The 40M dollar job
idiallo.com
idiallo.com
About 40 to 50 hours into the project I have a show and tell demo on what I had developed so far. At the end of the meeting the Director of Operations leans back and says. "What I envisioned as the never ending, never caught up task of collecting and organizing competitive pricing is now going to be 1 or 2 hours a day for someone."
Developer me was proud to hear that. I heard/understood the real business requirements and developed a system that automates away 90% of the repetitive drudgery of the overall task leaving someone better able to spend time on edge cases and what is changing in the market.
On the other hand I felt slightly guilty that maybe now someone who is already too busy will get this added to their plate because it is just an hour or two a day. And, that someone else who could really use an entry level analysis job, won't get one because I automated it away before they could even get started.
In the end developer me will keep building stuff like this because that is what is valued and helps pay my bills.
You didn't take a job away from anyone. You freed up someone from drudgery so that they could do more valuable work instead. This is EXACTLY how society gets richer. We have hundreds of years of evidence that this is the case.
I will keep automating away the drudgery in part because it is inevitable and I might as well be someone who profits from the master trend rather than be trampled by the trend.
I think this is a really clear example of that.
Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645
I get a strong sense of this any time I get out of my office. I'm sure part of it is because I don't prefer interacting with humans but - as the owner of a machine learning consulting company - I see few jobs that can't be automated today with current technology given enough time.
Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI.
I've never heard it put so bluntly, but you're right.
The world does not need more incubators and startups (for the most part). It needs better public policy, governing, and a more equitable distribution of resources.
"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." -- William Gibson
Same with crumbling infrastructure, affordable housing & education and other such things in the USA.
32 hours a week. Every hour after 32 and before 40 would be time and half. Every hour after 40 and before 50 would be double. Hours after 50 would be billed at triple the hourly rate.
I would only change the hours. Not rates, or anything else. Let the market settle out the rest.
I've been working as a SWE now at 35 hours a week for almost 4 years (admittedly at a lowend SWE salary [but still much higher than average, we live pretty comfortably]) and honestly I can't even imagine going back to 40+ hours a week (or 60+ when I was a fresh out of college kid at a start up) The extra time now I spend with my family, and just getting stuff done has been so much more valuable than I ever could have imagined.
It's something I wish I could spread to others. When I was at a startup I scoffed at people going home at 5-5:15. Considered them not "passionate about the product".
Oh how misguided I was...but I digress.
What business is it of yours? Geez.
Wages need to continue to be driven up while also reducing the minimum number of hours per week making a worker considered full time.
Unless, of course, you are in a salaried position. Then you can work as many hours a week as your employer and you agree on.
A higher standard of living for everyone is a great idea. How to do that over a long period of time in a society is a hard problem. I think it probably consists of letting people decided for themselves how to live their lives and have as little central planning, state control, and corporations as possible, but who knows?
It wouldn't happen right away, but would creep up, and people would feel they'd have no choice because they need a job and all other companies by that point would be doing the same thing anyway.
Just look at the video game industry, where the supply for jobs is so high and people are willing to put up with so much shit to live their dream that it has a notorious 'crunch time' of 60-80+ hour weeks, sometimes lasting for years on end, and just expected of you.
It's gotten so bad in that industry there are (supposedly) legitimate efforts to unionize to protect the workers. You don't see that in any other software development field.
That's basically what you're advocating for.
The overtime needs to be there as a check against the corporation's own greed and psychopathic indifference towards its employees' well being. The financial disincentive is the only thing that stops the employer from allowing these abuses in most cases.
Instead, we're living in a bizarre opposite world where nothing makes sense.
https://www.google.com/search?q=financial+independence+retir...
Not saying this is the right thing for everyone. Lots of people would hate it, and that's fine. The nice thing is that we all get to choose what's best for ourselves.
I know several people who could retire tomorrow and never work again but they keep working away anyway. If your premise is we would all like to stop working but can't because we aren't deploying tech correctly or don't have the money to do so, why do large numbers of these people exist?
Throw out all your ideas about economics and politics. You want as many people as possible to have a comfortable enough life to pursue things they find fulfilling without stress about survival. You're an engineer, how do you do it?
