Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?
268 comments
·April 2, 2025rqtwteye
p1necone
> 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.
stouset
Also this push to measure everything means that anything that can’t be measured isn’t valued.
One of your teammates consistently helps unblock everyone on the team when they get stuck? They aren’t closing as many tickets as others so they get overlooked on promotions or canned.
One of your teammates takes a bit longer to complete work, but it’s always rock solid and produces fewer outages? Totally invisible. Plus they don’t get to look like a hero when they save the company from the consequences of their own shoddy work.
majormajor
The biggest mistake those employees make on their way to getting overlooked is assuming their boss knows.
Everyone needs to advocate for themselves.
A good boss will be getting feedback from everyone and staying on top of things. A mediocre boss will merely see "obvious" things like "who closed the most tickets." A bad boss may just play favorites and game the system on their own.
If you've got a bad boss who doesn't like you, you're likely screwed regardless. But most bosses are mediocre, not actively bad.
And in that case, the person who consistently helps unblock everyone needs to be advertising that to their manager. The person who's work doesn't need revisiting, who doesn't cause incidents needs to be hammering that home to their manager. You can do that without throwing your teammates under the bus, but you can't assume omnipotence or omniscience. And you can't wait until the performance review cycle to do it, you have to demonstrate it as an ongoing thing.
animuchan
What you're describing was precisely our culture at the last startup.
One group plans ahead and overall do a solid job, so they're rarely swamped, never pull all-nighters. People are never promoted, they're thought of as slacking and un-startup-like. Top performers leave regularly because of that.
The other group is behind on even the "blocker"-level issues, people are stressed and overworked, weekends are barely a thing. But — they get praised for hard work. The heroes. (And then leave after burning out completely.)
(The company was eventually acquired, but employees got pennies. So it worked out well for the founders, while summarily ratfucking everyone else involved. I'm afraid this is very common.)
the_snooze
It's even got a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
chinchilla2020
> Also this push to measure everything means that anything that can’t be measured isn’t valued.
Never thought I'd see an intelligent point made on hackernews, but there it is. You are absolutely correct. This really hit home for me.
api
The phenomenon being discussed here is a type of overfitting:
https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....
The last 50 years or so of managerial practice has been a recipe for overfitting with a brutal emphasis on measuring, optimizing, and stack ranking everything.
I think an argument can be made that this is an age of overfitting everywhere.
marginalia_nu
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.
spudlyo
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...
squiggleblaz
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?
pjot
This compounds with each _team_ modeling the work in jira/excel too!
zusammen
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.
My grandpa once said something that seemed ridiculous but makes a lot of sense: that every workplace should have a “heavy” who steals a new worker’s lunch on the first day, just to see if he asserts himself. Why? Not to haze or bully but to filter out the non-fighters so that when management wants to impose quotas or tracking, they remember that they’d be enforcing this on a whole team of fighters… and suddenly they realize that squeezing the workers isn’t worth it.
The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing.
djmips
What if the workers decide the work is imposing on them? Maybe that's a good thing but it could go too far.
namaria
> steals a new worker’s lunch on the first day, just to see if he asserts himself
> to filter out the non-fighters
This is bullying and hazing.
Spooky23
That generation had it more together as citizens, and they held on to power for a long time. Postwar all of the institutions in the US grew quickly, and the WW2 generation moved up quickly as a result. The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone.
t-3
> The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing.
That era also had militant labor organization and real socialist and communist parties in the US. Anticommunism killed all that and brought us to the current state of affairs where employers that respect their employees even a little bit are unicorns.
temporallobe
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
>> 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.
latentsea
I would just terminate the call. Like... hell no.
AnimalMuppet
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...
AtheistOfFail
Yep, that would be my own personal hell.
MikeTheGreat
Twice the billable hours! /s
dyauspitr
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.
ecocentrik
If you're creating nothing stories to justify work life balance and avoid burnout your organization has a problem. Look into Extreme Programming and Sustainable Pace.
RobRivera
I think thats the observation being made. Most people respond to the organizational problem with the only tools they have, which manifests as that.
Usually management knows and doesnt care about the problem
singpolyma3
And yet well over half of professional developers have productivity so low that if they get laid off the term gets the same amount done...
motorest
> 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.
dwattttt
> 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
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.
namaria
Difference is machines break and that costs lots of money.
People just quit, some businesses consider it a better outcome.
saghm
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
joquarky
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.
Sparkyte
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
I felt this way with Github Copilot but I started using Cursor this week and it genuinely feels like a competent pair programmer.
