The important word "TikTok" is missing from the title, which might lead people to believe this was about real trends rather than whatever the heck is going on over there at any particular time.
It doesn't. I think sometimes it comes to empire building in large corporations. Where value of managers is decided by how many people are under them. Not by what they actually produce. Or if the people are capable enough to make PKIs look good enough...
A job doesn't have to add value at each instant to add value.
Companies can't spin up new workers in an instant. So for some jobs, they'll need to keep people on staff but not really working. They're there for specific tasks, or when more effort is needed, or for intermittent operations.
A lot of office jobs aren't like factory lines, where output is constant and directly related to input. That doesn't make the job bullshit. It just means that "40 hours per week" is an arbitrary number, the result of centuries of conflict between labor and management, and there's nothing sacred about it.
The amount that the job is worth depends on the job and the company, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with hours served. They need an employee to be prepared to fill that job, and the pay is negotiated on that basis. There's no reason to be expect it to be a straightforward function of prevailing hourly wage and 40 hours per week.
It seems like this shouldn't be a hard concept to explain to software devs. We're knowledge workers. The company hires us for our knowledge (knowing how to tell a computer what to do) and then retains us mostly for our knowledge (understanding the resulting code), so that when that knowledge is necessary, it doesn't need to be recreated.
> “A lazy girl job is basically something you can just quiet quit,” she says in the two-and-a-half minute video. “There’s lots of jobs out there where you could make, like, 60 to 80 K and not do that much work and be remote.” As an example, she zeroes in on non-technical roles, where she feels the hours fall within a 9-to-5 schedule, and believes the pay is enough to allow for some financial freedom.
This influencer branded it “lazy girl job” but this concept is wildly popular among young people of all genders right now.
I was invited to be a mentor in a career-focused program for college students. The number of students who wanted advice about how to get easy remote jobs where they didn’t have to do any work was depressing.
The ideas they got from social media were wild. It was usually more Reddit than TikTok, but the concepts were the same: Overly confident internet posts had convinced them that most people don’t actually do much work at work and that it was all one big game. They thought remote work was the final piece of the puzzle that would turn these jobs into easy paychecks so they could have near total freedom without having to give up more than a couple hours per day to send some emails.
The weirdest part for me was how much they wanted to believe these internet influencers over the mentors in the group. It was hard to get some people to understand that the influencers were selling them a dream as a way to increase their follower count. I guess people will always have an appetite for hearing what they want to hear.
It's not really a dream, you can indeed get those jobs.
If a company has those jobs, it means their managers/leadership are doing the exact same lazy job, so you are in good company.
An alternative is simply to be good at your job and get your work done and have spare time. If you want behaviors to change in this situation, businesses need to give better direct incentives for finishing work early. Right now, the reward for getting your work done quickly is more work.
Most office jobs outside of the software engineering bubble are like that. People do very little actual work. Making such roles fully remote is basically the final step.
Where is the sarcasm? I've been a consultant pulling well north of six figures and had weeks in the office doing fuck-all.
3 hours of meetings and then killing time on Slashdot. Except I had to be in the office, in a button-up shirt, and had to commute.
I've done 50+ hour weeks at home, but when it's slow I'll take meetings while prepping a slow-cooker dinner. I had a boss that use to do the 1-on-1 meetings with his team (e.g. me) while running errands. I got used to hearing the sound of self-checkout machines while on that call, lol.
I thought he was being sarcastic. I could be wrong. Intent can be tough to suss out of text.
> I've been a consultant pulling well north of six figures and had weeks in the office doing frak-all.
I'm sure it has happened somewhere at sometime; I have heard an anecdote or two. Perhaps three now.
But based on what I've witnessed over 30 years of onsite calls (more fields than I can count) - the assertion that "Most office jobs outside of the software engineering ... People do very little actual work" - is false.
If it were true in the slightest, I'd of witnessed it repeatedly. I would have met people who could testify of it over and over. If not one in field, than another.
What I (along with most folks) witness are employees doing actual work, many working to the point of their own physical detriment.
