8 ms·

Why so many jobs are crappy

89 points by kevinburke 14y ago

rgbrenner 14y ago
I didn't like this article. Felt the author gave no thought to what work has been throughout human history: dull, physically demanding, etc. He says work is meant to be interesting engaging and meaningful... It would be great if that were true... But that is written nowhere. Work is simply things that need to be completed that someone else is willing to pay for. Any other definition is you projecting your ideals onto what the task really is. So to answer the question: why are so many jobs crappy? Because that is the way things have always been. If you enjoy your work (like I do), count yourself lucky.
- joelrunyon 14y ago
  Isn't that the whole reason of why jobs need to be done? Someone has a problem and they want to get it solved (but don't want to do it themselves) so they pay someone else to do it for them. That's the reason work is called work – it's work.
  - potatolicious 14y ago
    You're disregarding specialization. Someone has a problem and they want to get it solved - but they can't do it themselves, so they pay someone else to do it for them. Things get outsourced for this as much as "I don't want to do it myself". And therein lies the space for interesting work.
    - joelrunyon 14y ago
      They could do it themselves but it's more valuable for them to pay you (or someone who already knows how) to do it than it is to learn & do it themselves. It's that gap - that allows value to be extracted from the job.
  - Dewie 14y ago
    If an employer has 20 employees, the biggest reason for that is that she can't do labour the equivalent of 21 persons herself. Work is simply things that need to be done; whether your boss finds your type of work fulfilling, or you find it fulfilling, is coincidental to that fact. It doesn't help that our western culture largely connotes any kind of work with drudgery and pain. I had a task to play a certain computer game in order to get myself acquainted with the mechanics and the feel of the game. It's a fun game; I assumed beforehand because I've played similar games before. But I didn't get around to doing it until two weeks later. Why? Because it was work.
- niggler 14y ago
  This article was clearly written by someone who has not had the experience of trying to hire and later fire someone. When you try to look at it from the other side, things start to make sense.
- bendmorris 14y ago
  People who read Hacker News are naturally biased about what work is or should be. If everyone did work that was interesting, engaging, and meaningful, society couldn't function. There are plenty of jobs that are neither interesting nor engaging but are necessary. How many garbage men or laundromat employees really enjoy and are stimulated by their work?
  - untog 14y ago
    How many garbage men or laundromat employees really enjoy and are stimulated by their work? I think you can live two kinds of life. One where your job is your passion, and takes over your life. A lot of startup folk are in this bracket. I'd argue that if you aren't, then you shouldn't be doing a startup. On the other side, people work to earn the money they need to pursue the interests outside of work. I really don't think there's anything wrong with that, and it annoys me when people in communities like HN get snobby about it. The garbage worker is even getting a physical workout every shift- meanwhile, the rest of us slowly get less fit sat at a desk, and end up sacrificing our free time to go to the gym.
    - mejarc 14y ago
      One thing I liked about my time as "dog-collar labor" is that all my co-workers had interesting non-work pursuits, and there was no penalty for leaving work behind to engage in them. None of us mistook our stints as cashiers, food servers, or book store clerks for our passions, nor did our employers. There was refreshing frankness that the whole thing was just business, nothing personal: no, we weren't enticed with company-paid meals, but we also weren't required to work limitless overtime.
      - coldtea 14y ago
        >no, we weren't enticed with company-paid meals, but we also weren't required to work limitless overtime. I.e exchange your little precious time in this world for some token BS "handout", that's pre-calculated in your pay expenses anyway.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  At the end of the day somebody has to muck the horse stalls. (That somebody was me for a while)
  - zanny 14y ago
    In this modern era, probably no. Someone doesn't need to. Go build a manure shoveling Roomba and never muck the stall again.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - erichocean 14y ago
    And yet my mother does it for free, because she likes her horses and the stall is across the trail from her house. Point being: for every "crappy job", there are people who legitimately are willing and able to do it for free, and already do.
    - sliverstorm 14y ago
      She doesn't do it because she loves to muck stalls though, does she? She does it because it is part of owning horses.
      - erichocean 14y ago
        I think she'd say she does, because it's part of (for her) the experience of owning a horse. She also did that for pay as a teenager, so maybe it helps her feel young, too. I think what you mean is that no on would miss it if horses didn't shit, and I think you're right about that. I think we underestimate, though, the value to people of belonging and participating, socially. Many activities people don't like, on their own, become neutral or even enjoyable as part of something else, like mucking stalls. Everything is contextual, and there's no objective, independent-of-context answer to the value or worth some thing or activity is going to have to someone.
    - 14y ago
- Simon321 14y ago
  Actually, work hasn't been like that at all throughout human history. Work as we know it comes with civilization. And civilization started 5000-8000 years ago. Homo sapiens have existed for 200,000 years. Before civilization, it wasn't something to be completed that someone else was willing to pay for. You can't really think life as a hunter gatherer would be dull? And there was no boss. Quote from wikipedia: Hunter-gatherer societies also tend to have relatively non-hierarchical, egalitarian social structures.
mcartyem 14y ago
