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Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?

• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• rqtwteye 2y ago
  I have been in the workforce for almost 30 years now and I believe that everybody is getting more squeezed so they don’t have the time or energy to do a proper job. The expectation is to get it done as quickly as possible and not do more unless told so. In SW development in the 90s I had much more time for experimentation to figure things out. In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. So you just hurry through your tasks. I think google had it right for a while with their 20% time where people could do wanted to do. As far as I know that’s over. People need some slack if you want to see good work. They aren’t machines that can run constantly on 100% utilization.
  • Avicebron 2y ago
    The article addresses the fact that it's more of the "job" that the software company provides as an extension of their services isn't really a "job" a la "SW development in the 90s" It's the after effect of companies not being penalized for using the exploitation dragnet approach to use people in desperate situations to generate more profits while providing nothing in return.
  • kunzhi 2y ago
    Only 20 years for me, but this is my observation also.
  • temporallobe 2y ago
    This is my experience as well. In the late 90s/early 2000s I had the luxury of a lot of time to deeply and learn Unix, Perl, Java, web development, etc., and it was all self-directed. Now with Agile, literally every hour is accounted for, though we of course have other ways of wasting time by overestimating tasks and creating unnecessary do-nothing stories in order to inflate metrics and justify dead space in the sprint.
    • TuringNYC 2y ago
      >> literally every hour is accounted for I saw one company where early-career BA/PMs (often offshore) would sit alongside developers and "keep them company" almost all day via zoom.
      • AtheistOfFail 2y ago
        Yep, that would be my own personal hell.
      • latentsea 2y ago
        I would just terminate the call. Like... hell no.
      • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
        Everyone's complaining about that as a developer, and rightly so. But that can't be easy for the PMs, either, trying to find a way to "add value" when they have no idea what's going on. I'd expect there to be some "unexpected network outages" regularly in that kind of situation...
      • MikeTheGreat 2y ago
        Twice the billable hours! /s
      • dyauspitr 2y ago
        This is kind of cool as an alternative process to develop apps with. Literally product in a zoom window telling you what to build as you go along. No standups, no refinement, no retros etc. Just a PM that really knows what the customer needs and the developer just building those as you go along.
        • PessimalDecimal 2y ago
          No. It's just awful.
        • arvinsim 2y ago
          No developer wants to being treated as a code monkey and I bet no PM would want to waste time watching someone type out code that they don't understand.
  • the_cat_kittles 2y ago
    sounds like bit of a death spiral
  • mschuster91 2y ago
    > In SW development in the 90s I had much more time for experimentation to figure things out. In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. Software development for a long time had the benefit that managers didn't get tech. They had no chance of verifying if what the nerds told them actually made sense. Nowadays there's not just Agile, "business dashboards" (Power BI and the likes) and other forms of making tech "accountable" to clueless managers, but an awful lot of developers got bought off to C-level and turned into class traitors, forgetting where they came from.
    • potato3732842 2y ago
      I commend you for having an opinion so bad I can't tell if you're satirizing marxists or not. Let me ask you this, would you rather be managed by a hierarchy made up of people who don't understand what you do? Because I assure you it is far worse than being managed by "class traitors".
      • bryanrasmussen 2y ago
        well, not the original poster, but I have been managed by both kinds, and the best manager I ever had was not a former techie and the worst was a former programmer. The worst manager did often say things that were sort of valuable and correct in a general way, like "well you don't actually know that because it hasn't been tested" which was of course true, but he also seemed to think he could tell people what the correct way to do something was without knowing the technology and the codebase. This often meant that I had to go to junior developers later, after a meeting, and say "concerning ticket X, T. didn't consider these things(listing the things), so that while it is true that we should in principle do what T. said, it will not be adequate, you will also need to do this - look at the code for this function here, it should be abstracted out in some way probably, this was my crappy way of handling the problem in desperation Y months ago." Trying to explain to him why he was wrong was impossible in itself, he was a tech genius evidently, and you just had to give it up after a bit, and figure that at some time in the future the decisions would be reversed after "we learned" something.¨ on edit: in the example I give the manager as I said was correct in what he wanted done, but as I said it was inadequate as the bug would keep recurring if only that was done, so more things had to be done that were not as pretty or as pure as what he wanted.
  • p1necone 2y ago
    > In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. So you just hurry through your tasks. This has been my exact experience. Absolutely everything is tracked as a work item with estimates. Anything you think should be done needs to be justified and tracked the same way. If anything ever takes longer than the estimate that was invariably just pulled out of someones ass (because it's impossible to accurately estimate development unless you're already ~75% of the way through doing it, and even then it's a crapshoot) you need to justify that in a morning standup too. The end result of all of this is every project getting bogged down by being stuck on the first version of whatever architecture was thought up right at the beginning and there being piles of tech debt that never gets fixed because nobody who actually understands what needs to be done has the political capital to get past the aforementioned justification filter.
    • marginalia_nu 2y ago
      It's fascinating that you end up sort of doing the work twice, you build an excel (or jira) model of the work work along with the actual work to be done. Often this extends to the entire organization, where you have like this parallel dimension of spreadsheets and planning existing on top of everything. Eats resources like crazy to uphold.
      • pjot 2y ago
        This compounds with each _team_ modeling the work in jira/excel too!
      • squiggleblaz 2y ago
        Yes but metrics! How can the CEO look like they know what's happening without understanding anything if they don't have everyone producing numbers?
      • spudlyo 2y ago
        Jira is already almost like "productivity theater" where engineers chart the work for the benefit of managers, and managers of managers only. Many programmers already really resent having to deal with it. Soon it will be a total farce, as engineers using MCP Jira servers have LLMs chart the "work" and manage the tickets for them, as managers do the same in reverse, instructing LLMs to summarize the work being done in Jira. It'll be nothing but LLMs talking to other LLMs under the guise of organizational productivity in which the only one deriving any value from this effort is the companies charging for the input and output tokens. Except, they are likely operating at a loss...
  • Sparkyte 2y ago
    Definitely squeezed. They say AI, but AI isn't eliminating programming. I've wrote a few applications with AI assistance. It probably would've been faster if I wrote it myself. The problem is that it doesn't have context and wildly assumes what your intentions are and cheats outcomes. It will replace juniors for that one liner, it won't replace a senior developer who knows how to write code.
    • NERD_ALERT 2y ago
      I felt this way with Github Copilot but I started using Cursor this week and it genuinely feels like a competent pair programmer.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • Retric 2y ago
        What work are you doing the last few days? My experience is for a very narrow range of tasks, like getting the basics of a common but new to me API working, they are moderately useful. But the overwhelming majority of the time they are useless.