Based on widespread reality, I rate the assertion as physics-grade false.
Even in software engineering. I've seen devs in enterprise jobs who could put in an hour or two a day and still get "exceeds expectations" on their performance reviews
Hey, it's me! I'm mostly valuable because I'm the only one on my project who hasn't quit at this point so I can help guide all the new people, including new project managers and tech leads. Even though I don't get much actual work done I'm there when they need to ask questions and that seems to be good enough. In fact if I had a remote position instead of in-office, I would probably meet this "lazy girl job" definition.
Yup. I'm a software dev at a small tech company, that mostly makes some industrial automation devices. My main job is "knowing the software": "XYZ is happening, is this a software bug?" "I'll take a look, but the software probably would only behave that way if hardware component ABC wasn't working".
Maybe once a month or so a real software issue or feature request will come up, I'll spend 2-3 days implementing it, then another couple weeks will go by with it going through the (heavily manual) testing process.
Don't get me wrong, those handful of days of work a month are not uncommonly pivotal in sealing multi-million dollar deals, so I'm earning my keep. But it would be nice if my employer recognized that I have 90%+ slack in my schedule, and let my fuck off and do my own (easily interuptable) thing.
> I was invited to be a mentor in a career-focused program for college students. The number of students who wanted advice about how to get easy remote jobs where they didn’t have to do any work was depressing.
This is likely one of the reasons companies want people back in the office.
Based on what exactly? If working didn't provide value, they wouldn't be paid. Companies aren't in the business of babysitting, and layoffs happen all the time.
People hire because they want large teams and people to lord over. It has nothing to do with the business, you just need a business model that spins off enough money to cover the empire building. Look at Google, all of their revenue comes from ads but they have a huge team of people who aren't working on that but are supported by the ad business.
Most businesses become bloated like this because the kind of people who become managers have been waiting their whole lives to build the biggest team possible.
You think most companies are comparable to Google, one of the worlds most profitable companies? The large large majority of jobs aren't mostly doing nothing and almost no businesses do what you are describing and survive long-term.
I've worked in many different types of companies. Every one that wasn't a tiny startup was full to the brim of people not doing anything meaningful. Entire roles and workflows are invented to create work. No, the scrum master isn't needed and you only need that project manager because the product manager is fighting for turf with the program manager and they want to show the director a burn down chart so he can pretend to know what's going on to the vp who's out on retreat with the ceo. Doesn't matter though because HR set a hard limit of 2% raises this year, but line managers still make sure to have your reports do their 360 degree evaluations!
I wish that were some sort of hyperbole or exaggeration, but it's reality.
> Every one that wasn't a tiny startup was full to the brim of people not doing anything meaningful.
That's an entirely different thing. You're moving the goalposts far away from how "lazy girl job" is defined above. People who aren't doing anything meaningful can also be working very hard at it.
The "send a couple quickie emails a day and make $100k" remote job is a fantasy. They may exist for a time, but unless the employer is printing money, the ride will usually stop as soon as someone bothers to look. Also I think it's very unlikely to get hired into one, especially as an inexperienced person.
The only area where I think one could be even remotely stable is in some critical area with lots of domain knowledge and experience is necessary. Once you've you've put in your time you can switch towards leaning on your experience to provide sufficient value to stay employed than your hard work.
This is such nonsense. “You actually only need engineers who will always perfectly prioritize their workflow and will always precisely identify the right strategy for the product independently and any management at any level whatsoever is unnecessary and none of those people actually work anyway” is entry-level noise. I get that it’s popular to think that the entire organization is worthless and that you are the only hero anyone needs, but come on.
That you don’t understand or can’t comprehend what someone is doing does not, at all, mean that they aren’t doing anything or that they have no value.
Paraphrasing someone so badly, as you have done above, is not good faith. And the GP is basically talking about 'Bullshit jobs', the subject of which David Graeber wrote a well regarded, well received book on [1], [2].
> you just need a business model that spins off enough money to cover the empire building.
Maybe so. But those business models don't just grow on trees. And once you have one, they don't maintain themselves, either. Someone competent has to keep that business model spinning off that kind of money.