Retric
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.
meander_water
This has been my experience as well.
Cursor Chat and autocomplete are near useless, and generate all sorts of errors, which on the whole cost more time.
However, using composer, passing in the related files explicitly in the context, and prompting small changes incrementally has been a game changer for me. It also helps if you describe the intended behaviour in excruciating detail, including how you want all the edge cases/errors handled.
jdcasale
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.
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atrettel
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.
brudgers
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.
Spooky23
Gig workers are casual labor. Like Dickens with less coal dust.
brudgers
Casual labor frequently involves working alongside other casual laborers and/or regular employees and/or the person hiring the casual labor.
The gig economy is people working alone.
nixpulvis
The whole concept of "hustling" is frustrating to me.
paxys
These days "hustling" = independently rich people trying to build an online following and selling ads/courses/get rich quick schemes/crypto scams.
The gig economy is real, back-breaking work. No "husler" has done a single day of food or package deliveries.
zeroCalories
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.
kayodelycaon
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.
brudgers
Hence the original gig economy job was called “mechanical turk.”
Ekaros
And maybe even become manager in some relatively small number of years. And then move to some other industry. Not that most of them do, but there is at least some career progression.
paxys
Managers at McDonalds can make $50-70K/yr. There is job security, benefits and opportunities for career advancement. Plenty of people start at the very bottom of the ladder flipping burgers and make it all the way to corporate. It's a tired meme that "McDonalds jobs are meant for teenagers". These are all incredibly in-demand jobs. And plenty of fast food chains pay significantly more, sometimes including benefits like college tuition reimbursement.
_aavaa_
But there’s a difference between “don’t want” and “structurally locked out”.
almosthere
Except when it isn't, like Peter Cancro of Jersey Mikes, who started making sandwiches and then bought it in 1975, and in 2024 sold it to Blackrock for $8B.
Or more here: https://www.businessinsider.com/ceos-started-entry-level-at-...
Now, not all people at Jack in the Box are destined to be the CEO, but they do have more opportunities than someone working DoorDash
brudgers
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
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.
l0new0lf-G
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.
ryandrake
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
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…
Uzmanali
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.
potato3732842
>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.
pavel_lishin
> > 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. ... My local upholsterer is a pleasure to work with compared to any tire and alignment shop.
I'm confused, isn't your local upholsterer exactly an example of a local professional?
pests
Yes but its not one with "with a license or high capital investment" needed.
ryandrake
We have to learn how to DIY more things. I pretty much don't hire anyone to do anything anymore, because I always end up having to supervise them, they do the work incorrectly, and I have to double check the quality and insist they come back to do it right. So, I'm not really saving any time. At some point, you might as well just do the work yourself because you know it will be done correctly.
angmarsbane
Bringing back woodshop, metalshop etc to schools could help with that.
kupopuffs
there are probably other factors than "how much are they"
thi2
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
You have basically described the government vs private contractor dynamic.
dyauspitr
Disagree. Just the other day I needed someone to replace my chimney cap. The quotes from the big companies ranged from $3k-10k. Utterly ridiculous. I got some guy from an app who bought the stainless steel cap for $300 and installed it for $300 more for a total of $600 and the work is fine.
dilyevsky
The difference is when guy from an app falls and breaks something it will turn out he doesn’t have insurance so you will lose much more than 3k when he sues
KennyBlanken
They don't focus on cheap convenience. They focus on milking as much money as they can from the customer and the restaurant, and then squeeze the worker to death by transferring as many expenses and risks as possible to the worker. Then they force them to engage in race to the bottom compensation-wise.
Result? Only the desperate do it, and get out of it as soon as possible. But the pay is so bad, people are increasingly trapped in it.
thi2
> 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.
djmips
There was one cashier who also bagged at a local supermarket who was the mythical 10x bagger. I'm not joking when I say they were a virtuoso at scanning and bagging and I would always line up in their line just to witness it again and anyway that line moved incredibly fast. It's fascinating that even mundane activities can be executed with speed and beauty.
They've graduated college so I guess I'll never see that again.
WorldMaker
My father paid for college working at a grocery _part time_ and is full of stories about how a good grocer could tell a little better the ripeness of a fruit to gift that perfectly ripe one to the right customer that day who was going to eat it that night or that weekend, how there used to be an art to bagging, how they used to have real breaks and social lives, how he could get some of his homework done during work hours or do something incredible for a customer with that same kind of time.
