Comment by brailsafe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brailsafe | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Well... if work was optional, but sufficiently and progressively rewarding, then people would choose to do the jobs that they're currently not choosing to do.

So many jobs not only pay like shit while extracting so much value from that labour, but in most cases you also have no incentive to give even the slightest shit about it. No ability to buy into the company, no autonomy, very little functional leverage over increasing your fixed salary, and in most cases not even remotely knowing how much the conpany is making.

My current company thought it was wierd that I basically just peaced out for a bit when they ran out of money to pay me and at the same time aren't the slightest bit transparent about details regarding potential acquisition. Likewise I learned early on that if you don't literally have either a seat at some table, or a real stake in the company, or any decision power, you might as well stop trying after your work is done with an acceptable level of quality. It ain't worth it.

Lots of companies rn complaining about worker shortages, but they offer crap pay and it's fixed. You either don't get a commission, or you get maybe a gift card as a bonus from time to time. Most don't offer benefits.

> you might as well stop trying after your work is done with an acceptable level of quality. It ain't worth it.

It's been worth it for me.

How so? It could very well be, but it's a risk assessment. Definitely keep going if there's a tangible and at least pseudo-measurable benefit, maybe skills or true impact, but for a company that just pays a fixed salary, I just see it as a burnout risk. You need to have the resources and autonomy to realize those benefits too, but a lot of people don't even get the choice between a mac or a pc in a dev position depending on where you work. Spend the time outside work doing something else that creates personal value. If that's working on the same thing you did all day anyway, there should be a way to connect that with compensation, and of course I do know that a lot of people have stock and big bonuses, I've just personally never had those

Some jobs, would you clean latrines if that was somehow the only job we couldn't figure out how to automate,

We already have self cleaning public toilets. Generally jobs that suck are the easiest types of jobs to automate because novelty is interesting.

> jobs that suck are the easiest types of jobs

So no true. Human manual and emotional labor is incredibly cheap compared to the cost of automating those tasks.

A friend works as a ER surgeon which is extremely physically and emotionally demanding. It’s a really hard job, but it’s also rewarding in a way that the worst jobs just aren’t.

As to manual labor, most of what’s been automated has been manual labor. Not just obvious stuff like dishwashers but heaters and cars save extreme amounts of physical effort.

This is partially what I meant to argue. ER Nurses as well are absolutely crazy sometimes about taking on overtime by choice, because they rake it in AND get some value out of the physical and emotional labour.

Doing furniture moving was easier to do every day than a salaried dev job tbh. It was grueling 10 hr days for shit pay, but you got to talk to clients, and they tipped pretty well, and there was an obvious value created. Also you physically get stronger.

> Generally jobs that suck are the easiest types of jobs to automate because novelty is interesting.

This isn't true even with jobs that only involve computer files.

I present to you the bane of my existence: The Somewhat Structured File. It has just enough structure you can almost process it using an easy-to-understand grammar, but there are enough inconsistencies in the file to preclude any clean solution. Every time you think you have a working parser, your program crashes because of an impossibility in the data, which means you've found another exception to the general rule you'd generated inductively by paging through the file. The file contains many white swans but plenty of black, brown, and purple swans as well, no two precisely alike. The code ends up as ugly as the data, epicycle on epicycle, because there's no pretty way to parse an ugly file.

People say Excel isn't a database, but not even Excel could have created some of the files I've seen. School bus routing has some horrors.

Moving on from my woes, I give you the entire field of nursing. True, 90% of the problems of the nursing field are due to administration and the healthcare systems of the world in general, but the other 90% are caused by patients, patients' families, and the very nature of disease and medicine. Automating nursing is far-horizon Strong General AI stuff, if that.

Nursing is a demanding job but doesn’t suck the way assembling iPhones using the exact same motions hour after hour day after day does. It’s also been automated in several ways, what remains seems really hard to automate because it’s the stuff that hasn’t already been automated.

As to the bane of your existence, that actually sounds fun. You haven’t described it in enough detail to give meaningful recommendations, but your parser should be telling you what’s confusing it rather than crashing. You want to automate the process of automation.

I wonder how much of iPhone assemblage hasn't been automated because workers in east asia doing the work earn so little it's not worth the effort to eliminate them?

It’s not just the cost of labor it’s also time to market for an expensive item etc. If manual assembly is 10x more expensive but it’s the difference between 1% and 0.1% of the sales price then other things can be the driving force.

Getting the next iPhone to market even 1 month sooner is extremely valuable, but they don’t manufacture the same phones for that long.

If cleaning latrines was the only job we couldn't figure out how to automate, we could probably work one week a year cleaning latrines and the rest of the time doing whatever. Which would be fine.

Obviously people have to do jobs and some are unpleasant. I'm not convinced that 40-hour work weeks or longer are necessary for society to function.

If I need to pay bills, I'll do anything as long as I'm capable and well-conpensated. I ain't pretentious. Sometimes it's a little awkward because even basic employers look at me as a liability.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com