Why so many jobs are crappy
heteconomist.com
heteconomist.com
He says work is meant to be interesting engaging and meaningful... It would be great if that were true... But that is written nowhere. Work is simply things that need to be completed that someone else is willing to pay for. Any other definition is you projecting your ideals onto what the task really is.
So to answer the question: why are so many jobs crappy? Because that is the way things have always been.
If you enjoy your work (like I do), count yourself lucky.
Someone has a problem and they want to get it solved (but don't want to do it themselves) so they pay someone else to do it for them.
That's the reason work is called work – it's work.
Things get outsourced for this as much as "I don't want to do it myself". And therein lies the space for interesting work.
It's that gap - that allows value to be extracted from the job.
It doesn't help that our western culture largely connotes any kind of work with drudgery and pain. I had a task to play a certain computer game in order to get myself acquainted with the mechanics and the feel of the game. It's a fun game; I assumed beforehand because I've played similar games before. But I didn't get around to doing it until two weeks later. Why? Because it was work.
I think you can live two kinds of life. One where your job is your passion, and takes over your life. A lot of startup folk are in this bracket. I'd argue that if you aren't, then you shouldn't be doing a startup.
On the other side, people work to earn the money they need to pursue the interests outside of work. I really don't think there's anything wrong with that, and it annoys me when people in communities like HN get snobby about it. The garbage worker is even getting a physical workout every shift- meanwhile, the rest of us slowly get less fit sat at a desk, and end up sacrificing our free time to go to the gym.
There was refreshing frankness that the whole thing was just business, nothing personal: no, we weren't enticed with company-paid meals, but we also weren't required to work limitless overtime.
I.e exchange your little precious time in this world for some token BS "handout", that's pre-calculated in your pay expenses anyway.
We have catered lunches 2-3 times per week. On those days, I will usually take about 30 minutes for lunch, and get right back to work. On other days, I'll take 45-90 minutes for lunch, and I'll get to take a walk, go outside, possibly see some of my non-work friends, and have different food.
The bottom line is that I'm going to leave the office at the end of the day at roughly the same time, regardless of the length of my lunch. That's almost certainly not the case for everyone, but, as a data point, it is for me. Lunch at the office only "saves" me time to get more work done that day. Don't get my wrong: I love my job, but I also love being outside and seeing friends too.
Same with garbage. Especially if the competition isn't killing.
I've seen many, many people cite this as some kind of provable, immovable fact -- a way to shut off the mind towards that line of thinking.
I'm not so sure. I see no inherent reason why some people should need to suffer merely to stay alive, why some people, or perhaps many people, should live lives of futility and meaningless work.
Frankly, I'd like to think that human ingenuity can overcome even that. Slavery was considered normal until a few hundred years ago, why should crappy work be any different?
When you bake pies, at the end of the day you're tired, covered in flour, and your feet ache, but you can point to a rack full of cooling pies and say "I did that today. 600 people are going to enjoy delicious pie today because I put in the work" - more than I can say most days working on software for a living.
Point being: for every "crappy job", there are people who legitimately are willing and able to do it for free, and already do.
I think what you mean is that no on would miss it if horses didn't shit, and I think you're right about that.
I think we underestimate, though, the value to people of belonging and participating, socially. Many activities people don't like, on their own, become neutral or even enjoyable as part of something else, like mucking stalls.
Everything is contextual, and there's no objective, independent-of-context answer to the value or worth some thing or activity is going to have to someone.
And your mother doing something she enjoys (and involves cute animals) doesn't mean that as many people as needed are "willing" to do a crappy job for free.
Before civilization, it wasn't something to be completed that someone else was willing to pay for. You can't really think life as a hunter gatherer would be dull? And there was no boss.
Quote from wikipedia: Hunter-gatherer societies also tend to have relatively non-hierarchical, egalitarian social structures.
Because there is no labor movement.
Jobs were even crappier back in the day: arbitrary work times with no overtime (16 hours were not uncommon), child labour accepted, no holidays, fired for whatever reason, blacks and women worked effectively under different laws, so work safety measures, bizarre employer demands, etc.
In american a lot of those were fixed after long struggles by the workers and the (glorious) american labor movement.