Many jobs are crappy because companies want guarantees. They would rather have peace of mind that things are moving at a known rate compared to any risk of uncertainty. The jobs are not necessarily crappy because companies are interested in keeping wages down. Companies are more interested in boosting profits compared to keeping wages down. The humorous part is so many jobs continue to remain crappy even when you make a boss look good by generating orders of magnitude more value than he bargained for when hiring you. Even if you explained to the boss how you could generate such value at the time of hire, they still wouldn't be able to assimilate it's possible. They don't see how one can generate such much value, even when you present plans on how it can be done. It's as if the boss is trying hard not to let you generate more value than expected.
scotty79 14y ago
... and that's why programmers change employers every two years.
nhashem 14y ago
Most jobs are selling your time in exchange for money. If your time is mostly fungible compared to someone else's time (ie. most low-skill labor), then I'd say all the algebraic equations expressed in the OP are true. He is essentially modeling supply/demand curves of typical scenarios involving "human capital." In the past, the value of human capital -- the amount you got paid for selling your time for money -- used to be more lucrative. At one point nearly half of Americans were in a labor union, which artificially constrained the supply of human capital so it would be worth more. Conversely, our previous industrial revolutions required a great deal of human capital (building factories, sewers, etc), generating lots of demand that would keep the value of human capital high. Due to political and technological changes, this is basically no longer the case. If you're a software engineer, then none of these models apply to you because you are high-skill labor (also sometimes called "talent.") You're paid for your time, but your productivity can be orders of magnitude higher than your pay. In the OP's "expendability of labor" graph, the "sweet spot" is enormous. In my nearly ten years as a software engineer, I've seen colleagues laid off/fired for all sorts of reasons, but none of them were due to, "well we did the math, and we decided your production is not worth your salary." I've seen layoffs where the executives literally admitted they would make less revenue/profits due to the lost productivity of the laid off workers not offsetting the savings in salary, but they had to hit a certain "profit percentage" or some other absurd reason that justified the layoffs. In any event -- I've thought a lot about the macro-society impact of this new model of economy, if we're truly destined for a world where human capital is just not that valuable. My interest in politics and healthcare has largely been based on this -- what should we consider "subsistence living," and what happens if we reach an inflection point where most jobs paying for human capital are below it? It's possible, of course, that this will all be moot, and our next industrial revolution will have a huge demand for locally-based human capital (e.g. a "renewable energy industrial revolution scenario," where there is a huge demand for laborers that can install solar panels on houses, or something), and the median income for Americans will increase. Or it's possible for a more gradual shift to happen (e.g. the graying of the baby boomers causes a gradual increase in demand for local caretakers of the elderly). But I'm not sure it's a good idea to just assume that will happen.
- erichocean 14y ago
jacob019 14y ago
Looter mentality, bosses and jobs just exist? Be grateful for the opportunity to have your efforts compounded by the contributions of others. If you were alone on an island, what would you have to show for your work at the end of a day? A meal? Temporary shelter? Even the lowest wage jobs offer us security, health, and a life much easier than our ancestors. Don't like what a job can offer you create one? Think you're worth more? Be your own boss, if you succeed then you'll create jobs and you can be the change you want to see. What has happened to our generation that everyone thinks they have something coming to them and are slighted by those who succeed? Want your fair share, then take it.
- A1kmm 14y ago
  Unfortunately, many resources are finite; for example, there is a finite amount of land, and in many places, society has for quite some time been about extracting more value from the same resources, rather than being a case of the resources being there but with insufficient labour to exploit them. Many people in urban environments cannot afford their own island of land to produce food on; they don't own the enough means of production to support themselves even if they supply the labour themselves, so they are obligated to work for someone who has the capital already (the 'gatekeepers') on whatever oppressive terms they offer to obtain the minimum needed to survive. As a result, the next generation of gatekeepers hold an even greater proportion of the wealth. Economic problems arise when the gatekeepers no longer need everyone to supply everyone with everything they need and want - now those who aren't gatekeepers find that they cannot get a job, and they don't have the capital to create a job. Some will try to 'gate jump' - e.g. take a revolutionary idea that is highly profitable, bootstrap it on a shoestring, and become a gatekeeper themselves. However, this is not a scalable model for the whole population, since it relies on luck and there is intense competition among potential gatejumpers and between gatejumpers and enterprises run by existing gatekeepers (who have the resources to crush gatejumpers if they become a threat). Ultimately, I think the only solution will be some form of income redistribution scheme; perhaps it would work best if the government made it a condition of the income redistribution scheme that beneficiaries work on creating and discovering things, such as science, art, public interest software, civil engineering projects and so on (essentially creating a larger government sector that produces things that don't have a commercial model but benefit society at large, employing the surplus people that are not needed to produce what is needed commercially).
A1kmm 14y ago
