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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

> “It's literally the gulag,” one of the employees claims. “You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week."

May I be blessed with a life so comfortable that I would be able to complain in such a way.

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Due to "politics" my teams main responsibility went from developing ai agents to just testing out a chat it developed by another team.

When you spend 8 hours a day doing mind numbing tasks, tasks that won't help you land another job and is constantly under stress of being fired, its bad for your mental health

Sounds like you already have the skills to automate your new responsibilities.

Did you think making unholy amounts of money came with no strings attached?

I was kinda surprised by that. I thought that people working there we're just conformists which have the FAANG money and are generally not bothered by company's actions.

People I read about in the article sounds like spoiled babies.

How come people these days treat jobs like its a social gathering?

Free food? Free massages? Low effort work? High salary? High social status? For a while I knew someone who lived in oakland and refused to commute across the bridge to the office because they couldn't be bothered.

The same people who bully the ones that actually do the work for not being fit for “company culture”. I had a similar experience before where I over delivered every task, but that wasn’t enough because I refused to join pizza parties and other “team building” activities.

You can come back now. The pizza parties and other "team building" activities are gone. Until they realize they could record them as training content for the robot AI models.

I want to work with people I like and who's company I enjoy; it's not all about executing the task with maximum efficiency. I can replace you with a solid robot worker before I can find another awesome human.

Working with others only works if you work with others

We are social creatures and naturally want to socialize.

Yea isn’t that basically all “normal” work? You do tasks and have little ownership or fun.

It’s also obviously not “literally” the gulag. Do these children know what a gulag is and what happens there? It’s quite offensive to equate their luxurious spoiled lives with people getting tortured and murdered over politics.

I was never sentenced to the Gulag, but based on what little I know, it's pretty different than one these people are experiencing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag

You do usually get to interact with coworkers at some points if the day though? Are they isolating them during breaks or something weird here

They're taking people who were skilled in product dev, employed to be product dev, and then assigning them data entry and telling them to suck it up or get leave.

They're not isolated... But they're no longer doing what they were trained to do, what they were employed to do, or what they can eek some satisfaction out of. Sure, they're talking with explosive terms - but they're also social media employees. That goes with the territory.

The emphatic literally has been in use for over 300 years, it's time to let it go

A day in the life of Ivan Slopisovich :'(

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/725/

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