The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach
scottsmitelli.com
scottsmitelli.com
I'm a big believer in the power of the zeitgeist, and this quiet desperation is all over the air of the year 2025. It doesn't really have a name yet. It's not just ennui, because ennui is just boredom. The feeling of 2025 is boredom and fear and despair, all mixed together. But it doesn't seem to be entirely new:
“...and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Who am I? Who are any of us to complain and/or fix things? The answer is: we're the only people who can. Change has to start somewhere. The best thing for people who have it worse isn't to silently suffer, it's to help ourselves by dismantling the systems under which we both suffer. We have to take every opportunity to do that, and that means even the unglamorous ones.
> If I'm not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when? — Hillel
Import taxes aren't going to help without serious, long-term government subsidization of those jobs.
Apply that to all companies who ship parts to Mexico for assembly/manufacture, and it will make a difference, assuming the tariffs are high enough to make a difference in the showroom.
Here's the Gore/Perot debate pre-NAFTA. Perot seems pretty spot on in his assessment.
More expensive cars means cars are going to be less in demand. Means less cars manufactured, means less jobs for people who make cars.
Also, reworking the auto manufacturing pipeline is going to take decades not days.
Maybe ask yourself if the reason nobody else in the past 30 years has enacted the recent measures of the American government is because they were stupid/lazy/greedy or if it's because they clearly don't work.
Shipping parts to Mexico to have them assembled then shipping it to the US is much less efficient than shipping the parts to the US, manufacturing in the US, then selling in the US.
>More expensive cars means cars are going to be less in demand. Means less cars manufactured, means less jobs for people who make cars.
Less jobs for Mexican labor making cars, more jobs for American labor making cars, that's the objective. It also strengthens unions by increasing headcount and making the threat of moving labor to another country much more expensive. Remember, the discussion is about the plight of the average American worker and how they've been systematically squeezed for 30+ years now due to globalization.
>Also, reworking the auto manufacturing pipeline is going to take decades not days.
Yes, more like years not decades, but ya, not sure why anyone would think it would take days. I suspect a lot of companies will try political maneuvers like waiting out Trump's term, hoping the next guy would be more sensible to their profit needs.
>Maybe ask yourself if the reason nobody else in the past 30 years has enacted the recent measures of the American government is because they were stupid/lazy/greedy or if it's because they clearly don't work.
Companies have a much higher profit margin by using Mexican labor, at the expense of US labor. Those companies also donate a lot of money to campaigns. It's pretty off brand for the Democrats under Clinton/Gore to champion moving thousands of jobs to Mexico under NAFTA. I wonder what motivated them to do that.
It may or may not work, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Despair of the average American has a lot of negative, long term social consequences we're currently dealing with, and it's just going to get worse.
Did you know foreign car manufacturers make cars in the US for the US market to avoid tariffs and improve efficiency? They might be on to something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobiles_manufactur...
Let's suppose that we institute an income cap and a wealth cap. For the sake of argument, we'll call that 10 million dollars a year, and 100 million dollars. All the existing taxes apply. Nothing gets treated specially: your income for the year will always be capped at 10MM, and your total wealth will be capped at 100MM. It's a 100% tax and knowingly evading it is a crime. If you hit the income limit in two different years, the mayor of your city will award you a plaque, with an optional ceremony, and if you hit the wealth limit, the governor of your state will award you a plaque.
How much pain does that inflict?
None at all.
But nearly everyone harbors some secret hope of becoming a billionaire right now, and the thought of not winning that lottery is enough to make it politically impossible to enact this tiny reform.
And if you can't make reforms, the whole thing may need to be dismantled.
I'm not repudiating (in this thread) capitalism, per se. Only whatever system it is that's abusing OP's protagonist. If you think capitalism inevitably punches someone in the stomach, well, then yeah; you've got your work cut out for you.
The question you should be asking first is, is it sustainable? If you give someone a bank account with a million in it, they can bring a lot of good to themselves by spending it profligately... but then one day it runs out.
Our safety nets have been ripped away from us. Leaving us with this awful choice of working with shitty employers. In some cases, they might even hold a monopsony on labor and thus have _no choice_.
The time I have wasted at shit tier employers is lost forever. All so the rapacious capitalists could pump the stock and deliver share holder value
That can be a legitimate use, but one should remember that it's but a temporary thing to solve a particular problem, there should be an end date, and a way out. In particular, you should not start depending on the thicker stream of money such a job pays.
It's rare that such a job leaves the physical damage described in the story. More often it can damage you mentally: burned out, depressed, crushed by internally felt shame and guilt. This should not be discounted too easily; it can cost you a lot of plain money to get treated, to say nothing of the suffering, both yours and that of those who care about you.
It may be a terrible job in the absolute sense, but also a good job in the relative sense because it pays well and most involve gut punches.
None of that applies to this allegory. Dodging the punch got the protagonist put on a three-punch PIP. Who knows what punching back would have led to.
For me it's the uselessness of it that would bother me, the actual act of getting punched is neither here nor there. I mean I pay to take boxing classes and I enjoy them.
>Who are you to feel bad about your situation?
I am a human being with one life that is far to brief to spend it being miserable.
