It's All Bullshit
thebaffler.com
thebaffler.com
Written as if 6 hours is little. To get a full focused 6 hours is a pretty high number.
Now I write and edit text for a living, alone, at home and without interruptions. I usually work from 10 to 16 with plenty of breaks.
8 real hours all day, every day is a pipe dream in creative professions.
On average it's probably less than 6 hours of actually writing code per day though.
Everyone's workday has always been this way.
(Cheese plant when in college)
But that's the way of it. Different jobs have different requirements, and different cultures. Assembly line work obviously cannot have people wandering off whenever they choose. Most white collar workers, have more choice, and the longer lunch, is part of the pay.
Once I worked at a place for like half a year to a year I have qued up so much work for others that I can't progress myself. And efficiency gets down to like 1-5% or something of what I would produce in a one man project.
I do both management and coding; so I can see both sides of the equation. Keeping your team motivated and stimulated with interesting work is hard. A lot of work just is drudgery. I know it is because I dread doing these things myself. And then end up doing them anyway. Drudgery is demotivating. Demotivated people drag their feet, especially when drudgery just leads to more drudgery. Often management is simply a matter of getting people to see results coming from their hard work. Break it down, celebrate the progress, do some more. Short feedback loops are a key tool. Even the drudgery gets dealt with when you do that.
I also find myself getting drudge woes when the chunks get too big, but sometimes the chunks have to be big (or at least i think they do). I prefer to be challenged and focusing on various efforts throughout the day, and focusing on a single task for multiple days in a row just destroys motivation for me. Its hard to convey this to employers without getting my resume fired right into the trashcan. Yes, i can focus on a single task for extended periods, but i cant really do that long term. Honestly one of the reasons i liked being in the datacenter / doing hosting things, the long focused tasks were there, but there were lots of other things that could be done too; a choose your own adventure, if you will.
When work _was_ done, it was done in the most unoptimised, short-term-thinking way possible. There was seemingly no concern for quality of output (almost presumed that they'd have to do the task again), and deadlines were a vague fairy tale. Most of their time was spent drinking coffee and chatting.
Since then, I've observed that this is just how people work. I had never experienced it because I'd always been in tech, where we actually _like_ what we do.
I'm happy to recommend construction crews you can tag along with for a day that will leave you a broken mess of a man with how hard they work. You won't get out of bed for a forthnight after one day of work with proper roofers.
My maid works 16-hour days at breakneck speed as well, with a smile on her face. Sleeps 3 hours, gets on with life. I don't know how she does it.
Likewise I've seen plenty of tech teams adding negative value. Their bosses would be better off paying them to play xbox all day.
I'd call it pride, but that's not the root cause either.
Have you considered not working your maid to death?
I'd never think someone could be happy or productive spending most of their waking hours working, but here we are. I'm sure she's at least a 1.5x maid compared to your average worker, too.
My maid works 16 hours a day
Bragging about working a maid twice the average working hours of the day probably doesn't look to other people like you think it looks.
It's a bit like bragging about how rude you are to wait staff, or how much you discipline your wife.
https://mothership.sg/2018/03/maid-schedule-daily-singapore-...
Go hang around with your finance, HR, or even sales teams. It's incredible.
I guess some amount of the population is just not that interested in work! Which is fine by me but I do hope they find fulfilment elsewhere.
I think there are three factors: passion, traction, and friction. There are plenty of passionate people in less technical domains. They tend to be slowed down because either it’s hard for them to get traction on an idea that doesn’t have a clear and concrete benefit (which technical outputs often do) and then because they expect friction in the form of rewrites, edits, and back and forths based largely on aesthetics, vibes, or a manager’s need to feel like they’ve made a mark too.
In my personal experience a lot of time is spent working “in the head” that does not involve me being in front of my computer - my wife says I have a programming face often when I sit at dinner or when we are out somewhere because I have code running in my head somewhere behind my eyeballs. At peak times this can persist for days (and needs downtime after to recover).
Switching that off is very hard for me - in contrast with when I did some more physical work in the past where you can get your mind back as soon as you down the tools.
While I don't think I'm evolved enough to be totally okay with knowing someone has a second full-time job... if someone working for me is delivering the goods and nice to work with and I don't have any idea, in the abstract I think I don't have a problem with it.
I am hiring for results, not keeping a chair warm.
Honestly, I usually do 90% of the most important creative work for a given week in a few hours. Always in a concentrated burst that I can't predict ahead of time.
Allowing my brain to stop feeling guilty for that is likely going to be a life-long challenge, but it doesn't change the reality of it.
Why would an "evolved" person be ok with it?