In other words, even in that kind of company, competence actually matters for at least a subset of the employees.
The jury is still out on what to make of Elon's firing 90% of the staff (sometimes illegally) means about the productivity of Twitter before and after.
> most people don’t actually do much work at work and that it was all one big game
This much is true. Most people don't do much work at work. The difference between working in the office and working remote is that when you're at the office, your "pretend to work" time is spent discreetly browsing social media on your phone. When you're at home, you can spend it on things more conducive to your health like going to the gym or walking your dog.
I have a hypothesis that the top 10% of performers (could really be as little as 1%) in society are usually very upset by the fact that 90% of people want to do as little work as possible, and those top 10% performers are holding the rest of us hostage via in-office requirements and constant electronic monitoring, but I think since 2020 these people are now losing that battle and the 90% no longer have to pretend to give a shit what the 10% think anymore
I don't mind people not working. I get upset when those people half-ass their work and then attempt to get me to do their work for them. For example, I would rather build a feature than spending the same (or more) time fixing someone else's pull request.
I completely agree. I was a very low performer at my previous job. I was bored, didn't like the mission, my team got shipped away due to office politics, and small incidents with management wore me down after the first year.
I mostly did nothing the last few months, but everything I did was correct. Not that it was perfect, there is always stuff to be improved, but the little I did was good enough, filled the requirements and was documented both outside (what it does, for the lead engineer and management) and inside the code (how it works, for the poor soul who would inherit the mission).
Maybe it's a tale I tell myself, but I like to think I wasn't a net negative overall.
deadly car accidents are most common in areas with people entering and exiting at different speeds.
mismatched priorities make it impossible to integrate and sure enough there are crashes.
i see similarities with work speeds and work demands. senior dev who goes hard generates friction with managers or team members who are not able or willing to do the same. this will lead to conflict.
>90% no longer have to pretend to give a shit what the 10% think anymore
The 10% that do all your work for you?
I guess that's seems pretty shortsighted. When I go to work, I expect the asshole (that just watches me get shit done) to be decent company, worth a laugh or really willing to grab things I need.
If you can't bother to 'pretend' then I'm going to stop pretending for you too.
I guess we'll see who gets to keep getting paid.
Not all jobs are productivity based, plenty are response based and you are really being paid to be available to do something within a time period if requested, regardless of whether you actually do get any requests to do something.
> The number of students who wanted advice about how to get easy remote jobs where they didn’t have to do any work was depressing.
Why was it depressing for you? For me it's great to see how people are slowly managing to readjust their priorities and attach less importance to work in order to focus on things that matter more to them. And if they can do that - its' fantastic!
They are designed to be addictive yes, but that doesn't make the user non-complicit. It's easy to stop using these products, especially if you have other interests in your life.
Well, the definition of addictive is quite literally "cannot stop doing once you have started" (Cambridge dictionary), so not really.
I do see your point, though, I grew up without social media nor internet so I have plenty of offline things I like doing. But you have to consider that most of these young kids grew up with social media and mobile games as their primary, and often only, source of entertainment. Their addictive nature makes it really hard for them to find other interests in life, especially considering that parents often leave their kids on the smartphone to keep them quiet.
What is your argument? That focus on social media is actually a good thing and on par with whitewater rafting? Or are you just trying to take shots at GP?
Calling someone a “boomer” for having a different opinion is only slightly less useless and childish than calling them a “Karen”, especially when the reasoning boils down to “you dislike things I like, and my only argument against your opinion is actually a personal attack.”
Look at it from their perspective. it's very very very hard without the bank of mum and dad to make it very far in this life. Housing is expensive, school is expensive, job market is tough. food is expensive. Employment has less and less conditions.
The young are not being enfranchised by their society.
I've never entirely understood why it was so difficult to make that work, but it seems to be.
I've been anticipating being replaced by cheaper software developers working remotely, ever since I graduated college in the 90s. It never happened.