I am not a supporter of UBI because of the commonly intended source of money, but I agree with you. IMO we will need a radical overhaul of our society pretty soon (~20-30 years).
My litmus test for how actually necessary a job is: what does the organization do when the worker takes a month of parental leave?
this seems more or less orthogonal to how necessary a job is. really what this question tests is time sensitivity. if you're the only engineer working on a project that needs to be done within a year, you could conceivably go on leave any month other than the last one or two of the year. if you're a fast food worker and you want to take a month off, they will either need to hire someone else entirely or make you carefully coordinate getting your shifts covered by co-workers. I don't think this implies the fast food employee is more necessary than the engineer.
This has been true for hundreds of years though. It's been shown time and time again that some kind of automation breakthrough eliminates jobs but people need work so new jobs are created. Engines were created to eliminate tons of manual labor jobs, we had looms, mills, automated mining, printing changes, etc. and here we are still working.
Five years ago we started to automate the food service industry. Now instead of driving to McDonald's to get a burger made by a human we can call up Uber Eats to have a human go get us a burger that was made by a robot. Is it a bullshit task? Maybe, but I can't see how one day we'll wake up and all of a sudden there will be no jobs.
But if you look at the overall stats, we are going in reverse on stability. More and more people are falling out of a middle class existence - will there be more jobs yes. Will there be as many, allowing a higher than subsistence living? That is very unclear even now before even more automation comes.
Um, no. This is wrong. Living standards around the world are improving like they never have in human history.
In a relatively developed area (e.g. the US and many first world nations), it is failing. In the US for example, life expectancy has dropped three years running. More and more people fall to a median income that doesn't even let them have kids and send them to college, and seems to be falling to where they can't even pay for minor emergencies. That's not improvement.
I'd bet money that US life expectancy in 2023 is hither than it was in 2018.
Largely due to obesity and related diseases. People are dying from overabundance. The percentage of people at "subsistence" levels is quite low.
> More and more people fall to a median income that doesn't even let them have kids and send them to college, and seems to be falling to where they can't even pay for minor emergencies. That's not improvement.
Is this at all true? Paying for your kids' college simply wasn't something most people did even 30 years ago, because most kids didn't go to college.
No, the decline is due primarily to drug overdoses, and that mainly from the opioid epidemic.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/28/us-life-expectancy-drops-as-...
Or that you can store 64 GB of data on a card the size of a bottle cap.
What they care about is that rent in this city has gone up ~50% in the last six years, their incomes haven't, and they went from having a home, to wrapping themselves in dirty blankets, and sleeping by the garbage bins in the back alley.
Vacancy rates are higher then they've been since the recession... Yet rents are climbing 5-15% yoy.
I look out the window, and it's a panorama of construction cranes. There's more active cranes here, then there are in any other American city.
Oh, and my rent went up 17% last year.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-ar...
Here is a very recent article:
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/amid-build...
I may not be representative, but the average rent dropping doesn't mean anything to someone renting a bottom 10%-cost unit.
Average rent may very well be dropping - but the average renter is not someone who lives right on the margin of having a home, and sleeping on a park bench.
It'll happen though if current building trends continue.
Zoning reform will at best only make it cheaper for high earning single people and small families to find housing in dense cities 30 years after a reform is implemented. Where, the only real solution is figuring out a way that would allow us to build dense urban multifamily buildings at the same cost per square foot as single family homes.
That time is now.
The industrial revolution was responsible for a greater increase in human wealth than almost any other even in human history. We are all tremendously better off getting to live after it instead of before it.
We’ve been working on self driving cars and drones for decades too. Maybe we’ll actually finish self driving cars. Maybe we won’t. If we do, that’s a lot of jobs lost.
Where do you come up with this racist crap? As someone who grew up in a poor white area in the North of the US I can assure you that race has absolutely nothing to do with lack of low-paying jobs concern.
>Of course, there is no reason why these people should make close to nothing while other people throughout the economy have bullshit jobs that pay really well.
Supply and demand. It's economics 101. It's like claiming that there is no reason people should be paying over a thousand dollars for an ounce of gold when copper is only a couple of dollars a pound.
