lightbulb.

mianos 3y ago
The quality of projects that succeed is pretty odd considering youtube music.
gniv 3y ago
Exactly my feelings too. The reality of tech, especially big tech, is much more mundane. The vast majority of engineers work on maintaining and (slowly) upgrading the products that we use every day -- search, mail, maps, video. Each of these have thousands of engs that work on stable projects -- not wildly innovative, but not bullshit either.

donatj 3y ago

I really enjoy the flexibility of my current job - being able to set my own hours, run to a doctor appointment without any prior notice, work at my own pace. Frankly part of why I have stayed so many years. We have a person on our team that has been as best I can tell really abusing it basically since we started working from home at the beginning of the pandemic. Turns in very little work, takes literal days(!) to respond on slack, almost entirely ignores requests for code review and has a project that is now six months late. Less important but they’ve also never shown to an in-person event or even turned their camera on in a meeting - not necessary but adds to the mystery. Literally have not seen their face since the start of the pandemic. If I hadn’t worked with the guy physically in an office pre-pandemic I’d be worried he wasn’t who he said he was. It’s been beyond frustrating to see, as someone who genuinely tries to gives his all and cares. Please for the love of peat, don’t ruin this for the rest of us. Do you want metrics, because this is how we get metrics. This only continues to work if our output is good. People higher than me have begun to notice (finally) - mostly because the late project is becoming more and more of an issue. It was supposed to be his project to design and lead. Because it’s so late however, the rest of us have been getting bumped from other projects to help. Mythical man month, I know. Best of all he’s been almost entirely unavailable to answer design questions or even review code. On top of everything else and despite the goal being to get it done by the end of the year, he took almost all of December off - because there’s no review of our PTO - another wonderful freedom being abused. I am very hopeful he can just get a stern talking to and kicked back onto track, but I am not going to hold my breath.

fragmede 3y ago
What did you manager say when you told them you noticed this person has been slacking off and how it's demotivating for you to work with this person?
- leosanchez 3y ago
  Shouldn't the manager already notice though?
- donatj 3y ago
  My manager is well aware and pissed. I only really became aware after getting pulled onto the project a little over a month ago, seeing how little existed followed by being able to get basically zero feedback on how things should fit into the project. It was easy to not see (for me) when we were supposed to be heads down on separate projects. We’re given a lot of rope when it comes to what we’re working on so other than hearing about what others are working on in standup, often I’ll never see it. That said, I’m not sure he knows what to do about it. I’ve worked under him for over a decade and this is the first time we’ve had a real problem like this. I suspect he’s working with his own manager on how to handle it.

huqedato 3y ago

Just wait a couple of years and all these "tech workers" at big tech firms will be replaced with AI. In our company, it's all about hitting the deadlines. It's cool because no one's clocking our hours, but miss a deadline and, whoops, you could be out the door. I totally dig this style – it's modern, bendy, and keeps us on our toes. Totally different from the 19th-century industrial routine of '8 hours a day' work style.

mo_42 3y ago

> Another Meta employee, also on TikTok, posted that “Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us, and then they were just kind of like hoarding us like Pokémon cards.” This might be true. An alternative explanation might be that such an employee changing the color of a button has probably millions of times more impact than an engineer working at a B2B start-up with three clients. If I would be executive at such companies and I would have the evil intent of hoarding talented people, I'd, at least, give them a playground for experimentation. Maybe a new innovative product comes out of this. This hoarding has become a popular belief in the tech industry but I don't quite buy it.

vasco 3y ago
> An alternative explanation might be that such an employee changing the color of a button has probably millions of times more impact than an engineer working at a B2B start-up with three clients. There's people who certainly tell themselves that, but I've started work in a 12 person company which grew to 300, got acquired into a 1.8k behemot and I have to say the impact is a linear decrease. But people at the 1.8k people company think they are "more professional" while in one week the 12 people did more than 800 of them do in 6 months.

firtoz 3y ago

This makes me happy that I chose not to work for megacorps who have too much money. When you work with smaller companies or early stage startups you get to do real work that does get used. They may not have the budget and resources, but this is why whatever you make needs to be useful and produce value. If bullshit happens too much the company can really fail. I am also experimenting with being a freelancer through mainly Toptal. Most of the projects I got are building MVPs and prototypes that are put in production ASAP or at least used as V1s for the next thing. Then I move on to the next contract. Feels alright, but the risks of being a freelancer are indeed present. However, it does feel really great to see a project is completed and the client is happy with it. There were some "not really great" projects or customers too but mostly good anyway, you get more of a choice what to build and for whom. I'm sure there are some nice corps out there too, and I may join one at some point, but after chatting with enough people from there who can show that they build things of value, efficiently enough. I had one job where I was building bullshit that got cancelled just before launch, twice, and that was super demoralising, even though we are constantly told to not get too attached to our work, well, it happens anyway.

radar1310 3y ago

Get a helmet life’s tough kids.

mgh2 3y ago

Bullshit company in a bullshit industry...

taimurkazmi 3y ago

That was a really fun well written article; sample: In tech, bullshit jobs—which the late David Graeber defines as “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence” even though they are obliged to pretend otherwise—come mostly from bullshit projects. At Google, such projects are aplenty. According to Killed By Google, an archival project that documents discontinued Google services, products, devices, and apps, the company has discontinued nearly three hundred projects since its founding.

markfinn 3y ago

[flagged]

j7ake 3y ago

Article is easy to dismiss Google's / big tech's recent achievements, but totally ignores the significant fraction of conference papers (e.g. NeurIPS) that come from these big tech companies.

cafard 3y ago

The last time I kept a timesheet that was more than pro-forma, I was a proofreader. I think that I was managing six or six and a half hours during an eight hour day, and I was told that I kept busier than most.