I couldn't finish reading this because of the intimately familiar existential nausea it induces, so I scrolled rapidly through it only stopping to observe that it touches on both psychiatry and unemployment in ways that made me glad I hadn't continued reading.
Frankly, this should be mandatory reading for everyone I've ever worked for.
Edit: Yeah, wow, this is more depressing than Ted Chiang's Exhalation[1].
For more in this vein, but with an erotic cyberpunk theme, play the interactive novel Secretary[2].
Edit 2: Perhaps the antidote to this malaise is a re-read of Hexing the Technical Interview[3].
Yes, I've shocked myself by referencing it, but if it's not your fetish, it is blackmail, abuse, and non-consensual body modification. It's somebody's literal nightmare.
>the assumption that everyone will share the writer's understanding of why it's worth reading.
There is no "why it's worth reading". They write for enjoyment, and don't care if anyone reads it.
"I write this content because I want to, and because I enjoy it. If you do too, great! And if not, also great; I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for elsewhere."
So you found it not worth your time to read the story, but found that it was worth your time to participate in discussions about it? That's certainly an interesting set of choices.
Or, perhaps, the author wrote the piece to fulfill his own intrinsic motivations, and then published it on his website so that anyone who did happen to find it worth reading could do so, without necessarily expecting anything of "everyone".
I am seeing this kind of comment more and more here and I think it's a trend I would like to see end. That's fine if you don't want to read a long, meandering essay. I myself made it about 30% through and decided I didn't want to finish. But why would you then expend the effort to come here and ask others to do work for you? Paste it into chatgpt and ask it to summarize for you.
I read the whole thing. It's a bit of a 'moralistic' ending, but I didn't have enough of a problem with it to find that a serious fault.
Unlike that comment about 'please summarize'. I'll fault that.
Here's the problem: this is an artwork. It's there to experience something, not intrinsically to deliver an answer or data point. It's to vicariously go on a journey without literally doing the thing. That's a purpose of artworks, and one that's completely wasted on LLMs as they cannot feel or experience or have a purpose: if they did they'd be fixed (or, I supposed, punched in the digital stomach)
Summary? You don't need an LLM for that, conserve the energy. The summary is 'The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach. And that's bad'.
It's literally in the title. I read through to see if it was 'and that's bad' or, 'and that's good', or possibly 'and that's inevitable'. I like the author better for ending up at 'that's bad' with a little bow on the end to celebrate meaningfulness, but that's not the only possible conclusion, and other conclusions would be just as artistically valid.
Quitting 30% of the way through is just as valid. You don't HAVE to take the ride just because it exists. If you're curious, averng, it's an okay story, leads up to its ending pretty well and finishes with a hopeful note. That's most of what you missed.
The only NON-valid way to engage with it would be to point an LLM at it and say 'tell me what the point is, I'm busy' because that would be failing to take the ride without even comprehending that you're failing to do so.
Living life through ChatGPT is about as useful as getting punched in the stomach. Try reading the story or ignoring it completely. There is no summary that is not as meaningless as… well, you know :)
I mean, I agree. My point is just that if you can't be bothered to read the piece but have such an insatiable curiosity to know what it was about, then do us a favor and just dump it into an llm to scratch your itch.
I find two things to be distasteful: 1) Asking others to do the work you're uninterested in doing yourself and 2) the rejection of any kind of stylistic writing as an annoying distraction. I don't know if the person I was replying to is guilty of #2 but I've seen the sentiment a lot here and more frequently than I used to. Not everything is a technical manual that needs to convey its main ideas in as straightforward a way as possible.
This article is a work of art. And I don't mean that in the highfalutin sense. But the style is meant to evoke something just as much as the words themselves. It's fine if it that doesn't work for you, but the goal was not to convey as much meaning in as few words as possible.
This isn't notably hard to read, though... and it's stylistically fairly plain and unadorned. Down-the-middle '80s-'00s era fiction style, for literary-leaning fiction that aspired nevertheless to sell some copies.
It isn't difficult to understand, it is difficult to get through. It is difficult in the sense that crawling through mud under barbed wire is difficult: exhausting because of its unpleasantness.
With the caveat that this is only possible with very lossy compression:
1. You land a software job which is "perfect" on almost every traditional indicator. Amazing office and amenities, incredible compensation and benefits, and no hard demands on your time... except to meekly endure some brief pain, for no particular reason, every day.
2. However it seems that neither the team nor yourself really accomplish anything, you gain no sense of social belonging, and you are literally a (very brief) punching-bag for your manager.
3. You "should" be happy, but you aren't. What's the point of it all? What are your values, and what is your worth? You start to struggle with depression. Eventually you can't take it anymore. You quit. Maybe you heal.
It's sort of like a Twilight Zone episode: You get (almost) everything you (believe that you) will be happy with, yet somehow the result is a subtle form of hell.
It’s a short story about corporate work and bullshit jobs, not an informative blog post. Either read it for your own enjoyment (or dread) or skip it, a summary doesn’t make much sense here.
I've spent time with several schizophrenics, and this is infinitely more coherent. I envy your inability to digest it.
> The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
— H. P. Lovecraft
Edit: Apologies; I forgot that my mind's ear had edited out the first section entirely. Skip it.
If you aren't a native English speaker, it makes sense you would struggle with this - it requires advanced reading comprehension. It's an essay from a first-person perspective that describes the author's feeling of existential dread from corporate make-work roles. It's written in a way that suggests the writer has worked in big-tech for a while.
2) It's written a little "higher" than modern popular young-adult-influenced fiction, mostly in that it sets up tension where the reader shouldn't know what's going on, then resolves it somewhat later, and relies on the reader holding context for a sentence or two for a thought or idea or image to resolve. This used to how books even fifth graders were expected to read were written (i.e. this wouldn't have been regarded as challenging) but extreme preferences for ease-of-reading has driven shifts in fashions (as publishers desperately seek a market in a world where readership is already very low and still declining) and now lots of folks find once-easy works of fiction "hard" (even, and perhaps especially, native speakers) simply due to rarely encountering fiction that's not, as it were, pre-chewed, so not exercising those reading skills.
3) It's written in second-person, which is a bit unusual. (First-person also used to be rare, but has become common because young readers find it easier, and it is now taking over popular fiction—I expect narrative perspectives other than first-person are the next thing that will be regarded as "difficult" by the folks just becoming adults now, and know for a fact that many current teens and tweens are expressing that to teachers, that they find reading narratives in 3rd person difficult and so mostly just... don't read those)
[EDIT] I'm not asserting that 2 or 3 are the reasons you specifically are having trouble with it, but pointing out a couple observations about it that might be reasons someone would have trouble with it. There could be others.
Well put. And second person is indeed unusual, to the point where it was quickly obvious that it wasn't some sort of LLM.
It's kind of fascinating, when I think about it. This artwork does something I've also seen the GenX novelist Douglas Coupland do to striking effect: set up a vicarious mental state, through seemingly tedious narrative, to produce a state of mind which is then played upon for artistic purposes, modulating this state of mind to cause feelings.
Coupland repeatedly does that by setting up thematic points without stating them, and then resolving not the surface details but the theme with a conclusion that targets the theme rather than the surface plot.
The author here plays on the theme of meaninglessness, and then more or less makes a plea for meaningfulness at the end. It's pretty straightforward, except there seem to be a lot of people unable to experience a narrative at all, and so they're looking for 'the answer' and unable to experience the narrative in a human way. (not that you're required to have this particular human experience… but the whole point is to have this described experience, without having it)
Pretty sure anybody who's frustrated by this would have an even harder time with Douglas Coupland's biggest works. This is really direct, theme-wise. If that's not enough to get you onboard (assuming you want to take that ride), there's a problem.
If large numbers of people in the post-LLM world end up unable to decode these sorts of artworks, that's a loss to human nature.
Your point #3 is concerning. It is almost saying that people are now unable to assume other peoples' points of view. That the skill of empathy -- in a narrow technical sense, not even loading it with positive moral associations; hell, a scammer may use their ability to take another vantage point in order to mislead -- is disappearing. That people are losing a "theory of mind". Mass solipsism. Excellent, autistic sheep, confused by the people around them.