My anecdotal experience: The best jobs in my career were the medium-pay, medium-expectations jobs.
Most (but not all) of the very high paying jobs I've had also came with very high expectations. They were paying a lot of money and they knew that people didn't have many other options to get paychecks that large. Managers were compensated on performance of their teams, so they had to extract as much work as possible to get the maximum pay. They knew that they could post a job ad tomorrow with the high salary listed and it would attract hordes of qualified applicants who wanted that paycheck.
I never got to experience the golden era of certain FAANG companies where many people were making bank and few people were ever fired.
Likewise, the lowest paying jobs I've had were also terrible. They had no concept of anything other than extracting work from people for minimum pay. They kept everyone tired, demoralized, and afraid of being fired. People don't search for other jobs as much when they're constantly burned out and overwhelmed.
The sweet spot, for me, has been right in the middle. Good pay (great, relative to all professions), but not top of market pay, and reasonable expectations. Surrounded by a mix of people from different ages but with a lot of parents who have families at home. If I interview somewhere and it's nothing but mid 20s people who don't have families, I stay away because they have much worse concept of work-life balance in my experience.
That's a very good point.
I remember the first time I was in a cycle of trying to meet impossible expectations. We kept putting in a lot of effort and doing some very impressive things, but every time we got close to delivering something the goalposts would move.
After far longer than I'd like to admit, I realized that those lofty expectations weren't designed to be met. They were designed to keep us perpetually insecure. Always feeling like we needed to try a little harder. And it was working on us, at least for a couple years.
The illusion was briefly shattered when a manager gave us a goal that numerically meant that one of our vendors would have to serve us at a loss. He wanted us to negotiate a contract where they paid us to be their customer, when you added up all the factors. When we showed him, he did a pretend-angry routine and lectured us on how we should be thinking bigger all the time. We "failed" to meet that impossible expectation, to the surprise of absolutely nobody on the team. After that, it was like the team had been freed from the shackles of impossible expectations. We did our best and shrugged off the disappointed manager routine when it didn't meet the arbitrary expectations. It was interesting to watch as the manager realized his power over us had been broken, which quickly gave way to a slow-motion process of sidelining us for younger replacements who were more receptive to the disappointed manager routine.
I miss many of those coworkers, but I do not miss that job.
If no one in management has kids, run the other way.
> And let’s not even get started on you. You, who breezily engaged with any recruiter who blew smoke up your ass. You, applying and interviewing for jobs you didn’t want, then saying yes to their offers just because the compensation was higher and it felt like maybe the grass would be greener too. You, who time and time again sat around waiting for the world to tell you what you were supposed to do at every given moment, spelled out in big bright letters. Someday you will have to learn that opportunities never find you like that; historically, only punches do.
I just don't like my job but it pays really well and has great benefits and I am scared to face the bundle of uncertainties that come with quitting.
When I tried an antidepressant for the first time, I thought the same thing you do. "I don't need medication! I'm sad because everything is terrible, and getting worse!". Everything was terrible. Everything was getting worse. The worst day of my life would come about a year later; I wasn't wrong that I was in very deep trouble. I was poor and getting poorer, my life had been decaying for years, and I could see that I would be out on the street very soon if my course didn't change, which was true (I found a place to go with a matter of hours left before I'd have been pitching a tent).
What I WAS wrong about was that that meant I couldn't be depressed, in the sense of "having major depressive disorder".
Antidepressants DO NOT make you happy. They don't make you ignore your problems. The day they kicked in for me, I was every bit as aware of the situation I was in as I had been when I began taking them a few weeks before. I still knew I was in deep trouble, I still had many things I wanted to change about myself. My values were not any different.
The difference, though, is that I wasn't drowning. This comic - https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-7/01-glower-vac... - describes my feelings almost exactly. It was like the difference between being inside a wildfire, and standing on a hilltop with a vantage point on it. The problem is still there and you still want to solve it, but you can pause, strategize, and turn the volume down enough to hear yourself. Now, in my case, it turns out I had been depressed in some form for most of my life, so this was a profound revelation to me. You mean most people's internal voices don't spend days abusing them for every small error? You can just like, go about your day and not have an internal voice telling you how worthless you are? I genuinely did not know that that was possible.
What people who "don't get it" don't realize, I think, is that major depressive disorder - the "chemical imbalance", in layperson's terms - can both occur on its own AND as a response to ongoing life stresses, in the same way that lung cancer can be genetic OR a response to toxic air. And depression is, somewhat by nature, self-sustaining once it is established: depression interferes with you doing precisely the things you'd need to do to not be depressed. Working on things you're invested in, exercising, getting social contact and support, all of these things are far harder when you're depressed than they would be if you weren't.
When you get on an antidepressant, you're not making your problems go away. You're just helping yourself interrupt the feedback loop that traps you within those problems. You still have to solve the problems, and that's why you still go to therapy. But therapy + antidepressants are more effective than therapy alone because it is far easier to apply what you learn in therapy when your mind isn't tearing itself apart with fear and pain.