      • jdcasale 2y ago
        I recently tried Cursor for about a week and I was disappointed. It was useful for generating code that someone else has definitely written before (boilerplate etc), but any time I tried to do something nontrivial, it failed no matter how much poking, prodding, and thoughtful prompting I tried. Even when I tried to ask it for stuff like refactoring a relatively simple rust file to be more idiomatic or organized, it consistently generated code that did not compile and was unable to fix the compile errors on 5 or 6 repromptings. For what it's worth, a lot of SWE work technically trivial -- it makes this much quicker so there's obviously some value there, but if we're comparing it to a pair programmer, I would definitely fire a dev who had this sort of extremely limited complexity ceiling. It really feels to me (just vibes, obviously not scientific) like it is good at interpolating between things in its training set, but is not really able to do anything more than that. Presumably this will get better over time.
  • golergka 2y ago
    How much more expensive is your time for the company now vs the 90s?
    • bryanrasmussen 2y ago
      counting in cost of living increases? Probably about the same.
  • dwattttt 2y ago
    > People ... aren’t machines that can run constantly on 100% utilization. You also can't run machines at 100% utilisation & expect quality results. That's when you see tail latencies blow out, hash maps lose their performance, physical machines wear supra-linearly... The list goes on.
    • dehrmann 2y ago
      The standard rule for CPU-bound RPC server utilization is 80%. Any less and you could use fewer machines; any more and latency starts to take a hit. This is when you're optimizing for latency. Throughput is different.
      • pdhborges 2y ago
        Doesn't this depend on the number of servers, crash rates and recovery times? I wouldn't feel confident running 3 servers running at 80% capacity in ultra low latency scenarios. A single crash would overwhelm the other 2 servers in no time.
        • dehrmann 2y ago
          Right; this is only for large pools of servers.
    • namaria 2y ago
      Difference is machines break and that costs lots of money. People just quit, some businesses consider it a better outcome.
  • zombiwoof 2y ago
    Same. What's crazier now is nobody in management seems to want to take a risk, when the risks are so much lower. We have better information, blogs, posts on how others solved issue, yet managers are still like "we can't risk changing our backend from dog shit to postgres". . . .when in the 90s you would literally be figuring it all out yourself, making a gut call and you'd be supported to venture into the unknown. now it's all RSU, Stock Prices, FAANG ego stroking and mad dashes for the acquihire exit pushing out as much garbage as possible while managers shine it up like AI goodness
  • m463 2y ago
    I've always thought if I gave better estimates about how long things would take, my schedule would support a decent job. But black swans seem to be more common than anticipated. (I also wonder - over your career, do you naturally move up to jobs with higher salaries and higher expectations?)
  • dustingetz 2y ago
    as tech gets commoditized the companies are worse, more funding but worse
  • wormius 2y ago
    It's almost as if people don't understand what the word "productivity" means. That's all it is, if you hear "x increase in productivity" and it sounds great, it really means : you, the worker, work harder after we fire other people and thus are "more productive" because you did the same out put that 2 people did. Sucker. And we all eat this shit up.
  • giantg2 2y ago
    I've even seen this and it seems to have accelerated in the last 10 years or so. I'm seeing roles be combined, deadlines get tighter, and quality go down. Documentation has also gotten worse. This all seems pretty odd when you consider the tools to develop, test, and even document have mostly gotten more powerful/better/faster.
    • joquarky 1y ago
      What documentation?
  • joquarky 2y ago
    You can’t brute-force insight. I'm often reminded of that Futurama episode “A Pharaoh to Remember” (S04E07), where Bender is whipping the architects/engineers in an attempt to make them solve problems faster.
  • atrettel 2y ago
    I was about to post largely the same thing. There is a saying in design: "Good, fast, cheap --- pick two." The default choice always seems to be fast and cheap nowadays. I find myself telling other people to take their time, but I too have worked jobs where the workloads were far too great to do a decent job. So this is what we get.
  • lumost 2y ago
    People have to care about outcomes in order to get good outcomes. Its pretty difficult to get someone to work extra time, or care about the small stuff if there is a good chance that they will be gone in 6 months. Alternatively, if leadership is going to cycle over in 6 months - then no one will remember the details.
  • 3abiton 2y ago
    I totally agree, it was a stark contrast between phd life and purely sw engineer life, in terms of doing things the way i wanted.
  • giancarlostoro 2y ago
    I think letting devs 2 hours a day, that they can flex so if they wanna use it on Fridays its fine, for personal projects, whether internal or otherwise. Just think of all the random tech debt that could be resolved if devs had 2 hours a day to code anything, including new projects that benefit everyone. Most people can only squeeze out about 6 hours worth of real work anyway. You burn up by the end of the day.
    • fsckboy 2y ago
      >Just think of all the random tech debt that could be resolved if devs had 2 hours a day to code anything, including new projects that benefit everyone. regardless of the potential benefits of this plan, zero tech debt would get erased. imho net tech debt would increase by the 80 20 rule, meaning that you're not going to get more than 80% of the side projects fully wrapped in the 20% of the time that you've allotted to them.
      • touisteur 2y ago
        I guess tech debt could even be increased in some cases. Some people shouldn't have too much time available :-)
  • rukuu001 2y ago
    Have we learnt nothing? 100% utilisation of practically any resource will result in problems with either quality or schedules. What, as an industry, do we need to do to learn this lesson?
    • Clubber 2y ago
      It needs to be reflected faster in quarterly results. When the effect takes a year or two, nobody notices and there are too many other variables/externalities to place blame.
  • svilen_dobrev 2y ago
    > People need some slack Definitely. If you tighten a bearing up-to 100% - to zero "play", it will stop rotating easy.. and start wearing. Which is.. in people-terms, called burnout. Or as article below says, (too much) Efficiency is the Enemy.. https://fs.blog/slack/ https://fs.blog/slack/
  • saghm 2y ago
    One time during a 1:1 with who I consider the best manager I ever had, in the context of asking now urgent something needed to get done, I said something along the llines of how I tend to throttle to around 60% of my "maximum power" to avoid burnout but I could push a bit harder if the task we were discussing was essential with to warrant it. He said that it wasn't necessary but also stressed that any time in the future that I did push myself further, I should always return to 60% power as soon as I could (even if the "turbo boost" wasn't enough to finish whatever I was working on. To this day, I'm equally amazed at both how his main concern with the idea of me only working at 60% most of the time was that I didn't let myself get pressured into doing more than that and the fact that there are probably very few managers out there who would react well to my stating the obvious truth that this is necessary
  • motorest 2y ago
    > I have been in the workforce for almost 30 years now and I believe that everybody is getting more squeezed so they don’t have the time or energy to do a proper job. The expectation is to get it done as quickly as possible and not do more unless told so. That's my impression as well, but I'd stress that this push is not implicit or driven by metrics or Jira. This push is sold as the main trait of software projects, and what differentiates software engineering from any other engineering field. Software projects are considered adaptable, and all projects value minimizing time to market. This means that on paper there is no requirement to eliminate the need to redesign or reimplement whole systems or features. Therefore, if you can live with a MVP that does 70% of your requirements list but can be hacked together in a few weeks, most would not opt to spend more man months only to get minor increments. You'd be even less inclined to pay all those extra man months upfront if you can quickly get that 70% in a few weeks and from that point onward gradually build up features.