You get the skills you pay for. When a part-time job can pay for college, imagine what the full-time regulars can do. When people have the sorts of breaks and downtime to improve themselves, think of what they can do with that time to also improve their customer's experience in little and unique ways. It is easy to wonder what all we've lost in letting companies penny pinch labor so hard, focusing on productivity numbers over anything else, minimizing the number of employees and their wages to the barest minimums.
But also, as it easy as it seems to wonder about those sorts of things, it is still fascinating how many that lived through those changes don't see the squeeze that well. My father tells those stories just as often to complain about the experience in a modern day grocery store and how quality has slipped. It does take explicit reminders like "they paid you well enough you paid for college, you know what minimum wage is like today, yeah?" The long boiled frog sometimes doesn't remember the soup wasn't always so hot.
jampekka
When visiting US I feel very weird about baggers. Bagging stuff is something I can easily do myself while the cashier scans the products. Now instead of doing something useful, I just stand there idle and awkward watching the staff working.
In general having service workers spend a good part of their lives doing things that I can trivially with minimal effort and no loss of time do myself feels actively degrading these people. Perhaps some do get sense of being useful out of it, but I'd guess a lot of them would rather be doing something else if given choice.
dkarl
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
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
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
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.
blackhaj7
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
nipponese
A low stress, easy job like that could totally be done out of choice. A big concern of seniors in my life is fearing cognitive atrophy from lack of social connections.
decimalenough
Retail is not "low stress". I guarantee you that senior bagger is getting chewed out every single day both by his customers and his management for being too slow hurry up already, packing the eggs at the bottom of the bag omg what are you doing you fucking idiot, etc.
ahmeneeroe-v2
Probably not true at all.
dyauspitr
Nonsense. Retail workers have a way of exaggerating how bad their jobs are. I worked retail in my teens and for years and maybe saw 2-3 bad customers in that entire time.
sgarland
[flagged]
NegativeLatency
I'll generally tell the clerk that I'll bag, which speeds up the lines, and I get stuff pretty much where I want it. (My store doesn't generally have a dedicated bagger)
singpolyma3
I'm not sure if there's someone who will bag your groceries in all of Canada. I've always done that myself
Buttons840
I bring couple reusable bags, that are more like foldable boxes than a bag. It makes bagging trivial because you just set your stuff in a box. It's organizing groceries in small and fragile plastic bags that's the hard part.
dyauspitr
It depends. When I go to Costco and make huge purchases to last a month, I unload the cart onto the payment conveyor and the bagger bags them on the other side. By the time I’m done unloading the cart and have finished paying, the cart is ready to go. I would say that’s like a 40-50% time save. Those really add up to shorter lines and more purchases for the stores.
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zw123456
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.
kcatskcolbdi
This seems supremely irrelevant to the topic of the article. I doubt very much the Wayfair bed assemblyperson is being held back from fear. But hopefully they read your inspiring comment and can, I guess, stop being timid.
tmpz22
> 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.
dartos
I long for the day when someone can give advice based on their own personal experience without someone else being like “well that won’t work for literally everyone”
Yeah obviously. It’s a personal anecdote.
mathgladiator
It's obnoxious behavior. For example, I decided when I was young to live in my car and be homeless. I saved a bunch of money, and I've been frugal most my life. I was also super focused at my work and climbed the ladder making real money.
I believe most people don't have discipline to endure less than and the discipline to really listen to what power asks of them. There is a lot of great advice for people to do well in a job, but they just... don't apply it.
These people are best to be ignored.
groby_b
What's the _point_ of the anecdote, though? You're taking up everybody's time to tell a story, do us a favor to have a relevant point.
"Have no fear" doesn't apply to the article, at all. You might as well write "what I learned was to not stick legos up my nostril". Also good advice. Also not applicable.
It's fine if it doesn't work for everyone, it's annoying if it isn't relevant to anyone.
luhsprwhk
I long for the day when people don't try to pass off vapid generic advice for likes. Waste of bandwidth.
kayodelycaon
It’s not just a personal anecdote. It’s telling people what they should do.
A personal anecdote would be saying this is what worked for me. Not this is how you should do it.
It comes off as telling you what your problem is and how you should fix it.
Stefan-H
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
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.
zeroCalories
People acclimate to their circumstances. Do you think people in developing countries live in a constant state of panic because they don't have a seven figure retirement account?
charlie0
This. Just gotta live within your means. It's so easy with a developer salary unless you're 1 year in and haven't had time to save for a rainy day.
84748498373
> Do you think people in developing countries live in a constant state of panic because they don't have a seven figure retirement account?
If Brazil is anything to look at, maybe?
