1. Large tech firms overhire like crazy
2. Interest rates go up, firms layoff tens of thousands of workers who never should have been hired in the first place
3. Firms pile more work on to remaining people, cut their pay relative to inflation
4. Existing workers threaten to leave, companies let them because "Look at all the talent on the market!"
It's abject lunacy, and companies are all too enthusiastically degrading the quality of their own workforces. The upshot is that this will pry some entrenched talent and experience out of large employers and into smaller companies. But the latest crop of MBA whiz kids are really something special.
Now we're in the worst case scenario- hundreds of thousands of middle-class "bullshit jobs" are disappearing, but rather than being replaced by a wave of productive jobs (say, in clean energy, non-polluting manufacturing, regenerative agriculture, medical technology, biotech, public transportation infrastructure, housing construction, etc) we're just seeing unemployment, underemployment and government policies that are openly hostile to anything helpful for society.
America could probably still be saved by a "Green New Deal" type of program which spurs massive investment and employment in industries which have positive externalities. Things don't exactly look like that's likely in the next few years, but maybe the 2024 election was the wake-up call the Democrats needed to reorient away from the "woke" social issues and reengage with the average American voter.
Maybe I'm too optimistic and we're just doomed, but I think the average voter would have cared more if a handful of things had gone differently.
For starters of course, Biden's rapid cognitive decline and the poor handling of it from the DNC made a mess of everything and prevented a unified platform message to tout the successes of those programs.
Also, the timelines were tough to make work for short-term political gain. There's necessarily going to be a span of time between a law being passed to eg, create tax incentives or loan programs to support building a factory and when those factories are actually built, operational and impacting the economy.
Finally, most of the programs from the Biden administration were hamstrung by trying to jam every left wing and liberal ideal into every program. Instead of saying "Go build a battery factory" they said "Go build a battery factory that's owned by racial minorities and run by women and employs union workers paid at a minimum of 110% of the prevailing wage and provides childcare onsite and doesn't negatively impact local housing affordability and ..." until the whole thing became impossible to implement.
Basically, I think an Ezra Klein type of Democrat could succeed. To be determined if that's the direction the party goes though.
Jobs are neither fungible nor mutually exclusive; there is no reason to assume that someone working in a bullshit job would thrive in a non-bullshit job that contributes to society in more productive ways, nor does the existence of bullshit jobs prevent people from working non-bullshit jobs. I hate to say it, but perhaps many people are employed in bullshit jobs because they are not capable of anything more challenging.
Because bullshit jobs paid mode. Your average engineer working on ad targeting or at a hedge fund makes a lot more than working in say medicine.
— Flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters
— Goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, or to prevent other goons from doing so, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists
— Duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers with lost luggage
— Box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers, academic administration
— Taskmasters, who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34617964
[1] https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/elon-musk-fired-80-p...
If Musk had never purchased Twitter and Jack Dorsey performed the same reduction in engineering staff, I doubt the site would be materially different from how it was pre-Musk.
Of course twitter still works. Even with 0 engineers, it would still work. That's never been the goal of a software company. I can compile Mario 64 right here, right now, decades later. Should Nintendo just go home? Call it quits? Of course not.
The perceived success is not the same as actual success. Remember it is a private company and you don’t actually have any idea how bad the balance sheets were after the layoffs. Before the financial engineering that Musk did by using his other companies to invest in Twitter to preserve its valuation, the company was down almost 80%. [1] If public companies go down that route, they’ll very quickly find out what the actual impact of that model is.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/29/fidelity-has-cut-xs-value-...
As I wrote in another post, if Musk had never purchased Twitter and Jack Dorsey performed the same reduction in engineering staff, I doubt the site would be materially different from how it was pre-Musk.
Just because it works on your phone doesn’t mean there are no engineering problems behind the scene. You’re just not aware of the problems that exist because it’s a private company and you’re not privy to the information.
Not true. The main reason I stopped clicking Twitter links in the first place was the abysmal chance of the tweet loading and not just displaying a generic "Failed to load. Try again?" after the takeover. I mean it occasionally happened before as well, but it became the default behavior.
It lasted long enough that by the time (over a year) they'd finally fixed it, the platform had deteriorated to a right-wing cesspool anyway.