The problem with the theory around mid-range-λ-jobs is that people with a non-zero t can compete for jobs as well - for example, they may have increased their skill level through training, volunteer work, formal education, or there could be a flood of skilled workers following layoffs at a competitor. A skilled employee is therefore potentially competing both against 'green' replacements and skilled replacements. At times when there is a surplus of skilled employees, the market price for skilled employees will tend towards the marginal cost of living for skilled employees, which is roughly the same as the costs of new employees, and so new employees would be prevented from gaining experience on the job (they could offer to work for less than their cost of living in the hope of a future payoff from their skills, but even that won't necessarily make sense to the employer, because the employer has costs per employee beyond just wages and employee benefits, and it might still be cheaper to hire fewer skilled employees at a higher price than to incur more per-employee costs hiring more unskilled employees at a lower rate). On the job learning therefore becomes less relevant, and new employees are forced to overcome the activation costs through other means, or try a different industry. If there is no credible alternative to on the job learning, this might cause a dynamic effect where the attrition of skilled employees combined with an absence of trained new employees raises the skilled employee price towards the utility to the employer, and makes it cost-effective to take on new employees again.
lalc 14y ago
>Work, being a core part of life, is meant to be interesting, engaging, and meaningful. Otherwise, why are we wasting our time on this planet? A little early for April Fools'. Let's try this again. >Work, being a core part of life, is meant to get things done. If your work is useful to other people, you will be able to enjoy life on this planet for a long time.
- usablebytes 14y ago
  Not really. The work must be enjoyable for self before it help others. And that won't happen unless we know our interests. E.g. Everyone at the restaurant admires good service; but not every waitress enjoys her job; those who do, keep their own as well as others' interests.
  - rhubarbquid 14y ago
    > The work must be enjoyable for self before it help others. The garbage man who doesn't enjoy carrying your trash away still helps you get rid of your trash. The truck driver who doesn't enjoy driving still gets your food to the store... Sure there are a lot of jobs that people can do better if they enjoy them, but that's certainly not all of them. Getting to have a job you enjoy is a luxury that most people in the world don't have.
rayiner 14y ago
Management consultants.
OGinparadise 14y ago
Work, being a core part of life, is meant to be interesting, engaging, and meaningful. Actually it's meant to more or less enable us to fill our stomachs and to help to provide for our kids. "Work" started quite a while ago, millions of years before iPhones, nice cars, paid vacation and houses. We might go back to basics one day too. Maybe a solar storm, volcano explosion or asteroid might just wipe the last 100 or so years away. Otherwise, why are we wasting our time on this planet? Why is dog or an antelope?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  "Work" means you do things for hire, do not own the result of your efforts but instead you are taken care of. This is a relatively new thing, few thousand years but not millions by any means.
  - OGinparadise 14y ago
    I think we're splitting hairs. if I plant tomatoes on my backyard for myself, and "work" there for a few hours a week, what is it?
    - guard-of-terra 14y ago
      You can't be fired, you own the output, there is no workplace competition, your neither your boss tries to make you more efficient not you can bargain your salary.
kenferry 14y ago
The math is kind of fun, but the conclusions in this article rely on a rather irrationally 'rational' view of how people behave, as well as far too much zero-sum reasoning. Clearly, the respect you feel from your boss has no impact on your productivity, and thus he wishes to reduce your wages to just above the point where you'd quit? Bosses are people too! If you ask any "boss" if they want the best for the people working for them, the vast majority will say that they do. A useful theory of how others make decisions needs to not completely discount non-"rational" factors like emotion, fairness, and morals.
- calibraxis 14y ago
  Yes, let's note that this blogpost had the "humor" tag. While there's truth to it, he seems to poke fun at economists' pseudoscientific use of mathematical models. That said, there's endless case studies throughout history where bosses bleed people down to minimum subsistance, and even below that. And their subordinates may fight back and win things like 40 hour workweeks. (Consider, what is a boss? An order-giver whose commands you obey the whole day. Some understandably call this wage slavery. The morality of bosses turns out to be pretty flexible, depending on how much of a fight they encounter.) Of course, some privileged people do well despite being subordinates. In those cases, their managers use a lighter touch because they're trusted to act in their boss's interests, even when arguing against the boss in technical matters. (The main function of professional codes, explained in Jeff Schmidt's "Disciplined Minds". http://disciplinedminds.com http://disciplinedminds.com)
michaelochurch 14y ago
That's not why. Bosses aren't trying to fuck you over. If they're aligned with the company, they're trying to maximize A - B, where A is what you contribute, and B is what you cost. For most of the industrial era, it's been considered easier to reduce B than to increase A. Why? Many reasons, but the fundamental one is that most of the work was concave, which is what OP describes when he has cost per unit approaching asymptote m, which is equivalent to performance approaching 1/m from below, with more learning. He's focusing on concave, commodity work and he's right about that stuff. Machines are also taking over the commodity work, leaving only the convex for humans. See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/gervais-macleod-9-convexity/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/gervais-macle... With convex labor, the managerial assumption that A is at a maximum falls flat, because no one even knows what that "maximum" might be. With concave work, management could assume that A was near its maximum value and occasionally fire a slacker. What this means is that, for convex work, A-maximizing is a worthier goal... but almost no one has figured out how to manage that kind of work. [ETA: a more cynical view is that someone else gets a bonus/credit for reducing B, but the worker himself gets all credit for improving A.]
andrewcooke 14y ago
remember when HN was for people who had good jobs? because it was full of good people?
- dictum 14y ago
  Remember when HN was for people who didn't correlate having a good job with being a good person?
