Until automation "saves humanity"[1] we have to work. We can and should push for healthy balances, respectful treatment of workers, sane retirement ages, etc. But still, work needs to be done, and i find it incredibly frustrating that some people think we can all just stop working.
[1]: Though i'm quite pessimistic that automation will save humanity. I suspect that while it could, it will also cause such turmoil in the beginning that we fail as a species. A nuclear winter of the working class.
So many jobs not only pay like shit while extracting so much value from that labour, but in most cases you also have no incentive to give even the slightest shit about it. No ability to buy into the company, no autonomy, very little functional leverage over increasing your fixed salary, and in most cases not even remotely knowing how much the conpany is making.
My current company thought it was wierd that I basically just peaced out for a bit when they ran out of money to pay me and at the same time aren't the slightest bit transparent about details regarding potential acquisition. Likewise I learned early on that if you don't literally have either a seat at some table, or a real stake in the company, or any decision power, you might as well stop trying after your work is done with an acceptable level of quality. It ain't worth it.
Lots of companies rn complaining about worker shortages, but they offer crap pay and it's fixed. You either don't get a commission, or you get maybe a gift card as a bonus from time to time. Most don't offer benefits.
It's been worth it for me.
This isn't true even with jobs that only involve computer files.
I present to you the bane of my existence: The Somewhat Structured File. It has just enough structure you can almost process it using an easy-to-understand grammar, but there are enough inconsistencies in the file to preclude any clean solution. Every time you think you have a working parser, your program crashes because of an impossibility in the data, which means you've found another exception to the general rule you'd generated inductively by paging through the file. The file contains many white swans but plenty of black, brown, and purple swans as well, no two precisely alike. The code ends up as ugly as the data, epicycle on epicycle, because there's no pretty way to parse an ugly file.
People say Excel isn't a database, but not even Excel could have created some of the files I've seen. School bus routing has some horrors.
Moving on from my woes, I give you the entire field of nursing. True, 90% of the problems of the nursing field are due to administration and the healthcare systems of the world in general, but the other 90% are caused by patients, patients' families, and the very nature of disease and medicine. Automating nursing is far-horizon Strong General AI stuff, if that.
As to the bane of your existence, that actually sounds fun. You haven’t described it in enough detail to give meaningful recommendations, but your parser should be telling you what’s confusing it rather than crashing. You want to automate the process of automation.
Getting the next iPhone to market even 1 month sooner is extremely valuable, but they don’t manufacture the same phones for that long.
So no true. Human manual and emotional labor is incredibly cheap compared to the cost of automating those tasks.
As to manual labor, most of what’s been automated has been manual labor. Not just obvious stuff like dishwashers but heaters and cars save extreme amounts of physical effort.
Doing furniture moving was easier to do every day than a salaried dev job tbh. It was grueling 10 hr days for shit pay, but you got to talk to clients, and they tipped pretty well, and there was an obvious value created. Also you physically get stronger.
Obviously people have to do jobs and some are unpleasant. I'm not convinced that 40-hour work weeks or longer are necessary for society to function.
What would happen if all the bullshit work ended tomorrow? Would the world come to an end? I don’t think so. But if all the unpaid work out there went undone, yes, society would quickly fall apart.
I don’t follow the “anti work” movement so I won’t pretend to know what they as a group believe. But for me, I believe we can drastically redefine the concept of work and come out ahead.
Or senior executives for that matter.
In big companies, cash cows subsidize all manner of boondoggles. That’s why we have a term for cash cows.
Ever have a long term project cancelled, either for a good reason, or just because a new VP showed up and the project didn't have his brand on it? Did that cancelled project make the company money? Companies only do things that make money, right?
Never saw a high level goal in your company that was misguided? A roadmap for getting there that was misguided? Never seen a process (methodology, etc) that wasted a lot of time, but one important person swore by? I could go on.
If you're waiting for elections to make your opinions about governance known you're leaving "money" on the table. And if you think you can do anything on that level with businesses you're fooling yourself, they don't care -- and you probably won't even know about the bullshit jobs they're propping up, anyway. If you don't believe me, why not email the CEO of Proctor and Gamble and see what he or she does?