As far as I can tell there are a bunch of reasons: language, time zone, shared cultural conventions, plain-old-racism, the value in at least having the option of occasional meeting in meatspace. Some of that is finally changing due to the pandemic forcing it on people. But I still think people are having trouble finding reliable employees in a country they don't understand, even though there are many millions of them available.
NDAs, employment law, currency changes -- fees for changing, plus wiring money -- and all manner of national / state / provincial / local taxes, different pension and hiring rules, etc.
and then there is the idea that you have no idea if i am who i really am, or if i'm the one doing the work. i could be a face on Teams Calls for what is essentially 5 Vietnamese kids, and we're all in different jurisdictions, so if we decide to rip off your IP, who would you sue? could you even get that lawsuit off the ground?
and for all that risk you're eating 4% to do currency conversions & wire transfers. or else i'm standing up an offshore subsidiary at a cost and then dealing with payroll tax, filing costs, local HR and accounting, etc, as well. there is, potentially, a lot of liability and headache in that.
and then there is the cultural, language, timezone, etc. difference.
> They thought remote work was the final piece of the puzzle that would turn these jobs into easy paychecks so they could have near total freedom without having to give up more than a couple hours per day to send some emails.
And you wonder why execs are pushing so hard for RTO!
At the same time, if progress is creating more crap or further degradation of our environment… maybe redefining progress as a metric would be interesting?
But yes, someone has to do work indeed.
Growing up, the plan was that the robots would do that and we would write poetry.
In your hypothetical scenario, your disposable income would go down over time because your income stays constant and rent increases every year. Eventually you'll be homeless
The issue is that for many people, their income is already insufficient to meet their needs. So it becoming less sufficient to meet their needs may not be much of a change.
What do you mean either way? If your income keeps up with inflation or grows faster then you're not screwed. See every software job in the US and the massive difference between L3 and L5 for example
I think GP means this: different companies call them different things, but the difference between a Sr. Software Engineer compensation and Staff Engineer compensation can be 100% in some companies.
Not everyone works in a field that pays as well as software does. People working in the service sector don't make a minimum wage even if they work hard. So why work hard?
Actually, starting from 2013/15 these conditions did appear out of thin air with the unregulated non-stop printing of dollars. Unlimited VC funds for almost any start-up in tech. Near zero interest rates. Those were the times that got us here.
> "free money for everyone, whats the problem, we don't really need to work?!" don't seem to understand that someone has to do the work you're avoiding, or else things don't progress.
No they don't. If this was the case, salaries would be low across the board, instead there's an ever increasing wealth inequality. There are a lot of people with jobs because of organizational inefficiencies. Lots of people that are there for that one to two hours of work because it falls into a weird area that can't be assigned to someone else. And the company doesn't give a shit if these people did a lot more - if they did, they pay them to do it. Starbucks doesn't care if the manager walks in and cleans tables to a mirror shine every ten minutes, they care that it's clean and that all managers as a whole are following a protocol of wiping things down every hour.
I think you have it backwards, progress should lead us to a world where you don't really need to work. I always think of that John Quincy Adams quote: "I study politics and war so that my son can study mathematics, commerce, and agriculture, so their sons can study poetry, painting, and music."
A younger generation being able to create a life that doesn't require backbreaking, soulless, exploitative work is a good sign. It means that we've done our job to give them an easier future. I don't want my kids to have to work as hard or as much as I have. It's our duty to our descendents and will be their duty to theirs.
Truly wished more people saw things your way. Why do some older generations feel a resentment at seeing younger kids « having it easier »?
That’s the goal of technology.
I think that resentment comes from feeling like you "wasted" your life to make someone else's life better in the future. It's obvious to feel that since we're all selfish to some degree. But ultimately it's self-sacrificial for the betterment of others, which isn't really highlighted or praised in American society outside of military service.
> I think you have it backwards, progress should lead us to a world where you don't really need to work.
If you haven't read, Bertrand Russell in his "In Praise of Idleness" essay talks exactly about that, how technological progress should bring more idle time to workers. It's from the 1920s...