  - andrewcooke 14y ago
    good as in technically competent, not good as in morally good / emotionally valued (i would have thought that was obvious from the context - not sure if you're so dumb you really can't understand, or just desperately trying to find a way to be offended). why would you stay at a crappy job if you're (technically) good enough to move elsewhere? this kind of complaining, about stereotypically bad bosses that treat programmers as commodities is, predominantly, either exaggerated fiction or the problems of commodity programmers. back in the day, commodity programmers didn't read hn - or at least, they didn't comment. it reminds me of the dilbert cartoon where someone is complaining that their boss micro-manages them all day. and dilbert asks if they've tried doing their job so well that the manager doesn't need to. this thread is an archetypical example of the crap that is overwhelming hn these days.
    - dictum 14y ago
      "Good people" is more likely to mean "people who are morally good" than "people who are good at what they do" even in this context. Sorry for misunderstanding your comment. I've seen the association of moral goodness to technical competence before and thought your comment meant that. >Why would you stay at a crappy job if you're (technically) good enough to move elsewhere? People are complicated. They have complex motives, are influenced by irrational thoughts and have a tendency to prefer known evils to unknown evils. I'm not saying this is the right course of action, but this is a good opportunity to start a Ask HN thread (or blog post) about the attitude of commodity programmers. I don't like when people complain about their jobs. I don't agree with the article. But a snarky comment in response to a long article (even if it's factually wrong, or draws the wrong conclusions from the facts) won't make HN better. I don't mean to discount your contribution to HN, but you can spend your time on HN complaining bitterly about the new regulars, or you can try to understand the problem more deeply and help HN in the process. Misguided elitism isn't helpful and only heightens the Dunning–Kruger effect in a community. Sturgeon's Law still stands—90% of everything is crap, and 90% of workers in any field are mediocre at best. Do you really want to spend your next years on HN complaining about the mediocre newbies? The thing that makes HN good is the HN users' ability to write well-thought refutations of any argument presented. HN doesn't have only good arguments and subjects, but people do a good job pointing out flaws and making helpful suggestions to what gets posted here. Instead of tilting at the mill of crappy articles on HN, we should point out what's wrong about them.
coldtea 14y ago
>Why so many jobs are crappy Because there is no labor movement. Jobs were even crappier back in the day: arbitrary work times with no overtime (16 hours were not uncommon), child labour accepted, no holidays, fired for whatever reason, blacks and women worked effectively under different laws, so work safety measures, bizarre employer demands, etc. In american a lot of those were fixed after long struggles by the workers and the (glorious) american labor movement. Nowadays a lot of the unions are BS (and viewed as suspect from the left and "lazy" from the right), and one of the reasons is that they do not represent enough of the workers anymore (in some fields, there is zero participation even). Those are now too apolitical, apathetic, and indoctrinated to "each one for himself" to join them and shake them up to function properly.
- smsm42 14y ago
  I don't know which country are you in, but in the US the unions is nowhere near apolitical and apathetic. The unions such as NEA and SEIU are among the most prolific political donors and most powerful lobbies, and routinely engage in both local and national politics, and any politician who wants to take on them takes huge risk. See e.g.: http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list_stfed.php?order=A http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list_stfed.php?order=A >>>> blacks and women worked effectively under different laws, You know that many labor measures - like minimal wages, etc. - were taken - with wide support of unions - to exclude blacks from labor markets, and at the time were openly acknowledged as such? See e.g.: http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2013/03/06/mandated-wages-and-discrimination-n1525477 http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2013/03/06/ma...
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    > You know that many labor measures - like minimal wages, etc. - were taken - with wide support of unions - to exclude blacks from labor markets, and at the time were openly acknowledged as such? This is one of those infamous libertarian myths formulated from taking a few past statements to represent a consensus of the time; that somehow black labor should have been cheaper than white labor if the free market was considered alone. This racist crap doesn't belong on Hackernews.
alecbenzer 14y ago
> Or maybe it's just because it feels good [to dump you at the drop of a hat] Stopped reading. Wtf is this?
- smsm42 14y ago
  Same here. And I wonder with such adversarial approach to (work) relationships why his (work) relationships look bad? Try it in any other relationship - try building a friendship or romantic relationship on the premise that the other party wants to exploit you and then dump you at the first opportunity - and see how well it works out. Even if the job is not something you dreamt of - and that happens in life - the adversarial approach is more likely to make it suck than otherwise. There are bad relationships, there are abusive relationships - but no reason to approach to any (work) relationship from the start expecting it to be the sucky one.
anaheim 14y ago
I wonder if this inherent 'replacability' is also behind the rise of techniques such as Agile - get you to divide your work into small, bite-sized pieces so you can be fired and someone else slotted in easily.
usablebytes 14y ago
I believe there are two types of workers. One who clearly knows what they enjoy doing and they seek their career in the same; others who never understand what their true interests are. The second type end up spending their lives doing the so called 'crappy' jobs; majority of human being falls under this category.
- camus 14y ago
  well do you really think people always have the choice ? do you really think everybody can afford a good education ? your message is really arrogant.