Many of us on this site are most likely contributors to bullshit. How many of us work on something that is tracking and spying on people with the purpose of selling or using that data to manipulate them later?
Is being bad at a job make the job “bullshit”?
Nobody gets to keep waiting tables or cleaning bathrooms if they are bad at it.
I would be bad at my job, and if I kept doing it indefinitely, i.e. if I wasn't quickly fired, then there would be a discrepancy between my nominal job (reducing crime) and what I actually did (nothing).
I am not going to argue that some work is more essential than other work, but I disagree that some jobs are created just to keep people busy. Why would anyone hire someone just to make sure they stayed busy? That is simply not happening. The people who control the money aren't worried about keeping people busy, they are worried about making more money.
Now, is there a large part of our economy that only exists because people who have capital will pursue anything in order to grow their capital? Yes, absolutely, but those jobs still exist because someone else will give them money to obtain what the job produces. Companies aren't sitting around thinking, "oh man, too many people in the world aren't busy... let's create some more useless jobs"
This happens _constantly_. It is a side effect of how the promotion ladder in the management profession typically works at large companies: your likelihood of being promoted to the next grade depends entirely on a small number of metrics one of which is how many people you manage.
I actually have been documenting a very strong example of this for a book I have been thinking about writing about what destroyed a high flyer after the dotcom. After the collapse of the dotcom, one group, which had the CEO's ear as "the project that will save us" had effectively unlimited headcount even while the rest of the company was in cuts-and-freeze mode for 2+ years, and because of the headcount = promotion issue, they hired armies of people that they were barely even interviewing. The project ended up 2-4 years late depending on whether you count the first release as a viable product (it wasn't).
I have seen this behavior in every single large company I have worked for. I'm not going to give more details because it would ID me, but this is very common and I was in a position to witness it with actual data, not just a leaf node engineer telling myself stories about why XXX got a promotion to VP or whatever.
Actually working for large companies has left me with a very bleak outlook on human organizations.
I’ll give you an example. My wife worked as an intensive case manager, where the job was ostensibly to help severely ill people manage their lives. Was that her actual job though? No, her actual job was filling out reams of paper work instead of actually helping anyone. That paperwork was sent to the state and the company got paid, with the vast majority of the money going to executives.
What would happen if her job were eliminated? Would the people be worse off? No, the whole point was to not help them and keep the state aid checks coming in. My wife wasn’t using her skills and was depressed and stressed all the time so she’d be better off if that job had never existed. Then there were the 3 layers of middle management coordinating all of the form filling. Their job was wholly redundant, and they didn’t do any meaningful work at all. Did they even need to exist? It’s not clear, but their existence didn’t work toward actually helping any real people. They just helped collect government checks. They were paid well though.
The people who would be harmed the most by that “work” not getting done are the executives.
And when the service being provided are also paid for by the government the taxpayers take it on both ends!
Edit: Is my comment unpopular because some people think I'm endorsing the status quo or because some people find this state of affairs inconvenient to their world view?
However, they are clearly providing value to SOMEONE. The person paying your wife gets more value (money) than they pay your wife to do the job. They aren’t trying to keep her busy, they are trying to make money.
You could call this rent seeking, which is a completely fair criticism. It just isn’t the same as ‘make work’ that is simply trying to keep someone busy. They are trying to extract value in a way that is not good for society as a whole.
I guess from a physics pov it all depends how you define the boundary of the system, and I draw it at a society level.
It might seem like a minor distinction, but I think it matters when trying to understand the motivations involved.
This is exactly what the Federal Reserve does with its mandate for "full employment". When there aren't "enough" jobs, it loans out of a bunch of new money at low interest rates, for bankers to spend on outlandish bets - like say polluting the environment with electric scooters and hoping they'll turn into a recurring revenue stream.
"Full time employment" in 1950 was 40 hours per household. The definition was never adjusted when women entered the workforce en masse, so it's now 80+. With technological advancement, "full time work" should mean an individual works around 15 hours per week (with that "exempt" loophole closed). Economically, workers should have accumulated surplus and then demanded lower working hours regardless, but the previously described economic feedback loop saw that didn't happen, and instead the gains got siphoned upwards as housing and other economic rent.