Instead we are under a system where almost all the extra productivity is siphoned away from the ones actually producing something, left with some breadcrumbs while those siphoning the product of labour keep constantly asking for more productivity from their workers for personal gain.
Historically any change to this system has only been achieved through bloodshed, which is very, very unfortunate...
Are we there yet? Can we all stop working because we've arrived? Well, no.
The problem is that we're still at a place where, if we all stop working, soon we all starve. Sure, we can maintain are current non-starving state with less backbreaking labor than it took a century ago, but there's still a huge amount of work needed to maintain that state.
So keep your goal, and keep working toward it, because we're not there yet. If we keep working on it, the next generation may have less backbreaking labor - not none, and not no work at all, just less.
I'm not saying we're at the point to fully stop working, but we've honestly been at the point that working 40hrs+ a week is no longer what's needed to maintain our current state. But the issue is that large public businesses are unsustainable by maintaining their current state, they must always have growth. We must always work harder. We must always work more efficiently. We must always work more. Because the business must grow.
This would require the idea of success as a business to change from constant growth to sustainability (in an economic sense). If we're able to shift our focus from constant growth to sustainability that will ultimately open up more time for us as a society to spend time away from work. To explore new ventures, to collaborate, to focus on answering questions that aren't profit-motivated. That's how we can slowly adapt to a society of minimally-exploitative work.
Someone has to start somewhere, and I'm hoping this younger generation can break us older generations out of our growth-motivated fog to begin adapting our society to sustainability rather than growth at all costs.
But a lot of people have decided, that before the system finally collapses they could be parasites on the system. And it is hard to blame the people for making this rational decision.
Late stage capitalism looks very much like Soviet Union in 80-ties. The economy doesn't make sense, the system is wasteful, no one believes in official propaganda, there are no values that you could follow. But a little guy can at least take it easy and relax a bit.
As the saying goes - They are pretending that they are paying us fair wages, and we are pretending that we are working.
What it would take is for hard work to actually be rewarded. As is, I know many people who have to work multiple grinding jobs and still barely make ends meet.
> I wonder what it will take - perhaps a war? - to get generations to understand that the wealth and prosperity they take for advantage are only a product of hard work.
That's the whole point. We work hard and give enough back to the world that the next generation have it easier, even to the point of them not knowing better. Things generally take care of themselves and your pessimism is unwarranted.
Before responding to what you think the article is about, it might be worthwhile reading up to the point where it explains this person was once working 60+ hours a week as a consultant and the resulting personal damage inspired her to come up with this (admittedly over the top) concept.
> this person was once working 60+ hours a week as a consultant and the resulting personal damage inspired her to come up with this
Past even that: Given how vastly more complex the business of routine living is (compared to my parents' generation), I'm hesitant to throw shade on folks seeking less demands from employment.
The people advocating lazy jobs will be the same ones wanting to hire people to mow their lawns, clean their houses, fix their cars, serve and cook for them at restaurants, pilot their airplanes, clean their pool, collect their trash, replace their roof, fix their AC and repair their leaking pipes.
The people doing these difficult and generally back breaking jobs won't be too happy spending 10 hours a day working while the lazy girl is drinking mojitos in the swimming pool.
I'd love a lazy job so I can do all those things during work hours instead of after the workday and commute. (except piloting airplanes or cleaning pools, I don't need to do that)
It is interesting that there's little discussion about the gender aspect of this, given that the job title includes the term "girl." Studies suggest that women place a higher priority on work-life balance compared to men. Moreover, it could imply that women are more inclined to pursue this line of work, particularly in fields like social media and influencing, where attractiveness can be leveraged as an advantage.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadCompanies can't spin up new workers in an instant. So for some jobs, they'll need to keep people on staff but not really working. They're there for specific tasks, or when more effort is needed, or for intermittent operations.
A lot of office jobs aren't like factory lines, where output is constant and directly related to input. That doesn't make the job bullshit. It just means that "40 hours per week" is an arbitrary number, the result of centuries of conflict between labor and management, and there's nothing sacred about it.