  • dumbledoren 2y ago
    Capitalism eventually ends up in those with capital making those without capital work until they drop. We are in that eventuality right now.
  • hellotheretoday 2y ago
    There are fields of study that agree with you. It is evidence based that treating your workers well, having reasonable quotas and expectations for work life balance, good wages and reinforcement for effort, etc creates conditions where workers perform more efficiently and last longer But many organizations reject this. Why wouldn’t they? There is a surplus of workers and consumers accept substandard products. Skimp on training, put out crap. Throw workers into the fire, demand everything from them, get furious if they don’t prioritize the company above everything in their life, burn them out, cut them loose, pick another from the stack of resumes I was talking to someone who works for a startup recently. A colleague died and it was announced on a Friday. They were expected to finish the day. On Monday their replacement started and the team was told to bring this person up to speed asap. No space to grieve, no time to process. Soulless and inhuman. Disgusting and sociopathic behavior
• lupusreal 2y ago
  Some jobs are bad. Some people are bad at their jobs. Sometimes it's both at the same time. This furniture assembly job sounds like shit. But also, somebody who puts in "several hours" of labor should be able to assemble some off-brand Ikea slop by simply following the instructions and using a little bit of common sense. If the pay is terrible so you don't even want to try, I get it, but you should bail quick not after "several hours", so it sounds like an earnest (albeit incompetent) attempt was made. This job sucks, not because there isn't training, but because the pay is too low to attract competent labor.
  • Ylpertnodi 2y ago
    Karl Pilkington, how art thy welcomed.
• zw123456 2y ago
  I recently retired after 45 years in tech. I started out in 1978 at Bell Labs. I have had great jobs and terrible jobs. Great bosses and horrific bosses. And all the things in between. I did not just survive, I thrived and beyond and worked at 3 start ups and a bunch of other companies large and small. What I learned is to not to be afraid. Regardless of what is happening around you. Fear is the enemy. Don't be afraid to be weird or crazy or whatever is causing you to be timid.
  • tmpz22 2y ago
    > What I learned is to not to be afraid. Regardless of what is happening around you. Were you perhaps financially secure enough not to have to fear anything? Or tenured (Bell Labs!) that unemployment wasn't actually a threat to you? YMMV.
    • Stefan-H 2y ago
      While YMMV, a fear response is a choice. You can have all the rational reasons to be afraid (like the bottom of your hierarchy of needs being unmet) and choose to act out of cold rationality rather than fear. Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - if you can act without fear even when there is justified reason to be afraid, you will be able to easily do so when it isn't justified.
      • Paul-Craft 2y ago
        Where I come from, "hav[ing] all the rational reasons to be afraid" and pretending otherwise is called a delusion. I prefer to see the world as it is.
        • Stefan-H 2y ago
          "... is called a delusion". What I am suggesting is not delusion, it is mindfulness and cutting through delusion. When one is presented with something that elicits a fear response (whether the stimulus is rational or not) the goal is to quiet all of the "lizard brain" reactions, and instead formulate a well reasoned response. "Fear is the mind-killer" - while from fiction, still rings true to me - if you react out of fear you will short-circuit internal processes that are far better at long-term reasoning even when at the expense of short-term comfort.
• Uzmanali 2y ago
  I’ve had similar frustrations with gig economy services. A while ago, i hired someone from TaskRabbit to set up a standing desk. i thought it would be an easy process, but the assembler showed up late. then he had a hard time following basic instructions, and he also left halfway through, saying he had another job to go to. I finished the assembly myself at the end. then i realize these platforms don’t support skilled, well-paid workers. they focus on cheap convenience, which often results in poor quality. the issue isn't just that people struggle with their jobs. it's that the system makes it hard for them to do good work. Now I hire local professionals, even if they cost more. Their experience and trustworthiness save me time and frustration.
  • thi2 2y ago
    The buisnessmodel is speculating that your average Joe does not have the energy or knowledge to go after the shobby work. I notice this trend a lot and while I can push back I feel sorry for the people that are not able to do so or do not know their rights.
    • imtringued 2y ago
      You have basically described the government vs private contractor dynamic.
  • potato3732842 2y ago
    >Now I hire local professionals, even if they cost more. Their experience and trustworthiness save me time and frustration. I've found the exact opposite. The deeper the moat the bigger the jerks. I can pick up a guy at home depot who'll bust ass as hard as I will at a very reasonable price. Can't say that (especially the first part) about most professionals. Anything with a license or high capital investment keeping upstarts out is like pulling teeth to work with. Even for brick and mortar this holds. My local upholsterer is a pleasure to work with compared to any tire and alignment shop. That said, I'm also not hiring people to put together Ikea beds for me or bringing piles of gravy work to any given professional. Edit: I will add, I have consistently been amazed with what concrete truck drivers will do above and beyond the bare minimum and the consistent "get it done or tear shit up trying" attitude they bring. But this might be a regional thing.
• thi2 2y ago
  > At Fred Meyer, our local Kroger-owned grocery store, a bagger in his 70s put all my frozen items in a normal bag, and my chips in the cold storage bag I’d brought from home. A) Having to work a job (obviously not done out of passion) 70+ is really disheartening B) I don´t understand why this even is something that has to be done by a worker. I bought the groceries. I know where I want my stuff in my bags. Or I just toss them back in the cart and load it properly at the car.
  • blackhaj7 2y ago
    Agreed. It’s so sad to have to work at that age. I know some people choose to but to have to is a pretty sad state of affairs and damning of how the country allows it’s citizens to prosper
  • dkarl 2y ago
    He might not be doing it for economic reasons. He might be doing it to get out of the house. My mom's physician suggested volunteer work or a part time job to keep her active instead of sitting on the couch all day.
    • bigtunacan 2y ago
      Most likely he is doing it for economic reasons. My preferred checker is an elderly woman that is slow, but very affable and likes to chat when there is no line. Despite her positive attitude, she is working because social security isn't enough and grocery workers also get an employee discount.