That's the macro. At the micro level there are certainly motivations to create useless jobs. For one, the more people you manage/employ the more powerful you are, even if they're spinning idle. Also, adversarial entities can create jobs beneficial to their own self-interest while the overall situation remains nonproductive or even antiproductive (eg healthcare billing).
And then sometimes I really question is that new version website really needed?
> Why would anyone hire someone just to make sure they stayed busy?
1) flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters, makers of websites whose sites neglect ease of use and speed for looks;
2) goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists, community managers;
3) duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing bloated code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive;
4) box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers, quality service managers;
5) taskmasters, who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals
It can't. Some of the bullshit work is actually just to provide a bizarro-world downtime where you can't just tell people to take extra vacation because that is unthinkable: "fairness" complaints, worries that idle time makes people more likely to consider their options, and frankly the inconceivability of the idea in and of itself. So what you do is have this kind of idle time work that doesn't actually need to be done but keeps people busy. Think of it as the workplace version of engagement tweaking.
As a concrete example, in the ASIC space, the sub-teams involved routinely finish their part of the current generation, and in some cases the next generation work isn't ready to start yet. One thing startups used to do (and were still doing in my direct observation as recently as 4 years ago) was lay off their ASIC guys as they finished the current generation until they could see whether the chip was getting traction, and then they'd hurry up and hire for the next generation of so.
And so on.
What the companies eventually started doing by ~2000 was creating bullshit background work projects that were clearly, at least to most observers, either senseless (like bumping the generation for a low-volume ASIC where even just the mask costs would never be paid back if the project shipped) or speculative-but-not-productive projects.
Honestly, it might. It would take an extraordinary amount of work to correctly identify all the work that's actually bullshit, and there might not be any time left for anything else.
There's work that's bullshit, but no-one realizes it because it's very hard to have an expansive yet detailed view of everything. There's also work that seems like bullshit, but performs an important, non-obvious function [1].
[1] Sort of like Congressional earmarks: they were attacked for a long time as corrupt waste. Now that they're gone, it seems like they might have actually been grease that helped keep polarization in check.
Essentially not all waste is actually worth eliminating.
It makes more sense when you consider that companies mostly don't experience market effects internally, but operate much more like the Soviet Union, and that, especially for very large companies, the effects of external competition are rather less than ideally efficient, to put it mildly. Throw in a heaping spoonful of principal-agent problems up and down every organization, the fact that information is very far from perfectly available and distributed to managers, and more than a little good ol' incompetence, and it'd be weird if it wasn't common.
Straw is inaccurate because said grandfather is doing the harvest, not cleaning up after the harvest
But my analogy of hay being cut by men vs machinery was just that an example.
The evidence is clear if there were not people making $8.56 million dollars per hour, there would be plenty enough money to give everyone enough to do what they want with their lives.
Yes plenty of BS jobs would vanish, and you'd have to pay people more to do "undesirable jobs" like taking the trash, but in developed countries like Australia we already do. I made $120k/year stacking boxes in a factory because it's mindless work that nobody wants to do. Instead they sit at home at get $1280 each month from the government as welfare. And that's fine.
There won’t be an abrupt instance where half the workforce now can’t work.
That's what I think. A shift on work views can't happen without there being some other way to sustain that percentage of unemployed people, and that requires political action, which probably won't happen until people who've previously been comfortable start feeling the pain.
There are without a doubt flight attendants who hate their job, but I'd guess that most of them like their jobs and like the structure and accountability that is provided to them, and not having to figure out every detail themself.
And then there are people like myself who can't stand being told what to work on and how to schedule my day.
It's also nice not having to worry about when/if your next paycheck will come in, if you can afford your health insurance, get company matches on 401ks, etc.. Freedom is free, after all. While security may be an illusion to some degree, it's a compromise for freedom that many are willing to make (myself included).
I sometimes get urges to go out and sow some wild oats, but I debate if it's worth all the effort in the end.
More precisely, I suppose, it's not the factual content that I have a problem with. It's technically true, but it also doesn't need to be said. It's like telling a human to keep breathing. So instead, it serves the purpose of contributing to a society that values "sacrificial work" too much.
Do you have an equitable way to solve this issue?