Today, my depression is much better managed, because I've had a long time to learn to understand it from a position of safety. I still spiral into it sometimes. But the loops are not unbreakable now, because I'm trained to recognize them and interrupt them. Because of my time on medication, I know what part of my mind that screaming abuse comes from, and I can better separate it from myself. I'm better, on any axis you care to measure: I'm 60 pounds lighter, make ten times the income, have more experiences, am better-liked, have had more fulfilling and durable relationships, whatever. And if I had not gotten on a medication, I would've been rotting in the ground for about six years now.
(That is not to say that we don't need broader societal reforms to fix what is putting all of our brains under enough stress to cause damage. We should absolutely pursue those, and we should expect our world to get sicker until we succeed, in the same way that a polluted city should expect cancer rates to increase. But that's not mutually-exclusive with antidepressants being an extremely valuable part of individual recovery, in the same way that regulating pollution is not mutually-exclusive with treating someone's cancer.)
In brief: depression is a feedback loop, because it interferes with your ability to take the actions you need to take to be less depressed. If you've been depressed for a while, that loop is probably pretty well-established. Antidepressants make the feedback weaker, and that lets you begin to work on breaking the loop.
Antidepressants don't solve your problems, and they don't make you unaware of them. They just make the problems easier to work on. They don't make you weak. They give you the ability to work on being stronger.
Then the 5 day weeks kick in and I become flat again.
I am not sure if it is just the nature of software jobs? The level of mental engagement and uncertainty we deal with is pretty high. Forcing yourself to do deep focused work for several hours a day every day while staring at a screen and doing remote meetings must cause some kind of schism. I love not commuting but I do wonder if working in person would help fix this.
In my case I think it would help a lot. I feels kind of lonely in this job too. There is no chatter or jokes, discussing news, tech meetups, nothing. Most of the day it is just 'please look at this PR' or 'Can customer have to active addresses' communication. And I rather social person. But I can't commute because I have small kids that needs to be driven to and from kindergarten everyday. And in a small city IT does not exists so either commuting or remote work.
In my experience, no.
"Coworker" is universally recognized as a slur for a reason. Think about "coworker music", etc. You go to work and pretend to care about sports or the Drake-Kendrick feud or cape movies (dude Brode Screenguy was so sick in Capeman CXXVIII) and make small talk around the office cooler. Then you go back to your desk and look like you're working. The managers are watching - it's an open office - sometimes they get up and walk around and make idle and foreboding chitchat, and sometimes you are pulled into a hey-how's-it-going that turns into a meeting on your way to the bathroom.
Sometimes I take my 9ams from home. I turn off my webcam and look at my phone. It doesn't matter. Meetings are enrichment for the ex-finance bro who likes to hear himself talk, and necessary for the other managers, most of whom struggle to read and write.
(The people in this thread who complain that the story is too long are likely in the top 50% of literacy skills for tech jobs - they're consuming written text as a hobby. Most people don't do this because they can't.)
...what?
That said, this also feels like something of a relic from the zero-interest-rate era when jobs like this were plentiful, before layoff fever swept the American boardroom.
It goes without saying that the physical damage of being punched in the stomach is a metaphor for the psychic damage of having your soul sucked. You can bare it for a while but it starts to add up. And, like many wounds, it CAN heal over time.
Focus on making your therapy easier and making better metrics, especially at the cost of actual value. The purpose of the therapy-is- the pointlessness.
I have seen this unironically used to excellent effect, and the user was considered indispensable, since being indispensable and highly “valued” was what he focused 100 percent of his 9-5 on. Meanwhile, he was able to leave work behind once he walked out of the office, because he was not at all invested emotionally in the “therapy “ sessions.
Probably won’t work for everyone, but it’s a pretty solid pattern for accepting useless work. The important part is to have some “real” work that you -do- care about. Otherwise it’s potentially a shortcut to a high ledge.
We could also do a lot of things to make such work less uncomfortable. For example, why are cashiers in American supermarkets forced to stand?
If there is no upside for anyone, but only discomfort for the checkout clerks, someone might be able to disrupt the field by paying slightly less but allowing them to stand. Since that isn't happening, I assume that either a) workers are showing the difference between revealed and stated preference b) grocery stores are actually making more money of clerks stand c) paying less in exchange for sitting clerks isn't possible because minimum wage
Employer isn't actually getting any value out of making cashiers stand, and in most other countries, it is a sitting job. So far as I can tell, the only reason why US does it is because "we have always done it this way", which is also the ultimate rationale for a lot of other similar bullshit.
The workers, realistically, don't have any choice if every employer does this. They can take the work as it is, or they can starve, especially seeing how US doesn't have full-fledged welfare.
Ah yes, because nobody has rent to pay or food to buy.
This Ayn Rand-level economic analysis is a joke, and is an insult to people with legitimate grievances. I hope You have the day you deserve.
But we aren’t on that track.
AI+robotics+energy is power. With real creative power you need money much less. The game changes from being a billionaire to having terawats of automation.
Without guardrails, robotics and artificial intelligence will become the primary tools of capital. Capital won’t need workers to implement their designs, and they won’t need money in the sense that they need it today, mostly to pay people to do things.
With factories to produce robots and ubiquitous artificial intelligence, there exists an opportunity for the capital class to separate itself entirely from the seething masses.