I know that people who succeed in non-monogamous romantic relationships often need to do a lot of work to get to the point where they are happy when their loved ones are happy, instead of eaten alive by jealousy.
I'm just saying that I haven't yet fully matured in my own development such that I would be totally fine with my FTEs having other full-time engagements, even if they were completely transparent about it. Even though I believe that someone doing a great job has fulfilled their obligation to me. I should have no more say over what they do when they aren't working on my stuff than I do over who they choose to be with in their family life.
I am also saying that if someone can be my best employee without me knowing that they have a whole second full-time job, I respect their game and hope that they are taking some time off for themselves, too.
I just kind of don't want to hear about it. ;)
Rewarding dishonesty doesn't seem like a wise plan.
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Not sure why you're equating romantic relationships to the workplace, as they're completely separate domains with no cross over of "monogamous" with "full time employment".
Hopefully no-ones been playing with your head to make you think otherwise. :/
If you can't or won't acknowledge the conceptual similarity between monogamy and full time employment, knowing that I'm explicitly not speaking literally... then I'm probably not the business mentor that you're looking for.
They'd only be similar if you don't understand what makes non-monogamy dangerous unless both partners are getting satisfaction from multiple sources.
If both partners are, then the whole jealousy concern you mention doesn't become a thing (baring mental issues).
As employment (full time or otherwise) doesn't have drivers that work anything like that, there's not enough similarity to really apply lessons from the romantic domain to it.
Well, maybe at a really high abstraction level somehow... :)
> I'm probably not the business mentor that you're looking for.
Thanks, I'm really not looking. ;)
Although, the more I think about it, I actually remember that their other boss might have figured it out and tipped me off as a professional courtesy, because he was pissed off at the guy.
That's the thing: if you're going to have two jobs (or two families) don't also be delusional about your ability to do even one of those jobs well, much less two.
It's like they forgot that in order to keep the scam going, you have to not also suck at development.
That I think is the point the critics miss. Integrity is essential, yet sometimes the most fulfilling relationships take on their own unconventional forms.
A person familiar with tech work would interpret 6-hour focused work to be not bullshit, but the author deliberately does not put the survey results into context.
I also disagree with the author here about "bullshit projects".
By listing the number of killed projects by Google, the author was trying to portray these projects as "bullshit".
But when one wants to innovate, it is not about how many projects get killed, but the quality of the projects that do succeed.
It would be like dismissing Edison's work as bullshit because he went through a brute-force approach to developing an incandescent lightbulb.
The reality of tech, especially big tech, is much more mundane. The vast majority of engineers work on maintaining and (slowly) upgrading the products that we use every day -- search, mail, maps, video. Each of these have thousands of engs that work on stable projects -- not wildly innovative, but not bullshit either.
Yet I say unto thee: “Despise not in others what one covets for themselves, for that is hypocrisy.”
I have trouble comprehending what this piece provides beyond bullshit slinging at big tech. Wishing you were the one making six fixture for 2 - 6 hour days?
Business is in part strategy.
Individual tech workers are in part corrupt (and incompetent), blaming leadership rather than taking initiative.
Sometimes there is extreme abuse, incompetence, and misguided direction; we hear and scampuousely retell those stories, forever.
We gain no wisdom or insight from these arbitrary post-mortem turd fests. Other than sensational wastes of someone else’s cash, aren’t we all ready to do it again?
As long as there is no real alternative for most people, they will stick with complaining.
I am one of these people. While I do earn a stupid amount of money in the financial sector, the reality for me isn't really that enviable. I do about 3 hours of honest work per day, but the other hours of the day aren't spent with my feet up on the beach. They're spent waiting. They're spent negotiating with pointy-haired managers to unblock me, or arguing with peabrained bodyshop engineers about the utility of totally uncontroversial concepts like unit-testing. They're spent jiggling the mouse every few minutes so that my status doesn't go yellow on Microsoft Teams. If I got to take my '3 honest hours of work' in a single block, and then log off, I'd be content. Except that the few honest hours of work the bank wrings out of me are spaced out over 9 agonising hours a day, interspersed with pointless corporate garbage like "Agile"(tm) cargo-cult meetings.
I pay my mortgage, but I hate my career.
The turntable idea is quite good imho. Could also repurpose a toy robot or something.
If you wanted to know the jiggler is safe, "just" write your own firmware and program a micro to do it.