    • bflesch 2y ago
      Not sure if you're joking, but volunteer work is quite different than having to stand at the checkout line packing backs in a commercial setting.
      • dkarl 2y ago
        Volunteer work is a lot like part time work, in that it's mostly low skill, and the work varies from physical labor to office work, and from behind-the-scenes jobs where you only interact with other volunteers to intensely face-to-face jobs where there's no hiding from the emotions of the people you serve.
• brudgers 2y ago
  The gig economy is way worse than the author describes. Gig workers can't advance with the companies they work for. Gig workers can't build a network with their coworkers because they don't have coworkers...and there's a good chance that they are competing for work with other people working for the same company. There are dead end day jobs, and then there is gig work.
  • zeroCalories 2y ago
    This isn't too different from most low-skill jobs. Most people don't aspire to be assistant manager at McDonalds, they do it for a while, build a resume, then move.
    • brudgers 2y ago
      build a resume And establish work relationships with other people who can help with future job hunting. The Uber app doesn’t have an HR department.
      • prawn 2y ago
        Not to mention casual employees at least get some sort of social aspect from their work life. (A slight variation on the networking you mentioned.) Most of my friends, I have through past work environments like shared offices, etc. That would be near-impossible as a gig worker.
    • _aavaa_ 2y ago
      But there’s a difference between “don’t want” and “structurally locked out”.
    • kayodelycaon 2y ago
      It’s vastly different. Gig workers are literally disposable robots. You’re part of a computer program. There is no human relationship. At least a McDonald’s worker can talk to their manager.
      • 2y ago
• KennyBlanken 2y ago
  Huh? Productivity per worker in the US is at an all-time high and is, I believe, the highest in the world? Can we please shit-can this notion that US workers are lazy/bad/whatever? That's not the problem. US workers are being squeezed to death. Corporations have gone from 50% tax burden to paying little taxes, the money is flowing almost entirely to the top 1% earners, C-suites, investors, private equity, etc and we're seeing record levels of corporate welfare. Corporate welfare like..full time or nearly full time employees getting welfare because their employers refuse to give them livable wages, so taxpayers have to step in. Amazon and Walmart are the biggest welfare recipients in the country, and that doesn't begin to count all the sweetheart deals they get on property taxes, the taxpayer money they get for setting up training programs, free infrastructure improvements to support their business. We have $8BN to give to a lumbering incompetent dinosaur like Intel, $500BN for "AI" crap (which will consume massive amounts of power, land, water...) ...but apparently we can't afford $4BN for LIHEAP which is half as much and keeps elderly people from freezing or broiling to death?
  • strken 2y ago
    I don't understand. From what I can tell, the blog post makes the exact point that workers are being squeezed to death in a way that raises nominal productivity while lowering quality. Can you elaborate a bit more on your exact disagreement?
  • potato3732842 2y ago
    >Huh? Productivity per worker in the US is at an all-time high and is, I believe, the highest in the world? Yeah, that's what happens when the latent cost of employing anyone for anything is so high all the menial stuff get shipped overseas or replaced with fewer expensive employees working with much more expensive labor saving technology/materials. Also, I'm not sure how much I trust the numbers themselves, metrics and targets and all that.
• wnolens 2y ago
  North Americans (my exp only) value cheap goods and services so highly, they don't care how the sausage is made.
  • wat10000 2y ago
    It’s very difficult to know how it’s made. I’m shopping for some good or service. I see different offerings. Usually I have little capacity to judge them. Companies aren’t transparent. Reviews are rigged. Recommendations are based on profit rather than quality. If I don’t have some personal knowledge of the thing, it’s really hard to tell what’s what. What do I do? Well, I usually pick the cheapest one. Might as well. If I spend more, it’s likely to be the same or even worse, so it’s just a waste.
    • protocolture 2y ago
      >It’s very difficult to know how it’s made. Do people not talk to the contractor? I remember riding along in a taxi, sitting up front, having a conversation about how he used his taxi license to get around the anti uber laws (that have since been repealed) in my state. I talk to the guys who I hire online. We often end up working out a deal behind the platform. I once hired a bloke to help move stuff out of my garage, and we talked about how he is having a hard time saving money after moving here to study, which is why he was taking airtasker stuff.
      • wat10000 2y ago
        I think we’re addressing different points. I’m talking about how difficult it is to judge quality when shopping for something. Sure, if I’m hiring a contractor I’ll get quotes and talk to them. But I’m deeply unqualified to judge their competence or work ethic. If I’m lucky I’ll go on personal recommendations from someone I know and whose judgment I trust. Otherwise it’s just vibes.
• jongjong 2y ago
  The jobs are bad and people get blamed for it. We've been through a credit bubble where everything was borrowed out of debt, in the hope that it would deliver massive-scale automation in the future. But reality is that everyone has been rushing out brittle solutions, creating a brittle, fragile architecture... And now people entering the job market have to spend so much time fixing the mess that they can't make progress. Worse, they take the blame for the slow progress and they have no say over foundations. We are asked to do impossible things given the current foundations and so every job becomes about politics; how to foist the impossible/infeasible tasks onto someone else so that they will take the blame. Because it's all political, the people who can actually create value and thus aren't good at politics get wiped out of the market; then all that remains in every company are political operators. The value creators are forced either to become political or to keep hopping between companies... Who make good use of them... for a short time until they burn out and hop on to the next company. Nobody acknowledges the value they contribute during their brief tenures; in spite of the fact that they're the only ones adding value. Only the political operator can rise through the ranks; getting credit for managing the constant churn of burnt-out value creators. Worse, as the political operators get into positions of power; who do they help? People who are like them; also political operators who don't know how to add value.
  • jongjong 2y ago
    Also, I should add that the job-hopping is likely a feature of our inflationary monetary system; as inflation is ongoing, people find that if they change jobs after 1 or 2 years, they can get some non-trivial salary increase... In reality, changing jobs every 2 years doesn't actually give you a real salary increase; it merely allows you to maintain your buying power in the face of inflation... The elite class is basically using the monetary system to constantly squeeze value creators by forcing them to job-hop frequently as it demoralizes them, lowers their self-esteem and thus helps to keep their salary expectations down. The manager class also contributes to the demoralization aspect of value creators by imposing unnecessary constraints on value creators. The reason we have population collapse in the west is because value creators are systematically demoralized. It's literally the enslavement of value creators by value extractors. I think this is why coding is increasingly seen as a low-class skill nowadays... If you possess any productive skill, it signals that you're part of the lower 'value creator' class. There is even a belief that if you have to create value for a living, then it means that you're just not smart enough to figure out how to make other people work for you... Completely ignoring the reality that it's all about social networking; literally all about your position in the social graph and distance to money printers.