89 points by kevinburke 14y ago

I didn't like this article. Felt the author gave no thought to what work has been throughout human history: dull, physically demanding, etc. He says work is meant to be interesting engaging and meaningful... It would be great if that were true... But that is written nowhere. Work is simply things that need to be completed that someone else is willing to pay for. Any other definition is you projecting your ideals onto what the task really is. So to answer the question: why are so many jobs crappy? Because that is the way things have always been. If you enjoy your work (like I do), count yourself lucky.

joelrunyon 14y ago
Isn't that the whole reason of why jobs need to be done? Someone has a problem and they want to get it solved (but don't want to do it themselves) so they pay someone else to do it for them. That's the reason work is called work – it's work.
- potatolicious 14y ago
  You're disregarding specialization. Someone has a problem and they want to get it solved - but they can't do it themselves, so they pay someone else to do it for them. Things get outsourced for this as much as "I don't want to do it myself". And therein lies the space for interesting work.
  - joelrunyon 14y ago
    They could do it themselves but it's more valuable for them to pay you (or someone who already knows how) to do it than it is to learn & do it themselves. It's that gap - that allows value to be extracted from the job.
- Dewie 14y ago
  If an employer has 20 employees, the biggest reason for that is that she can't do labour the equivalent of 21 persons herself. Work is simply things that need to be done; whether your boss finds your type of work fulfilling, or you find it fulfilling, is coincidental to that fact. It doesn't help that our western culture largely connotes any kind of work with drudgery and pain. I had a task to play a certain computer game in order to get myself acquainted with the mechanics and the feel of the game. It's a fun game; I assumed beforehand because I've played similar games before. But I didn't get around to doing it until two weeks later. Why? Because it was work.
niggler 14y ago
This article was clearly written by someone who has not had the experience of trying to hire and later fire someone. When you try to look at it from the other side, things start to make sense.
bendmorris 14y ago
People who read Hacker News are naturally biased about what work is or should be. If everyone did work that was interesting, engaging, and meaningful, society couldn't function. There are plenty of jobs that are neither interesting nor engaging but are necessary. How many garbage men or laundromat employees really enjoy and are stimulated by their work?
- untog 14y ago
  How many garbage men or laundromat employees really enjoy and are stimulated by their work? I think you can live two kinds of life. One where your job is your passion, and takes over your life. A lot of startup folk are in this bracket. I'd argue that if you aren't, then you shouldn't be doing a startup. On the other side, people work to earn the money they need to pursue the interests outside of work. I really don't think there's anything wrong with that, and it annoys me when people in communities like HN get snobby about it. The garbage worker is even getting a physical workout every shift- meanwhile, the rest of us slowly get less fit sat at a desk, and end up sacrificing our free time to go to the gym.
  - mejarc 14y ago
    One thing I liked about my time as "dog-collar labor" is that all my co-workers had interesting non-work pursuits, and there was no penalty for leaving work behind to engage in them. None of us mistook our stints as cashiers, food servers, or book store clerks for our passions, nor did our employers. There was refreshing frankness that the whole thing was just business, nothing personal: no, we weren't enticed with company-paid meals, but we also weren't required to work limitless overtime.
    - coldtea 14y ago
      >no, we weren't enticed with company-paid meals, but we also weren't required to work limitless overtime. I.e exchange your little precious time in this world for some token BS "handout", that's pre-calculated in your pay expenses anyway.
sliverstorm 14y ago
At the end of the day somebody has to muck the horse stalls. (That somebody was me for a while)
- zanny 14y ago
  In this modern era, probably no. Someone doesn't need to. Go build a manure shoveling Roomba and never muck the stall again.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- erichocean 14y ago
  And yet my mother does it for free, because she likes her horses and the stall is across the trail from her house. Point being: for every "crappy job", there are people who legitimately are willing and able to do it for free, and already do.
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    She doesn't do it because she loves to muck stalls though, does she? She does it because it is part of owning horses.
    - erichocean 14y ago
      I think she'd say she does, because it's part of (for her) the experience of owning a horse. She also did that for pay as a teenager, so maybe it helps her feel young, too. I think what you mean is that no on would miss it if horses didn't shit, and I think you're right about that. I think we underestimate, though, the value to people of belonging and participating, socially. Many activities people don't like, on their own, become neutral or even enjoyable as part of something else, like mucking stalls. Everything is contextual, and there's no objective, independent-of-context answer to the value or worth some thing or activity is going to have to someone.
  - 14y ago
Simon321 14y ago
Actually, work hasn't been like that at all throughout human history. Work as we know it comes with civilization. And civilization started 5000-8000 years ago. Homo sapiens have existed for 200,000 years. Before civilization, it wasn't something to be completed that someone else was willing to pay for. You can't really think life as a hunter gatherer would be dull? And there was no boss. Quote from wikipedia: Hunter-gatherer societies also tend to have relatively non-hierarchical, egalitarian social structures.

