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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

This story is a pretty accurate fable for the pointlessness of the modern economy and its inability to provide real value to anyone. Man spends all day playing video games, because he automated his largely superfluous job at a law firm which itself likely only exists to deal with bureaucratic or unnecessary cases (assuming this is true, as they have a single absent IT person who handles their entire infrastructure.)

On top of all that, this story itself is probably made up, created to get attention from other people in pointless jobs. It’s a meta-exercise in pointlessness.

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This description falls under the "duct tapers" category of Bullshit Jobs[1], according to David Graeber:

> 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;

In this case, perhaps its easier and cheaper to simply pay this guy 90k per year to run this script rather than get an entire law firm, likely staffed by extreme tech Luddites, to switch to using the cloud solution properly.

I've also seen worse waste in other industries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs#Summary

Is that really bullshit work? I seriously doubt you’d be able to completely solve the problem of lost luggage. You could cut it down, yet you can’t scale down the number of jobs dealing with it very easily (one per airport at least, and you can’t hire half a person if there’s only half a workload).

A similar thing could be said of bloated code.

> you can’t hire half a person if there’s only half a workload

True. You can, however, hire one person to do one full workload that's made up of fractional workloads.

Or hire someone who wants or needs to work part time.

One of the things I appreciate most about Germany is that I was able to switch to part time after coming back from maternity leave, but still do the same type of work.

I know nothing about luggage transit, and any idea of a solution for lost luggage I could come up with is more likely naive than not.

Could you define why lost luggage is an unsolvable problem? What makes it so difficult?

logistics.. its amazing that MORE luggage isn't lost on a daily basis. I traveled every week for 10 years, lost my bag maybe 4 times? usually around a holiday where the airports are burdened with extra people (and 75% of those lost bags were out of O'Hare... )

sure it seems simple take a bag put it in a tube, take it off the tube give it back to the person.. but man, probably 30 people touched that bag in that process, countless conveyer belts, several trucks.. add in TSA and it doubles the handling

There's also significant fanout and sometimes very short layovers. One plane might have luggage that goes to five other planes. Also, the vehicles that transport the luggage are not airtight, so bags can fall out of them. This isn't to mention human error in the scanning process (forgetting to scan something, scanning a bag and then not moving it, etc.).

Had a bag that from all available evidence after the fact fell off a conveyor at SeaTac and got stuck somewhere. Very directional scrape damage on the bag. Found within 13 hours of me filing a missed luggage complaint, but due to a lack of good photo evidence (and alas throwing the no longer fit for purpose bag away) I did not get the cost of the replacement bag comped by Delta.

probably not relevant but one time my mid-trip flight landed late. I ran to the connecting flight and made it on board but my luggage did not. I did get it the next day so the system worked but it just points out a complication I hadn't personally considered before.

Isn't this more of a box-ticker? OP created a permanent solution; at this point, however, he himself is not doing anything useful:

> 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;

Hired as a duct-taper, he turned himself into a box-ticker by doing this automation.

The right solution short-term for CYA reasons is probably to get this replaced by a real engineer on a time and materials contract from an IT consulting company. That doesn't mean replacing this employee, though. If I was the boss at this company and found this out, I'd make that person in charge of selecting the vendor, specifying the features, accepting delivery of the work, and then monitoring and troubleshooting any malfunctions.

More scope managing the rest of the office IT could be introduced to the position. They're not wasting money on getting things running smoother. That's clearly worthwhile to them. They're wasting time not making better use of the employee's time for which they're paid.

He is not paid just to transfer files. He is paid to be responsible for the files being transferred. It's not quite the same thing.

This. He’s being paid to be responsible for the system. If he can do that successfully a few minutes a day. Cool. If his employer still sees value. It’s all good.

It's really on the business to have some kind of continual improvement process that looks at everyone's workflow and works out where the time/resource wastage is. If the company wanted to save money on these things they have get someone to identify that a lot of time is spent on "manual" work which could be streamlined.

I hope he read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs.

This one is the text book definition of fall guy as a service. Anything goew wrong, it's his head, that's why the pay him.

Are you sure the boss would agree, if he would fully know and understand the situation?

This is information asymmetry that employers also weaponize to hide the true value produced by each employee. Would employees agree to their salary if they fully understood how much of the value they create is pocketed at various other levels of the org?

Because humans are irrational. It's the butts in seats mentality vs results. The business should be bringing in experts to regularly work out what parts of their process are slow and to streamline them. There is no incentive for an individual not in this role to make their lives harder.

If the law firm is making significant profit and this employee is not doing anything additionally shady does it really matter? He provides value to the company regardless of whether or not he is actively working - and if one of his automations fail then he is the one who has to fix it. There are lots of jobs where we pay people for things that do not require a constant work output - think about Firemen for example.

A forward thinking business would promote this guy and then involve him in other aspects of their work to try and optimize and automate wherever they can. The better small / medium size businesses recognize this and realize that IT can be thought of not just as a cost center but also a path to innovation.

> the pointlessness of the modern economy and its inability to provide real value to anyone

Plenty of people get value out of the modern economy. There are always outliers, and OP is a Spiders Georg.

The public sector is often tumor like in its structure. It's pile of bad ideas requiring more bad ideas to manage the previous one problems. They're wildly incompetent in terms of productivity all across the chain and resort to petty solutions and hiring more people (with precarious contracts) to attempt at avoiding sinking.

I assume they only have 20 more years to live until the whole thing evaporates through the new generation automating it away.

That’s bollocks. He is providing huge amounts of value - consumer surplus and producer surplus. That’s like saying the creator and maintainer of a machine are useless because the machine does all the work, shall we stop using trains and employ millions of people to transport things on foot because it would employ more people doing strenuous work? As he said so himself, people were taking hours a day doing this before he came along with his skillset.

That meaninglessness is by design.

https://youtu.be/Qe4x2Fv9to4

> This story is a pretty accurate fable for the pointlessness of the modern economy and its inability to provide real value to anyone.

Yeah absolute true man. In past times economy provided real value. Modern economy can't produce shit. No clean water, no medicine, no holidays... Nowadays life is just suffering and 100 years ago economy was providing real value all the time.

Anyway, can you pass the bong plz

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