• buckle8017 2y ago
  > Working for UPS is a good job — and that’s part of why UPS workers are good at their jobs. Are UPS workers really better at their jobs? FedEx and UPS seem nearly identical in my area, only DHL is competent.
  • BrenBarn 2y ago
    In my experience UPS is better.
    • ryandrake 2y ago
      In my neck of the woods, UPS is the absolute best, Amazon depends on which driver is doing the rounds this month, and FedEx you're lucky if your package even arrives at the right house.
    • lupusreal 2y ago
      UPS drivers keep crashing into my rock wall. They aren't even delivering packages to me, they just use my drive way to turn around and keep hitting the rocks. For some reason its always UPS. Maybe some quirk of their navigation system is tacitly encouraging it.
  • dpifke 2y ago
    UPS in my area (South Dakota) is terrible, way worse than FedEx or USPS. They're so bad that I will choose a different retailer if possible if the only shipping option is UPS. UPS has repeatedly lost packages, delivered things in crushed or shredded boxes, held packages for more than a week due to "local weather" (there was no rain or snow), made it impossible to pick up packages that are being held, and damaged my trees by backing into them after delivering to a neighbor's house. USPS is fine in the summer, but they won't come all the way up my road if there's any snow or ice on the ground, so I had to get a PO box for regular mail. FedEx is fantastic, I have never had any problems with them. (We don't have DHL here.) Edit to add: my wife works for a small online retailer that ships perishable goods nationwide from a distribution center in Missouri, and they exclusively use FedEx now. They canceled their contract with UPS due the cost of lost or delayed shipments. She says their FedEx experience has been significantly better.
• BrenBarn 2y ago
  It's a mix. Sometimes a person is bad at their job because the people who hired or trained them are bad at their jobs. But another way to look at it is that our society increasingly values only people who are "good" at the "job" of making as much money as possible while externalizing as many costs as possible. > The exploitation (of workers, of natural resources) that made that abundant cheapness possible was largely invisible and thus ignorable. It's not just the exploitation of workers and natural resources, it's also the exploitation of customers and our society as a whole. When you pay for a product and it's crap, you, the customer, were also exploited by the seller. The key part to me is the invisibility. The theory of capitalism is that companies compete to better satisfy customers. But nowadays the predominant mode of competition is obfuscation: companies compete to be the best at hiding costs, dodging responsibility, and deflecting consequences. The quality of the actual products and services is secondary to the apparatus of delivering them and responding to feedback, and that apparatus is not oriented towards actually improving the products or services, just at finding somewhere to dump the negative consequences. > But resistance is very possible. If everyone’s good at their job, shop there. The article lists a few of these "consumer-level" modes of resistance based essentially on the idea of voting with your dollars. The problem is that it's hard to be an informed dollar-voter in this environment of deliberate obfuscation. Spending hours wading through reviews, product descriptions, and so on, just to buy one thing, effectively increases your cost, and there's no guarantee you'll make the right choice in the end anyway. I'd be willing to pay more in many cases for a better result, but there's no way to tell if something that costs a bit more is actually better, or just another clever scam cloaked in verbiage like "artisanal" and "handcrafted" to lure in people just like me, people who are willing to pay more and can be fooled into doing so while getting no benefit for the extra money. We need more organized and deliberate resistance: laws. Laws and specific enforcement mechanisms that directly penalize, not just companies, but the individuals at the top who are good at their jobs, namely the job of squeezing value out of other people by lying, cheating, and hiding. We need laws that force competition into the realm of actual products and services, and punish engagement in the obfuscation arms race. > As a society, we have decided that we want more for less: more convenience, more purchases, more technology, but none of it at prices that render it out of reach. There's an Arcade Fire lyric I heard a long time ago but recently came across again, from "Windowsill": "I don't want it faster, I don't want it free". Too many people these days want things faster and free, and don't understand that the costs are still being paid, somehow, somewhere, often even by the same person who thinks they're getting something fast and free.
• ckdot 2y ago
  In Germany you have quite high minimum wages. Unions and works committees are quite common. Labor protected laws are quite strict. Sure, not every job is fun, but living with low income is not as bad as in the US. So, are people better at their jobs? Nope. Do people work better just because you pay them better? Nope. Should people get paid better, especially those with shirty jobs? Yes - of course. But there’s no reason to believe this would improve quality of work.
  • OutOfHere 2y ago
    Germany in my experience is a country of too many scammers. Right from the taxi driver to the entrepreneurs, it is about cheating the customer. The funny thing is that it is native Germans who do it. Of course not everyone is like it, and there are plenty of top-notch open source developers that call Germany home.
    • sumedh 2y ago
      Can you give some examples?
• 5w3llth3n 2y ago
  The solution is simple; quit jobs, assemble our own shit. In the US, lean in to the 2A and tell the <1 million cops, <700k politicians to eat it. We peacefully assemble around jobs. Just peacefully assemble around a new meme of telling the walking dead to pound sand. Education worked to an extent; most will not devolve into dumb fucks. Pretty pathetic seeing the adults kowtowed by the ossified establishment.
  • saulpw 2y ago
    Did you read the part where the OP was unable to assemble her own shit, and thus had to get help?
    • OutOfHere 2y ago
      It was the OP's choice and mistake to buy a complex design that was difficult to self-assemble. Any number of simple metal bed frames bought online can trivially be assembled by a single person. Never give up your power unnecessarily.
      • voidnap 2y ago
        What if they have a physical disability or affect like they're pregnant or recovering from surgery? What if instead of a simple furniture item it's a piano. Nobody can have pianos anymore unless they move them on their own?
        • OutOfHere 2y ago
          Even if they have a disability, it still makes sense to get a simpler bed frame. The chance of anything going wrong when someone is assembling a simple metal frame are much lower. As for pianos, they would have to get a dedicated piano mover.
          • voidnap 2y ago
            > As for pianos, they would have to get a dedicated piano mover. You said to never give up your power unnecessarily. Pianos aren't necessary.
• adverbly 2y ago
  Amazing I left almost this exact question as a comment a couple weeks ago! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43427615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43427615
• black_13 2y ago
  [dead]
• zombiwoof 2y ago
  Managers are bad and make the jobs bad and then the people get bad. Shit flows downhill
• cynicalsecurity 2y ago
  People mentioned they had it easier in the past. It's true, it was easier. The world was not as fast as it is now. The world needs to slow down a bit. Slowing down would benefit both the planet and the people.