Nowadays a lot of the unions are BS (and viewed as suspect from the left and "lazy" from the right), and one of the reasons is that they do not represent enough of the workers anymore (in some fields, there is zero participation even).
Those are now too apolitical, apathetic, and indoctrinated to "each one for himself" to join them and shake them up to function properly.
>>>> blacks and women worked effectively under different laws,
You know that many labor measures - like minimal wages, etc. - were taken - with wide support of unions - to exclude blacks from labor markets, and at the time were openly acknowledged as such? See e.g.: http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2013/03/06/ma...
This is one of those infamous libertarian myths formulated from taking a few past statements to represent a consensus of the time; that somehow black labor should have been cheaper than white labor if the free market was considered alone. This racist crap doesn't belong on Hackernews.
First, the myth is widely pushed by groups with certain ideologies without much grounding in real history. They take a couple of quotes from way back when and make a sweeping generalization. But when we go back through unbiased sources, the argument falls apart; the minimum wage was mostly well intentioned.
Second, that poorly educated blacks were somehow inferior to poorly educated whites is extremely racist in itself. The argument then should NEVER be "the minimum wage hurts blacks", it should rather be "racism hurts blacks". No would here would argue with that.
>>>> the minimum wage was mostly well intentioned.
How you then explain the quotes about "colored labor"? Ah, yes, I know - they never said that, despite the sources, evil libertarians invented that. Maybe on your planet they didn't indeed.
I said given two poorly educated workers, one white, one black. Any big delta in their treatment is due to racism, not the minimum wage.
> How you then explain the quotes about "colored labor"? Ah, yes, I know - they never said that, despite the sources, evil libertarians invented that.
You cherry picked your sources and then made a broad generalization. Libertarians aren't racist, they are just dishonest for using racism to further their own ends: to make the minimum wage sound like a racist plot when there is no real evidence for that.
Big delta in treating two specific workers can be due to anything, not excluding racism of course. But we weren't discussing specific people, we were discussing the fact that the unions contributed a lot to the fact that blacks effectively worked under "different laws" then whites, back at 19th and early 20th century. It is a fact, and your claim that it is a "libertarian myth" is false, and if you ask any historians knowledgeable in the subject, they will tell you that the same as I am.
>>>> to make the minimum wage sound like a racist plot when there is no real evidence for that.
I don't know what you call "real evidence". There are quotes from prominent labor officials. There are history books. There are articles by historians who research the question. I gave you a number of links, you can find more by simple google reseqrch on labor relations and African Americans. If you willing to deny the facts because your ideology says something you now support can not have bad roots - well, I can not help you with your willful ignorance, I can only feel sorry for you. You still know what the truth is, even if you can't admit it.
And because it was a fact of life, unions were up in arms against blacks "taking their jobs" and "lowering the prices" (as they are up in arms now against other non-union people lowering the prices). Of course, another solution would be to accept everybody to the union and have them receive the same wages, but for some reason (I live as an exercise to you what it was) they preferred not to go with that, and African Americans had to organize their own unions - with, of course, much less power and access to legislation and regulation - because they were frequently excluded from the white unions up to the Civil Rights era.
You can talk all day long about evil libertarians but if you look it up the history of labor and racial relationships is widely available and there's no way to deny the basic fact that racism played a huge role here and unions were as racist as state officials were.
See e.g.: http://www.oxfordaasc.com/oa/article/opr/t0005/e0934?p=oamon... among many other sources (really, it's just a google away). If Oxford's African American studies center is full of racist libertarians, then apparently they are much more powerful than universally thought.
Yes. We call those kind of unions apolitical and apathetic where I am from. They don't represent the workers interests, and they don't involve mass active participation from their members (like unions of old). They just make some union leaders "political players" and "influencers". I was referring to actual militant and mass-participation (not just mass registration) unions of old.
>You know that many labor measures - like minimal wages, etc. - were taken - with wide support of unions - to exclude blacks from labor markets, and at the time were openly acknowledged as such?
No, I know this to be a liberal myth.
For one, minimal wages were established all over the world, not only in the US. Including tons of places without blacks (or whites) or racial tensions. People all over the world have argued for, demanded, and still demand, minimal wage laws for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with some US racism issues back in the 19th century.