I think it's more just saying that second person narrative is not common and so it tends to throw people off. Not that your points aren't necessarily valid, but I don't think you can get all the way there just off of second person being an uncommon literary perspective.
I'd assume FooBarBizBazz meant my aside about the rise of the (once also fairly rare, if not so rare as second) first person narrative perspective in fiction, and increasing discomfort and difficulty with the 3rd person among younger readers. I'm not sure I'd assume this coincides with a decline in empathy, but do think it's worrisome that a huge body of literature, even recent literature, is harder for these folks to access than it was for those who grew up with 3rd person as the default and anything else being a notable stylistic choice.
It's fiction in the "second person" perspective, and you should keep reading until you can empathize with the protagonist, purely because it will help you recognize abuse and/or the trappings of professionalism which cause and/or accommodate abuse.
I'm only about 20% in but if anybody ever asks me "what is your day-to-day internal experience of ordinary life like?" I'm just going to point them to this.
[EDIT] Still not done but this is just getting more true the farther I go.
I had a similar experience at Apple as well, except I took the punches for almost 4 years--you can take more punches when you're younger. I feel like a little bit of my soul died there.
This captures a form of existential dread I am sure all of us have felt. On the one hand, you have an ostensibly "good" job with great pay, benefits, etc. On the other hand, you have to _get punched in the stomach_ each day. All while knowing that there are people out there taking more abuse for likely far less pay. Who are you to feel bad about your situation?
Very well put. Most jobs are definitionally bad in some way. Well-paying (at least relative to the wider job market) tech jobs represent some of the better jobs available. They’re deeply frustrating, nearly any customer service job is a significantly worse experience for far less money, benefits, time off, healthcare, etc.
Who am I? Who are any of us to complain and/or fix things? The answer is: we're the only people who can. Change has to start somewhere. The best thing for people who have it worse isn't to silently suffer, it's to help ourselves by dismantling the systems under which we both suffer. We have to take every opportunity to do that, and that means even the unglamorous ones.
> If I'm not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?
— Hillel
I agree we need to be the change we want to see. However taking about dismantling a system is probably going to introduce more pain (in the short and long run). For example capitalism doesn’t need dismantling, it has brought us far more good than bad. However we do need to figure out how to deal with bad actors and net negative behavior (deforestation, over fishing, ocean trash etc).
Globalization is a big one. There are no good jobs for average people anymore, they all got moved to Mexico or China or Vietnam, etc. Tariffs can help with that if applied correctly.
Sure they will. US car manufacturers ship parts to Mexico where they are assembled and shipped into the US for sale. If that method now costs 25% more, they will probably move some manufacturing back home to avoid the tariff.
Apply that to all companies who ship parts to Mexico for assembly/manufacture, and it will make a difference, assuming the tariffs are high enough to make a difference in the showroom.
Here's the Gore/Perot debate pre-NAFTA. Perot seems pretty spot on in his assessment.
Deliberately making a process inefficient isn't going to fix anything.
More expensive cars means cars are going to be less in demand. Means less cars manufactured, means less jobs for people who make cars.
Also, reworking the auto manufacturing pipeline is going to take decades not days.
Maybe ask yourself if the reason nobody else in the past 30 years has enacted the recent measures of the American government is because they were stupid/lazy/greedy or if it's because they clearly don't work.
>Deliberately making a process inefficient isn't going to fix anything.
Shipping parts to Mexico to have them assembled then shipping it to the US is much less efficient than shipping the parts to the US, manufacturing in the US, then selling in the US.
>More expensive cars means cars are going to be less in demand. Means less cars manufactured, means less jobs for people who make cars.
Less jobs for Mexican labor making cars, more jobs for American labor making cars, that's the objective. It also strengthens unions by increasing headcount and making the threat of moving labor to another country much more expensive. Remember, the discussion is about the plight of the average American worker and how they've been systematically squeezed for 30+ years now due to globalization.
>Also, reworking the auto manufacturing pipeline is going to take decades not days.
Yes, more like years not decades, but ya, not sure why anyone would think it would take days. I suspect a lot of companies will try political maneuvers like waiting out Trump's term, hoping the next guy would be more sensible to their profit needs.
>Maybe ask yourself if the reason nobody else in the past 30 years has enacted the recent measures of the American government is because they were stupid/lazy/greedy or if it's because they clearly don't work.
Companies have a much higher profit margin by using Mexican labor, at the expense of US labor. Those companies also donate a lot of money to campaigns. It's pretty off brand for the Democrats under Clinton/Gore to champion moving thousands of jobs to Mexico under NAFTA. I wonder what motivated them to do that.
It may or may not work, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Despair of the average American has a lot of negative, long term social consequences we're currently dealing with, and it's just going to get worse.
Did you know foreign car manufacturers make cars in the US for the US market to avoid tariffs and improve efficiency? They might be on to something.
Among the problems: people refuse to consider reasonable limits.
Let's suppose that we institute an income cap and a wealth cap. For the sake of argument, we'll call that 10 million dollars a year, and 100 million dollars. All the existing taxes apply. Nothing gets treated specially: your income for the year will always be capped at 10MM, and your total wealth will be capped at 100MM. It's a 100% tax and knowingly evading it is a crime. If you hit the income limit in two different years, the mayor of your city will award you a plaque, with an optional ceremony, and if you hit the wealth limit, the governor of your state will award you a plaque.
How much pain does that inflict?
None at all.
But nearly everyone harbors some secret hope of becoming a billionaire right now, and the thought of not winning that lottery is enough to make it politically impossible to enact this tiny reform.
And if you can't make reforms, the whole thing may need to be dismantled.
I'm not repudiating (in this thread) capitalism, per se. Only whatever system it is that's abusing OP's protagonist. If you think capitalism inevitably punches someone in the stomach, well, then yeah; you've got your work cut out for you.
> For example capitalism doesn’t need dismantling, it has brought us far more good than bad.
The question you should be asking first is, is it sustainable? If you give someone a bank account with a million in it, they can bring a lot of good to themselves by spending it profligately... but then one day it runs out.
Normalization of this existential dread is a direct result of the fundamental shift of power from labor to capital.
Our safety nets have been ripped away from us. Leaving us with this awful choice of working with shitty employers. In some cases, they might even hold a monopsony on labor and thus have _no choice_.
The time I have wasted at shit tier employers is lost forever. All so the rapacious capitalists could pump the stock and deliver share holder value
Any job where you have to get regularly punched in the stomach is a terrible job regardless of the compensation involved. That others may have even worse jobs doesn't change that.
Sometimes people take such jobs to get out of a bad financial situation.
That can be a legitimate use, but one should remember that it's but a temporary thing to solve a particular problem, there should be an end date, and a way out. In particular, you should not start depending on the thicker stream of money such a job pays.
It's rare that such a job leaves the physical damage described in the story. More often it can damage you mentally: burned out, depressed, crushed by internally felt shame and guilt. This should not be discounted too easily; it can cost you a lot of plain money to get treated, to say nothing of the suffering, both yours and that of those who care about you.
When I was younger one of my favorite punchlines was "What kind of (wo)man do you think I am?! ... Oh, we've already established that, we're just negotiating price"
There is some level of compensation where our protagonist could have retired after his first paycheck. His paycheck was very high, but not that high. He made a bad career move, despite the pay. For some people it would have been ok. Experienced fighters would know how to take the hit better. For them it would not have been such a problem. In the story it was a big problem. I would say there was probably no level of compensation that would make it worthwhile for the character, given he had to keep doing it on a daily basis indefinitely. His old job was fine. His new job let him pay off his mortgage faster but made his whole life worse. What good is all this money if one's life is suffering? If money lets you buy your way out of suffering, that's good.
Not to sugar coat a rough sport with a real history of terrible concussions and their consequences, but boxers get to punch back. They’re also rewarded for dodging punches when it gets them to their clear tangible goal: winning a match. In a real sense they have a lot of control over how and when they get punched.
None of that applies to this allegory. Dodging the punch got the protagonist put on a three-punch PIP. Who knows what punching back would have led to.