  • prawn 2y ago
    I know it's dull to blame another thing on them, but I suspect it's phones/etc as a connection to a live world. There's always a pipeline of content, always something getting updated, always a notification. I remember many many years ago on the cusp of home internet (when I couldn't justify $50/m to have internet at home as well as work!), if there wasn't something interesting on TV, I'd read or have some other calm activity. If I wanted to know who won the day's NBA games, I'd have to wait until the next day's newspaper. Now, almost no matter what activity I do, there's a portal to endless distractions within arm's reach.
• lesuorac 2y ago
  I mean, if just hire somebody without any sort of training it should just be expected that they're bad? Like show me where in the Apple training they teach how to set ringtones? UPS straight up flies people to training [1]. Of course their drivers are going to be better. [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/UPS/comments/16oizrm/hiring_and_training/ https://old.reddit.com/r/UPS/comments/16oizrm/hiring_and_tra...
• ryandrake 2y ago
  I think a lot of commenters here are projecting this article onto their work lives as tech office workers, but it's really more about the world of unskilled and semi-skilled service/gig workers, like handymen, furniture assemblers, delivery drivers, and so on. All these things can be true and they reinforce each other: The jobs suck <-> The people willing to do them aren't very happy, skilled or competent <-> The pay is minuscule. And we can't seem to get out of this Nash Equilibrium.
  • Olreich 2y ago
    None of those listed jobs is actually unskilled labor. Driving a big truck around narrow roads is a skill most don’t have, doing it at speed and running up and down to actually move the heavy packages is a skill most don’t have. Assembling furniture is a skill most don’t have, especially with complex engineered wood products that will break if stressed wrong. Handymen is literally just a collection of skilled labor jobs rolled into one guy that can handle small home improvement projects like carpentry, masonry, plumbing, and electrical. These are specialized jobs that have wrongly been labeled “un-skilled” or “semi-skilled” as if knowledge work is the only skill of value…
    • reaperman 2y ago
      Very, very little labor is unskilled. In almost any work there is a massive difference in quality and speed between someone who has been doing it for <6 months vs. someone who has been doing it for >3 years. My theory is that "unskilled labor" was a term of propaganda invented by an earlier generation of business leaders in order to publicly devalue many labor-intensive roles. That generation knew that it was a lie, but the business leaders that followed were taught that "unskilled labor" was axiomatic, and essentially "drank the kool-aid". The result of this is that the labor pool for many disciplines has been hollowed out because it's no longer financially sustainable for workers to build the skills needed to excel in those roles.
      • aaronbaugher 2y ago
        Yes, it's propaganda. If the corporatists can convince people that a previously well-paid job (working in a slaughterhouse, for instance) is actually "unskilled labor," they're one step closer to convincing people it should pay less, and that it's a job no one you know would take so they have to import cheap labor to do it.
• cadamsdotcom 2y ago
  Labor laws in the US are outdated, not being updated, and not being enforced. Companies exist to make money. If the company's environment permits it to exploit people to make money? It'll do it just to not get outcompeted. Delivery drivers' pay should be higher - the cost of delivery should drive some percent of people choose pickup. Bed assembly being impossible due to the wrong part being sent should cause recourse for the bed assembly company/staff. Everyone involved is doing their best, but it's a bit dire lately.
• OutOfHere 2y ago
  In the software world, managers could and should be replaced by user counts. If a developer's work product doesn't have users, that is not a desirable outcome. In practice, when this happens in the real world, 9 times out of 10 it is the manager's fault.
• protocolture 2y ago
  I used to use airtasker a lot. One thing I noticed is that the people doing airtasker full time, rushed a lot. I really don't think the platform is for them. The 2 - 3 people who did the best work, were already people in that trade, doing professional work (often self employed), but using the app to book up just their slack time. One time I had a professional lawn care company come through and do all my garden maintenance, just to keep the apprentice busy. The job was just for lawn mowing. But unlike the other people on the platform, these guys never wanted to hear from me again. They dont need my business on an ongoing basis.
• TheJoeMan 2y ago
  I’d be interested in a breakdown of Angi’s costs. They paid $85 for assembly and estimate the assembler was paid $25? Where could the money possibly be going, server hosting is incredibly cheap.
  • semiquaver 2y ago
    Don’t forget that Wayfair gets a cut of that $85 as well.
  • dublinben 2y ago
    Check out their financial statements. Half their revenue is eaten up by sales and marketing. https://ir.angi.com/ https://ir.angi.com/
• bcoates 2y ago
  This is a nit, but grocery bagging (one of the article's examples) is a no-win situation. I worked it as a summer job a while back--It’s the most bikeshed job in existence because (nearly) everyone understands it, but they all have their own theory of bagging. To this day I remember a client whose entire purchase was a loaf of bread, a package of fresh raw chicken, and a bottle of liquid drain cleaner. Paper bags, of course. I don't remember how I arranged them but I remember being yelled at.
  • throwaway422432 2y ago
    This is actually a good lesson in communication. Question 1, are you fine with the chicken in with the bread? Question 2, would you like the drain cleaner left separate rather than with the food items. They either don't care or would suggest leaving the bread or chicken separate, same for the drain cleaner. The worst grief you'll get is why they can't have 3 bags.
    • imp0cat 2y ago
      This is obviously a three-bag situation, who would want to have these items packed any other way?
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
• stego-tech 2y ago
  Excellent article, and better than I could do at generalizing the larger problem of outsourcing. From the IT perspective, companies pay far more to outsource than they would by keeping permanent employees on staff and decently compensated (as in, enough for a modest home, a car every decade, a vacation every year, and all necessary medical/dental/vision care, plus some retirement compensation of some form). Outsourcing communicates two things very loudly: 1) To the outsourcer, that you're a cheap client who will fire you as soon as someone cheaper comes along or a KPI is missed 2) To those in the know (colleagues, workers, stakeholders), that you don't intend to be here long enough to deal with the consequences of your actions Outsourcers will never care about your infrastructure or its actual needs, and won't care about your budget either. An employee is more likely to conserve budget with smarter product choices and more in-house builds, while outsourced workers will just nod and accept whatever you point to as gospel, since they'll never have to fix it anyway. In essence, you're paying more money to have someone else handle it then you would have paid someone else to talk you professionally down or implement it properly. Similar arguments: * Public Cloud is a form of outsourcing that can often increase costs, especially for static or non-scaling infrastructure/resources. Yet because it's more convenient and skirts CAPEX budgets, more companies will just outsource to AWS/Azure/GCP instead of buying two to three servers, a storage array, and some network infrastructure to host their internal directories/applications/file shares. * XaaS is also outsourcing, often doubly so. You outsource the application to an XaaS provider, and then outsource its management or setup to an outsourcing firm/MSP/consultant. Then you leave, and the company is stuck with a product they have to pay for because "it's necessary", don't know how to support it, don't understand what it's for, and can't begin to move off of or away from it for at least a year after they hire new permanent in-house technical staff. * Outsourcing leads to a dependency on consultants, because you don't understand your own estate anymore (and fired the folks who did, so you could send the labor elsewhere) and need someone else to tell you what's needed, with the pretty slide decks to justify it to stakeholders. Now you're paying for the outsourced infra (often public cloud or XaaS), the MSP to manage out, the consultants to update/implement it, and now additional consultants to integrate it with other systems who also require consultants because - again - you outsourced your technical staff. Before long you're just blindly implementing whatever's in the upper-right Gartner quadrant without understanding function or utility, let alone ROI. The end result is a bunch of grossly overpaid leaders, a glut of burnt-out MSP workers who only get paid to put out fires but never prevent them (and even if they were paid for prevention, they'll only be able to do it for whoever pays them the most), and a lagging domestic workforce you have to invest in upskilling when you do want to bring technical staff back in house. Congratulations, instead of leaving your engineers and architects on payroll, you've single-handedly saved the company enough money during your contract to get yourself all your KPI-tied bonuses, and left the organization on fire while you parachute off to repeat it elsewhere. The OP is right - people aren't necessarily bad at their jobs, we've just incentivized the worst behavior as a society to the point most jobs are just bad. Now we're even doing it to technology folks (IT/IS/Devs) with LLMs, racing ahead with ever more outsourcing and banking on the fact someone else will clean up our mess.