If the people with low paying jobs were qualified to do the higher paying job, the employer would happily hire them for a lower price to save money.
This is especially true because if you don't work, you'll almost certainly be homeless, hungry, ect so the entire premise of there being a fair market for labor is false.
Disagree, for now. Your statement wasn't feasible a few years ago. It took a growing volume of practitioners, readily available tool sets, scaling technologies, and education to get to this point. Many knowledge and execution jobs will be redundant, and when appropriate automation and sensors combine, more labor jobs become redundant.
Based on my experience - the cheaper the labor, the more bullshit jobs. If human resources are expensive, companies are very keen on adapting automation and getting rid of humans. But if a human being for 8 hours a day costs you 500 dollars per month, why bother?
I've see this said similarly before but find it unbelievable. Why would any company want to employ people en masse as a benefit primarily for the employees?
How would that even arise? And if it did, how wouldn't another more efficient company out-compete them?
I accept that it's possible companies don't want to invest in or take the risk of automation, but that's nothing like it being some kind of conscious UBI-like policy decision.
In reality, the vast majority of things that need doing in the world are pretty mundane. Most of us just have a small part in a mundane machine. But that does't mean it's not a part that matters. It just doesn't matter very much, because you are one of 7 billion people. And that's OK.
Are you saying that you think any non-world-changing job is bullshit or that you think other people hold that view?
Either way, this is a bullshit definition. Growing food isn't a "bullshit" job but also doesn't change the world. Most jobs don't "change the world", regardless of how important they are. Most people who think they are changing the world are just self-delusional.
I do not hold that view.
I'm sorry if that was unclear in my comment. I basically agree with everything you said.
"He is joined in the misemployment ranks by people who make cigarettes, addictive but sterile television shows, badly designed condos, ill-fitting and shoddy clothes, deceptive advertisements, artery-clogging biscuits and highly-sugared drinks (however delicious)."
I think our bullshit jobs guy is a bullshit writer, personally. Shoddy condos, you might not like, but they provide housing. Shoddy clothes provide warmth. You might not like it, you might not agree with the incentives behind it, but they can be and are important parts of some people's existence.
https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/unemployment-d...
Because our educational system has remained virtually unchanged throughout the past 100+ years while the world in which it exists transformed radically. Education needs to be society's number one goal. [0]
Even if you don't subscribe to the idea that AI / automation will replace [all / most / many] jobs, the world is already facing secular challenges due primarily to globalization.
Cheap labor has been outsourced to developing nations, who are not going to "develop" just because of that. They will all need to agree to build institutions that enforce rule of law in order to bring about economic prosperity.
This is an incredibly complex problem[1], and personally I can only think of historical examples that transpired in the form of revolutions – Industrial, American, French or otherwise.
So lately I've become convinced that nothing will effectively change from the sort of incremental tweaks policy makers discuss. I'm even more cynical than that as I strongly believe policy makers in positions of power have no incentive to do anything other than that which ensures the continuation of their power. In other words, they create platforms that cater to the largest subset of potential voters by optimizing between issues that matter the most to people and issues that keep away the smallest number of potential voters, effectively landing somewhere in a wishy washy middle that's profoundly devoid of purpose.
In order for humanity to overcome its current obstacles, it will need a paradigm shift. In developing nations, the population needs to be educated enough to want to create institutions that enforce rule of law. In developed nations, the population needs to be educated enough to be able to take on more complex, specialized, service-type jobs. The problem is that this population is already very well educated compared to the rest of the world and we haven't yet devised a way to level up our education system, probably because this would require the whole of society to care for this topic at least an order of magnitude more than it currently does. Unfortunately, I don't think people are incentivized to change their perspectives on the topic until the economic wheels (i.e. prosperity levels) grind to a screeching halt.
––––––––––
⁰ https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/2... [PDF]
¹ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03057...
Even in your own, and many of ours, situation there are people struggling with education, housing and stability. So even if you are keeping up with the future in the positive sense, you aren't protected from the negatives. Something like UBI isn't going to fix that stability has increasingly become something valuable to be traded.
