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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 t

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
        Yes, they should be class compliant devices. When I mentioned drivers I was talking about the possibility of an alternate driver that would simulate the 'jiggling'. I was just throwing one possibility out there. Mainly just to illustrate the point that anything running on your PC would be subject to some scrutiny from the bank.
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.

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
      Yes, they should be class compliant devices. When I mentioned drivers I was talking about the possibility of an alternate driver that would simulate the 'jiggling'. I was just throwing one possibility out there. Mainly just to illustrate the point that anything running on your PC would be subject to some scrutiny from the bank.

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.