mcartyem 14y ago

Many jobs are crappy because companies want guarantees. They would rather have peace of mind that things are moving at a known rate compared to any risk of uncertainty. The jobs are not necessarily crappy because companies are interested in keeping wages down. Companies are more interested in boosting profits compared to keeping wages down. The humorous part is so many jobs continue to remain crappy even when you make a boss look good by generating orders of magnitude more value than he bargained for when hiring you. Even if you explained to the boss how you could generate such value at the time of hire, they still wouldn't be able to assimilate it's possible. They don't see how one can generate such much value, even when you present plans on how it can be done. It's as if the boss is trying hard not to let you generate more value than expected.

scotty79 14y ago

... and that's why programmers change employers every two years.

nhashem 14y ago

Most jobs are selling your time in exchange for money. If your time is mostly fungible compared to someone else's time (ie. most low-skill labor), then I'd say all the algebraic equations expressed in the OP are true. He is essentially modeling supply/demand curves of typical scenarios involving "human capital." In the past, the value of human capital -- the amount you got paid for selling your time for money -- used to be more lucrative. At one point nearly half of Americans were in a labor union, which artificially constrained the supply of human capital so it would be worth more. Conversely, our previous industrial revolutions required a great deal of human capital (building factories, sewers, etc), generating lots of demand that would keep the value of human capital high. Due to political and technological changes, this is basically no longer the case. If you're a software engineer, then none of these models apply to you because you are high-skill labor (also sometimes called "talent.") You're paid for your time, but your productivity can be orders of magnitude higher than your pay. In the OP's "expendability of labor" graph, the "sweet spot" is enormous. In my nearly ten years as a software engineer, I've seen colleagues laid off/fired for all sorts of reasons, but none of them were due to, "well we did the math, and we decided your production is not worth your salary." I've seen layoffs where the executives literally admitted they would make less revenue/profits due to the lost productivity of the laid off workers not offsetting the savings in salary, but they had to hit a certain "profit percentage" or some other absurd reason that justified the layoffs. In any event -- I've thought a lot about the macro-society impact of this new model of economy, if we're truly destined for a world where human capital is just not that valuable. My interest in politics and healthcare has largely been based on this -- what should we consider "subsistence living," and what happens if we reach an inflection point where most jobs paying for human capital are below it? It's possible, of course, that this will all be moot, and our next industrial revolution will have a huge demand for locally-based human capital (e.g. a "renewable energy industrial revolution scenario," where there is a huge demand for laborers that can install solar panels on houses, or something), and the median income for Americans will increase. Or it's possible for a more gradual shift to happen (e.g. the graying of the baby boomers causes a gradual increase in demand for local caretakers of the elderly). But I'm not sure it's a good idea to just assume that will happen.

erichocean 14y ago

jacob019 14y ago

Looter mentality, bosses and jobs just exist? Be grateful for the opportunity to have your efforts compounded by the contributions of others. If you were alone on an island, what would you have to show for your work at the end of a day? A meal? Temporary shelter? Even the lowest wage jobs offer us security, health, and a life much easier than our ancestors. Don't like what a job can offer you create one? Think you're worth more? Be your own boss, if you succeed then you'll create jobs and you can be the change you want to see. What has happened to our generation that everyone thinks they have something coming to them and are slighted by those who succeed? Want your fair share, then take it.

A1kmm 14y ago
Unfortunately, many resources are finite; for example, there is a finite amount of land, and in many places, society has for quite some time been about extracting more value from the same resources, rather than being a case of the resources being there but with insufficient labour to exploit them. Many people in urban environments cannot afford their own island of land to produce food on; they don't own the enough means of production to support themselves even if they supply the labour themselves, so they are obligated to work for someone who has the capital already (the 'gatekeepers') on whatever oppressive terms they offer to obtain the minimum needed to survive. As a result, the next generation of gatekeepers hold an even greater proportion of the wealth. Economic problems arise when the gatekeepers no longer need everyone to supply everyone with everything they need and want - now those who aren't gatekeepers find that they cannot get a job, and they don't have the capital to create a job. Some will try to 'gate jump' - e.g. take a revolutionary idea that is highly profitable, bootstrap it on a shoestring, and become a gatekeeper themselves. However, this is not a scalable model for the whole population, since it relies on luck and there is intense competition among potential gatejumpers and between gatejumpers and enterprises run by existing gatekeepers (who have the resources to crush gatejumpers if they become a threat). Ultimately, I think the only solution will be some form of income redistribution scheme; perhaps it would work best if the government made it a condition of the income redistribution scheme that beneficiaries work on creating and discovering things, such as science, art, public interest software, civil engineering projects and so on (essentially creating a larger government sector that produces things that don't have a commercial model but benefit society at large, employing the surplus people that are not needed to produce what is needed commercially).