I think the following paragraphs provide useful non-hypocritical/non-"jealous" commentary, and were the most thought-provoking for me:
> But even with stronger regulations, the manifold problems that these tech giants create for society will persist. Unlike the industrial firms that Marx and Smith wrote about, tech firms like Google differ in one key aspect: how they turn a profit. Where industrial firms extract profits from the gap between value produced and what workers get paid in wages, internet platforms rely foremost on rents, which generate profit on the basis of existing property, intellectual or otherwise. No additional labor is needed for each unit of output; profit thus becomes fundamentally extractive, or “unproductive” as Marx, or even classical economists like Smith and Ricardo, would say. For companies like Google, rent comes from owning the infrastructure through which we live our digital lives. The vast majority of Google’s windfall profits—$60 billion in 2022—come from rents.
[...]
> In the end, the tech workers themselves are not responsible for the proliferation of bullshit. Nevertheless, the work they do (or don’t do) reveals that the problem, at its core, lies in the business model of the platform economy, one that depends not on productive labor but on rents. In our present economic paradigm, rents are undifferentiated from productive work where the creation of surplus value vis-à-vis the exploitation of labor lies at the heart of profitability. Making explicit these differences, however, would reveal that these platforms are not all that different from the banks of Wall Street: they are not making value, they’re taking it. And as long as this remains the underlying form of profit, tech firms’ imaginary of a technological future will be limited to the fast and cheap profits of monopoly rents. This is at the center of tech’s innovation crisis. That tech work is becoming bullshit is not the problem. The problem is that the companies themselves are bullshit.
(emphasis mine)
That rent-based profits allow these companies to retain vast numbers of bullshit-producing workers is less significant to me than the fact that these profits are extracted from everyday internet users. We are all made poorer from the value that Google et al are extracting from us, when they don't need that value to actually provide the services we are using. But their market dominance allows them to spend some of those profits in the service of artificially maintaining dominance, rather than on improving those services, or by extracting less value to provide the same services at a lower "cost" to us.
We have a person on our team that has been as best I can tell really abusing it basically since we started working from home at the beginning of the pandemic. Turns in very little work, takes literal days(!) to respond on slack, almost entirely ignores requests for code review and has a project that is now six months late.
Less important but they’ve also never shown to an in-person event or even turned their camera on in a meeting - not necessary but adds to the mystery. Literally have not seen their face since the start of the pandemic. If I hadn’t worked with the guy physically in an office pre-pandemic I’d be worried he wasn’t who he said he was.
It’s been beyond frustrating to see, as someone who genuinely tries to gives his all and cares. Please for the love of peat, don’t ruin this for the rest of us. Do you want metrics, because this is how we get metrics. This only continues to work if our output is good.
People higher than me have begun to notice (finally) - mostly because the late project is becoming more and more of an issue. It was supposed to be his project to design and lead. Because it’s so late however, the rest of us have been getting bumped from other projects to help. Mythical man month, I know. Best of all he’s been almost entirely unavailable to answer design questions or even review code. On top of everything else and despite the goal being to get it done by the end of the year, he took almost all of December off - because there’s no review of our PTO - another wonderful freedom being abused.
I am very hopeful he can just get a stern talking to and kicked back onto track, but I am not going to hold my breath.
We’re given a lot of rope when it comes to what we’re working on so other than hearing about what others are working on in standup, often I’ll never see it.
That said, I’m not sure he knows what to do about it. I’ve worked under him for over a decade and this is the first time we’ve had a real problem like this. I suspect he’s working with his own manager on how to handle it.
I've seen this same inability to punish incompetence in my own coding career at [insert large retailer]. No one got in trouble despite my protests but rather were moved around the organization. Alongside lots of other signs, it was clear to me that the tech work being done there wasn't important to many or any people who would be using it. It seemed to mostly be about the value of the company's stock.
I didn’t know the extent though before complaining about lack of reply/feedback from the dev, at which point I started looking at the commits across projects see what he had been doing. Not much so it seems.
In the time I have been here we’ve fired three people, but it was all for much worse. We’re not untouchable but it takes a lot. I would honestly far rather he just get back on track. We’re already short staffed and it’s becoming harder and harder to hire devs in our tech stack.
I worked for a medical technology startup for 8.5 years and the tech work really, truly mattered. Then we were acquired by a huge public company and I hung on to see what might happen.
Before the end of the first year it was apparent that all that was happening is verbatim your last sentence here. I left shortly after. I have some former colleagues who have hung on and they report that they have literally nothing of value to do today. They think the company is playing chicken with them, more or less, and hoping that they'll get bored out and leave.
I kind of gave up caring and expecting anything will get done about it; it's way beyond ridiculous or any personal / health issue excuse at this point (and the company has a leave of absence policy for this stuff).
