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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>No one ever used it and they became extremely angry at him, and eventually he quit as all his coworkers in the department saw him as "taking away jobs".

And they were right. His program, put in production, would indeed take away their jobs.

Now in a perfect society (and in neoliberal make-believe), they'd find a more meaningful job to do.

In reality, they'd probably just be tossed aside, fired, and left in the dustbins of history (with cushioned younger people that think they have it made laughing at them for not being able to "adapt" -- the same kind of people that get angry and call it "hate speech" when they're themselves fired and are told "learn to code").

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If it made economic sense to pay people to dig holes and refill them all day, we would. But that's pointless - it provides no value. If we were going to do that, we should just pay people for nothing, which is what digging holes and refilling them is.

They would be better off, and so would the company and society at large, if they were put into a new role (at the existing company or a new one) that actually provided value.

>If it made economic sense to pay people to dig holes and refill them all day, we would. But that's pointless - it provides no value.

Actually we do it, and it helps. In fact a large part of current jobs is like that, BS busywork jobs.

The reason it helps is, as I see it:

1) Productivity/automation is well up...

2) More people than required are available to work

3) -- On-demand re-education of the kind needed to fit actual needs (e.g. for programmers), can't / ain't gonna happen, it's a pipe dream at the speeds required and for the populations concern

4) -- and even if it was possible, it would just cover a small fraction. Even with all job needs covered, many people are not needed to work anywhere, period.

5) BS jobs hence serve as a distribution / welfare system / kindergarten for adults

6) -- but allow us to not call it "welfare" and to include more than the poor, and have them keep their dignity (since we sneer on welfare recipients)

7) -- and keep from having a huge unemployed mass revolting or making society Mad Max

The really sad part is all the missed positive externalities. Think about what could happen if a few companies owned up to it and said "hey we'll let you have one day a week helping children with their homework or working on a shared vegetable garden or... or... because [insert outreachy marketing speech]"

Companies would never do it because of competition. Only a token company might do it, when it doesn't need to compete as much (e.g. has a niche, sells luxury stuff with a secure market, where the positive work balance they sell as part of the brand). If many did it, then this good-will gesture would lose the marketing value for the company (since it would be common).

Instead, companies need to be forced to do it, by law -- like they were forced to stop child labor, to have safety laws, to 8 hours workday, etc.

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