The amount that the job is worth depends on the job and the company, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with hours served. They need an employee to be prepared to fill that job, and the pay is negotiated on that basis. There's no reason to be expect it to be a straightforward function of prevailing hourly wage and 40 hours per week.
This influencer branded it “lazy girl job” but this concept is wildly popular among young people of all genders right now.
I was invited to be a mentor in a career-focused program for college students. The number of students who wanted advice about how to get easy remote jobs where they didn’t have to do any work was depressing.
The ideas they got from social media were wild. It was usually more Reddit than TikTok, but the concepts were the same: Overly confident internet posts had convinced them that most people don’t actually do much work at work and that it was all one big game. They thought remote work was the final piece of the puzzle that would turn these jobs into easy paychecks so they could have near total freedom without having to give up more than a couple hours per day to send some emails.
The weirdest part for me was how much they wanted to believe these internet influencers over the mentors in the group. It was hard to get some people to understand that the influencers were selling them a dream as a way to increase their follower count. I guess people will always have an appetite for hearing what they want to hear.
If a company has those jobs, it means their managers/leadership are doing the exact same lazy job, so you are in good company.
An alternative is simply to be good at your job and get your work done and have spare time. If you want behaviors to change in this situation, businesses need to give better direct incentives for finishing work early. Right now, the reward for getting your work done quickly is more work.
It's 2023 and text submission still doesn't auto-add the /s where it's needed. Is that ever going to be fixed?
3 hours of meetings and then killing time on Slashdot. Except I had to be in the office, in a button-up shirt, and had to commute.
I've done 50+ hour weeks at home, but when it's slow I'll take meetings while prepping a slow-cooker dinner. I had a boss that use to do the 1-on-1 meetings with his team (e.g. me) while running errands. I got used to hearing the sound of self-checkout machines while on that call, lol.
I thought he was being sarcastic. I could be wrong. Intent can be tough to suss out of text.
> I've been a consultant pulling well north of six figures and had weeks in the office doing frak-all.
I'm sure it has happened somewhere at sometime; I have heard an anecdote or two. Perhaps three now.
But based on what I've witnessed over 30 years of onsite calls (more fields than I can count) - the assertion that "Most office jobs outside of the software engineering ... People do very little actual work" - is false.
Massively, bizarrely false. Conspiracy-theory level false.
If it were true in the slightest, I'd of witnessed it repeatedly. I would have met people who could testify of it over and over. If not one in field, than another.
What I (along with most folks) witness are employees doing actual work, many working to the point of their own physical detriment.
Based on widespread reality, I rate the assertion as physics-grade false.
Maybe once a month or so a real software issue or feature request will come up, I'll spend 2-3 days implementing it, then another couple weeks will go by with it going through the (heavily manual) testing process.
Don't get me wrong, those handful of days of work a month are not uncommonly pivotal in sealing multi-million dollar deals, so I'm earning my keep. But it would be nice if my employer recognized that I have 90%+ slack in my schedule, and let my fuck off and do my own (easily interuptable) thing.
This is likely one of the reasons companies want people back in the office.
If you apply the Pareto Principle, they aren’t wrong. As you go up in the org, it all becomes mostly a political game. YMMV of course.
Where's the lie? Most people don't accomplish anything of actual value at work, and promotion and advancement is a big game.
Most businesses become bloated like this because the kind of people who become managers have been waiting their whole lives to build the biggest team possible.
I wish that were some sort of hyperbole or exaggeration, but it's reality.
That's an entirely different thing. You're moving the goalposts far away from how "lazy girl job" is defined above. People who aren't doing anything meaningful can also be working very hard at it.
The "send a couple quickie emails a day and make $100k" remote job is a fantasy. They may exist for a time, but unless the employer is printing money, the ride will usually stop as soon as someone bothers to look. Also I think it's very unlikely to get hired into one, especially as an inexperienced person.
The only area where I think one could be even remotely stable is in some critical area with lots of domain knowledge and experience is necessary. Once you've you've put in your time you can switch towards leaning on your experience to provide sufficient value to stay employed than your hard work.
That you don’t understand or can’t comprehend what someone is doing does not, at all, mean that they aren’t doing anything or that they have no value.