I actually know people who get punched regularly at their job and like it. Obviously there are boxing coaches but I also know someone who works with disabled and troubled youths (I'm not entirely clear on exactly what he does) and they all actually like their jobs. If it wasn't for low pay and potential brain trauma I would love to have a job where I get punched.
For me it's the uselessness of it that would bother me, the actual act of getting punched is neither here nor there. I mean I pay to take boxing classes and I enjoy them.
I had a job at S&P Global. Great pay. Great benefits. I was fucking miserable. I left, took a 50k pay cut, and have been much happier. I understand it's a privilege to be able to take a 50k pay cut, but I also lived well within my means and didn't adjust my lifestyle when I got raises. Let that be an important lesson to anyone reading this.
>Who are you to feel bad about your situation?
I am a human being with one life that is far to brief to spend it being miserable.
> All while knowing that there are people out there taking more abuse for likely far less pay.
My anecdotal experience: The best jobs in my career were the medium-pay, medium-expectations jobs.
Most (but not all) of the very high paying jobs I've had also came with very high expectations. They were paying a lot of money and they knew that people didn't have many other options to get paychecks that large. Managers were compensated on performance of their teams, so they had to extract as much work as possible to get the maximum pay. They knew that they could post a job ad tomorrow with the high salary listed and it would attract hordes of qualified applicants who wanted that paycheck.
I never got to experience the golden era of certain FAANG companies where many people were making bank and few people were ever fired.
Likewise, the lowest paying jobs I've had were also terrible. They had no concept of anything other than extracting work from people for minimum pay. They kept everyone tired, demoralized, and afraid of being fired. People don't search for other jobs as much when they're constantly burned out and overwhelmed.
The sweet spot, for me, has been right in the middle. Good pay (great, relative to all professions), but not top of market pay, and reasonable expectations. Surrounded by a mix of people from different ages but with a lot of parents who have families at home. If I interview somewhere and it's nothing but mid 20s people who don't have families, I stay away because they have much worse concept of work-life balance in my experience.
I‘ve found that the „high expectations“ were acutely stressful because they were concealed: there was no way to match them. This story wonderfully expresses the dread of trying to guess what’s expected of you by an employer. Yes, a middling wage might be more sustainable when it’s compensating obvious work tasks that demographically average people can perform.
> I‘ve found that the „high expectations“ were acutely stressful because they were concealed: there was no way to match them.
That's a very good point.
I remember the first time I was in a cycle of trying to meet impossible expectations. We kept putting in a lot of effort and doing some very impressive things, but every time we got close to delivering something the goalposts would move.
After far longer than I'd like to admit, I realized that those lofty expectations weren't designed to be met. They were designed to keep us perpetually insecure. Always feeling like we needed to try a little harder. And it was working on us, at least for a couple years.
The illusion was briefly shattered when a manager gave us a goal that numerically meant that one of our vendors would have to serve us at a loss. He wanted us to negotiate a contract where they paid us to be their customer, when you added up all the factors. When we showed him, he did a pretend-angry routine and lectured us on how we should be thinking bigger all the time. We "failed" to meet that impossible expectation, to the surprise of absolutely nobody on the team. After that, it was like the team had been freed from the shackles of impossible expectations. We did our best and shrugged off the disappointed manager routine when it didn't meet the arbitrary expectations. It was interesting to watch as the manager realized his power over us had been broken, which quickly gave way to a slow-motion process of sidelining us for younger replacements who were more receptive to the disappointed manager routine.
I miss many of those coworkers, but I do not miss that job.
Before anyone jumps in to say that stress doesn't cause ulcers, only H. pylori does: stress can absolutely trigger gastritis, especially if you're predisposed for that, and chronic gastritis can very much cause ulcers :')
We are at the stage where most creative experienced persons with at least a year or savings (of their expenses) should look to a self-bootstrapped AI-assisted entrepreneurship instead of a job. AI changes the game to enhance the chances of entrepreneurial success. Also, when you are working for yourself, it doesn't really feel like work.
When you write truth to power, you get downvoted and suppressed!
There's a couple problems causing this negative appraisal of your 'truth'.
Firstly, there's no reason to assume 'AI-assisted' will help you in any way. You might consider that by definition that places you in a position interchangeable with any other person or indeed running the AI by itself, without you.
Secondly, 'most' creative experienced persons? As someone who's successfully-ish done the thing you're talking about, WOOF. No. In fact, I would suggest based on my experience and perspective, that a person looking to rely on AI assistance is the last person who should attempt to be entrepreneurial.
I guess go ahead if you must? If it doesn't really feel like work, it probably isn't work. If it doesn't seem meaningful because it's just chasing what an AI tells you to do, it's probably not going to stick out with any competitive distinctiveness. And if you are only doing it for yourself, you should keep your day job because that's not enough to succeed at business.
If someone doesn't yet feel substantially empowered by AI, then they just don't know how to use it very well, and also lack the imagination to do so. It's a lot more than just asking ChatGPT.
AI is not a substitute for personal effort; it's a tool for going where one struggles to go alone.
For work to not feel like work, one has to be super passionate about the goal that one is working toward, and this is never possible at a job. Most people have forgotten what it means to have a personal passion, some of which can also manifest a commercial angle.
To make a long comment short, AI is the missing glue in ikigai that brings everything together.
Oddly, right now I'm seeing a lot of federal workers in the US talking about how they've struggled for years to get into positions where the mission they serve is deeply important to them, so much so that they'd pass over private sector work and did just that.
Just at the small cost of your soul. For some this is a small price to pay, and for others, the cost is enormous. Will AI make fundimental differences in the way life works? Look at every single stoplight that is green while no cars are waiting.
Leveraging continuous innovation, this individual would drive team and industry advancements towards scales of operational efficiency not seen before. Their visionary contributions will redefine AI integration, ensuring access to robust, strategic, gut-punching partnerships. What a team-player.
Honoré de Balzac has a great bit about cashiers in Melmoth reconciled, basically explaining that it's a useless job that stems from a lack of trust (meanwhile the cashier becomes a trustee, which is ironic as if he had ambition he could just leave with the money). I have no idea how good the english translation is, but there's much better literature about bullshit jobs than this.
it's a lot of words, I mostly engage on HN articles from other people's comments but yeah I get it, I read books but I don't spend an entire hour on a blog post someone posts. everybody has their own values I get that
I read the entire thing in one sitting. I think I assumed it was just a normal blog-post length and the scroll bar at the side was so small because the bottom had a bunch of photos or more articles or something. The story was engaging, so I just continued reading.
You're saying you come here to participate in discussions about articles you can't be bothered to read in the first place? Isn't that a little bit disingenuous?
It would be interesting if you asked random people if they'd like to sit down and read something for 45mins how many people would accept.
I obviously looked at this one and was like "nah" seeing the size of the scroll bar and I copied/pasted the words into a counter to get that 26K figure.
Anyway it doesn't matter there's nothing to win here. I'm pointing out this post is long as hell and I'm not gonna spend my time reading it.
It also probably speaks of my caliber as a tech person I have not been in a FAANG job before probably won't be, I'm just lucky to have picked this field up later in life and can get a job in it but I'm nobody noteworthy.
> It would be interesting if you asked random people if they'd like to sit down and read something for 45mins how many people would accept.
I wouldn't expect many to do so, but I absolutely wouldn't expect people who declined to do the reading to stick around for the post-reading discussion.
That's all fine. I am not a fast reader and spent 40 minutes before my spouse entered. I saw I was only at 3 quarters, that's more than where I get at in the average book I read, so still super engaging! Probably already spent the same amount on reading comments.
I don't care about 99.99% of Twitter posts enough to read them, but I'd certainly not call them "massive" -- in fact, much of my lack of interest in microblog posts comes from them being far too short to convey any ideas of substance.
Consider that you might indeed have a short attention span, and that there might be a lot of insights and concepts that you may be missing out on due to unwillingness to engage with long-form writing.
it took me 20 minutes. it was a pretty easy read. i didn't think i was a fast reader ... but gemini tells me otherwise.
people read entire books you know.
i ran the text through a grade level calculator and it came out as 8th grade level, which i understand is typical for a mainstream newspaper. i guess that's why it was such a quick read.
