Although you are required to do your job, you secretly believe it is pointless and should not need to be performed.
( dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33709599 ? )
These are first-derivative bullshit jobs. My job provides an useful service in that it enables other people to do their bullshit jobs. Those jobs do not need to exist, and if they didn't, my job would not need to exist, either.
Just like advertisement tricks you into buying things you don't need, the advertisement-funded internet tricks you into paying attention to things you don't care about. We're better off without.
My perspective is that advertising sets a perverse incentive to create content that is indexable and clickable (machine-translated Stack Overflow answers, recipes with twelve paragraphs of backstory, fake download links for the latest Marvel movie) instead of content that is valuable.
While I would agree that advertising can result in distorted priorities it isn't inherently evil. We used to have an internet with both ads and rational incentives. Even then the value of the internet service could not cover itself without advertising.
The main point though was that the cost of the internet is a mix of direct and indirect cost. I seriously doubt there will be enough people willing into incur the direct cost for modern services at a level that will co er those indirect cost incurred by the network and content providers.
While an ad free internet sounds great it isn't very practical or necessary. The answer is on the user end rather than the provider end though. Stop rewarding the perverse incentives instead of pretending we can wish them away.
That is absolutely a job that shouldn’t have to be done.
The best job I’ve had was making educational tools for children, but it was also the worst paid. There seems to be a linear relation between pointlessness and pay.
Therefore, all meaningful jobs trend towards minimal/no pay.
Meanwhile everything that _makes money_, no matter how helpful to society at large, requires workers and will pay for them.
So the farmers, transporters, teachers, cleaners, garbage haulers, ... are paid badly. If they stop for more than a few weeks, society is doomed. Nurses are also a badly paid good example, doctors are an interesting edge case.
Top politicians, bankers, CEOs, a lot of management, ... has low or even negative value. Their incompetence and egoism is a huge cost to society, not only monetarily, but more so in health and well-being. They might disappear for months or even years before we really start to feel the impact. Hence, they make a fortune.
IT jobs are somewhere in the middle. IT is a godsend for large scale organization and prediction, but that's maybe 10% of our jobs, and taking away the other 90% probably won't hurt too much. Twitter lost 80% of its staff and it seems to take a while before the hurt starts setting in over there. So while IT is not paid as much as politicians et al, they are paid pretty well.
It might fit with your view, too: A society tries to grow moral compasses that make people do important work for free, as one way to build redundance.
i believe in addition to bullshit software projects, there exist projects where the business case is good, but the implementation is very dysfunctional and has poor communication, bad or non-existent coding standards, code architecture and team boundaries that don't make sense, etc. you do talk briefly about this in the quote
> That job also taught me that tech and the business case for a business case are mostly independent. You can have a strong business case and be successful with garbage tech, and the reverse is also true. You should prefer a strong business case because customers are so important.
but i think it is perhaps worthy of it's own article. what to do when your company has thrown so many developers on a project that should have one? what to do when your "design" (term used extremely liberally) has no conceptual integrity? i wish i knew what fred brooks would do.
Now pick that up, your mother doesn't work here.
Also, side note, ty for the CoRecursive podcast, lots of excellent episodes :) I especially like the more “story time” ones, e.g. ppl talking about the early days of Apple/Unix/SQLite, being a sort of pioneering remote developer, etc. My main piece of constructive criticism would be that the episodes on functional programming don’t translate too well to a podcast - interesting to read about, but too much detail to ingest in podcast format, I’ve started to skip those (even though I am a fan of FP). IMO the podcast would be more consistently great if there were more stories about programming, less describing of programming paradigms/techniques.
It sounds like you are saying you don't like the old episodes, which I totally get.
The functional programming episodes are where I started and it took me a while to figure things out.
I've thought about taking them down before or putting them in another feed but I unless I'm misunderstanding I haven't made in a year or more.
Would it be helpful to give them a different title or put them in a different season perhaps?
I could see two different feeds, but maybe unnecessary - e.g. maybe most listeners tend to listen to the new stuff and ignore the old stuff anyways.
Then at another company there were the bonus projects. Our annual bonuses depended on completing a project that was not part of our normal work - almost always the pet project of a manager in another department. Inevitably it'd be over halfway through the year before we got the first info about it, and by the time we got started, it had already been canceled or that manager had left the company and no one else knew anything about it. I never heard of anyone at that company getting a bonus project that wasn't DOA.
And this didn't happen to me, but one place I worked got a government contract. They had to hire someone officially approved, and a couple of us worked with him early on to discuss what he was going to be working on and how his project would interface with ours. Then, still pretty early on, the government agency paused his project. But it had already been funded and there was the contract, which said he couldn't work on any other projects. So he spent the rest of the year reading, playing games, and asking every now and then whether the project had been greenlit yet (it never was).
And another job, there was one guy I worked with, who despite being a fairly good developer and decent designer as well, routinely got tasked with typing in content that another department printed out and passed to our manager. That was one full day's work per week. We asked if they could give us access to their system so he could just copy and paste it over, but they said no. However, they let slip what their system was and when we looked at it, there was a public RSS feed of the content that they were printing out and handing over for him to retype into our system. It took less than one hour to setup something to process that feed in the background, import it to our system, and free up 20% of his time. That's hundreds of hours per year.
This stuff is very common everywhere.