A1kmm 14y ago

The problem with the theory around mid-range-λ-jobs is that people with a non-zero t can compete for jobs as well - for example, they may have increased their skill level through training, volunteer work, formal education, or there could be a flood of skilled workers following layoffs at a competitor. A skilled employee is therefore potentially competing both against 'green' replacements and skilled replacements. At times when there is a surplus of skilled employees, the market price for skilled employees will tend towards the marginal cost of living for skilled employees, which is roughly the same as the costs of new employees, and so new employees would be prevented from gaining experience on the job (they could offer to work for less than their cost of living in the hope of a future payoff from their skills, but even that won't necessarily make sense to the employer, because the employer has costs per employee beyond just wages and employee benefits, and it might still be cheaper to hire fewer skilled employees at a higher price than to incur more per-employee costs hiring more unskilled employees at a lower rate). On the job learning therefore becomes less relevant, and new employees are forced to overcome the activation costs through other means, or try a different industry. If there is no credible alternative to on the job learning, this might cause a dynamic effect where the attrition of skilled employees combined with an absence of trained new employees raises the skilled employee price towards the utility to the employer, and makes it cost-effective to take on new employees again.

lalc 14y ago

>Work, being a core part of life, is meant to be interesting, engaging, and meaningful. Otherwise, why are we wasting our time on this planet? A little early for April Fools'. Let's try this again. >Work, being a core part of life, is meant to get things done. If your work is useful to other people, you will be able to enjoy life on this planet for a long time.

usablebytes 14y ago
Not really. The work must be enjoyable for self before it help others. And that won't happen unless we know our interests. E.g. Everyone at the restaurant admires good service; but not every waitress enjoys her job; those who do, keep their own as well as others' interests.
- rhubarbquid 14y ago
  > The work must be enjoyable for self before it help others. The garbage man who doesn't enjoy carrying your trash away still helps you get rid of your trash. The truck driver who doesn't enjoy driving still gets your food to the store... Sure there are a lot of jobs that people can do better if they enjoy them, but that's certainly not all of them. Getting to have a job you enjoy is a luxury that most people in the world don't have.

rayiner 14y ago

Management consultants.

OGinparadise 14y ago

Work, being a core part of life, is meant to be interesting, engaging, and meaningful. Actually it's meant to more or less enable us to fill our stomachs and to help to provide for our kids. "Work" started quite a while ago, millions of years before iPhones, nice cars, paid vacation and houses. We might go back to basics one day too. Maybe a solar storm, volcano explosion or asteroid might just wipe the last 100 or so years away. Otherwise, why are we wasting our time on this planet? Why is dog or an antelope?

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
guard-of-terra 14y ago
"Work" means you do things for hire, do not own the result of your efforts but instead you are taken care of. This is a relatively new thing, few thousand years but not millions by any means.
- OGinparadise 14y ago
  I think we're splitting hairs. if I plant tomatoes on my backyard for myself, and "work" there for a few hours a week, what is it?
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    You can't be fired, you own the output, there is no workplace competition, your neither your boss tries to make you more efficient not you can bargain your salary.

kenferry 14y ago

The math is kind of fun, but the conclusions in this article rely on a rather irrationally 'rational' view of how people behave, as well as far too much zero-sum reasoning. Clearly, the respect you feel from your boss has no impact on your productivity, and thus he wishes to reduce your wages to just above the point where you'd quit? Bosses are people too! If you ask any "boss" if they want the best for the people working for them, the vast majority will say that they do. A useful theory of how others make decisions needs to not completely discount non-"rational" factors like emotion, fairness, and morals.

calibraxis 14y ago
Yes, let's note that this blogpost had the "humor" tag. While there's truth to it, he seems to poke fun at economists' pseudoscientific use of mathematical models. That said, there's endless case studies throughout history where bosses bleed people down to minimum subsistance, and even below that. And their subordinates may fight back and win things like 40 hour workweeks. (Consider, what is a boss? An order-giver whose commands you obey the whole day. Some understandably call this wage slavery. The morality of bosses turns out to be pretty flexible, depending on how much of a fight they encounter.) Of course, some privileged people do well despite being subordinates. In those cases, their managers use a lighter touch because they're trusted to act in their boss's interests, even when arguing against the boss in technical matters. (The main function of professional codes, explained in Jeff Schmidt's "Disciplined Minds". http://disciplinedminds.com http://disciplinedminds.com)

michaelochurch 14y ago

That's not why. Bosses aren't trying to fuck you over. If they're aligned with the company, they're trying to maximize A - B, where A is what you contribute, and B is what you cost. For most of the industrial era, it's been considered easier to reduce B than to increase A. Why? Many reasons, but the fundamental one is that most of the work was concave, which is what OP describes when he has cost per unit approaching asymptote m, which is equivalent to performance approaching 1/m from below, with more learning. He's focusing on concave, commodity work and he's right about that stuff. Machines are also taking over the commodity work, leaving only the convex for humans. See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/gervais-macleod-9-convexity/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/gervais-macle... With convex labor, the managerial assumption that A is at a maximum falls flat, because no one even knows what that "maximum" might be. With concave work, management could assume that A was near its maximum value and occasionally fire a slacker. What this means is that, for convex work, A-maximizing is a worthier goal... but almost no one has figured out how to manage that kind of work. [ETA: a more cynical view is that someone else gets a bonus/credit for reducing B, but the worker himself gets all credit for improving A.]

andrewcooke 14y ago

remember when HN was for people who had good jobs? because it was full of good people?