It was about an hour for me, although I admittedly read it while fixing and munching on my lunch. It was very relatable, and so I felt motivated to see the protagonist to the end, whatever their fate- see if they derived alternate insights than the ones I had arrived at.
I've spent longer reading documentation late at night that ultimately would turn out to be useless to me. This actually had some plausibility of real life utility, but requires "experiencing" to derive useful benefit from.
I think I just punched myself in the stomach again.
I thought several times I wish Ben Stiller would direct an episode on a TV show somewhere about this. Like the author, he can blend grounded realism and comedy in his unique, transcendent way.
I think the stomach punching is much more creatively articulated on Severance. All of those severed workers are getting metaphorically punched in the gut constantly, so much so that they need to be severed to do the job at hand.
Reminds me of a job posting sent by a recruiter that expected candidates to seek "professional and personal hypergrowth", "keep up with an unrelenting pace", and "thrive on change". Dealing with these facets of work in moderation is all well and good. However, these and other points led me to guess that they had set up a high-pressure, possibly chaotic environment, perhaps on purpose.
> However, these and other points led me to guess that they had set up a high-pressure, possibly chaotic environment, perhaps on purpose.
It's always wise to ask questions about this during the interview
In my experience, though, hyperbole in job listings is usually the product of someone in HR who doesn't know how to write job listings, so they write a bunch of vacuous words that sound good but mean nothing.
The casual, patent absurdity juxtaposed with the ennui of modern life at a corporate job is, in a genuine literary sense, Kafkaeque. Bravo.
That said, this also feels like something of a relic from the zero-interest-rate era when jobs like this were plentiful, before layoff fever swept the American boardroom.
I am working a job like this now. Instead of getting punched in the stomach I have to make Jira subtasks and come up with some narrative about what I'm doing in a stupid scrum meeting every morning. Easy, pays well, less physically demanding than being punched in the stomach, but not really making use of my skills, and ultimately soul-sucking in a way that previous jobs weren't. And yet who am I to complain?
It goes without saying that the physical damage of being punched in the stomach is a metaphor for the psychic damage of having your soul sucked. You can bare it for a while but it starts to add up. And, like many wounds, it CAN heal over time.
Most of this can be solved with a paradigm shift. Find something you enjoy, do it the way you like to. -that- is your new job. The soul desiccating jira handjob is -therapy- to remind you how pointless life is if you don’t do something that you love. Focus your energy on appreciating your “job”, and appreciating your therapy (and your co-therapists) for making it possible for you to retain focus on your job.
Focus on making your therapy easier and making better metrics, especially at the cost of actual value. The purpose of the therapy-is- the pointlessness.
I have seen this unironically used to excellent effect, and the user was considered indispensable, since being indispensable and highly “valued” was what he focused 100 percent of his 9-5 on. Meanwhile, he was able to leave work behind once he walked out of the office, because he was not at all invested emotionally in the “therapy “ sessions.
Probably won’t work for everyone, but it’s a pretty solid pattern for accepting useless work. The important part is to have some “real” work that you -do- care about. Otherwise it’s potentially a shortcut to a high ledge.
If the value created by doing that work wouldn't surpass the shittiness of doing it, the work wouldn't exist. Unless workers are slaves, they clearly prefer the work over other options or not working. Otherwise they'd leave. The employer is clearly getting enough value to pay them the compensation needed for the tediousness.
If there is no upside for anyone, but only discomfort for the checkout clerks, someone might be able to disrupt the field by paying slightly less but allowing them to stand. Since that isn't happening, I assume that either
a) workers are showing the difference between revealed and stated preference
b) grocery stores are actually making more money of clerks stand
c) paying less in exchange for sitting clerks isn't possible because minimum wage
You are assuming that all economic activity is rational. One only needs to look at Bitcoin price to know otherwise.
Employer isn't actually getting any value out of making cashiers stand, and in most other countries, it is a sitting job. So far as I can tell, the only reason why US does it is because "we have always done it this way", which is also the ultimate rationale for a lot of other similar bullshit.
The workers, realistically, don't have any choice if every employer does this. They can take the work as it is, or they can starve, especially seeing how US doesn't have full-fledged welfare.
Perhaps robotics and artificial intelligence will propel us to star trek socialism.
But we aren’t on that track.
AI+robotics+energy is power. With real creative power you need money much less. The game changes from being a billionaire to having terawats of automation.
Without guardrails, robotics and artificial intelligence will become the primary tools of capital. Capital won’t need workers to implement their designs, and they won’t need money in the sense that they need it today, mostly to pay people to do things.
With factories to produce robots and ubiquitous artificial intelligence, there exists an opportunity for the capital class to separate itself entirely from the seething masses.
With essentially unconstrained power to create, you don’t need to buy things you want, except very special or artisanal things perhaps. You want a yacht? You build a yacht. The promise of GPAR is that you don’t need a factory. You just need more general purpose arthropod robots and the right software. They build the warehouse, they build the ways, they lay the keel, they build the ship. The fact that it might not be the most efficient way to build a yacht is immaterial.
Of course materials may need to be purchased so there will still be steelworks and other heavy industries that don’t lend themselves to small scales, but they too will be “manned” with GPAR labor, and the capital class will just be swapping tokens around among themselves. The true end to trickle down economies.
Humans will still have work in some situations, but it will be work that for some reasons robots cannot do because it is too risky, or too expensive to use automation. So humans will be limited to work that robots cannot do without risking destruction of robotic capital, or that humans can do for around the same cost as 36kw of solar electricity and $10/day of depreciation. Maybe that will cover rice and beans?
Either way, unfettered, untaxed access to effective hybrid cognitive/physical automation is not likely to be great for most humans in the long term.
We need an entirely new approach where labor is not the basis of survival if we are to realise the humanitarian potential of universal automation.
You are the only one who cares if your job is soul-sucking or not, so you're exactly the person to complain.
This whole idea of "other people have it worse so it's rude or 'bad' for me to complain about things I don't like" is not a helpful mindset. That there are starving kids in Africa or victims of war in eastern Europe or slaves imprisoned in China doesn't make your life any better or worse. If every slave in the world was freed making those JIRA tasks would feel exactly the same so there's nothing wrong with wishing those JIRA tasks weren't quite as bad as they are.
I don't blame too many privileged tech workers who feel their soul being slowly eroded away, because working in software is one of the only decent ways to have any economic security at all anymore. Admittedly, Silicon Valley is responsible for some of this insecurity, but still.
Housing is expensive. Food is expensive. Childcare is expensive. Health insurance is expensive (even the "good" insurance, where a PPO will still gleefully deny your claims).
So you can either be well-off and miserable, but probably not destitute, or you can work at a gas station, and enjoy 30-40 years of precarity before you die of a preventable illness.
I voted for the other one, but things were getting worse anyway, and the accelerationist in me wonders if somebody willing to say the quiet fascist stuff out loud and take a sledgehammer to the parts of the government that were actually doing anything useful is unfortunately what it will take to nudge a few more USAians out of their comfortable slow downfall mindset and into one where they actually start to organize against the uh, more-clearly-than-ever oligarchical system that they've been living under.
Either way, things are going to suck for a while. That my employer prioritizes Jira tickets over making good software seems a small price to pay for a bit of financial security (at least until Elon hacks my bank account and takes all my money, or I get thrown in prison for being a wokeness sympathizer, or whatever).
Less money and greater meaning, or more money and mind-numbing tedium.
I sympathize with you because on January 1st I nearly doubled my salary, but the job leaves me rather unfulfilled. I'm left substituting my hobbies and family for all meaning in my life, but it's challenging when you spend 50-55 hours a week at work.
I spent some time at Pivotal, and then shamelessly adopted the Pivotal process at subsequent companies. One thing I took to heart is that a product manager that communicates through well-written user stories is golden. Jira is a drag but it's still fundamentally a textbox and you control what goes into that textbox.
Run wild with it! Engineers actually are counting on you.
Is there a name for the genre of writing that gets so, so close to magical realism without actually incorporating literal magic? Because this story is the epitome of it.
Kafkaesqueness doesn't require magical realism. It's about a sense of being powerless in the overwhelming and opaque machinations of a larger system, usually a bureaucracy.