With essentially unconstrained power to create, you don’t need to buy things you want, except very special or artisanal things perhaps. You want a yacht? You build a yacht. The promise of GPAR is that you don’t need a factory. You just need more general purpose arthropod robots and the right software. They build the warehouse, they build the ways, they lay the keel, they build the ship. The fact that it might not be the most efficient way to build a yacht is immaterial.
Of course materials may need to be purchased so there will still be steelworks and other heavy industries that don’t lend themselves to small scales, but they too will be “manned” with GPAR labor, and the capital class will just be swapping tokens around among themselves. The true end to trickle down economies.
Humans will still have work in some situations, but it will be work that for some reasons robots cannot do because it is too risky, or too expensive to use automation. So humans will be limited to work that robots cannot do without risking destruction of robotic capital, or that humans can do for around the same cost as 36kw of solar electricity and $10/day of depreciation. Maybe that will cover rice and beans?
Either way, unfettered, untaxed access to effective hybrid cognitive/physical automation is not likely to be great for most humans in the long term.
We need an entirely new approach where labor is not the basis of survival if we are to realise the humanitarian potential of universal automation.
I think there might be a modest proposal or two floating around out there that would neatly resolve the problems as stated.
This whole idea of "other people have it worse so it's rude or 'bad' for me to complain about things I don't like" is not a helpful mindset. That there are starving kids in Africa or victims of war in eastern Europe or slaves imprisoned in China doesn't make your life any better or worse. If every slave in the world was freed making those JIRA tasks would feel exactly the same so there's nothing wrong with wishing those JIRA tasks weren't quite as bad as they are.
Housing is expensive. Food is expensive. Childcare is expensive. Health insurance is expensive (even the "good" insurance, where a PPO will still gleefully deny your claims).
So you can either be well-off and miserable, but probably not destitute, or you can work at a gas station, and enjoy 30-40 years of precarity before you die of a preventable illness.
Great options.
Either way, things are going to suck for a while. That my employer prioritizes Jira tickets over making good software seems a small price to pay for a bit of financial security (at least until Elon hacks my bank account and takes all my money, or I get thrown in prison for being a wokeness sympathizer, or whatever).
Less money and greater meaning, or more money and mind-numbing tedium.
I sympathize with you because on January 1st I nearly doubled my salary, but the job leaves me rather unfulfilled. I'm left substituting my hobbies and family for all meaning in my life, but it's challenging when you spend 50-55 hours a week at work.
I spent some time at Pivotal, and then shamelessly adopted the Pivotal process at subsequent companies. One thing I took to heart is that a product manager that communicates through well-written user stories is golden. Jira is a drag but it's still fundamentally a textbox and you control what goes into that textbox.
Run wild with it! Engineers actually are counting on you.
Is there a name for the genre of writing that gets so, so close to magical realism without actually incorporating literal magic? Because this story is the epitome of it.
Every job I've had has always felt like they're taking more than my time and energy: they take my "life force", as it were.
A job can really drain you, especially since as the article says, a lot of jobs are just busywork. A corporation is a machine whose goal is to spend money, and sometimes make money back too.
The massive layoffs in 2022 and 2023 in the tech world sort of exemplify this. The big tech companies had money, so they have to spend it, and the easiest way to spend money is to hire people. Whether or not they're "necessary" isn't the point, the point is that you need to do something with the money.
When the money dried up, suddenly they have tens of thousands of people whose jobs really were not necessary and so they have to fire a bunch of them. It's terrible, but it's basically the backbone of our economy, so I don't even know that it can be fixed.
It made me physically ill.
Obviously if you have any empathy, it’s also very unpleasant.
[EDIT] Still not done but this is just getting more true the farther I go.
I opted not to pursue the opportunity.
It's always wise to ask questions about this during the interview
In my experience, though, hyperbole in job listings is usually the product of someone in HR who doesn't know how to write job listings, so they write a bunch of vacuous words that sound good but mean nothing.
I think the key is to have some part of your life that is meaningful and fulfilling and not dependent on your work situation - aka hobbies.
To relate it back to the story, there's a part where the protagonist thinks about what they've been doing with their time ("What have you been doing with the remaining 36 hours of the past workweek?") - when you're at this step, you should pick something up.
Painting, learning spanish, volunteering at the animal shelter, amateur hockey league, picking up trash at the park, writing a book, etc
If you can manage this, you'll find a new appreciation for your job. This thing that is minimal tax on your life that allows you the opportunity to hobby in the 99th percentile.
I was like GP, and worked on fulfilling side-projects for years (after family goes to bed).
Like you, I'm beginning to see that it isn't working well any more. Though I've built some very useful things for myself, being productive in this all-but-invisible manner still leaves much to be desired.
For example, I'm not frustrated that I have to spend 8 hours sleeping. I simply accept that's the world I was born into, that our bodies require sleep, so I do it. I imagine you probably accept it in the same way. If we were to criticize this from a perspective of "this is a dumb design and we should change it", then maybe we would be frustrated by it.