dictum 14y ago
Remember when HN was for people who didn't correlate having a good job with being a good person?
- andrewcooke 14y ago
  good as in technically competent, not good as in morally good / emotionally valued (i would have thought that was obvious from the context - not sure if you're so dumb you really can't understand, or just desperately trying to find a way to be offended). why would you stay at a crappy job if you're (technically) good enough to move elsewhere? this kind of complaining, about stereotypically bad bosses that treat programmers as commodities is, predominantly, either exaggerated fiction or the problems of commodity programmers. back in the day, commodity programmers didn't read hn - or at least, they didn't comment. it reminds me of the dilbert cartoon where someone is complaining that their boss micro-manages them all day. and dilbert asks if they've tried doing their job so well that the manager doesn't need to. this thread is an archetypical example of the crap that is overwhelming hn these days.
  - dictum 14y ago
    "Good people" is more likely to mean "people who are morally good" than "people who are good at what they do" even in this context. Sorry for misunderstanding your comment. I've seen the association of moral goodness to technical competence before and thought your comment meant that. >Why would you stay at a crappy job if you're (technically) good enough to move elsewhere? People are complicated. They have complex motives, are influenced by irrational thoughts and have a tendency to prefer known evils to unknown evils. I'm not saying this is the right course of action, but this is a good opportunity to start a Ask HN thread (or blog post) about the attitude of commodity programmers. I don't like when people complain about their jobs. I don't agree with the article. But a snarky comment in response to a long article (even if it's factually wrong, or draws the wrong conclusions from the facts) won't make HN better. I don't mean to discount your contribution to HN, but you can spend your time on HN complaining bitterly about the new regulars, or you can try to understand the problem more deeply and help HN in the process. Misguided elitism isn't helpful and only heightens the Dunning–Kruger effect in a community. Sturgeon's Law still stands—90% of everything is crap, and 90% of workers in any field are mediocre at best. Do you really want to spend your next years on HN complaining about the mediocre newbies? The thing that makes HN good is the HN users' ability to write well-thought refutations of any argument presented. HN doesn't have only good arguments and subjects, but people do a good job pointing out flaws and making helpful suggestions to what gets posted here. Instead of tilting at the mill of crappy articles on HN, we should point out what's wrong about them.

coldtea 14y ago

>Why so many jobs are crappy Because there is no labor movement. Jobs were even crappier back in the day: arbitrary work times with no overtime (16 hours were not uncommon), child labour accepted, no holidays, fired for whatever reason, blacks and women worked effectively under different laws, so work safety measures, bizarre employer demands, etc. In american a lot of those were fixed after long struggles by the workers and the (glorious) american labor movement. Nowadays a lot of the unions are BS (and viewed as suspect from the left and "lazy" from the right), and one of the reasons is that they do not represent enough of the workers anymore (in some fields, there is zero participation even). Those are now too apolitical, apathetic, and indoctrinated to "each one for himself" to join them and shake them up to function properly.

smsm42 14y ago
I don't know which country are you in, but in the US the unions is nowhere near apolitical and apathetic. The unions such as NEA and SEIU are among the most prolific political donors and most powerful lobbies, and routinely engage in both local and national politics, and any politician who wants to take on them takes huge risk. See e.g.: http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list_stfed.php?order=A http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list_stfed.php?order=A >>>> blacks and women worked effectively under different laws, You know that many labor measures - like minimal wages, etc. - were taken - with wide support of unions - to exclude blacks from labor markets, and at the time were openly acknowledged as such? See e.g.: http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2013/03/06/mandated-wages-and-discrimination-n1525477 http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2013/03/06/ma...
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  > You know that many labor measures - like minimal wages, etc. - were taken - with wide support of unions - to exclude blacks from labor markets, and at the time were openly acknowledged as such? This is one of those infamous libertarian myths formulated from taking a few past statements to represent a consensus of the time; that somehow black labor should have been cheaper than white labor if the free market was considered alone. This racist crap doesn't belong on Hackernews.

alecbenzer 14y ago

> Or maybe it's just because it feels good [to dump you at the drop of a hat] Stopped reading. Wtf is this?

smsm42 14y ago
Same here. And I wonder with such adversarial approach to (work) relationships why his (work) relationships look bad? Try it in any other relationship - try building a friendship or romantic relationship on the premise that the other party wants to exploit you and then dump you at the first opportunity - and see how well it works out. Even if the job is not something you dreamt of - and that happens in life - the adversarial approach is more likely to make it suck than otherwise. There are bad relationships, there are abusive relationships - but no reason to approach to any (work) relationship from the start expecting it to be the sucky one.

anaheim 14y ago

I wonder if this inherent 'replacability' is also behind the rise of techniques such as Agile - get you to divide your work into small, bite-sized pieces so you can be fired and someone else slotted in easily.

usablebytes 14y ago

I believe there are two types of workers. One who clearly knows what they enjoy doing and they seek their career in the same; others who never understand what their true interests are. The second type end up spending their lives doing the so called 'crappy' jobs; majority of human being falls under this category.

camus 14y ago
well do you really think people always have the choice ? do you really think everybody can afford a good education ? your message is really arrogant.