I find that it brings a lot of context into view when I remind people Kafka read his stories to crowds with a dry sense of humor. Consider The Burrow - there’s certainly something funny about trying so hard to perfect your bunker that you end up not using it.
I didn't get any sense of magical realism from this story. It seemed to delve a lot into the internal thoughts and reflections of someone dealing with the absurdity of the outside world, so Kafkaesque seems the best description.
There are well paid corporate jobs that feel like a punch in the stomach every day. Luckily they did not cross your path. It can happen very quickly though, for example the company you work for gets bought by another one with different company culture or simply your boss got switched to a narcissist.
Lots of the details hit for me (the lifelong habits from marching band, moments alone of feeling a little actually-crazy, being terrible at remembering names well past the point where you feel like you should have gotten good at that, the conference room lights shutting off and awkwardly standing to make them come back on, trying not to look as idle and bored as you are).
It's mostly about big-corp life, though—my time with startups and little agencies and such didn't much resemble this, day to day, but still had some of that "why the fuck are people paying me to do this?" factor, like having finished projects cancelled without ever being released due to corporate politics or because it turns out a client was only paying us build a product as a BATNA for some acquisition negotiation and they weren't really planning on using it except as a bargaining chip, or having clients (or your own startup leaders...) assign you projects that you're 100% certain are a bad idea that's never going anywhere (and sure enough, you get it done, and it flops, for exactly the reasons you could have told them it would on day 1).
Like, 80+% of the work I've ever been paid to do has been kinda pointless except to drive the gears on some abstract large-scale money-making machine that randomly sometimes produces returns but mostly just makes everyone do a bunch of work that at least someone involved already knows isn't valuable, at least not for any straightforward reasons, but everyone has to do anyway to keep the gears turning.
Feeling lost in a large org, the awkwardness of being new at a large office and of kinda clinging to the very-few people whose names you can remember, being told you're doing well and being paid great while kinda feeling like you're just coasting along and money's showing up in your account for no good reason and because that's just how your stumbling-through-life path has worked out, for whatever reason, but why should that continue for another day and OMG what will I do if people figure out they could just not do a bunch of this stuff and nothing bad would happen and they'd save money and I'd be out of a job and what else do I even know how to do and is this current too-easy gig making me soft and messing me up for future employment (but they're all kinda like that...)—very relatable.
I think that's more metaphorical—unpleasant but easy, unclear what benefit it's providing, somehow leaves you out-of-sorts the whole week so the days slip away even though, when you look at it, there's not good reason for that (making you feel even worse). And getting punched is bad, but is it that bad? Just one punch a day, and in the stomach? It's degrading, but what isn't, and it's not like they're making you feel bad about it, it's just how things are. And the pay is so good. Subjectively you're miserable but objectively you shouldn't be, which makes you more miserable.
Meanwhile you feel like an imposter, but everything else the others are doing also looks kinda-fake but you're never quite sure if it is and everyone else is just playing along, or if you're the odd man out and just don't get why all that stuff is useful because you're too dumb, and are just lucky nobody's yet noticed that you're not doing anything useful.
Right -- I mean the misery at work is what I cannot relate to.
Furthermore, if the best way to support my family and to live my non-professional life is to take a punch in the stomach each morning, I think I'd find a way to deal with it?
Yeah, the counter-point to this is something like Yates' Revolutionary Road—you're not as special as you think, you definitely don't have the ambition to back up the way you think your life should look and probably not enough to make anything of it even if you were dropped into that situation for free, most of your misery is because you think you should have something else, and hey, look around—of course you don't like your job, that's the deal, and the more "nice life" you want the less you'll like it, and that accidental-success you're seeing there without even trying is something you should be leaning into rather than being repulsed by.
In short, being a little clever just means you can live normal life on easy mode and you shouldn't feel bad about that, and wanting something more meaningful or glamorous or romantic without actively putting in the work to make that happen and accepting the sacrifices that come with it is just you making yourself miserable for no good reason.
(And of course if you're in the throes of that sort of a mood, being familiar with the above perspective just makes it worse, even as it offers a way out to acceptance of a life as an ordinary schlub who doesn't have things too hard, LOL)
[EDIT] I'm nearing the end and I think, to this piece's credit, some of this criticism of the perspective character's ("your") mindset is present as both text and subtext, plus a good deal of the darker thoughts and moments we're clearly to take as the output of a mind that's unwell and trying to square external reality, perceived un-reality of their situation, a certain awareness of their own privilege, plus the inescapable fact that they simply are not doing OK and are aware that they aren't and also aware that they should be and everyone else seems to be—rather than taking them as something the author intends for us to take as big-T or objectively True just because the perspective character is presenting these thoughts to us.
Working at Microsoft, my final task was to write a monitoring and keepalive subsystem for an API that aggregated monitoring dashboards.
This is absolutely how that feels. With the exception of my boss reneging on promised expenses and the magical realism elements: I came in, did scrum, said everything was fine, then fucked around on factorio because I could be interrupted at any time, with a 5 minute SLA target, but often days passed between these events. Don’t worry, I had tons of recommendation panels to advise on steering committees to sit silently on. It’s… it’s this, you have nothing to do and all the time to do it in, paid (in my case) primarily to not work somewhere else.
I never even learned the names of the products the dashboards monitored.
I'm sure it's not universal, but I bet a lot of HN readers have at least had one job in the past where they were 1. paid very well, but 2. their day-to-day of work felt metaphorically like a daily punch in the stomach. I certainly have, and it took me 4 years (the full stock vesting period, LOL) to break away from it.
Lots of people (including me) have gotten burnt out from a job that should be a dream job, yet somehow manages to inflict so much mental pain that you have trouble getting up from bed.
I don’t resonate with the “my job is bullshit” parts of the story, but I feel like the story does an excellent job of describing how burnout feels. Each day is physically painful and it starts taking an increasing toll both physically and mentally to show up to work.
Yeah, I'm with you on that. I'm in a profession that I chose because I was interested in it and I'm at an employer I chose because I was interested in what they do.
I recognized the lyrics at the beginning right away. The song is reel big fish’s say goodbye which has some other relevant lyrics
> I know, you feel like a whore
Working for a dream that isn't even yours
Pleasing everybody but yourself
Would you rather be, somewhere else with someone else?
When casually-inflicted trauma and indifference to using you effectively, let alone your needs as a human being, are a constant, while other responsibilities come and go and are taken less seriously, it feels like the core of the job.
This hits so many feels, and so... effectively. The corporate speak. The callousness. The vapid emptiness. The confusion.
The confusion - that this thing that seems like it should be excellent, isn't, and is in fact damaging - that's a sign of gaslighting, of being convinced to ignore or dismiss your own sense of reality.
When we're in these situations, we do know something's wrong, but we doubt; that it's wrong enough, that the wrongness matters, that the wrongness is worthwhile.
When you know it's wrong enough, you quit. When you know the wrongness is worthwhile, you don't have the dazed malaise. When you doubt your sense of reality, the reality you sense... crumbles.
I remember one time saying to a coworker : something is wrong. Only after I left for a place with a more 'normal' boss, I realized just how wrong it had been.
This was a compelling story for me to read, after leaving a tech job so abusive that I didn’t work full-time for five years. When you envy the cashier at the minimart for their ostensibly more straightforward work day, it’s time to resign. I appreciate that the author found humor in so many inexplicable details of typical corporate office life.
I think we've all had jobs where we were paid much more than we ever expected, that on paper looked like "dream jobs," where our acquaintances would gently rib us about how fortunate and pampered we were, yet working there we felt like an abused puppy until we finally resigned. This story really brought back that weird combination of dread and gratefulness that I simultaneously felt while working such a job.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 74.9 ms ] threadFrankly, this should be mandatory reading for everyone I've ever worked for.
Edit: Yeah, wow, this is more depressing than Ted Chiang's Exhalation[1].
For more in this vein, but with an erotic cyberpunk theme, play the interactive novel Secretary[2].
Edit 2: Perhaps the antidote to this malaise is a re-read of Hexing the Technical Interview[3].
1. https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/
2. https://www.secretarygame.com/
3. https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview
There is no "why it's worth reading". They write for enjoyment, and don't care if anyone reads it.