Or maybe people who don't do strictly necessary work still need to do something. And maybe you consider that "sacrificial", I consider it "contributing"
The real harm isn't the imaginary laziness you fear here.. It's scaled political power that allows groups to exploit others.
> What would it look like in your town? I don't know, but I don't need to
This sounds a lot like a non-answer. Perhaps I would understand what you're talking about better if you explained how you believe it would work in your town where you do have more context.
Forget all that tech. "Localism" couldn't even produce a single 2B pencil, which is such a trivial thing when we consider the scale of society as it is today.
I was honestly hoping there was going to be a better answer than this handwavy nonsense.
I'm not. I am suggesting that if you took the world as it exists today, and strongly turned down the volume on "everybody has to work," the world would improve, and that labor at the end of a pointy stick is not necessary to keep things going, and generally makes things worse.
Yes, the mix of goods and services could perhaps drastically change. E.g. if you love throwing away your 3 year old iPhone for a new one, I'm sorry, you will suffer; you'd probably have to deal with repaired phones with interchangeable parts. I think that's probably a better place.
The idea that you can just not work is not realistic.
The "pointy stick" you are talking about is nature, as in we will die without working to survive. You aren't entitled to the labour of others to ensure your survival.
You can either work at survival, eg: growing food to eat, building shelter, making clothes, etc, or you can have others do that while you provide something else.
No reasonable person FACTUALLY disputes what you're saying about work; it's so something-like-tautological and obvious that you should all think about why people seem to parrot it over and over.
It's not because human beings are likely to keel over and stop working in the face of nature. It's because it's a longstanding political wedge used by the powerful to get working classes to go against each other.
Even if you are willing to go back in time to a simple farm in a small town, you are still taking for granted that you will have people helping you survive. And you still aren't entitled to their labour. They will help you plant your field if you help them plant theirs. The scale of our society has changed, but the transactions haven't.
In any case, you seem dead set on misrepresenting or misunderstanding what I'm saying. If you're not going to address my actual arguments, then kindly get lost. You're wasting my time
That's how I see it anyway. I'm a techno-optimist, given the nature of technology in our species' development.
E.g. I'd argue that the biggest medical improvement of my lifetime was in a sense a step backwards, in that it was our collective discovery and consequent reduction in smoking.
You can of course go full relativism and say that our society cannot be judged as better or worse than any other, but I think that's disingenuous.
Its quite notable that modern medics has made its fair share of opium addicts. I don't know whether that's a feather in the modern cap or not
Also, how can you accuse everyone else of being a benevolent dictator when your suggestion is just as impossible to implement?
I agree that only people born with privilege think that supporting yourself while only doing what you want is a viable option, but that is kinda my point.
And of course, this is not realistic, because some people would want to get paid for things that no one would be willing to pay for.
Obviously, everybody wants more money/benefits/etc, respect, pleasant work conditions, etc. But the workers I know have ABSOLUTELY NO INTEREST in jobs like research scientist, politician, stockbroker, lawyer, doctor, programmer, etc because they involve all sorts of skills & tasks they fear, despise or seem wildly unobtainable. Many people are introverted and fear meeting strangers and public speaking. Many people are enjoy the physical world and "it makes my head hurt" to spend hours thinking about abstract stuff, which a lot of these "desk jobs" involve.
I highly recommend the book: How to Tell When You're Tired
source: 30 years working all sorts of jobs, from warehouse and retail jobs to executive and board roles.
Do you mind answering a few questions? I am kind of in a "should I stay or should I go?" dilemma with my current employment, and I have no idea what I want to do (I know more about what I do NOT want to do).
You've been working almost longer than I have been alive, and I am curious what you think (and others).
1. What job made you the happiest, and Why?
2. Did you happen to find any positive or negative correlation between life satisfaction/happiness and the amount of money you made?
I'm just your average, run of the mill developer. Nothing special about me, and that's okay. It's just a job for me, and I enjoy the work. I have no desire to be some Big N programmer. I could chase dollar signs considering what is out there for us devs, but I am not sure the juice is worth the squeeze when I am already living comfortably.
Think about what you want to optimize. 5-10 years from now, what do you want your life-experience to have been? Are you having fun? Are you learning/growing? Are you building a network? Is it sustainable i.e. if the company reorg'd tomorrow and your whole team laid off, could you get another job?
