No One Is Working
humaninvariant.com
humaninvariant.com
What is mindlessly coding and how does that work? Seems like the author is dismissive of meetings and some coding tasks.
If I could turn the first type of work over to an AI assistant so I could spend that time napping or working on a hobby or side interest, that would be cool. But that's not the goal of companies pushing AI. They figure if I don't have to do the "mindless" work anymore, I can do "deep work" for my full 40 hours. But maybe I'm not capable of working more hours at that level of focus. Maybe the hours spent doing "mindless" work are necessary for resting and recharging between the intense sessions. So if my company takes away the "mindless" work, they're probably not going to get the jump in productivity they're going for. They're more likely to burn me out and send me looking for a new job.
Working for 10 hours a week can either be embarrassingly bad or heroically productive depending on the situation you find yourself in. People can avoid work, of course, but generally avoiding work looks very different if you could be doing 30+ hours of real work each week. I recall (but cannot find) an article about the many months and meetings it took to add a single option to the windows shutdown menu. Depending on your organizational constraints, doing very little work each week may be optimal. Doing more work in the wrong direction would be a net-negative.
I just think it's very odd to say "no one is working" instead of "companies can't organize people to be able to work." If you are in an environment where you could actually do a lot of work and you do a little, you will not last long. The only way you last is if you're in the ballpark.
There are many who choose not to participate and work for other motivations.
All the virtuous skeptics here would just be calling the study flawed.
I would be content with just a statement like "these are real people I personally know (anonymized)."
You can either use that to get more done or get the time back. Lots of people choose the 2nd option. Especially if they can wfh.
And the idea that someone who works late (9-7) isn't working.
Like, what?
The article goes off the rails when it tries to explain high salaries with a generational wealth transfer scheme that is at odds with corporate incentives.
A better explanation exists which is that companies slowly become bureaucracies, everyone is playing politics, trying to get more resources and people around them to accomplish less and less. People are trying to do that locally, for their own interests, and it manifests globally as productive output tending towards zero and cost of labor tending higher. No society-wide scheme necessary. This is at odds with the shareholders, but its difficult to fix because bureaucracies are parasitic organisms which defend themselves.
Especially once the org is old enough that the 2-year tenure people start to be in the 50th percentile of seniority.
A huge raison detre to create and sustain a "firm" in the first place is stability. That stability extends on all fronts - stable base of customers, stable base of revenue, stable base of shareholder returns, and stable base of compensation for employees. Therefore, it is expected that there would be some looseness/slip/"irrationally high" or however you want to think about it, in the salaries. An early-stage startup by comparison is dealing with a different problem and purpose.
That’s a thing the corporation does, I guess.
I’ve had cushy jobs that the author is mistaking for “all jobs”, but my experience is that these places are in decline and when layoffs come, get ready to work hard if you want another job.
Okay. So he’s working. What do you want exactly?
Most of your analysis comes from low motivation grunt level coders here. Then beyond that you classify everything that isn’t deep breakthroughs not work.
Are a lot of engineers at big tech under utilized? Yes because they are often last on the line do what their told types. Could they do more? Sure. Are they not working? No.
This essays is at best naive, and at worst laughably stupid.
Maybe I'm getting old and out of touch myself, so maybe someone marketing-adjacent can tell me: is this sort of person actually real and employed in a typical corporation these days? This sounds like an obnoxious minor character in a poorly written Netflix Original.
There are lots of do nothing jobs out there (bureaucrat, HR, excel guru, receptionist, etc) where you can coast doing maybe an hour of real work per day, but you are not getting paid the $100k-$300k the article quotes.
You can find out there SWE jobs around $100k that you can get away with doing nothing as the organizations tend to not be technically strong and therefore the organization is not able to or does not measure your output. I used to work in such a job, but got bored and wanted more money. I climbed several rungs up the salary ladder, but now my output is much more carefully measured and I do actually have to work the full day. I think the jobs that pay $300k and you don’t have to work are basically nonexistent now, that was a product of zirp. Maybe back in 2022 you could get a cushy job and rake it in, but not any longer.
There are 168 hours in a week, which is the max available for 1000x robots. So by OP's definition, a typical 1x employee works only for 10,08 minutes, and TikToks the rest of the week.
The reasons not everybody can be this 10x employee is two-fold:
1. People are content with busy work just to appear busy and don't really care if they get anything meaningful accomplished.
2. For those who are better at managing their time to focus on more impactful issues, they lack the ability to actually resolve those issues in a way that has meaningful impact.
That's why the 10x employee is so difficult to find. But a 1000x employee? Get out of here!
I think there actually exists infinity-X employees which perform work that could not be done by infinity 1x engineers. At some level, deep technical experience is not something that can be achieved by throwing more engineers at it.
So depending on how you define it, I do legitimately think 1000x engineers exist.