"I write this content because I want to, and because I enjoy it. If you do too, great! And if not, also great; I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for elsewhere."
On the contrary--every individual reader gets to determine this. I found that it wasn't.
Unlike that comment about 'please summarize'. I'll fault that.
Here's the problem: this is an artwork. It's there to experience something, not intrinsically to deliver an answer or data point. It's to vicariously go on a journey without literally doing the thing. That's a purpose of artworks, and one that's completely wasted on LLMs as they cannot feel or experience or have a purpose: if they did they'd be fixed (or, I supposed, punched in the digital stomach)
Summary? You don't need an LLM for that, conserve the energy. The summary is 'The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach. And that's bad'.
It's literally in the title. I read through to see if it was 'and that's bad' or, 'and that's good', or possibly 'and that's inevitable'. I like the author better for ending up at 'that's bad' with a little bow on the end to celebrate meaningfulness, but that's not the only possible conclusion, and other conclusions would be just as artistically valid.
Quitting 30% of the way through is just as valid. You don't HAVE to take the ride just because it exists. If you're curious, averng, it's an okay story, leads up to its ending pretty well and finishes with a hopeful note. That's most of what you missed.
The only NON-valid way to engage with it would be to point an LLM at it and say 'tell me what the point is, I'm busy' because that would be failing to take the ride without even comprehending that you're failing to do so.
Living life through ChatGPT is about as useful as getting punched in the stomach. Try reading the story or ignoring it completely. There is no summary that is not as meaningless as… well, you know :)
I find two things to be distasteful: 1) Asking others to do the work you're uninterested in doing yourself and 2) the rejection of any kind of stylistic writing as an annoying distraction. I don't know if the person I was replying to is guilty of #2 but I've seen the sentiment a lot here and more frequently than I used to. Not everything is a technical manual that needs to convey its main ideas in as straightforward a way as possible.
This article is a work of art. And I don't mean that in the highfalutin sense. But the style is meant to evoke something just as much as the words themselves. It's fine if it that doesn't work for you, but the goal was not to convey as much meaning in as few words as possible.
1. You land a software job which is "perfect" on almost every traditional indicator. Amazing office and amenities, incredible compensation and benefits, and no hard demands on your time... except to meekly endure some brief pain, for no particular reason, every day.
2. However it seems that neither the team nor yourself really accomplish anything, you gain no sense of social belonging, and you are literally a (very brief) punching-bag for your manager.
3. You "should" be happy, but you aren't. What's the point of it all? What are your values, and what is your worth? You start to struggle with depression. Eventually you can't take it anymore. You quit. Maybe you heal.
It's sort of like a Twilight Zone episode: You get (almost) everything you (believe that you) will be happy with, yet somehow the result is a subtle form of hell.
> The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. — H. P. Lovecraft
Edit: Apologies; I forgot that my mind's ear had edited out the first section entirely. Skip it.
But it's starts from nowhere, without context, is this fiction? Opinion? AI rambling? Why should I keep reading?
2) It's written a little "higher" than modern popular young-adult-influenced fiction, mostly in that it sets up tension where the reader shouldn't know what's going on, then resolves it somewhat later, and relies on the reader holding context for a sentence or two for a thought or idea or image to resolve. This used to how books even fifth graders were expected to read were written (i.e. this wouldn't have been regarded as challenging) but extreme preferences for ease-of-reading has driven shifts in fashions (as publishers desperately seek a market in a world where readership is already very low and still declining) and now lots of folks find once-easy works of fiction "hard" (even, and perhaps especially, native speakers) simply due to rarely encountering fiction that's not, as it were, pre-chewed, so not exercising those reading skills.
3) It's written in second-person, which is a bit unusual. (First-person also used to be rare, but has become common because young readers find it easier, and it is now taking over popular fiction—I expect narrative perspectives other than first-person are the next thing that will be regarded as "difficult" by the folks just becoming adults now, and know for a fact that many current teens and tweens are expressing that to teachers, that they find reading narratives in 3rd person difficult and so mostly just... don't read those)
[EDIT] I'm not asserting that 2 or 3 are the reasons you specifically are having trouble with it, but pointing out a couple observations about it that might be reasons someone would have trouble with it. There could be others.
It's kind of fascinating, when I think about it. This artwork does something I've also seen the GenX novelist Douglas Coupland do to striking effect: set up a vicarious mental state, through seemingly tedious narrative, to produce a state of mind which is then played upon for artistic purposes, modulating this state of mind to cause feelings.
Coupland repeatedly does that by setting up thematic points without stating them, and then resolving not the surface details but the theme with a conclusion that targets the theme rather than the surface plot.
The author here plays on the theme of meaninglessness, and then more or less makes a plea for meaningfulness at the end. It's pretty straightforward, except there seem to be a lot of people unable to experience a narrative at all, and so they're looking for 'the answer' and unable to experience the narrative in a human way. (not that you're required to have this particular human experience… but the whole point is to have this described experience, without having it)
Pretty sure anybody who's frustrated by this would have an even harder time with Douglas Coupland's biggest works. This is really direct, theme-wise. If that's not enough to get you onboard (assuming you want to take that ride), there's a problem.
If large numbers of people in the post-LLM world end up unable to decode these sorts of artworks, that's a loss to human nature.
[EDIT] Still not done but this is just getting more true the farther I go.
Who am I? Who are any of us to complain and/or fix things? The answer is: we're the only people who can. Change has to start somewhere. The best thing for people who have it worse isn't to silently suffer, it's to help ourselves by dismantling the systems under which we both suffer. We have to take every opportunity to do that, and that means even the unglamorous ones.
> If I'm not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when? — Hillel
Import taxes aren't going to help without serious, long-term government subsidization of those jobs.
Apply that to all companies who ship parts to Mexico for assembly/manufacture, and it will make a difference, assuming the tariffs are high enough to make a difference in the showroom.
Here's the Gore/Perot debate pre-NAFTA. Perot seems pretty spot on in his assessment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fi8OOAKuGQ
More expensive cars means cars are going to be less in demand. Means less cars manufactured, means less jobs for people who make cars.
Also, reworking the auto manufacturing pipeline is going to take decades not days.
Maybe ask yourself if the reason nobody else in the past 30 years has enacted the recent measures of the American government is because they were stupid/lazy/greedy or if it's because they clearly don't work.
Shipping parts to Mexico to have them assembled then shipping it to the US is much less efficient than shipping the parts to the US, manufacturing in the US, then selling in the US.
>More expensive cars means cars are going to be less in demand. Means less cars manufactured, means less jobs for people who make cars.
Less jobs for Mexican labor making cars, more jobs for American labor making cars, that's the objective. It also strengthens unions by increasing headcount and making the threat of moving labor to another country much more expensive. Remember, the discussion is about the plight of the average American worker and how they've been systematically squeezed for 30+ years now due to globalization.
>Also, reworking the auto manufacturing pipeline is going to take decades not days.
Yes, more like years not decades, but ya, not sure why anyone would think it would take days. I suspect a lot of companies will try political maneuvers like waiting out Trump's term, hoping the next guy would be more sensible to their profit needs.
>Maybe ask yourself if the reason nobody else in the past 30 years has enacted the recent measures of the American government is because they were stupid/lazy/greedy or if it's because they clearly don't work.
Companies have a much higher profit margin by using Mexican labor, at the expense of US labor. Those companies also donate a lot of money to campaigns. It's pretty off brand for the Democrats under Clinton/Gore to champion moving thousands of jobs to Mexico under NAFTA. I wonder what motivated them to do that.
It may or may not work, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Despair of the average American has a lot of negative, long term social consequences we're currently dealing with, and it's just going to get worse.
Did you know foreign car manufacturers make cars in the US for the US market to avoid tariffs and improve efficiency? They might be on to something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobiles_manufactur...
Let's suppose that we institute an income cap and a wealth cap. For the sake of argument, we'll call that 10 million dollars a year, and 100 million dollars. All the existing taxes apply. Nothing gets treated specially: your income for the year will always be capped at 10MM, and your total wealth will be capped at 100MM. It's a 100% tax and knowingly evading it is a crime. If you hit the income limit in two different years, the mayor of your city will award you a plaque, with an optional ceremony, and if you hit the wealth limit, the governor of your state will award you a plaque.