Second, if racism was prevalent in society at large, I wouldn't expect the unions of the time to be immune to that. Unions are made of people. So they could have said the things you quote but that doesn't mean the unions are inherently racist. It just means that unions in a racist society were racist. There are also lots of wonderful examples of collaboration between black and whites, and immigrants of all races and origins, in the US labor movement.
If anything, the businessmen and employers of the time were even more racist, because their interests (cheep labor, etc) depended on it. It's for business reasons that the slaves were brought to the US in the first place, after all, and it was done not by poor workers, but by wealthy businessmen and land owners.
I don't know if they represent workers interests (I suppose since they insist of compulsory membership, they feel voluntary one would not work well for them) but you can certainly observe mass active participation - e.g. recall recent events in Wisconsin where the governor tried to reduce the power and the privileges of the unions.
>>>> No, I know this to be a liberal myth.
You don't "know" it, you think and hope it is, but if you look at the real history, then you would know it's true.
>>>> People all over the world have argued for, demanded, and still demand, minimal wage laws for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with some US racism issues back in the 19th century.
That may be true, but US is not "all over the world", and in this particular part of the world both unions and minimum wage laws have particular history.
>>>> Second, if racism was prevalent in society at large, I wouldn't expect the unions of the time to be immune to that.
I do not. You seem to, saying that the fact that unions were racist is a "myth". If you admin they were, then you can proceed to justifying it by saying "everybody did it" (which is not true too, but differently). You can not both deny it and justify it at the same time. Choose one.
In the past, the value of human capital -- the amount you got paid for selling your time for money -- used to be more lucrative. At one point nearly half of Americans were in a labor union, which artificially constrained the supply of human capital so it would be worth more. Conversely, our previous industrial revolutions required a great deal of human capital (building factories, sewers, etc), generating lots of demand that would keep the value of human capital high. Due to political and technological changes, this is basically no longer the case.
If you're a software engineer, then none of these models apply to you because you are high-skill labor (also sometimes called "talent.") You're paid for your time, but your productivity can be orders of magnitude higher than your pay. In the OP's "expendability of labor" graph, the "sweet spot" is enormous. In my nearly ten years as a software engineer, I've seen colleagues laid off/fired for all sorts of reasons, but none of them were due to, "well we did the math, and we decided your production is not worth your salary." I've seen layoffs where the executives literally admitted they would make less revenue/profits due to the lost productivity of the laid off workers not offsetting the savings in salary, but they had to hit a certain "profit percentage" or some other absurd reason that justified the layoffs.
In any event -- I've thought a lot about the macro-society impact of this new model of economy, if we're truly destined for a world where human capital is just not that valuable. My interest in politics and healthcare has largely been based on this -- what should we consider "subsistence living," and what happens if we reach an inflection point where most jobs paying for human capital are below it?
It's possible, of course, that this will all be moot, and our next industrial revolution will have a huge demand for locally-based human capital (e.g. a "renewable energy industrial revolution scenario," where there is a huge demand for laborers that can install solar panels on houses, or something), and the median income for Americans will increase. Or it's possible for a more gradual shift to happen (e.g. the graying of the baby boomers causes a gradual increase in demand for local caretakers of the elderly). But I'm not sure it's a good idea to just assume that will happen.
There's still an enormous amount of traditional "labor" to be done in the third-world, where just getting clean water is itself still an achievement.
The first-world is definitely heading directly towards the problems you've described.
The "Productive workers" are those who generate profitable production with their time - a factory worker producing widgets, a doctor treating patients, etc. 1 hour = 1 surgery = $500 (or whatever). These workers are best viewed as a cost center - if hourly revenue - hourly cost > 0, they are worth hiring, otherwise they are not. They can be low or high skilled - doctors are a great example of a highly skilled productive worker. Software developers working at an agency would be another.
The "Garret Jones Workers" are those who generate organizational capital. As a result of their work, the revenue stream of their company will increase. Hiring them is an investment - you need to look at (NPV(future revenue generated by the organizational capital they produce) - NPV(cost)) to determine if they are profitable. Examples of this include software developers building a product or a doctor improving business practices at his hospital.