Stefan-H
As someone who is more in the middle of my career rather than the end of it, I would like to echo your sentiment. I have had plenty of roles where I was tasked with things that were out of my depth, and the answer is to just not let it be. There is always a path to get the answers/skills you need to do what is asked of you, you just might not know the path yet, so the core skill (and where I think fear comes into the process) is accepting that not knowing something now is never a hinderance so long as once can do self-directed learning. The rest is reality testing if what you just learned is actually able to solve your problem. If it isn't, then repeat ad infinitum until it is.
saturn8601
How do you slog through something you truly hate?
More than a decade ago I was hired as an intern at Colgate-Palmolive as a software developer. Turns out they were(are?) one of the largest SAP deployments in the US. The entire company revolved around SAP. Due to lack of college graduates knowing SAP, they took great pains to treat me extremely well and train me (a CS major) in ABAP using SAP Netweaver.
My project was more ambitious than the rest of the group because I had enough courage and bravado to be assigned a project like that. In fact I made it a point to be 'brave' and make myself look really good in front of the upper level managers. I tried to know everyones name, even in other departments and to be super polite and humble around any sort of manager there. When I finally got some tasks to do, I was so miserable that I finished multiple days without getting anything done. I felt so depressed thinking that I slogged through four years of CS for this?
In the end I managed to finish last in the cohort and Colgate took the rare(at the time)decision to not extend me a full time offer. I felt like a complete failure because I didn't put in 100% and I felt like I let my mentor down.
At the same time I know that I truly hated it. To this day seeing pictures of SAP GUI gives me anxiety and makes my stomach turn. How do you overcome something like that and push on? It does not always seem like a sure thing. I sometimes think what if I had pushed through and gotten the offer? I'd probably still be at Colgate like my mentor was.
With the benefit of hindsight I have learned to be super appreciative and thankful for them treating me so well but im glad circumstances led me to not ending up there. But really who knows if it would have been better in the long run? Whenever I see Colgate it actually evokes positive memories of that time. But the biggest thing I learned was to not bite off more than you can chew and if you don't truly love what you are doing there is another path out there.
Stefan-H
"How do you slog through something you truly hate?" - I don't.
When signals that a role is not aligned with my needs start cropping up, I begin searching for a new role passively, and as the situation develops I speed up my search.
"I felt like a complete failure because I didn't put in 100% and I felt like I let my mentor down" - to thine own self be true. I have failed to put in 100% at some jobs, and sometimes i regret it more than others. I have narratives that legitimize my laziness or lack of commitment based on some previous slight from the company, or a missed promise on their part, but I hold myself accountable.
"How do you overcome something like that and push on? It does not always seem like a sure thing" Resilience is a wildly varying trait of folks, and depends on your emotional and mental state. "First world problems" are a great example, one when is socialized at a certain comfort level, missing that causes distress. Some working conditions are truly untenable, in which case do what you have to do, but otherwise do the best with the situation you're given.
cnasc
Which Bell Labs? Are you still in the area? I’m minutes away from Murray Hill and a lot of what you’re saying resonates with me (~10 years into my career and starting to lean into what I previously thought was weird).
adultcool
Fear is the mind killer.
saturn8601
Fear is one thing but how do you deal with regret? Regret for taking the leap as well as regret for not taking the leap? There can be regret in both paths.
imp0cat
Start by reading some Robert Frost.
anarticle
You have to accept that life is single threaded and you’re not always going to choose the most optimal path.
It’s easy to overthink, but without omniscient info, execute the plan you have.
Regret is tough because it piles up as you age. It’s easy to look back and think “dang, I did a lot of bad moves” while ignoring all the upsides and limited info you had at the time.
In many ways our easy access to info makes you think “just one more search” will make my decision 10x better when in reality it’s a huge super power you should use to drive execution, not the other way around. Think of what an advantage it is to have that much context on the scale of human existence. At least for me, this makes me more optimistic: I make less mistakes than ages before me because I’m relatively better informed. Note: this doesn’t mean the choices are always good, just that I understand them more completely.
callc
Did anyone else’s boss ask them to stick your hand in a box or just me?
numa7numa7
This is such a boomer style comment.
* Not super relevant.
* Gives advice that is extremely vague.
* The entire comment is essentially a humblebrag.
Would fit well on Facebook.
owenversteeg
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
... 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 :/
I_Nidhi
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.
nixpulvis
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
Yeah, this is prevalent everywhere. It’s pretty crazy. I’m glad I’m not the only one that has noticed this.
Larrikin
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
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.
jwr
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
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
> 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.
jt-hill
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
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.
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.