How much pain does that inflict?
None at all.
But nearly everyone harbors some secret hope of becoming a billionaire right now, and the thought of not winning that lottery is enough to make it politically impossible to enact this tiny reform.
And if you can't make reforms, the whole thing may need to be dismantled.
I'm not repudiating (in this thread) capitalism, per se. Only whatever system it is that's abusing OP's protagonist. If you think capitalism inevitably punches someone in the stomach, well, then yeah; you've got your work cut out for you.
The question you should be asking first is, is it sustainable? If you give someone a bank account with a million in it, they can bring a lot of good to themselves by spending it profligately... but then one day it runs out.
Our safety nets have been ripped away from us. Leaving us with this awful choice of working with shitty employers. In some cases, they might even hold a monopsony on labor and thus have _no choice_.
The time I have wasted at shit tier employers is lost forever. All so the rapacious capitalists could pump the stock and deliver share holder value
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony
That can be a legitimate use, but one should remember that it's but a temporary thing to solve a particular problem, there should be an end date, and a way out. In particular, you should not start depending on the thicker stream of money such a job pays.
It's rare that such a job leaves the physical damage described in the story. More often it can damage you mentally: burned out, depressed, crushed by internally felt shame and guilt. This should not be discounted too easily; it can cost you a lot of plain money to get treated, to say nothing of the suffering, both yours and that of those who care about you.
It may be a terrible job in the absolute sense, but also a good job in the relative sense because it pays well and most involve gut punches.
None of that applies to this allegory. Dodging the punch got the protagonist put on a three-punch PIP. Who knows what punching back would have led to.
For me it's the uselessness of it that would bother me, the actual act of getting punched is neither here nor there. I mean I pay to take boxing classes and I enjoy them.
>Who are you to feel bad about your situation?
I am a human being with one life that is far to brief to spend it being miserable.
My anecdotal experience: The best jobs in my career were the medium-pay, medium-expectations jobs.
Most (but not all) of the very high paying jobs I've had also came with very high expectations. They were paying a lot of money and they knew that people didn't have many other options to get paychecks that large. Managers were compensated on performance of their teams, so they had to extract as much work as possible to get the maximum pay. They knew that they could post a job ad tomorrow with the high salary listed and it would attract hordes of qualified applicants who wanted that paycheck.
I never got to experience the golden era of certain FAANG companies where many people were making bank and few people were ever fired.
Likewise, the lowest paying jobs I've had were also terrible. They had no concept of anything other than extracting work from people for minimum pay. They kept everyone tired, demoralized, and afraid of being fired. People don't search for other jobs as much when they're constantly burned out and overwhelmed.
The sweet spot, for me, has been right in the middle. Good pay (great, relative to all professions), but not top of market pay, and reasonable expectations. Surrounded by a mix of people from different ages but with a lot of parents who have families at home. If I interview somewhere and it's nothing but mid 20s people who don't have families, I stay away because they have much worse concept of work-life balance in my experience.
That's a very good point.
I remember the first time I was in a cycle of trying to meet impossible expectations. We kept putting in a lot of effort and doing some very impressive things, but every time we got close to delivering something the goalposts would move.
After far longer than I'd like to admit, I realized that those lofty expectations weren't designed to be met. They were designed to keep us perpetually insecure. Always feeling like we needed to try a little harder. And it was working on us, at least for a couple years.
The illusion was briefly shattered when a manager gave us a goal that numerically meant that one of our vendors would have to serve us at a loss. He wanted us to negotiate a contract where they paid us to be their customer, when you added up all the factors. When we showed him, he did a pretend-angry routine and lectured us on how we should be thinking bigger all the time. We "failed" to meet that impossible expectation, to the surprise of absolutely nobody on the team. After that, it was like the team had been freed from the shackles of impossible expectations. We did our best and shrugged off the disappointed manager routine when it didn't meet the arbitrary expectations. It was interesting to watch as the manager realized his power over us had been broken, which quickly gave way to a slow-motion process of sidelining us for younger replacements who were more receptive to the disappointed manager routine.
I miss many of those coworkers, but I do not miss that job.
If no one in management has kids, run the other way.
A friend of mine developed stomach ulcers, so this isn't even that fantastical.
Hope your friend's doing okay.
Stress pretty much ruins your body one way or another. It was the teeth grinding that got me.
We both ended up putting more stock in family than work and it has been going well.
When you write truth to power, you get downvoted and suppressed!
Firstly, there's no reason to assume 'AI-assisted' will help you in any way. You might consider that by definition that places you in a position interchangeable with any other person or indeed running the AI by itself, without you.
Secondly, 'most' creative experienced persons? As someone who's successfully-ish done the thing you're talking about, WOOF. No. In fact, I would suggest based on my experience and perspective, that a person looking to rely on AI assistance is the last person who should attempt to be entrepreneurial.
I guess go ahead if you must? If it doesn't really feel like work, it probably isn't work. If it doesn't seem meaningful because it's just chasing what an AI tells you to do, it's probably not going to stick out with any competitive distinctiveness. And if you are only doing it for yourself, you should keep your day job because that's not enough to succeed at business.
AI is not a substitute for personal effort; it's a tool for going where one struggles to go alone.
For work to not feel like work, one has to be super passionate about the goal that one is working toward, and this is never possible at a job. Most people have forgotten what it means to have a personal passion, some of which can also manifest a commercial angle.
To make a long comment short, AI is the missing glue in ikigai that brings everything together.
Want to ask AI, that question?
That's impressive, this post was massive
edit: this post has almost 26,000 words in it I am extremely skeptical someone reads it in its entirety I'm not sure how long that would take
Why do you find that hard to believe?
I obviously looked at this one and was like "nah" seeing the size of the scroll bar and I copied/pasted the words into a counter to get that 26K figure.
Anyway it doesn't matter there's nothing to win here. I'm pointing out this post is long as hell and I'm not gonna spend my time reading it.
It also probably speaks of my caliber as a tech person I have not been in a FAANG job before probably won't be, I'm just lucky to have picked this field up later in life and can get a job in it but I'm nobody noteworthy.
I wouldn't expect many to do so, but I absolutely wouldn't expect people who declined to do the reading to stick around for the post-reading discussion.
Consider that you might indeed have a short attention span, and that there might be a lot of insights and concepts that you may be missing out on due to unwillingness to engage with long-form writing.
people read entire books you know.
i ran the text through a grade level calculator and it came out as 8th grade level, which i understand is typical for a mainstream newspaper. i guess that's why it was such a quick read.
I've spent longer reading documentation late at night that ultimately would turn out to be useless to me. This actually had some plausibility of real life utility, but requires "experiencing" to derive useful benefit from.
I think I just punched myself in the stomach again.
I read it in two sittings, because it was getting waaay too late to finish it yesterday.
At times my career over the decades has felt like this.
I opted not to pursue the opportunity.
It's always wise to ask questions about this during the interview
In my experience, though, hyperbole in job listings is usually the product of someone in HR who doesn't know how to write job listings, so they write a bunch of vacuous words that sound good but mean nothing.
That said, this also feels like something of a relic from the zero-interest-rate era when jobs like this were plentiful, before layoff fever swept the American boardroom.
It goes without saying that the physical damage of being punched in the stomach is a metaphor for the psychic damage of having your soul sucked. You can bare it for a while but it starts to add up. And, like many wounds, it CAN heal over time.
Focus on making your therapy easier and making better metrics, especially at the cost of actual value. The purpose of the therapy-is- the pointlessness.
I have seen this unironically used to excellent effect, and the user was considered indispensable, since being indispensable and highly “valued” was what he focused 100 percent of his 9-5 on. Meanwhile, he was able to leave work behind once he walked out of the office, because he was not at all invested emotionally in the “therapy “ sessions.
Probably won’t work for everyone, but it’s a pretty solid pattern for accepting useless work. The important part is to have some “real” work that you -do- care about. Otherwise it’s potentially a shortcut to a high ledge.
We could also do a lot of things to make such work less uncomfortable. For example, why are cashiers in American supermarkets forced to stand?