They say that happiness is most strongly correlated with having a good relationship with your direct manager, and that's been my experience.
For me, there was little correlation with pay - all four quadrants have examples. But money is funny, and has strong correlations to culture: good to understand your understand your relationship with money, both short term and long term. Watch out for sucker deals, both in income, overhead/taxes and lifestyle costs: it's easy to end up with far less money than you think based on the paycheck, especially if there's complex stock or benefits. Also, you're only on this planet once so optimize your time as well: a good paying job that's crazy hours can be a sucker bet if you're not learning/growing enough. A job can pay crap but be intense learning and payoff in the next job.
Watch out for grass-is-greener: I see lots of jobs that sound awesome... from the outside. Also lots of jobs that sound awesome for summer, but not years. Switching is a lot of overhead.
Happy to help if you want, DM me. I learn from hearing other peoples' stories.
HN note: I'm not mentioning extreme options since it sounds like you're blessed with a comfortable position in the upper middle class. Some people have real freedom to radically change their income and/or expenses, which then presents different challenges.
How do I DM you? Is email the most effective way?
This is non-obvious, to the extent that I don't think it's true. People are more than happy to not optimize work related things.
People want respect and to be treated like humans for the work they are doing. Not being a doctor doesn't mean you should be demeaned
Now, if the OA felt entitled to his chosen career path regardless of economic reality then I agree that would be uncool, but I'm not seeing that here. The author is not looking for a handout. He is simply grappling with the tradeoff between optimizing for max remuneration vs the nature of the work itself.
Having disposable income means you can pursue leisure opportunity, give charitably, gain security for your loved ones, etc. You don't have to love your job to accomplish your goals.
Meanwhile, if a small fraction of those minds worked on a more efficient toilet, or desalinating water the ROI for society would be significantly higher.
But I guess market forces are at work. and they make it possible for people to be paid for growing food or building infrastructure in accordance with demand.
To compare it to your basketball analogy, it is fine to pursue becoming the best basketball player of all time, but if you think you have failed if you don't achieve it is not good.
My ideal work life is to eat snacks while reading HN, for a couple of hours each week (or more/fewer as desired), and to be able to turn that into a comfortable living.
What? I totally have this today and it's great and not only am I happy, but also all these people who don't want to do things find that I can pay them to do things and then they're happy too. In fact, they're happier that I pay them to do these things than if I didn't pay them to do these things and they had to do other things.
Ok. But how much?
For example, somebody needs to clean the sewers. But does anybody need to do that 40 hours a week?
How about 4 hours a week?
I dunno about you but I could do any horrible job if it's only 4 hours a week.
And then I could spend the rest of my time doing my fun job and/or whatever I feel like doing.
That would be pretty close to doing only what I want.
How does that work for you?
There are many social equilibriums, and not all are equally desirable for all; but Everybody writing from their backpacks while traveling is not one of the equilibria states (which does not necessarily mean it's not a suitable goal for an individual, as long as expectations are tempered:)
Why not? Maximum consumption with minimum amount of work is the very definition of success in every process.
However, it needn’t be that way forever: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Commu...
[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/monsieur-dupont-nihi...
I am always torn when I read something like this. On one hand, I want people to be able to pursue their passions. On the other hand, I know that it is impossible for the world to function if everyone got to only do what they want.
This person wants to be able to earn a living doing whatever they want, but they also want to enjoy the benefits of other people doing things they don’t want to do. They want to be able to travel, but that requires other people to do a lot of labor they probably don’t want to do. The boarding agent, flight attendant, and pilots likely all don’t want to be doing what they are doing while he flies. The person who cleans the plane and loads the luggage aren’t doing what they want to be doing.
This is going to apply for so much of what the author is going to expect from others to support his lifestyle of doing whatever he wants whenever he wants. He wants to write while other people grow his food, provide his infrastructure, the services he requires.
In the end, I don’t think it is a healthy goal for people to expect to not have to do work that they don’t want to do. Sure, it might turn out that you can support yourself doing what you wanted to do anyway (although even then you will probably have to do a lot of stuff that isn’t what you want to do, too), but I don’t think you should expect it or define success in life as being able to do that.