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Comment by scaramanga | Hacker News Reader

The downside, Rabois said, was that the new hires just had to "be entitled, sit at their desks, and do nothing."

"There's nothing for these people to do —it's all fake work. Now that's being exposed, what do these people actually do, they go to meetings."

I think I see the problem, workers are taking over tasks traditionally reserved for middle and upper management: entitlement, desk-sitting, inane meetings, LARPing as people who have real work to do.

The difference being that for people with actual talent, the state of affairs is intolerable. So you have to wonder what kind of efforts management were exerting to prevent these capable hands from being set to necessary work (of which there is plenty).

Then again, if you've ever worked in the tech industry, you needn't spend too long wondering since your own experiences will furnish you with more examples than you would want to enumerate, lol.

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I would be very surprised if anyone at these companies go to their desk to just do nothing. Less productive than should be, sure, but doing nothing would cause general revolts from people that do something (of course there are people that do something, innovative or not new features come and general uptime is held). It's basically impossible to both have an entitled tech elite but also members that don't work among them unless 100% are not working.

Yeah my experience is people who have nothing contribute tend to make frenzied efforts to LARP as people who do something. Often creating needless busy work for others, or creating constant messes for others to deal with. Usually those people are at least in middle management, if not in upper management, so when people are trying to fix or ameliorate the damage they've done, they can't even stand up and say that that's what they're doing for fear of offending these peoples fragile egos. Alternatively, if the culprits are not in management, then management has hired them, but simply may not willing to admit they made a hiring mistake so will deal with any information from subordinates as simple personality issues for the employees to solve themselves.

As a result, the people that work have to take on themselves an additional unpaid responsibility the actual restorative work or, at the very least, the emotional labour of pretending the mess being cleaned up wasn't made by someone, and just fell out of the sky.

This leads to a syndrome called "burnout" and "staff turnover" far more often than it leads to "open revolt". You can't have an open revolt of one (that's just called "a mad shouty fucker who can't hack it"). And you can't come together with others to revolt if you're unsure to what extent people have internalized the state of affairs as being their own fault, or at least, being something that is not okay to be discussed (either for fear of retaliation, or they've internalized the notion that it's an unsolvable personality conflict and the done thing is to be polite).

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