Here's the kicker - any new industry, at any point in the future, that pops up demanding labor, is much more likely to invest (since they are investing anyway - it is new industry and new markets) in automating the labor out of the equation from the start. Industries are only slow in that transition today because they have established infrastructure around the usage of meat bags on two legs as units of work, but for anything brand new (like semiconductor plants, or the Tesla auto factory) even in the short term it makes more sense to automated the expletive out of any physical work because I'd imagine in even just a year at minimum wage it would pay for itself factoring in the fact you have to build everything up from scratch.
So the solar panel installer in 10 years would probably be a self-driving fork lift truck that carries a bed of industry-standard packed and oriented solar panels, where the vehicle has GPS and will drive to all customer homes and install the panels automatically, with only the need for an electrician to come wire them into the houses electric.
But that is short term. You can easily replace the electrician with some hand held spider robot that will use the blueprints for the house and sensors to find and rewire the electrical into the panel. In a hundred years, you aren't installing new panels, because every new house is factory made (by automated assembly) with the panels preinstalled, and they all have interchangeable parts quality electric systems that dumb non-sensing robots can rewire because they are standardized if necessary.
It is glorious that we are eliminating the need for human capital to make things happen. We are removing people from so many equations you would otherwise be wasting someones time on. We may have some bumps in the road and some dark ages of depravity and extremely concentrated ownership of the means of production and all that, but a thousand years out (assuming we haven't destroyed ourselves yet) any human still alive (albeit with a nebulous definition of human if we start gene splicing and installing cybernetics pervasively) will almost certainly have no need to "labor" at all, because the machines and infrastructure built up over a thousand years will provide for them.
Well, this is what I'm personally concerned about. I agree with everything you just said. But what is the politically optimal way to cross over that inflection point? Or to rephrase: what kind of rules should we have in government/society so that the transition doesn't effectively cause a revolution and end up derailed? Should we consider an education system oriented around high-skill labor? Should our system of taxation and assistance account for this new concentration of capital? And can you do this without impeding the very technological/economic growth you're accounting for? Too much taxation may stymie private sector advancement, too little taxation may cause an elective or literal revolution, and the wrong adjustments can easily introduce moral hazards (e.g. nobody working at all before our technology is advanced enough to require zero human capital).
I suspect in the US we could do that now with around a flat 40% tax without deductions. Note: Living wage would need to be a national number ~12 to 15k and not what it takes to get by in NYC or whatever.
PS: What makes the numbers work out is you also get rid of social security, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and the lower tax brakes as well as all other tax breaks. Also, people making the average income are revenue neutral in this scheme as they get back the same amount of money as there paying into it minus whatever overhead is involved in running the program.
What it does mean is that jobs like waiting and cleaning that are currently easily replaced by automation, but are not due to the artificial need to maintain the wasting of hours to get food. I don't think the traditional restaurant industry would survive such a transition, for example, because it is much more economical to have a local food generator that knows all the recipes and can ship freshly prepared meals via automated vehicle to consumers than to have them go to a restaurant, get served, get waited on, get cooked for by kitchen chefs (who are usually doing something between heating up frozen food to following an instruction sheet from corporate) when we can eliminate all that work for most of us, and anyone who cares enough to get the waited experience can pay a real wage for it, because labor demand is more reasonable in such a circumstance - people would only work for you if you gave reasonable value for their time, not just because they need to eat and our progressively greater per-worker output and ability to eliminate human capital in many endeavors all together makes most labor unnecessary.
The jobs are not necessarily crappy because companies are interested in keeping wages down. Companies are more interested in boosting profits compared to keeping wages down.
The humorous part is so many jobs continue to remain crappy even when you make a boss look good by generating orders of magnitude more value than he bargained for when hiring you.
Even if you explained to the boss how you could generate such value at the time of hire, they still wouldn't be able to assimilate it's possible. They don't see how one can generate such much value, even when you present plans on how it can be done.
It's as if the boss is trying hard not to let you generate more value than expected.
A little early for April Fools'. Let's try this again.