Now when it comes to "bullshit jobs", I feel the same way. I was born into a society where some % of my job is bullshit but I can be paid for it anyway. But it really doesn't bother me that much, it's historically a great transaction, and I'm not responsible to change it (is it even a bad thing that needs to be changed? even if it's dumb that doesn't mean bad)
I simply spend some hours of my week doing this arbitrary thing, just as I do for Sleeping and Pooping. And as soon as I'm done, I put it down and go live my "real life". I've never thought - "wow 15 minutes spent pooping everyday? I'm wasting my life"
So what's the difference between the bullshit job and pooping? Well maybe there's a perception that these 2 things are different categories because 1 is designed by other humans and can therefore be changed. But I don't actually think it is changeable because it turtles down to some quirk in basic human desire. It won't work in the same way that you can't just tell people "Hey don't be curious today" or "don't be vain" or "don't be greedy".
I accept that our current iteration of society has been defined somewhat organically, much like the way our body has biologically evolved. And that I need to "poop" at the societal level.
We all need to "poop" at the societal level
That is one of the more "zen" things I've read recently. Thank you!!
Happened to a friend, a big Java shop spent 1 year looking for the perfect candidate, courted him again after they failed, and even my friend said no to them.
A friend of mine developed stomach ulcers, so this isn't even that fantastical.
Hope your friend's doing okay.
Stress pretty much ruins your body one way or another. It was the teeth grinding that got me.
We both ended up putting more stock in family than work and it has been going well.
I'm lucky to have a job where although my main value is tolerating a lot of disrespect and pointless abuse, I value my colleagues a lot and enjoy working with them, and my job/product/company is doing something meaningful, which offsets it quite a lot. I've also been in roles where that hasn't been true and the oppressiveness after a while is hard to put into words - particularly people like the unsympathetic bad-advice relative that thinks anyone that makes what you make shouldn't be miserable at all.
The first time I noticed I was burning out like this, at an old miserable job, was there was a part of my commute I'd been taking for 10+ years where a few weeks in February, the morning sunrise will shine in a particular way at an intersection I noticed. Then, one year, I noticed this again and in my head I was like "oh, it's February again" and kind of uneasily noted that it had only felt like a few months, not an entire year - and then the next year it happened, was even more unsettling - huge chunks of time I couldn't really piece together clearly in between the two years. The year after I got a little bit better of a job and had recovered from burnout, the "February sunlight" phenomenon stopped. It now feels like a full year in between noticing this, if I notice at all, and I'm grateful for that very small and weird win.
Until I could improve my situation, every day I'd look him square in the eye with a fierceness that says:
I'M READY, LET'S DO THIS M_O_T_H_E_R_F_U_C_K_E_R !!!
Once I bump into Chris's boss, it will just be a matter of leverage, as is the nature of all tactical domination.
Then one day Chris will show up,
and be escorted by security
into my new office,
I mean, his old office.
I'll crack my knuckles and tell him to have a seat.
You're late for your onboarding, after which legal's going to explain your situation to you.
There are definitely people that thrive in such environments (like Chris).
FWIW, it's an office workplace, not MMA, so one shouldn't need to be a "finely-tuned fighting machine" to do the job.
Perhaps one can extrapolate that the author is hinting at another dark truth -- the higher up you go in the hierarchy, the more MMA-like this will be. Therefore CEOs are, by definition, distilled psychopaths (like the Felon and the Husk in the White House right now).
Nah, I'm too easy-going for that bs. I'm a thinker, a problem-solver, but I was an athlete who trained myself pretty hard for nearly a decade of American folk-style wrestling.
My thought-train started with simply being able to be able to take the daily bunch, then my imagination just ran wild, like the excellent author of the original post. Combine that with the fact that "Chris" was obviously a psychopath, I went towards figuring out how he could learn why he chose the wrong path -- learn as gently as possible. And, as someone who has watched a lot of MMA over the years, I understand that training the entire body for combat would require more than just a shitton of situps, so the story just kind of just followed the original story's inspiration, as per my life experience.
> Perhaps one can extrapolate that the author is hinting at another dark truth -- the higher up you go in the hierarchy, the more MMA-like this will be. Therefore CEOs are, by definition, distilled psychopaths (like the Felon and the Husk in the White House right now).
Hinting or not, he paints a disturbing-enough picture of the such narcissists and their choices to not give a shit how people suffer as a result of their decisions.
If you want to learn a true story that is far, far worse, read David W. Blight's Pullitzer Prize winning 2019ish biography of Frederick Douglass. The audiobook was available as a free download from a reputable site (I forget), and my two teenagers and I listened 4-6 hours/day for 2.5 weeks (weekends off) until we made it through the entire 900+ page book. FD was an extraordinary human being who led an extraordinary life.
As a result, my kids understand the cruelty of the wealthy as best as one can without having actually gone through it themselves.
We are actually also pretty knowledgeable about WWII history (via Stephen E. Ambrose's unabridged audiobooks D-Day, Citizen Soldier, and Band of Brothers) so we are also aware of what our German kin are capable of, as are all human beings.
Peace be with you, friend.
"We gonna be alright." --Kendrick
Peace to you as well, and to your family!
I think socially we have mental-model of what a "good" job, or "good" life is, and this model is largely based on certain capitalistic/individualistic assumptions.