[1] https://www.penguin.com.au/books/bullshit-jobs-9780141983479
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
Maybe so. But those business models don't just grow on trees. And once you have one, they don't maintain themselves, either. Someone competent has to keep that business model spinning off that kind of money.
In other words, even in that kind of company, competence actually matters for at least a subset of the employees.
This much is true. Most people don't do much work at work. The difference between working in the office and working remote is that when you're at the office, your "pretend to work" time is spent discreetly browsing social media on your phone. When you're at home, you can spend it on things more conducive to your health like going to the gym or walking your dog.
I have a hypothesis that the top 10% of performers (could really be as little as 1%) in society are usually very upset by the fact that 90% of people want to do as little work as possible, and those top 10% performers are holding the rest of us hostage via in-office requirements and constant electronic monitoring, but I think since 2020 these people are now losing that battle and the 90% no longer have to pretend to give a shit what the 10% think anymore
I mostly did nothing the last few months, but everything I did was correct. Not that it was perfect, there is always stuff to be improved, but the little I did was good enough, filled the requirements and was documented both outside (what it does, for the lead engineer and management) and inside the code (how it works, for the poor soul who would inherit the mission).
Maybe it's a tale I tell myself, but I like to think I wasn't a net negative overall.
mismatched priorities make it impossible to integrate and sure enough there are crashes.
i see similarities with work speeds and work demands. senior dev who goes hard generates friction with managers or team members who are not able or willing to do the same. this will lead to conflict.
The 10% that do all your work for you?
I guess that's seems pretty shortsighted. When I go to work, I expect the asshole (that just watches me get shit done) to be decent company, worth a laugh or really willing to grab things I need.
If you can't bother to 'pretend' then I'm going to stop pretending for you too. I guess we'll see who gets to keep getting paid.
You know, have some decency.
Why was it depressing for you? For me it's great to see how people are slowly managing to readjust their priorities and attach less importance to work in order to focus on things that matter more to them. And if they can do that - its' fantastic!
Well, the definition of addictive is quite literally "cannot stop doing once you have started" (Cambridge dictionary), so not really.
I do see your point, though, I grew up without social media nor internet so I have plenty of offline things I like doing. But you have to consider that most of these young kids grew up with social media and mobile games as their primary, and often only, source of entertainment. Their addictive nature makes it really hard for them to find other interests in life, especially considering that parents often leave their kids on the smartphone to keep them quiet.
another hot boomer take. how you feel about kids on your lawn?
i remember my grandparents saying similar things about nintendo in the 90s.
my dad told me stories about them complaining about his white water rafting hobby before that.
Calling someone a “boomer” for having a different opinion is only slightly less useless and childish than calling them a “Karen”, especially when the reasoning boils down to “you dislike things I like, and my only argument against your opinion is actually a personal attack.”
- there’s no need for most remote jobs to hire only from the USA, and that
- 60-80k is a huge salary in most of the world?
I've been anticipating being replaced by cheaper software developers working remotely, ever since I graduated college in the 90s. It never happened.
As far as I can tell there are a bunch of reasons: language, time zone, shared cultural conventions, plain-old-racism, the value in at least having the option of occasional meeting in meatspace. Some of that is finally changing due to the pandemic forcing it on people. But I still think people are having trouble finding reliable employees in a country they don't understand, even though there are many millions of them available.
and then there is the idea that you have no idea if i am who i really am, or if i'm the one doing the work. i could be a face on Teams Calls for what is essentially 5 Vietnamese kids, and we're all in different jurisdictions, so if we decide to rip off your IP, who would you sue? could you even get that lawsuit off the ground?
and for all that risk you're eating 4% to do currency conversions & wire transfers. or else i'm standing up an offshore subsidiary at a cost and then dealing with payroll tax, filing costs, local HR and accounting, etc, as well. there is, potentially, a lot of liability and headache in that.
and then there is the cultural, language, timezone, etc. difference.
You still need people in the same timezone as you, usually
this should be all jobs. companies look at you in much the same way, and will drop you like you're on fire if there is a need.
