Ask HN: Tell Professionals What to Do
It's a commonly-voiced concern that jobs are bullshit. The community could take specific needs and connect them to specific bullshit jobs, telling fellow professionals what they should be doing instead. Why do we not do this?
5 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 15.2 ms ] threadMore specifically I am thinking you mean to say employment, which suggests time in exchange for compensation. That is accounted for and owned by the employer even if used inefficiently. Why would any employer want to allow open access to the time?
We often feel our jobs aren't very important. Also we complain about things not getting done.
My question is why we, as a community, do not specifically match individuals' complaints about their jobs' bullshit to specific needs we know of?
Even in politics, you tend to have a consensus on what the desired end-state is (not on all subjects), but the question is how to best achieve that end-state, and many of the suggestions require the authority of the government to pass a new law. In theory, the role of government is to promote the will of the people, similar to the way you are describing - those unhappy people should be contacting their representatives and organizing their community.
Take for example school safety. There are a number of suggestions about this topic, but we'll take the two big ones. One side wants armed guards in schools. Another side wants to remove armed guards from schools and create new gun control laws (specifics of the suggested laws vary). The goal of both sides is to make schools safer, but they have opposing views on how to do that. This is also an issue that can't be solved without government authority (passing gun control laws or allowing armed guards in schools).
Anyone who feels that things aren't being done right, write it up as a specific job description, with a specific government or corporate employer.
You have no hiring authority. But you can see what needs doing. So write up what should be done, and who ought to hire to do it. Then just put it out there.
If we did that as a community, we'd build up a body of specific suggestions rather than noisy politically-opinionated complaints. And probably some workers, and some hiring authorities, would act on the open-sourced suggestions for what work needs to be done and funded.