We tell ourselves that being isolated, feeling useless, feeling blamed, being punched in the stomache once doesn't really matter and aren't real problems if we get paid a lot.
So we save up a lot of money, but we aren't happy (despite insisting we should be), and ironically no amount of money can purchase back what we gave up -- a sense of purpose, respect, community, etc.
A friend once asked "What would be your ideal job if you had F-you money?" and my answer was "The field wouldn't matter that much, just a job where I had coworkers who genuinely liked and respected each other and cared about what we did." He couldn't understand me and kept repeating "No what field though, if you could choose?"
And of course the absurdity of the physical abuse is a mere literary device, the heavy hitter (oof, sorry) is the emotional one. (As the story spells it out. It's cPTSD from struggling in this unfamiliar world every day, with not knowing what exactly is going to happen, not being able to connect to humans, being alone.)
Maybe the darkest aspect is how sidelined any support is. Spouse? Only mentioned as a healthcare package. An old friend? Good for telling the truth, but that did not help at all! Lots of supervisors are dicks.
The protagonist mentions that their previous jobs gave the same anxiety and pointlessness. (The previous boss that was bombarding them with tickets, emails, etc. seems like a stand-in for typical micromanagers who don't respect boundaries. And the protagonist was obviously bad at saying no and standing up for themselves, etc.)
Still fantastic writing, though. Just personally can't relate.
I would have thought the same about 10 years ago, and then ... life got interesting.
I was always going around with at least a book! How bad a punch is after all? Is it worse than tripping and falling with skis? And we still want to ski more almost immediately, right? Just work out a bit, get some protective layer, try to come up with some sustainability strategy with Chris so he doesn't punch in the same place all the time, and let's go!
... and now I can relate a lot more to the character. But after many years I read a book this year! (I mean other than this ~150 page short story. :D)
Mental health shit is insidious.
That's impressive, this post was massive
edit: this post has almost 26,000 words in it I am extremely skeptical someone reads it in its entirety I'm not sure how long that would take
Why do you find that hard to believe?
I obviously looked at this one and was like "nah" seeing the size of the scroll bar and I copied/pasted the words into a counter to get that 26K figure.
Anyway it doesn't matter there's nothing to win here. I'm pointing out this post is long as hell and I'm not gonna spend my time reading it.
It also probably speaks of my caliber as a tech person I have not been in a FAANG job before probably won't be, I'm just lucky to have picked this field up later in life and can get a job in it but I'm nobody noteworthy.
I wouldn't expect many to do so, but I absolutely wouldn't expect people who declined to do the reading to stick around for the post-reading discussion.
Consider that you might indeed have a short attention span, and that there might be a lot of insights and concepts that you may be missing out on due to unwillingness to engage with long-form writing.
people read entire books you know.
i ran the text through a grade level calculator and it came out as 8th grade level, which i understand is typical for a mainstream newspaper. i guess that's why it was such a quick read.
I've spent longer reading documentation late at night that ultimately would turn out to be useless to me. This actually had some plausibility of real life utility, but requires "experiencing" to derive useful benefit from.
I think I just punched myself in the stomach again.
I read it in two sittings, because it was getting waaay too late to finish it yesterday.
At times my career over the decades has felt like this.
If you like Severance's grounded absurdity, you might also like the film Corner Office with Jon Hamm.
For someone who spent his whole career on camera, Stiller and company absolutely nailed every minute aspect office culture.
The confusion - that this thing that seems like it should be excellent, isn't, and is in fact damaging - that's a sign of gaslighting, of being convinced to ignore or dismiss your own sense of reality.
When we're in these situations, we do know something's wrong, but we doubt; that it's wrong enough, that the wrongness matters, that the wrongness is worthwhile.
When you know it's wrong enough, you quit. When you know the wrongness is worthwhile, you don't have the dazed malaise. When you doubt your sense of reality, the reality you sense... crumbles.
> I know, you feel like a whore Working for a dream that isn't even yours Pleasing everybody but yourself Would you rather be, somewhere else with someone else?
Frankly, this should be mandatory reading for everyone I've ever worked for.
Edit: Yeah, wow, this is more depressing than Ted Chiang's Exhalation[1].
For more in this vein, but with an erotic cyberpunk theme, play the interactive novel Secretary[2].
Edit 2: Perhaps the antidote to this malaise is a re-read of Hexing the Technical Interview[3].
1. https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/
2. https://www.secretarygame.com/
3. https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview
"There was an extraordinarily high mortality rate among employees of the VOC due to shipwrecks, illnesses such as scurvy and dysentery, and clashes with rival trading companies and pirates. The VOC 'consumed' approximately 4,000 people per year." [1]
[1] Zanden (1993) The rise and decline of Holland's economy : merchant capitalism and the labour market
What a reference! Probably my favorite line of the story.
I’ve never been good with twiddling my fingers at work. It’s a strange anxiety when you see others go, “yeah, I’m fine with this.”
I mean I'd rather be on a road trip with my kids, but my work is generally pleasant outside infrequent periods of high stress.
