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What he seems to be railing against is hierarchy. It is easy to see what nurses do in a hospital. They walk around and treat the sick. The nurses have managers

What he seems to be railing against is hierarchy. It is easy to see what nurses do in a hospital. They walk around and treat the sick. The nurses have managers (or whatever they're called). These managers don't treat the sick themselves but they help organize the nurses. All the managers at the hospital are organized by the hospital administrator, and so on. The higher up the hierarchy, the less obvious it is what people do. And with hierarchy, there is also more chance of waste and having a bullshit job. But those bullshit jobs can come at almost any level. My first job out of college was at an environmental firm with extensive government contracts. The firm got paid for every hour they logged under my name on maintenance of projects that didn't require much maintenance except on paper. So the firm got paid for me showing up and doing nothing. But I can confirm that it was horrible. At first I liked that I could come in at 10 and leave at 3. After a while though, it killed me inside.

michas 12y ago
I understand your point about managing nurse's jobs, but think about this: in the last century we went from doing manager's work by means of pen and paper to computers with software that can do planning, managing, accounting etc. Given the technological advances it should take less and less managers to organize jobs of the same number of workers. Mystery lies in the fact that we have more managerial jobs than we used to.
VLM 12y ago
"After a while though, it killed me inside." Did they supervise you too closely? My first job while still in school was being a network operator with maybe 5 hrs a week of real work (most of which I automated away or was just grunt labor install/cabling jobs) and maybe 5 randomly allocated hours of stark terror handling outages and disasters. I was instructed to look busy and professional the other 30 hours per week. 1) I "apprenticed" under the PBX operator and helped out with MACs and cable pulling and learned how to terminate and test ST fiber connectors. I had more formal telecom/EE training than the PBX op which was a little weird. I also apprenticed under our IBM customer engineer and he had be do all kinds of crazy stuff, which was kind of cool. The IT director got a little greedy about my "volunteering" for him, although if I had a better attitude about it I might have ended up working for him. 2) IBM manuals laying everywhere, taught myself some BAL from the books although the sysops wouldn't give me access. Also learned all about ATM. IBM mainframes had this weird crypto subprocessor with great manuals. IBM manuals, at least professional level pre 1990, were awesome, I'd suggest checking out bitsavers.org and reading some. 3) Taught myself motorola 68HC11 assembly, procomm/telix scripting. I read a lot of programming books.

michas 12y ago

I understand your point about managing nurse's jobs, but think about this: in the last century we went from doing manager's work by means of pen and paper to computers with software that can do planning, managing, accounting etc. Given the technological advances it should take less and less managers to organize jobs of the same number of workers. Mystery lies in the fact that we have more managerial jobs than we used to.

VLM 12y ago

"After a while though, it killed me inside." Did they supervise you too closely? My first job while still in school was being a network operator with maybe 5 hrs a week of real work (most of which I automated away or was just grunt labor install/cabling jobs) and maybe 5 randomly allocated hours of stark terror handling outages and disasters. I was instructed to look busy and professional the other 30 hours per week. 1) I "apprenticed" under the PBX operator and helped out with MACs and cable pulling and learned how to terminate and test ST fiber connectors. I had more formal telecom/EE training than the PBX op which was a little weird. I also apprenticed under our IBM customer engineer and he had be do all kinds of crazy stuff, which was kind of cool. The IT director got a little greedy about my "volunteering" for him, although if I had a better attitude about it I might have ended up working for him. 2) IBM manuals laying everywhere, taught myself some BAL from the books although the sysops wouldn't give me access. Also learned all about ATM. IBM mainframes had this weird crypto subprocessor with great manuals. IBM manuals, at least professional level pre 1990, were awesome, I'd suggest checking out bitsavers.org and reading some. 3) Taught myself motorola 68HC11 assembly, procomm/telix scripting. I read a lot of programming books.