This isn't however something unique. It happens at least to some degree every time there is a shift. People start capitalizing on the positives and the negatives eventually catches up. When the greatest shift is in how to handle the negatives. That is really how to keep up with the future.
Once there is a solution to how people e.g. can get education, housing and stability you can automate everything you want. But it often requires giving up the former for the latter. You can't have a high cost of living and automate all the bullshit jobs without consequences. Because the bullshit jobs are paying for that.
Higher productivity will decrease the amount of labor that goes to those now productive endeavors, and go to those that arent as productive, like the service industry in general, healthcare, entertainment, etc. Much how like all of that started when less labor was required for farming.
In the article, someone dressed as a hot dog doing marketing is misemployed because it's not "contributing to human welfare and flourishing".
If that's the case, then the century-long history of employment in post-industrial-revolution society is a story of misemployment. Is tightening a nut repeatedly 40 hours a week under the job guarantee of a 1950s GM true "flourishing"? And is the 1850s Irish farmer racing to harvest blighted potatoes misemployed as well? (Perhaps not, since the survival state creates an certain "authenticity" versus the "banality" of guaranteed life?)
Some of the items were grouped on websites or application pages, but many of them were spread out.
A year before I started, there wasn't even a checklist on a webpage.
After a while, I started scripting as much of the checklist as I could. My point of view being: my job is to improve the tools needed to do my job. I thought that the apps should be able to quickly and easily provide their statuses.
What I wanted was something like spring boot's /health endpoint(s). I don't know if I would ever have invented a health endpoint, but once I found out about it, it's obvious.
---
This wasn't my only job in the plant, I did quite a bit more: desktop support, application support, hosting, app scripting, plant floor support, internet of manufacturing things (PLC support). Anyway, that job is gone now. Some of it is spread to other teams and ticket queues, but some of it is just gone.
Part of that is politics, part is bullshit, part is misemployment, a large part was contract structure.
1. He was being told something was important, and it simply wasn't. They lied to him to make him feel good. Probably not?
2. He was doing something that was important to other people, and those people incorrectly believed they were important. Given that the department was closed, this might go several levels up.
3. The approach of the department or group was misaligned. "Misaligned" being a way to say that either (a) it wasn't a very good approach when the full picture was taken into account (the picture from an altitude higher than the department), or (b) it was a good approach, but someone else was able to convince people higher up that it wasn't.
4. It was important, and whoever cancelled it didn't realize it. The chickens may eventually come to roost.
5. It was an important thing embedded in an unimportant thing. Maybe the department really was ready to be disbanded, dispersed, eliminated. It's likely that the department had many duties. Did someone actually look carefully at each one, and decide where they all should go?
6. Someone needed the project (or whatever larger project his project was embedded in), but didn't know it. This is a danger of a proactive project: if the person who gets the value from it isn't asking for the thing, they might not appreciate the value of the thing itself.
7. It's a valuable project, but the cost (real or perceived) of carrying it through other organizational change is considered excessive.
8. Management was simply too lazy to decide if it was important. Maybe they didn't have the resource leeway to keep it running without a fight, which makes it easier to be lazy.
And there's yet more possibilities than that.
I'm thinking about this right now, as I'm in the process of tearing down a large amount of my own work. I could believe it's just a sunk cost, a failed investment... but I'm pretty sure it's not. It might be the right choice to throw stuff away. Strategies change. Old theories work themselves out until they don't seem to offer much potential, and then everything based on the old theory is in question. We've never really known what the underlying ROI on anything is, though we're throwing it away so we can make room for other similar things; the organization is trading a known unknown for an unknown unknown. And none of us will really know what the right decision was. If I was making the decision, I wouldn't know either.
I'm genuinely curious, I've been self employed for about my entire career, so I have no experience with corporate lifestyle.
Not all of them, but in my experience, yes.
I was on a small team at a big company in 1998. Due to recent mergers there were duplicated teams across the company. A big initiative came out that our team was in line to respond to. We (about 10 of us) put together a highly functional prototype in a couple months, put it forward showing we could take it on. Another team went out and hired 200 people and had no other presentation than an org structure. They won, and I learned a lesson.
A good read - how the author will novelize this anecdote into a larger story will be interesting!