It's mostly about big-corp life, though—my time with startups and little agencies and such didn't much resemble this, day to day, but still had some of that "why the fuck are people paying me to do this?" factor, like having finished projects cancelled without ever being released due to corporate politics or because it turns out a client was only paying us build a product as a BATNA for some acquisition negotiation and they weren't really planning on using it except as a bargaining chip, or having clients (or your own startup leaders...) assign you projects that you're 100% certain are a bad idea that's never going anywhere (and sure enough, you get it done, and it flops, for exactly the reasons you could have told them it would on day 1).
Like, 80+% of the work I've ever been paid to do has been kinda pointless except to drive the gears on some abstract large-scale money-making machine that randomly sometimes produces returns but mostly just makes everyone do a bunch of work that at least someone involved already knows isn't valuable, at least not for any straightforward reasons, but everyone has to do anyway to keep the gears turning.
Feeling lost in a large org, the awkwardness of being new at a large office and of kinda clinging to the very-few people whose names you can remember, being told you're doing well and being paid great while kinda feeling like you're just coasting along and money's showing up in your account for no good reason and because that's just how your stumbling-through-life path has worked out, for whatever reason, but why should that continue for another day and OMG what will I do if people figure out they could just not do a bunch of this stuff and nothing bad would happen and they'd save money and I'd be out of a job and what else do I even know how to do and is this current too-easy gig making me soft and messing me up for future employment (but they're all kinda like that...)—very relatable.
It is interesting to hear how your perspective resonates with the essay, I was mostly wondering how universal that resonance is.
Meanwhile you feel like an imposter, but everything else the others are doing also looks kinda-fake but you're never quite sure if it is and everyone else is just playing along, or if you're the odd man out and just don't get why all that stuff is useful because you're too dumb, and are just lucky nobody's yet noticed that you're not doing anything useful.
Furthermore, if the best way to support my family and to live my non-professional life is to take a punch in the stomach each morning, I think I'd find a way to deal with it?
In short, being a little clever just means you can live normal life on easy mode and you shouldn't feel bad about that, and wanting something more meaningful or glamorous or romantic without actively putting in the work to make that happen and accepting the sacrifices that come with it is just you making yourself miserable for no good reason.
(And of course if you're in the throes of that sort of a mood, being familiar with the above perspective just makes it worse, even as it offers a way out to acceptance of a life as an ordinary schlub who doesn't have things too hard, LOL)
[EDIT] I'm nearing the end and I think, to this piece's credit, some of this criticism of the perspective character's ("your") mindset is present as both text and subtext, plus a good deal of the darker thoughts and moments we're clearly to take as the output of a mind that's unwell and trying to square external reality, perceived un-reality of their situation, a certain awareness of their own privilege, plus the inescapable fact that they simply are not doing OK and are aware that they aren't and also aware that they should be and everyone else seems to be—rather than taking them as something the author intends for us to take as big-T or objectively True just because the perspective character is presenting these thoughts to us.
This is absolutely how that feels. With the exception of my boss reneging on promised expenses and the magical realism elements: I came in, did scrum, said everything was fine, then fucked around on factorio because I could be interrupted at any time, with a 5 minute SLA target, but often days passed between these events. Don’t worry, I had tons of recommendation panels to advise on steering committees to sit silently on. It’s… it’s this, you have nothing to do and all the time to do it in, paid (in my case) primarily to not work somewhere else.
I never even learned the names of the products the dashboards monitored.
Not sure if plot hole or even deeper metaphor.
And for some unfortunates, this is their school life.
"Good Sir, I must politely decline your generous invitation."
> None of what you’ve been saying to people over the course of your career has been a joke.
But seems, most did take it as such.. or pretended..
> as you mentally replayed your time at the company.
and this one.. still hurts.
> You notice, not even a month into this engagement, that you resent the regularity with which you are forced to interact with your supervisor.
This is very relatable for some reason. I don't hate anyone I work with, but them being physically gone sends a wave of relief over me. Even if it's just for 15 minutes, being in an empty room with no one around really helps me focus and reduces stress.
Bullshit / Pointless jobs ? Most are definitely not physically demanding. Meanwhile, our devices run on metals mined by 12 year old kids.
Toxic bosses ? They probably don't act in the open. And they don't pay well.
Lack of workplace regulation ? Your continent democratically decided that workplace regulations were bad, so it should be a "gleeful" metaphor ?
Bad job market ? Then the guy would be accepting a job where he gets punched AND badly paid. But that's not metaphorical: that's a lot of real life jobs.
So I'm missing something here.
It's possible that his spouse didn't even notice that he was slowly losing it. It's possible that his spouse _doesn't even know_ that he gets punched in the stomach for work.
I essance, it is kind of bizarre and more felt as breaking of the third wall, a wink to the reader, but it is not something that I can't understand. Many man going through stuff like that alone, when asked if everything is fine, for sure they will tell 'its fine' and than decide to kill themselves.
Especially you need to be able to understand the main bit about not needing to do anything at all after daily standup, err I mean punch in the stomach. (because likely the work will be thrown away soon, or the company will pivot.) and then the pre-climax (there's a name for this in plot development but I don't know it), the perf review. and finally the firing. The unnamed peers used as an excuse for a single instance of not being a team player, ie not participating in a nonsense ritual. It is indeed fatal for such firms, so to that degree the firing was a correct action.
