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> most people don’t actually do much work at work and that it was all one big game

This much is true. Most people don't do much work at work. The difference between working in the office and working remote is that when you're at the office, your "pretend to work" time is spent discreetly browsing social media on your phone. When you're at home, you can spend it on things more conducive to your health like going to the gym or walking your dog.

I have a hypothesis that the top 10% of performers (could really be as little as 1%) in society are usually very upset by the fact that 90% of people want to do as little work as possible, and those top 10% performers are holding the rest of us hostage via in-office requirements and constant electronic monitoring, but I think since 2020 these people are now losing that battle and the 90% no longer have to pretend to give a shit what the 10% think anymore

I don't mind people not working. I get upset when those people half-ass their work and then attempt to get me to do their work for them. For example, I would rather build a feature than spending the same (or more) time fixing someone else's pull request.

I completely agree. I was a very low performer at my previous job. I was bored, didn't like the mission, my team got shipped away due to office politics, and small incidents with management wore me down after the first year.

I mostly did nothing the last few months, but everything I did was correct. Not that it was perfect, there is always stuff to be improved, but the little I did was good enough, filled the requirements and was documented both outside (what it does, for the lead engineer and management) and inside the code (how it works, for the poor soul who would inherit the mission).

Maybe it's a tale I tell myself, but I like to think I wasn't a net negative overall.

deadly car accidents are most common in areas with people entering and exiting at different speeds.

mismatched priorities make it impossible to integrate and sure enough there are crashes.

i see similarities with work speeds and work demands. senior dev who goes hard generates friction with managers or team members who are not able or willing to do the same. this will lead to conflict.

>90% no longer have to pretend to give a shit what the 10% think anymore

The 10% that do all your work for you?

I guess that's seems pretty shortsighted. When I go to work, I expect the asshole (that just watches me get shit done) to be decent company, worth a laugh or really willing to grab things I need.

If you can't bother to 'pretend' then I'm going to stop pretending for you too. I guess we'll see who gets to keep getting paid.

You know, have some decency.

No, I believe that the 90% do most of the work. Just based on sheer numbers. I also think the 10% try too hard

Not all jobs are productivity based, plenty are response based and you are really being paid to be available to do something within a time period if requested, regardless of whether you actually do get any requests to do something.

> The number of students who wanted advice about how to get easy remote jobs where they didn’t have to do any work was depressing.

Why was it depressing for you? For me it's great to see how people are slowly managing to readjust their priorities and attach less importance to work in order to focus on things that matter more to them. And if they can do that - its' fantastic!

yeah... improve focus on what really matters: tiktok, instagram... :-)

It must be a depressing view, to think people's vices double as their ambitions.

Can't really blame them since those products are designed to be as addictive as possible. Rather blame the companies behind them?

They are designed to be addictive yes, but that doesn't make the user non-complicit. It's easy to stop using these products, especially if you have other interests in your life.

> It's easy to stop using these products [...]

Well, the definition of addictive is quite literally "cannot stop doing once you have started" (Cambridge dictionary), so not really.

I do see your point, though, I grew up without social media nor internet so I have plenty of offline things I like doing. But you have to consider that most of these young kids grew up with social media and mobile games as their primary, and often only, source of entertainment. Their addictive nature makes it really hard for them to find other interests in life, especially considering that parents often leave their kids on the smartphone to keep them quiet.

> yeah... improve focus on what really matters: tiktok, instagram... :-)

another hot boomer take. how you feel about kids on your lawn?

i remember my grandparents saying similar things about nintendo in the 90s.

my dad told me stories about them complaining about his white water rafting hobby before that.

What is your argument? That focus on social media is actually a good thing and on par with whitewater rafting? Or are you just trying to take shots at GP?

Calling someone a “boomer” for having a different opinion is only slightly less useless and childish than calling them a “Karen”, especially when the reasoning boils down to “you dislike things I like, and my only argument against your opinion is actually a personal attack.”

Meh, people in the 70ies were literally spending money on pet rocks, I don’t know who’s dumber.

It's not really a dream, you can indeed get those jobs.

If a company has those jobs, it means their managers/leadership are doing the exact same lazy job, so you are in good company.

An alternative is simply to be good at your job and get your work done and have spare time. If you want behaviors to change in this situation, businesses need to give better direct incentives for finishing work early. Right now, the reward for getting your work done quickly is more work.

>Overly confident internet posts had convinced them that most people don’t actually do much work at work and that it was all one big game.