I think this actually might just happen sometimes in the industry, but it was the first time I've seen it and it's absolutely baffling. I just hope to not be on the same project as this person again, because if I am I'm going to have to have an awkward conversation with my manager about it since I'm not there to do 2 people's jobs. I really like the job in every other regard and don't typically work with that person, so it's a weird situation to say the least..
When you work with smaller companies or early stage startups you get to do real work that does get used. They may not have the budget and resources, but this is why whatever you make needs to be useful and produce value. If bullshit happens too much the company can really fail.
I am also experimenting with being a freelancer through mainly Toptal. Most of the projects I got are building MVPs and prototypes that are put in production ASAP or at least used as V1s for the next thing. Then I move on to the next contract. Feels alright, but the risks of being a freelancer are indeed present. However, it does feel really great to see a project is completed and the client is happy with it. There were some "not really great" projects or customers too but mostly good anyway, you get more of a choice what to build and for whom.
I'm sure there are some nice corps out there too, and I may join one at some point, but after chatting with enough people from there who can show that they build things of value, efficiently enough. I had one job where I was building bullshit that got cancelled just before launch, twice, and that was super demoralising, even though we are constantly told to not get too attached to our work, well, it happens anyway.
Can't stand being at home all day and work very little and be drafted to so many meetings, syncs while effectively seeing 15 people teams achieve the work I can confidently say can be done by two people, and better.
Not only that, by working much more I get to solve many more problems, under bigger time pressure and my skills and knowledge grow many times over than those of other peers.
> Making explicit these differences, however, would reveal that these platforms are not all that different from the banks of Wall Street: they are not making value, they’re taking it. And as long as this remains the underlying form of profit, tech firms’ imaginary of a technological future will be limited to the fast and cheap profits of monopoly rents. This is at the center of tech’s innovation crisis. That tech work is becoming bullshit is not the problem. The problem is that the companies themselves are bullshit.
Also please read David Graeber s Bullshit Jobs.
Graeber's ideas/books with respect to "bullshit" are themselves cynical bullshit written as a kind of joke for maximum controversy. I'm sure he had a lot of fun though, being invited to speak and tell people all their work is bullshit...
"Why am I working so much, doing so little, and getting so little in return? What's the point? Life should be more fulfilling, considering how wealthy our society is."
It _feels_ like bullshit. Unfortunately, his book is essentially a long and unscientific blog post that builds upon weak arguments and arm chair philosophy. The irony is that his book seems to be an example of the problem.
The issue is that this feeling people have isn't really related much to Graeber's objective claims.
Bell Labs was funded by AT&Ts telephone monopoly and was able to pay a bunch of really smart people to do projects that they found interesting.
This resulted in innovations like the transistor, C, C++, and Unix among others.
In some ways the push for productivity can actually kill innovation, since innovation requires times to think and the risk that all the effort may end up being wasted if it doesn't work out.
In our company, it's all about hitting the deadlines. It's cool because no one's clocking our hours, but miss a deadline and, whoops, you could be out the door. I totally dig this style – it's modern, bendy, and keeps us on our toes. Totally different from the 19th-century industrial routine of '8 hours a day' work style.
Unfortunately, success attracts attention from management, and we found ourselves mired in further layers of bureaucracy. Those who had not really owned products or shipped anything significant began to call the shots.
This might be true. An alternative explanation might be that such an employee changing the color of a button has probably millions of times more impact than an engineer working at a B2B start-up with three clients.
If I would be executive at such companies and I would have the evil intent of hoarding talented people, I'd, at least, give them a playground for experimentation. Maybe a new innovative product comes out of this. This hoarding has become a popular belief in the tech industry but I don't quite buy it.
There's people who certainly tell themselves that, but I've started work in a 12 person company which grew to 300, got acquired into a 1.8k behemot and I have to say the impact is a linear decrease. But people at the 1.8k people company think they are "more professional" while in one week the 12 people did more than 800 of them do in 6 months.
all the while we are being told by the high priests of capitalism that “the market” will sort it out, that “the market” will force efficiency. Pshaw!
> That tech work is becoming bullshit is not the problem. The problem is that the companies themselves are bullshit.
It's refreshing to see it said so directly for a change.
If it's difficult to keep people programming 2 hours a day, losing 8 a week to a side project was naturally making fuller projects than the meeting encased projects.
In tech, bullshit jobs—which the late David Graeber defines as “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence” even though they are obliged to pretend otherwise—come mostly from bullshit projects. At Google, such projects are aplenty. According to Killed By Google, an archival project that documents discontinued Google services, products, devices, and apps, the company has discontinued nearly three hundred projects since its founding.