To me this is a story about big-A Agile as a disease. But there are other meanings (side messages?) that can be taken away.
And, yeah, not all meetings were the best use of our time, it's better to write things down, it's tricky to find out which software to write and which to throw away, we got things wrong lots of time, we wrote legacy code for ourselves, etc...
But "being punched in the stomach and then spend your day doing nothing" was not part of it.
But I guess "burning books" is not yet a thing in the USA, and yet "Farenheit 451" is still a good metaphor of "something" ?
I've never been confortable with the literary genre of "let's slide through the slippery slopes and imagine unrealistic worst case scenarios to sound smart and not really make a case about anything cause fiction".
When you write truth to power, you get downvoted and suppressed!
Firstly, there's no reason to assume 'AI-assisted' will help you in any way. You might consider that by definition that places you in a position interchangeable with any other person or indeed running the AI by itself, without you.
Secondly, 'most' creative experienced persons? As someone who's successfully-ish done the thing you're talking about, WOOF. No. In fact, I would suggest based on my experience and perspective, that a person looking to rely on AI assistance is the last person who should attempt to be entrepreneurial.
I guess go ahead if you must? If it doesn't really feel like work, it probably isn't work. If it doesn't seem meaningful because it's just chasing what an AI tells you to do, it's probably not going to stick out with any competitive distinctiveness. And if you are only doing it for yourself, you should keep your day job because that's not enough to succeed at business.
AI is not a substitute for personal effort; it's a tool for going where one struggles to go alone.
For work to not feel like work, one has to be super passionate about the goal that one is working toward, and this is never possible at a job. Most people have forgotten what it means to have a personal passion, some of which can also manifest a commercial angle.
To make a long comment short, AI is the missing glue in ikigai that brings everything together.
Want to ask AI, that question?
There is no "why it's worth reading". They write for enjoyment, and don't care if anyone reads it.
"I write this content because I want to, and because I enjoy it. If you do too, great! And if not, also great; I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for elsewhere."
On the contrary--every individual reader gets to determine this. I found that it wasn't.
Unlike that comment about 'please summarize'. I'll fault that.
Here's the problem: this is an artwork. It's there to experience something, not intrinsically to deliver an answer or data point. It's to vicariously go on a journey without literally doing the thing. That's a purpose of artworks, and one that's completely wasted on LLMs as they cannot feel or experience or have a purpose: if they did they'd be fixed (or, I supposed, punched in the digital stomach)
Summary? You don't need an LLM for that, conserve the energy. The summary is 'The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach. And that's bad'.
It's literally in the title. I read through to see if it was 'and that's bad' or, 'and that's good', or possibly 'and that's inevitable'. I like the author better for ending up at 'that's bad' with a little bow on the end to celebrate meaningfulness, but that's not the only possible conclusion, and other conclusions would be just as artistically valid.
Quitting 30% of the way through is just as valid. You don't HAVE to take the ride just because it exists. If you're curious, averng, it's an okay story, leads up to its ending pretty well and finishes with a hopeful note. That's most of what you missed.
The only NON-valid way to engage with it would be to point an LLM at it and say 'tell me what the point is, I'm busy' because that would be failing to take the ride without even comprehending that you're failing to do so.
Living life through ChatGPT is about as useful as getting punched in the stomach. Try reading the story or ignoring it completely. There is no summary that is not as meaningless as… well, you know :)
I find two things to be distasteful: 1) Asking others to do the work you're uninterested in doing yourself and 2) the rejection of any kind of stylistic writing as an annoying distraction. I don't know if the person I was replying to is guilty of #2 but I've seen the sentiment a lot here and more frequently than I used to. Not everything is a technical manual that needs to convey its main ideas in as straightforward a way as possible.
This article is a work of art. And I don't mean that in the highfalutin sense. But the style is meant to evoke something just as much as the words themselves. It's fine if it that doesn't work for you, but the goal was not to convey as much meaning in as few words as possible.
1. You land a software job which is "perfect" on almost every traditional indicator. Amazing office and amenities, incredible compensation and benefits, and no hard demands on your time... except to meekly endure some brief pain, for no particular reason, every day.
2. However it seems that neither the team nor yourself really accomplish anything, you gain no sense of social belonging, and you are literally a (very brief) punching-bag for your manager.
3. You "should" be happy, but you aren't. What's the point of it all? What are your values, and what is your worth? You start to struggle with depression. Eventually you can't take it anymore. You quit. Maybe you heal.
It's sort of like a Twilight Zone episode: You get (almost) everything you (believe that you) will be happy with, yet somehow the result is a subtle form of hell.
"This job, it was you. Every sentence, every bullet point, they all described you [...] You fire off a copy of your résumé. [...] As each employee taps their badge, the turnstile emits a pleasant green [...] You were directed to the gate at the far end, which the receptionist opens manually [...] you are absolutely speechless [...] The only words that were polite but nonspecific enough to fill the absolutely dead air that now fills the room."
Turnstiles emit green pleasantly, as Noam Chomsky might once have said.
Style points for gratuitous misuse of the word "catachresis." (Autocatachresis?)