Where's the lie? Most people don't accomplish anything of actual value at work, and promotion and advancement is a big game.

Based on what exactly? If working didn't provide value, they wouldn't be paid. Companies aren't in the business of babysitting, and layoffs happen all the time.

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

Given what we know about Graeber today, his book should be approached with skepticism.

Care to share "what we know about Graeber"?

People hire because they want large teams and people to lord over. It has nothing to do with the business, you just need a business model that spins off enough money to cover the empire building. Look at Google, all of their revenue comes from ads but they have a huge team of people who aren't working on that but are supported by the ad business.

Most businesses become bloated like this because the kind of people who become managers have been waiting their whole lives to build the biggest team possible.

You think most companies are comparable to Google, one of the worlds most profitable companies? The large large majority of jobs aren't mostly doing nothing and almost no businesses do what you are describing and survive long-term.

I've worked in many different types of companies. Every one that wasn't a tiny startup was full to the brim of people not doing anything meaningful. Entire roles and workflows are invented to create work. No, the scrum master isn't needed and you only need that project manager because the product manager is fighting for turf with the program manager and they want to show the director a burn down chart so he can pretend to know what's going on to the vp who's out on retreat with the ceo. Doesn't matter though because HR set a hard limit of 2% raises this year, but line managers still make sure to have your reports do their 360 degree evaluations!

I wish that were some sort of hyperbole or exaggeration, but it's reality.

> Every one that wasn't a tiny startup was full to the brim of people not doing anything meaningful.

That's an entirely different thing. You're moving the goalposts far away from how "lazy girl job" is defined above. People who aren't doing anything meaningful can also be working very hard at it.

The "send a couple quickie emails a day and make $100k" remote job is a fantasy. They may exist for a time, but unless the employer is printing money, the ride will usually stop as soon as someone bothers to look. Also I think it's very unlikely to get hired into one, especially as an inexperienced person.

The only area where I think one could be even remotely stable is in some critical area with lots of domain knowledge and experience is necessary. Once you've you've put in your time you can switch towards leaning on your experience to provide sufficient value to stay employed than your hard work.

This is such nonsense. “You actually only need engineers who will always perfectly prioritize their workflow and will always precisely identify the right strategy for the product independently and any management at any level whatsoever is unnecessary and none of those people actually work anyway” is entry-level noise. I get that it’s popular to think that the entire organization is worthless and that you are the only hero anyone needs, but come on.

That you don’t understand or can’t comprehend what someone is doing does not, at all, mean that they aren’t doing anything or that they have no value.

Paraphrasing someone so badly, as you have done above, is not good faith. And the GP is basically talking about 'Bullshit jobs', the subject of which David Graeber wrote a well regarded, well received book on [1], [2].

[1] https://www.penguin.com.au/books/bullshit-jobs-9780141983479

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

> you just need a business model that spins off enough money to cover the empire building.

Maybe so. But those business models don't just grow on trees. And once you have one, they don't maintain themselves, either. Someone competent has to keep that business model spinning off that kind of money.

In other words, even in that kind of company, competence actually matters for at least a subset of the employees.

The jury is still out on what to make of Elon's firing 90% of the staff (sometimes illegally) means about the productivity of Twitter before and after.

Elon's antics aren't relevant.

Most office jobs outside of the software engineering bubble are like that. People do very little actual work. Making such roles fully remote is basically the final step.

>Most office jobs outside of the software engineering bubble are like that. People do very little actual work.

It's 2023 and text submission still doesn't auto-add the /s where it's needed. Is that ever going to be fixed?

Where is the sarcasm? I've been a consultant pulling well north of six figures and had weeks in the office doing fuck-all.

3 hours of meetings and then killing time on Slashdot. Except I had to be in the office, in a button-up shirt, and had to commute.

I've done 50+ hour weeks at home, but when it's slow I'll take meetings while prepping a slow-cooker dinner. I had a boss that use to do the 1-on-1 meetings with his team (e.g. me) while running errands. I got used to hearing the sound of self-checkout machines while on that call, lol.

> Where is the sarcasm?

I thought he was being sarcastic. I could be wrong. Intent can be tough to suss out of text.

> I've been a consultant pulling well north of six figures and had weeks in the office doing frak-all.

I'm sure it has happened somewhere at sometime; I have heard an anecdote or two. Perhaps three now.

But based on what I've witnessed over 30 years of onsite calls (more fields than I can count) - the assertion that "Most office jobs outside of the software engineering ... People do very little actual work" - is false.