If there is no upside for anyone, but only discomfort for the checkout clerks, someone might be able to disrupt the field by paying slightly less but allowing them to stand. Since that isn't happening, I assume that either a) workers are showing the difference between revealed and stated preference b) grocery stores are actually making more money of clerks stand c) paying less in exchange for sitting clerks isn't possible because minimum wage
Employer isn't actually getting any value out of making cashiers stand, and in most other countries, it is a sitting job. So far as I can tell, the only reason why US does it is because "we have always done it this way", which is also the ultimate rationale for a lot of other similar bullshit.
The workers, realistically, don't have any choice if every employer does this. They can take the work as it is, or they can starve, especially seeing how US doesn't have full-fledged welfare.
Ah yes, because nobody has rent to pay or food to buy.
This Ayn Rand-level economic analysis is a joke, and is an insult to people with legitimate grievances. I hope You have the day you deserve.
But we aren’t on that track.
AI+robotics+energy is power. With real creative power you need money much less. The game changes from being a billionaire to having terawats of automation.
Without guardrails, robotics and artificial intelligence will become the primary tools of capital. Capital won’t need workers to implement their designs, and they won’t need money in the sense that they need it today, mostly to pay people to do things.
With factories to produce robots and ubiquitous artificial intelligence, there exists an opportunity for the capital class to separate itself entirely from the seething masses.
With essentially unconstrained power to create, you don’t need to buy things you want, except very special or artisanal things perhaps. You want a yacht? You build a yacht. The promise of GPAR is that you don’t need a factory. You just need more general purpose arthropod robots and the right software. They build the warehouse, they build the ways, they lay the keel, they build the ship. The fact that it might not be the most efficient way to build a yacht is immaterial.
Of course materials may need to be purchased so there will still be steelworks and other heavy industries that don’t lend themselves to small scales, but they too will be “manned” with GPAR labor, and the capital class will just be swapping tokens around among themselves. The true end to trickle down economies.
Humans will still have work in some situations, but it will be work that for some reasons robots cannot do because it is too risky, or too expensive to use automation. So humans will be limited to work that robots cannot do without risking destruction of robotic capital, or that humans can do for around the same cost as 36kw of solar electricity and $10/day of depreciation. Maybe that will cover rice and beans?
Either way, unfettered, untaxed access to effective hybrid cognitive/physical automation is not likely to be great for most humans in the long term.
We need an entirely new approach where labor is not the basis of survival if we are to realise the humanitarian potential of universal automation.
I think there might be a modest proposal or two floating around out there that would neatly resolve the problems as stated.
This whole idea of "other people have it worse so it's rude or 'bad' for me to complain about things I don't like" is not a helpful mindset. That there are starving kids in Africa or victims of war in eastern Europe or slaves imprisoned in China doesn't make your life any better or worse. If every slave in the world was freed making those JIRA tasks would feel exactly the same so there's nothing wrong with wishing those JIRA tasks weren't quite as bad as they are.
Housing is expensive. Food is expensive. Childcare is expensive. Health insurance is expensive (even the "good" insurance, where a PPO will still gleefully deny your claims).
So you can either be well-off and miserable, but probably not destitute, or you can work at a gas station, and enjoy 30-40 years of precarity before you die of a preventable illness.
Great options.
Either way, things are going to suck for a while. That my employer prioritizes Jira tickets over making good software seems a small price to pay for a bit of financial security (at least until Elon hacks my bank account and takes all my money, or I get thrown in prison for being a wokeness sympathizer, or whatever).
Less money and greater meaning, or more money and mind-numbing tedium.
I sympathize with you because on January 1st I nearly doubled my salary, but the job leaves me rather unfulfilled. I'm left substituting my hobbies and family for all meaning in my life, but it's challenging when you spend 50-55 hours a week at work.
I spent some time at Pivotal, and then shamelessly adopted the Pivotal process at subsequent companies. One thing I took to heart is that a product manager that communicates through well-written user stories is golden. Jira is a drag but it's still fundamentally a textbox and you control what goes into that textbox.
Run wild with it! Engineers actually are counting on you.
Is there a name for the genre of writing that gets so, so close to magical realism without actually incorporating literal magic? Because this story is the epitome of it.
I mean I'd rather be on a road trip with my kids, but my work is generally pleasant outside infrequent periods of high stress.
It's mostly about big-corp life, though—my time with startups and little agencies and such didn't much resemble this, day to day, but still had some of that "why the fuck are people paying me to do this?" factor, like having finished projects cancelled without ever being released due to corporate politics or because it turns out a client was only paying us build a product as a BATNA for some acquisition negotiation and they weren't really planning on using it except as a bargaining chip, or having clients (or your own startup leaders...) assign you projects that you're 100% certain are a bad idea that's never going anywhere (and sure enough, you get it done, and it flops, for exactly the reasons you could have told them it would on day 1).
Like, 80+% of the work I've ever been paid to do has been kinda pointless except to drive the gears on some abstract large-scale money-making machine that randomly sometimes produces returns but mostly just makes everyone do a bunch of work that at least someone involved already knows isn't valuable, at least not for any straightforward reasons, but everyone has to do anyway to keep the gears turning.
Feeling lost in a large org, the awkwardness of being new at a large office and of kinda clinging to the very-few people whose names you can remember, being told you're doing well and being paid great while kinda feeling like you're just coasting along and money's showing up in your account for no good reason and because that's just how your stumbling-through-life path has worked out, for whatever reason, but why should that continue for another day and OMG what will I do if people figure out they could just not do a bunch of this stuff and nothing bad would happen and they'd save money and I'd be out of a job and what else do I even know how to do and is this current too-easy gig making me soft and messing me up for future employment (but they're all kinda like that...)—very relatable.
It is interesting to hear how your perspective resonates with the essay, I was mostly wondering how universal that resonance is.
Meanwhile you feel like an imposter, but everything else the others are doing also looks kinda-fake but you're never quite sure if it is and everyone else is just playing along, or if you're the odd man out and just don't get why all that stuff is useful because you're too dumb, and are just lucky nobody's yet noticed that you're not doing anything useful.
Furthermore, if the best way to support my family and to live my non-professional life is to take a punch in the stomach each morning, I think I'd find a way to deal with it?
In short, being a little clever just means you can live normal life on easy mode and you shouldn't feel bad about that, and wanting something more meaningful or glamorous or romantic without actively putting in the work to make that happen and accepting the sacrifices that come with it is just you making yourself miserable for no good reason.
(And of course if you're in the throes of that sort of a mood, being familiar with the above perspective just makes it worse, even as it offers a way out to acceptance of a life as an ordinary schlub who doesn't have things too hard, LOL)
[EDIT] I'm nearing the end and I think, to this piece's credit, some of this criticism of the perspective character's ("your") mindset is present as both text and subtext, plus a good deal of the darker thoughts and moments we're clearly to take as the output of a mind that's unwell and trying to square external reality, perceived un-reality of their situation, a certain awareness of their own privilege, plus the inescapable fact that they simply are not doing OK and are aware that they aren't and also aware that they should be and everyone else seems to be—rather than taking them as something the author intends for us to take as big-T or objectively True just because the perspective character is presenting these thoughts to us.
This is absolutely how that feels. With the exception of my boss reneging on promised expenses and the magical realism elements: I came in, did scrum, said everything was fine, then fucked around on factorio because I could be interrupted at any time, with a 5 minute SLA target, but often days passed between these events. Don’t worry, I had tons of recommendation panels to advise on steering committees to sit silently on. It’s… it’s this, you have nothing to do and all the time to do it in, paid (in my case) primarily to not work somewhere else.
I never even learned the names of the products the dashboards monitored.
> I know, you feel like a whore Working for a dream that isn't even yours Pleasing everybody but yourself Would you rather be, somewhere else with someone else?
The confusion - that this thing that seems like it should be excellent, isn't, and is in fact damaging - that's a sign of gaslighting, of being convinced to ignore or dismiss your own sense of reality.
When we're in these situations, we do know something's wrong, but we doubt; that it's wrong enough, that the wrongness matters, that the wrongness is worthwhile.
When you know it's wrong enough, you quit. When you know the wrongness is worthwhile, you don't have the dazed malaise. When you doubt your sense of reality, the reality you sense... crumbles.