• bluedevilzn 2y ago
  Except paying more for a service doesn’t guarantee better service. I have hired local handymen at $75 per hour and they have been equally bad with fake reviews.
• xyst 2y ago
  The author dances around the real cause. It's the lack of labor unions and/or decreasing participation. In this neoliberal/neoclassical (aka "orthodox") economy, companies are maximizing profits at all costs and sacrificing quality and customer service. Then enter "private equity" which has historically extracted/squeezed once profitable businesses for all they are worth. Saddle them with debt, load up them up on consulting fees (paid to PE, by the way), squeeze the labor force/downsize, decrease quality of items. Then when the debt cannot be paid, sell businesses for parts, layoffs across the board, cook the books, and sell to the next sucker. Small grocery stores -- (too many to name) Veterinary care -- (too many to name) Health clinics -- (too many to name) Electronics -- iRobot Software -- (too many to name, but nearly any company bought by "Vista Equity Partners" and et al) Appliances -- Maytag, Instapot, Electrolux Great names in their industry with amazing benefits to employees. Reduced to numbers. Benefits cut. Pensions cut/abolished and replaced with shitty 401Ks. Yea everything is getting shittier. Blame the billionaire class, decades of tax cuts for the wealthy that has been a parasitic drain on society as a whole.
• mirawelner 2y ago
  Sturgeons's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
• jt-hill 2y ago
  This makes me think of The Sort, coined by the venerable patio11. The types soft skills it takes to to be effective in the kinda crappy jobs described by the author can command much better remuneration in any number of other roles, and society has gotten much better at efficiently allocating that human capital.
  • lurk2 2y ago
    I always thought “soft skills” were a cope for those who didn’t learn an actual skill, until I entered the workforce. I was working mainly in customer service, construction, and facility maintenance roles, and in all three I found it was incredibly common for coworkers to have issues with anger management, emotional maturity, and basic courtesy. These jobs were all fairly terrible aside from customer service; perhaps not coincidentally, that is also where these issues were the least common.
• owenversteeg 2y ago
  I agree with the author's point, which basically boils down to "pay peanuts, get monkeys." But I think another large issue is a deep lack of respect at these jobs, in every way. They are impersonal, they are short-term, you are a cog in a machine, they don't know your name, the customers don't know your name, they don't care about you, you are replaceable, you don't care about the work, why would you?
  • pas 2y ago
    ... that's the problem right? The big furniture factory is good at making (cheap) furniture, but they are very bad at managing local teams to deliver and assemble and ... IKEA (at least in most of Europe) is good at this, because they spend a lot of attention and invest in their local presence (all of their big stores have pretty okay fast-food restaurant, as far as I understand) ... so of course it would make sense to let the factory do that and let some other company focus on assembly (and last-mile stuff generally). ... but there's no competition, no ratings to look up, no alternatives, they will send someone and that's it. ... and of course this spreads the negative cost all around, everyone gets a bit more of the annoyances, but keeps costs down (yay, I guess?) and as a comment [1] in this thread mentioned this is a bad Nash equilibrium. (the post mentioned lemons already, and of course we know that due to information asymmetry bad goods crowd out good ones.[2]) there's no price information for "respect". it used to be enforced by big brands, hiring processes, unions, trade organizations, certifications, licensing requirements. but of course assembling a standardized bed is not hard, especially if someone did a few of the same. so of course none of the usual signals apply (no certification, no licensed assemblers registry maintained by some government organization, no assemblers union/guild, and so on.) ... the possible solutions are to open up the data for these gig companies. or fix labor laws. or fix social security (unemployment compensation, negative income tax). yeah, I know. good luck with any of that nowadays :/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43563248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43563248 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
    • telotortium 1y ago
      IKEA in the US has a good fast-food restaurant as well (although I'd call it more of a cafeteria). On the other hand, in the US, IKEA doesn't value making it easy to navigate the store or developing a competent assembly service. I think the issue is that companies will generally either see something as a core competency, or at least central to brand identity, and therefore put more effort into it, or they'll see it as non-core, in which case it will go to the cheapest option.
• nixpulvis 2y ago
  Customer service across the board is in free-fall. Just the other day I was met with a Chipotle worker who was visibly frustrated that I ordered a burrito instead of a bowl. A little thing, but holy shit. I guess when wages don't add up to a viable life, resentment and carelessness spread like wildfire.
  • pylua 2y ago
    Yeah, this is prevalent everywhere. It’s pretty crazy. I’m glad I’m not the only one that has noticed this.
  • Larrikin 2y ago
    I would be interested in knowing what Chick-Fil-A does to prevent this. Pretty much every customer facing job that doesn't hope for charity at the end of the service is pretty bad in the US currently, but somehow they achieve the level of service of what I would get in Japan. The only thing I've been able to surmise is that they probably pay the managers very well and mostly just hire smart high schoolers that may have been passed over or didn't know about internship opportunities, and pay slightly better rates than McDonald's. They still pull the same scummy things as McDonald's with pressuring employees for goals that only benefit the manager, but maybe its not so bad if you're getting paid more than your very young peers. Chick-Fil-A would probably try to attribute some religious meaning to the Sunday off for their adult workers, but it seems like any company could just guarantee a day off on the weekend for their workers.
