9 ms·
That could very well be because the jobs are effectively useless. By no means does that mean the people are, nor is what the income allows them to do. But most
by _heimdall 2y ago
That could very well be because the jobs are effectively useless. By no means does that mean the people are, nor is what the income allows them to do. But most jobs sure do seem pointless.
- homarp 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36373190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36373190
- bravetraveler 2y agoThe work is mysterious and important
- pdimitar 2y agoBoth are true, separately in different situations. And sometimes both at the same time. There are a lot of useless employees out there. So, so much. And a ton of bullshit jobs as well.
- Workaccount2 2y agoIt's kinda like online games. Most people who play a game are not too great at it, a large subset is pretty good, and then it's smaller and smaller groups as the ability increases. At the top you get the people who are true pros, they write the books, the guides, they solve the hardest problems, and everyone looks up to them. But spin the wheel and get a random SWE to do some work? It's not gonna be far off from an random 1v1 lobby.
- PickledChris 2y agohttps://danluu.com/p95-skill/ https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ Continues to apply
- anal_reactor 2y ago> And for games like Overwatch, I don't think improving is a moral imperative; there's nothing wrong with having fun at 50%-ile or 10%-ile or any rank. But in every game I've played with a rating and/or league/tournament system, a lot of people get really upset and unhappy when they lose even when they haven't put much effort into improving. If that's the case, why not put a little bit of effort into improving and spend a little bit less time being upset? Interesting read, but I feel like the author could've spent just one more minute on this sentence. How good you are at given activity often doesn't matter, because you're mostly going to encounter people around your own level. What I'm saying is, unless you're at the absolute top or the absolute bottom, you're going to have similar ratio of wins to loses regardless whether you're a pro or an amateur, simply because an amateur gets paired with other amateurs, while a pro gets paired with other pros. In other words, not being the worst is often everything you need, and being the best is pretty much unreachable anyway. This can be very well extended to our discussion about SWEs. As long as you're not the worst nor the best, your skill and dedication have little correlation with your salary, job satisfaction, etc. Therefore, if you know you can't become the best, doing bare minimum not to get fired is a very sensible strategy, because beyond that point, the law of diminishing returns hits hard. This is especially important when you realize that usually in order to improve on anything (like programming), you need to use up resources that you could use for something else. In other words, every 15 minutes spent improving is 15 minutes not spent browsing TikTok, with the latter being obviously a preferable activity.
- jimbokun 2y agoUnfettered capitalism is pretty good at figuring out which is which. It’s pretty core to Elon Musk’s animating philosophy: get as many jobs as possible then see if there’s any negative impact. Not as appropriate in a government setting where the impact goes far beyond personal profit and loss.
- exe34 2y agoif a CEO can run 7 companies and still play monopoly with the ship of government, then maybe CEOs aren't really that useful.
- matwood 2y agoThe problem is defining negative impact and also timing. For example, I can stop doing backups and save time and money. There is zero negative impact right up until the point I need to use the backup, then the impact is catastrophic.
- Toenex 2y agoMaybe we already have Universal Basic Income, you just need to have a pointless job to collect it.
- ornornor 2y agoI never thought about it this way, but it does make sense.
- nyarlathotep_ 2y agoYES, this is exactly the case and why the Twitter layoffs and now the "DOGE" purge is a terrible thing (even in cases where it was totally legitimate to eliminate "waste"). "They had useless make-work jobs and sent 4 emails a week and watched TikToks the rest of the time" So? There's FAR too many people and nowhere near enough jobs for a large portion of people to do something that is both "real", and provides actual economic value. Far more important that people have some form of dignity and can pay to feed their families and live a life with some material standard. Anyone who's been in a corporate role knows there's loads of people that have a dubious utility and value--and people with "tech skills" are NOT exceptions to this rule, at all.
- mschuster91 2y agoWe don't just have "bullshit jobs" (which is an actual term these days), we have a "bullshit economy" as well - centered around advertising because without advertising most of the bullshit just wouldn't sell. Like, if you already got a car, you can drive it for 10-20 years easily, or more if you take well care of it. But advertising makes you think you "need" a new car every few years... because that keeps the economy alive. You buy a car and sell the old one to someone else who can't afford a new car but also wants a new one, so their old car goes off to Africa or whatever to be repaired until truly unrepairable. But other than the buyer in Africa who actually needed a new car, neither you nor the guy who bought your old car would have needed a car. And cars are a massive industry that employs many millions of people worldwide - so if you'd ban advertising for cars, suddenly the bubble would pop and you'd probably have a fifth of the size remaining, and most of it from China because the people in Africa can't afford what a brand new Western made car costs. Or Temu, Shein, Alibaba and godknowswhat other dropshipping scammers. Utter trash that gets sold there, but advertising pushes people to buy the trash, wear it two times and then toss it. A giant fucking waste of resources because our worldwide economy is based on the dung theory of infinite growth. It has worked out for the last two, three centuries - but it is starting to show its cracks, with the planet itself being barely able to support human life any more as a result of all that resource consumption, or with the economy and the public sector being blown up by "bullshit jobs". We need to drastically reform the entire way we want to live as a species, but unfortunately the changes would hurt too many rich and influential people, so the can gets kicked ever further down the road - until eventually, in a few decades, our kids are gonna be the ones inevitably screwed.
- eru 2y ago> But most jobs sure do seem pointless. Do you include the private sector? Why do corporations engage in this kind of charity? Do we need more competition?
- blackqueeriroh 2y agomost jobs are absolutely not useless. They might seem useless to you, but the work has to get done. Personally, I think that a receptionist as a building is useless, but I would be pretty pissed off if my packages kept getting stolen or I had to go get each one when it came at my place of business.
- isaacremuant 2y agoOr maybe just extremely inefficient due to the huge complexity of reality and how it hides a lot of the power dynamics and real decision making. Big entities are such that if you take it all down, you feel the side effect of output (maybe value, maybe something else) but if you take Hugh chunks, you might not feel much because they're so extremely ineffictive and value creation doesn't correspond with value received for the individuals that created it.
- throw10920 2y agoWhat's the evidence for "most"?
- h2zizzle 2y agoMany jobs are quite helpful and even necessary, if done for ~2 hours a day. They become "useless" in aggregate when they're forced to be minded by the same person for 8 hours (because of opportunity cost, effects on health well-being, etc., you end up "breaking even" or worse on QoL and net productivity). Overall economic productivity is high enough that a lot of positions could be split into 2 or 3 short shifts, at full pay - IF you don't factor in the various financial boondoggles that we've gotten ourselves wrapped up in. If you made the decision to wipe out a lot of these obligations (mostly to rich people), we could get to that kind of set-up, solvently.
- Paracompact 2y agoI imagine you're a fellow Graeberian. I feel the same way you do (and deeply so), but I don't have the confidence to give numbers, let alone such idealistic ones. How do you support your own numbers?