Massively, bizarrely false. Conspiracy-theory level false.

If it were true in the slightest, I'd of witnessed it repeatedly. I would have met people who could testify of it over and over. If not one in field, than another.

What I (along with most folks) witness are employees doing actual work, many working to the point of their own physical detriment.

Based on widespread reality, I rate the assertion as physics-grade false.

Even in software engineering. I've seen devs in enterprise jobs who could put in an hour or two a day and still get "exceeds expectations" on their performance reviews

Hey, it's me! I'm mostly valuable because I'm the only one on my project who hasn't quit at this point so I can help guide all the new people, including new project managers and tech leads. Even though I don't get much actual work done I'm there when they need to ask questions and that seems to be good enough. In fact if I had a remote position instead of in-office, I would probably meet this "lazy girl job" definition.

Yup. I'm a software dev at a small tech company, that mostly makes some industrial automation devices. My main job is "knowing the software": "XYZ is happening, is this a software bug?" "I'll take a look, but the software probably would only behave that way if hardware component ABC wasn't working".

Maybe once a month or so a real software issue or feature request will come up, I'll spend 2-3 days implementing it, then another couple weeks will go by with it going through the (heavily manual) testing process.

Don't get me wrong, those handful of days of work a month are not uncommonly pivotal in sealing multi-million dollar deals, so I'm earning my keep. But it would be nice if my employer recognized that I have 90%+ slack in my schedule, and let my fuck off and do my own (easily interuptable) thing.

Look at it from their perspective. it's very very very hard without the bank of mum and dad to make it very far in this life. Housing is expensive, school is expensive, job market is tough. food is expensive. Employment has less and less conditions. The young are not being enfranchised by their society.

> “A lazy girl job is basically something you can just quiet quit,”

this should be all jobs. companies look at you in much the same way, and will drop you like you're on fire if there is a need.

Yes, and if you treat your job like that, you're going to be one of the first ones dropped as soon as there's a need.

> I was invited to be a mentor in a career-focused program for college students. The number of students who wanted advice about how to get easy remote jobs where they didn’t have to do any work was depressing.

This is likely one of the reasons companies want people back in the office.

Do they not understand that

- there’s no need for most remote jobs to hire only from the USA, and that

- 60-80k is a huge salary in most of the world?

I've never entirely understood why it was so difficult to make that work, but it seems to be.

I've been anticipating being replaced by cheaper software developers working remotely, ever since I graduated college in the 90s. It never happened.

As far as I can tell there are a bunch of reasons: language, time zone, shared cultural conventions, plain-old-racism, the value in at least having the option of occasional meeting in meatspace. Some of that is finally changing due to the pandemic forcing it on people. But I still think people are having trouble finding reliable employees in a country they don't understand, even though there are many millions of them available.

NDAs, employment law, currency changes -- fees for changing, plus wiring money -- and all manner of national / state / provincial / local taxes, different pension and hiring rules, etc.

and then there is the idea that you have no idea if i am who i really am, or if i'm the one doing the work. i could be a face on Teams Calls for what is essentially 5 Vietnamese kids, and we're all in different jurisdictions, so if we decide to rip off your IP, who would you sue? could you even get that lawsuit off the ground?

and for all that risk you're eating 4% to do currency conversions & wire transfers. or else i'm standing up an offshore subsidiary at a cost and then dealing with payroll tax, filing costs, local HR and accounting, etc, as well. there is, potentially, a lot of liability and headache in that.

and then there is the cultural, language, timezone, etc. difference.

Probably because government contracting is such a huge part of the economy, aka why many positions require security clearances.

60-80k is very good in most of the US, too.

> there’s no need for most remote jobs to hire only from the USA

You still need people in the same timezone as you, usually

> This influencer branded it “lazy girl job” but this concept is wildly popular among young people of all genders right now.

Indeed. I don’t see the point of marketing this to women instead of men (or both!)… Is this some kind of low key, maybe interiorised, sexism?

> Overly confident internet posts had convinced them that most people don’t actually do much work at work and that it was all one big game.

If you apply the Pareto Principle, they aren’t wrong. As you go up in the org, it all becomes mostly a political game. YMMV of course.

Did you mean Peter principle?

> They thought remote work was the final piece of the puzzle that would turn these jobs into easy paychecks so they could have near total freedom without having to give up more than a couple hours per day to send some emails.

And you wonder why execs are pushing so hard for RTO!