And you wonder why execs are pushing so hard for RTO!
Indeed. I don’t see the point of marketing this to women instead of men (or both!)… Is this some kind of low key, maybe interiorised, sexism?
But yes, someone has to do work indeed.
Growing up, the plan was that the robots would do that and we would write poetry.
Kinda worked the other way around eventually.
Rent prices have gone up 17% since 2021, and average household income have stayed the same.
And people are going homeless! Single-person homelessness up 3% since 2020, and chronic homelessness has gone up 16% since 2020. All per HUD.
We ran out of carrots, but we have this nice stick here.
No they don't. If this was the case, salaries would be low across the board, instead there's an ever increasing wealth inequality. There are a lot of people with jobs because of organizational inefficiencies. Lots of people that are there for that one to two hours of work because it falls into a weird area that can't be assigned to someone else. And the company doesn't give a shit if these people did a lot more - if they did, they pay them to do it. Starbucks doesn't care if the manager walks in and cleans tables to a mirror shine every ten minutes, they care that it's clean and that all managers as a whole are following a protocol of wiping things down every hour.
A younger generation being able to create a life that doesn't require backbreaking, soulless, exploitative work is a good sign. It means that we've done our job to give them an easier future. I don't want my kids to have to work as hard or as much as I have. It's our duty to our descendents and will be their duty to theirs.
That hasn't changed in 200 years and it won't, any time soon.
If you haven't read, Bertrand Russell in his "In Praise of Idleness" essay talks exactly about that, how technological progress should bring more idle time to workers. It's from the 1920s...
Instead we are under a system where almost all the extra productivity is siphoned away from the ones actually producing something, left with some breadcrumbs while those siphoning the product of labour keep constantly asking for more productivity from their workers for personal gain.
Historically any change to this system has only been achieved through bloodshed, which is very, very unfortunate...
Are we there yet? Can we all stop working because we've arrived? Well, no.
The problem is that we're still at a place where, if we all stop working, soon we all starve. Sure, we can maintain are current non-starving state with less backbreaking labor than it took a century ago, but there's still a huge amount of work needed to maintain that state.
So keep your goal, and keep working toward it, because we're not there yet. If we keep working on it, the next generation may have less backbreaking labor - not none, and not no work at all, just less.
This would require the idea of success as a business to change from constant growth to sustainability (in an economic sense). If we're able to shift our focus from constant growth to sustainability that will ultimately open up more time for us as a society to spend time away from work. To explore new ventures, to collaborate, to focus on answering questions that aren't profit-motivated. That's how we can slowly adapt to a society of minimally-exploitative work.
Someone has to start somewhere, and I'm hoping this younger generation can break us older generations out of our growth-motivated fog to begin adapting our society to sustainability rather than growth at all costs.
But a lot of people have decided, that before the system finally collapses they could be parasites on the system. And it is hard to blame the people for making this rational decision.
Late stage capitalism looks very much like Soviet Union in 80-ties. The economy doesn't make sense, the system is wasteful, no one believes in official propaganda, there are no values that you could follow. But a little guy can at least take it easy and relax a bit.
As the saying goes - They are pretending that they are paying us fair wages, and we are pretending that we are working.
That's the whole point. We work hard and give enough back to the world that the next generation have it easier, even to the point of them not knowing better. Things generally take care of themselves and your pessimism is unwarranted.
Past even that: Given how vastly more complex the business of routine living is (compared to my parents' generation), I'm hesitant to throw shade on folks seeking less demands from employment.
The name is over the top, but the concept isn't: a low-stress job that earns you a living wage without pushing you to burnout.
The people doing these difficult and generally back breaking jobs won't be too happy spending 10 hours a day working while the lazy girl is drinking mojitos in the swimming pool.
Let me know where, please. I guess I'm trash, but I've never stood a chance/have the resume to make it past ATS...
Edit: Also, some of these are posted on Reddit every now and then and create a real hubbub, e.g., some email pusher for Uber recently - https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/s9iviz/the_misogy...