>Work, being a core part of life, is meant to get things done. If your work is useful to other people, you will be able to enjoy life on this planet for a long time.
E.g. Everyone at the restaurant admires good service; but not every waitress enjoys her job; those who do, keep their own as well as others' interests.
The garbage man who doesn't enjoy carrying your trash away still helps you get rid of your trash. The truck driver who doesn't enjoy driving still gets your food to the store...
Sure there are a lot of jobs that people can do better if they enjoy them, but that's certainly not all of them.
Getting to have a job you enjoy is a luxury that most people in the world don't have.
At times when there is a surplus of skilled employees, the market price for skilled employees will tend towards the marginal cost of living for skilled employees, which is roughly the same as the costs of new employees, and so new employees would be prevented from gaining experience on the job (they could offer to work for less than their cost of living in the hope of a future payoff from their skills, but even that won't necessarily make sense to the employer, because the employer has costs per employee beyond just wages and employee benefits, and it might still be cheaper to hire fewer skilled employees at a higher price than to incur more per-employee costs hiring more unskilled employees at a lower rate). On the job learning therefore becomes less relevant, and new employees are forced to overcome the activation costs through other means, or try a different industry. If there is no credible alternative to on the job learning, this might cause a dynamic effect where the attrition of skilled employees combined with an absence of trained new employees raises the skilled employee price towards the utility to the employer, and makes it cost-effective to take on new employees again.
Many people in urban environments cannot afford their own island of land to produce food on; they don't own the enough means of production to support themselves even if they supply the labour themselves, so they are obligated to work for someone who has the capital already (the 'gatekeepers') on whatever oppressive terms they offer to obtain the minimum needed to survive. As a result, the next generation of gatekeepers hold an even greater proportion of the wealth.
Economic problems arise when the gatekeepers no longer need everyone to supply everyone with everything they need and want - now those who aren't gatekeepers find that they cannot get a job, and they don't have the capital to create a job.
Some will try to 'gate jump' - e.g. take a revolutionary idea that is highly profitable, bootstrap it on a shoestring, and become a gatekeeper themselves. However, this is not a scalable model for the whole population, since it relies on luck and there is intense competition among potential gatejumpers and between gatejumpers and enterprises run by existing gatekeepers (who have the resources to crush gatejumpers if they become a threat).
Ultimately, I think the only solution will be some form of income redistribution scheme; perhaps it would work best if the government made it a condition of the income redistribution scheme that beneficiaries work on creating and discovering things, such as science, art, public interest software, civil engineering projects and so on (essentially creating a larger government sector that produces things that don't have a commercial model but benefit society at large, employing the surplus people that are not needed to produce what is needed commercially).
Do you live in America like me? Redistribution schemes move power from producers to bureaucrats, who are notoriously bad with it. This has been tried repeatedly with the same results every time.
There are two kinds of people, people who happen, and people who things happen to. I choose to be the former.
We are not limited by finite resources, we are resources.
We are all both. Nobody gets to "choose" to be one or the other.
You making a mistake here assuming it is always the same people (or groups of people) holding the wealth. Think about this: if the average height of pupils in 2nd grade is not increasing, does it mean we're turning into the nation of dwarves? Probably not, since people grow after 2nd grade, and they may grow faster than ever before for all we know. In fact, if they did grow faster than ever before, then relative height of the 2nd grader would decrease (since adults are higher now) giving us much cause for alarm for the height of our nation, if we don't understand the meaning of statistics.
Imagine now we had a country where people started their life pretty poor and then after working all their life, they had a little money. Now imagine some genius in that country discovers a secret that allows every 70-year-old, if he follows his patented strategy, to become a millionaire. Would we observe the gap between poor and rich grow? Probably yes. Would the actual people be worse off because of that? Not really, since the same person that is poor now has big chance to be a millionaire if he gets to 70, and the situation of people that are currently poor is not worse off.
Of course, real life is much more complex, I am just illustrating how misapplying statistics can lead to wrong conclusion.
>>>> essentially creating a larger government sector that produces things that don't have a commercial model but benefit society at large
Many of the things larger government sector produces benefits nobody but very narrow slice of people enjoying direct transfers from the government. The welfare of the rest is impeded by the incessant stream of regulations, demands and restrictions coming from ever increasing bureaucracy. It would be more efficient for the economy if these people would retire at 18, and probably a lot cheaper too.