    • WorldMaker 2y ago
      Tribalism, presumably. Chik-Fil-A has intentionally made their brand about serving a specific tribe, being part of that specific tribe. That tribe has ideals and to work for that tribe is to live up to those ideals and if you don't live up to those ideals you are fired and probably not a "real" member of that tribe. It's tautological, but so is a lot of tribalism. Given how much of that tribalism is also explicitly religiously coded, I find it's hard not to want to apply harsher words like "cult-like" to Chik-Fil-A, specifically, but "sect-like" is probably more accurate given how predominant both their business culture tribe and religious tribe are in American politics today even if "sect-like" doesn't have quite the same harsh connotations designed to help you question the systems of power in place.
• kmoser 2y ago
  Contributing factors that I didn't see discussed yet are the increasing stratification of job descriptions, along with reduction in autonomy to break out of your stratum (combined with incentive not to). This creates workers with an extremely limited view of the whole picture, and lack of interest or ability to do anything outside their job description to fix your problem. I've heard that Ritz-Carlton does the opposite: they empower employees at all levels to address any customer's concern. This, I believe, is how it should be. https://ritzcarltonleadershipcenter.com/2019/03/19/the-power-of-empowerment/ https://ritzcarltonleadershipcenter.com/2019/03/19/the-power...
• _ea1k 2y ago
  That Wayfair scenario is very familiar to me. I had a really similar experience with them delivering a table and chairs. They stayed for a shockingly long time to assemble them. I figured it was just really hard to assemble. That was somewhat true. However, when I looked at them, I was shocked at how shoddy the work was. Cross braces were installed backwards. Seat bottoms had huge gaps from the underlying support. Some screws were literally just missing, with parts that would just flop. A lot of this stemmed from not paying attention to the instructions, which specified really specific sequences for putting in the screws, leveling, then tightening. Those steps were obviously engineered to minimize misalignment, but this crew thought they knew better... sigh I didn't ask for a new crew, as I didn't trust them to send a better crew. Instead I just spent a good evening redoing quite a bit of the work.
• lormayna 2y ago
  Maybe an unpopular opinion, but the article mentioned very low skills jobs as courier, assembler, clerk. There is a reason why those people are doing job like these instead that better jobs. Some people are just not interested in doing their work correctly, some other are not skilled enough.
• jwr 2y ago
  The problem is with work ethics, not with jobs. In Japan, it's impressive to see how people perform even the most menial jobs with dedication. It's the Yoda approach: do or do not. If you do a job, do it well. So, you will see people whose job is to stand in the rain and watch over a construction site exit making sure people in the sidewalk do not get run over by trucks exiting the site, doing their job with utter dedication. Even if it rains. Even if the job is crappy. I'm sure these people would rather have a different job — but as long as this is the one they have, they will sure as anything do it well!
  • bob1029 2y ago
    The average level of work ethic in the areas I frequent has cratered over the last 6-7 years. I can feel it happening to me as well. I used to get super anxious if I wasn't going to be able to respond to a work email within a few minutes. Basically chained myself to my desk at home M-F. Remember phone calls? Having to answer a ringing phone within 15 seconds or you could be perceived as delinquent? No one is responding quickly to anything anymore. Keeping myself amped up 8 hours a day for vendors and customers who are 1000% asleep at the wheel is too much. I wait for meaningful work to accumulate now and work in bursts. This definitely contributes to the downward spiral, but I don't know what else to do. Human energy is finite. I'm willing to stick my neck out really far for really long if it seems like others are willing to do the same, but it doesn't feel like that kind of situation right now.
  • jampekka 2y ago
    > So, you will see people whose job is to stand in the rain and watch over a construction site exit making sure people in the sidewalk do not get run over by trucks exiting the site, doing their job with utter dedication. That kind of job existing in the first place is the problem. And that could be well called subservience instead of work ethic.
    • voidnap 2y ago
      > That kind of job existing in the first place is the problem. Why? You don't think that job is important? To prevent injuries around a construction site?
• Clubber 2y ago
  "no one wants to work anymore" No one ever wanted to work, we just had to in order to pay the bills. Sometimes work can be gratifying, but most of the time it's just a slog and always has been.
• 28304283409234 2y ago
  Yes.
• I_Nidhi 2y ago
  The thing is if someone prepared for an interview and cracked the job, they have to be good at it. I have realised that it's often our perception of them which makes them bad at the their jobs. Similar to how we usually blame motivation when the actual problem is clarity of role or job. If we believe in the motive behind it and have clarity of our role in it, motivation does not remain an issue. We make the jobs bad by not being able to properly share the incentive behind it, what good it brings and to whom. Most of the time people don't want to work because they don't see the ROI in it.
• l0new0lf-G 2y ago
  Very good and insightful article, but suffers from a weakness: it implies that the problem can be solved by everyone just buying from the ones whose workers are doing the job well. This is not the case. The evidence that the "free market" does not "regulate itself" (at least not in favor of the many) since the 2008 recession is beyond refutation: we need pro-worker governments stepping in.
• swee69 2y ago
  Gig economy employment model works great for Amazon’s end product - the other companies have just executed poorly
• BizarroLand 2y ago
  Jobs are just boring. The only challenge involved in most of them is the challenge of finding the willpower to show up on time.
• jjk166 1y ago
  I take some issue with the notion that we shouldn't blame the individual who does a bad job because of the system that incentivizes them to do a bad job.' Let's say you have someone working a cash register. It is rare for a manager to check the amount of money in the register, and it's certainly too infrequent for them to be able to determine who took money from the register if any were missing. This is a system that encourages low paid employees to take money from the register - it's clearly in their personal best interest. As the store loses money to these issues, it's harder to pay a good wage to a large staff, so individual compensation is going to get worse, further incentivizing skimming. On could obviously see the system has a flaw, and it could be fixed with more managerial effort. But at the same time the employees are just straight up stealing. They are actively choosing to do something which is clearly unethical simply because they can get away with it. Those upstanding individuals who do the right thing suffer the consequences - whether it be a less prosperous employer or a less trusting management - because of these selfish individuals. Applying the same principle, those who intentionally do a bad job, such as throwing packages in the bushes or not putting in the effort to make sure a prescription is filled properly, are likewise acting unethically in their own self interest because they can get away with it. They are stealing time or energy instead of money, but in the grand scheme of things they are all mutually interchangeable. I do think that better pay, better aligned incentives, and better training would all help, and the broader trend of enshittification is obvious. There is a price point below which quality is just not really viable, and those who want cheaper will get what they pay for. But treating those employees who are active participants in this system, the ones who agree to take the jobs for low pay and then cut corners to make up for it, as helpless victims of the system with no agency is intellectually stifling.