Stopped reading. Wtf is this?
Bosses are people too! If you ask any "boss" if they want the best for the people working for them, the vast majority will say that they do. A useful theory of how others make decisions needs to not completely discount non-"rational" factors like emotion, fairness, and morals.
That said, there's endless case studies throughout history where bosses bleed people down to minimum subsistance, and even below that. And their subordinates may fight back and win things like 40 hour workweeks. (Consider, what is a boss? An order-giver whose commands you obey the whole day. Some understandably call this wage slavery. The morality of bosses turns out to be pretty flexible, depending on how much of a fight they encounter.)
Of course, some privileged people do well despite being subordinates. In those cases, their managers use a lighter touch because they're trusted to act in their boss's interests, even when arguing against the boss in technical matters. (The main function of professional codes, explained in Jeff Schmidt's "Disciplined Minds". http://disciplinedminds.com)
Bosses aren't trying to fuck you over. If they're aligned with the company, they're trying to maximize A - B, where A is what you contribute, and B is what you cost.
For most of the industrial era, it's been considered easier to reduce B than to increase A. Why? Many reasons, but the fundamental one is that most of the work was concave, which is what OP describes when he has cost per unit approaching asymptote m, which is equivalent to performance approaching 1/m from below, with more learning.
He's focusing on concave, commodity work and he's right about that stuff. Machines are also taking over the commodity work, leaving only the convex for humans. See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/gervais-macle...
With convex labor, the managerial assumption that A is at a maximum falls flat, because no one even knows what that "maximum" might be. With concave work, management could assume that A was near its maximum value and occasionally fire a slacker.
What this means is that, for convex work, A-maximizing is a worthier goal... but almost no one has figured out how to manage that kind of work. [ETA: a more cynical view is that someone else gets a bonus/credit for reducing B, but the worker himself gets all credit for improving A.]
Actually it's meant to more or less enable us to fill our stomachs and to help to provide for our kids. "Work" started quite a while ago, millions of years before iPhones, nice cars, paid vacation and houses. We might go back to basics one day too. Maybe a solar storm, volcano explosion or asteroid might just wipe the last 100 or so years away.
Otherwise, why are we wasting our time on this planet? Why is dog or an antelope?
This is a relatively new thing, few thousand years but not millions by any means.
why would you stay at a crappy job if you're (technically) good enough to move elsewhere? this kind of complaining, about stereotypically bad bosses that treat programmers as commodities is, predominantly, either exaggerated fiction or the problems of commodity programmers. back in the day, commodity programmers didn't read hn - or at least, they didn't comment.
it reminds me of the dilbert cartoon where someone is complaining that their boss micro-manages them all day. and dilbert asks if they've tried doing their job so well that the manager doesn't need to.
this thread is an archetypical example of the crap that is overwhelming hn these days.
>Why would you stay at a crappy job if you're (technically) good enough to move elsewhere?
People are complicated. They have complex motives, are influenced by irrational thoughts and have a tendency to prefer known evils to unknown evils. I'm not saying this is the right course of action, but this is a good opportunity to start a Ask HN thread (or blog post) about the attitude of commodity programmers.
I don't like when people complain about their jobs. I don't agree with the article. But a snarky comment in response to a long article (even if it's factually wrong, or draws the wrong conclusions from the facts) won't make HN better. I don't mean to discount your contribution to HN, but you can spend your time on HN complaining bitterly about the new regulars, or you can try to understand the problem more deeply and help HN in the process. Misguided elitism isn't helpful and only heightens the Dunning–Kruger effect in a community.
Sturgeon's Law still stands—90% of everything is crap, and 90% of workers in any field are mediocre at best. Do you really want to spend your next years on HN complaining about the mediocre newbies? The thing that makes HN good is the HN users' ability to write well-thought refutations of any argument presented. HN doesn't have only good arguments and subjects, but people do a good job pointing out flaws and making helpful suggestions to what gets posted here.
Instead of tilting at the mill of crappy articles on HN, we should point out what's wrong about them.