
Are you paid to look busy? - resdirector
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/ask-says-notorious-occupy-academic-job-exist/
======
ryandrake
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to
earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a
technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of
today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living.
We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be
employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian
theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors
and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true
business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it
was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had
to earn a living.” -- Buckminster Fuller

~~~
paulhauggis
This sounds great, but you still need money to survive.

This would mean that the few that did work would essentially be supporting the
rest of society. Why would I ever want to start a million dollar business if I
knew the majority of my earnings would be taken from me by the government to
support people that didn't need to do anything??

You don't have to get a crappy job and work for someone you hate for the rest
of your life. I started a business 2 years ago and I don't plan on getting a
job anytime soon.

You have the freedom to do this..or work for someone..or you could even live
in the woods on berries.

~~~
chasing
You appear to be getting downvoted, but you've struck at the heart of the
issue:

If we want to do away with meaningless jobs, people will still need resources
to survive. And that "one-in-ten-thousand" (or whatever) will need to be taxed
very heavily so the wealth can be spread. We can't have all of our financial
resources siloed into an increasingly small number of people's wallets.

A great benefit to this system will be that people can do important work that
might not necessarily reward them financially. The downside is that, well,
those who do financially well will have to share their earnings. And we'll
have to detach the notion of financial success with the notion of power, which
will be difficult.

And all of this runs anathema to the usual sort of libertarian financial-
might-makes-right of the tech world, unfortunately.

[Edit, since I can't reply to zo1, yet, below: No, I wasn't trying to tie
libertarianism to "financial-might-makes-right." I meant that the tech world
seems to slant libertarian, and people in this world seem to aggrandize money
as the supreme metric of success.]

~~~
vishnugupta
> And that "one-in-ten-thousand" (or whatever) will need to be taxed very
> heavily so the wealth can be spread

I think this is always going to be problematic because once wealth gets
concentrated it's going to be very hard to redistribute it, short of some
revolution or coup. And I sense that this is going to be especially hard in
democratic countries where there's a very close nexus between elected
representatives and wealth holders; US, India being prime examples that I
could think of.

An alternative is to have systems and institutions such that wealth
concentration doesn't even happen in the first place. Also I believe wealth
gets concentrated by systemic and institutionalized transfer of wealth from
middle and poor class to a selected few rich and not because those who are
wealthy are geniuses or are contributing proportionately to society.

I can think of a few examples of systemic, institutionalized wealth transfers
that are happening right now.

1\. Riding on others hard work: A labor working in inhuman conditions with
peanuts for wage producing textiles which are sold with profit margin of a few
thousand percentages.

2\. Privatizing essential services: Poor/middle class persons having to pay
out regular health premium and still live in fear of getting their claim
rejected and end up paying through their nose for smallest of diseases,
medicines.

3\. Rent seeking: Natural resources (oil, spectrum etc.,), licenses, monopoly,
forced software contracts, patents and such.

4\. Crony Capitalism: Govt bail outs for failed private institutions that have
caused massive financial crisis which in itself was a wealth transfer from
poor to rich of a scale that was perhaps unheard of.

5\. Crony Capitalism: Tax payer's money getting transferred to weapon's
manufacturers and private military contractors who in turn are going to
protect the interest of private oil corporations.

6\. Riding on others hard work: Illegal or institutionalized collusion among
private corporations to suppress the wage by not allowing free labor market.

7\. Resource transfer: Government snatching massive tracts of farming land
from the poor farmers and giving them away to private corporations for
pittance.

9\. Erect massive blockade to democratic institutions so that the common
citizen, for whom they were meant for in the first place, will have no choice
but to resort to middle men and shell out huge sums. Courts (lawyers, out of
court settlements etc.,), parliaments (lobbyists) etc.,

If I look at the list of wealthiest people, rent seeking behavior and riding
on cheap labor jumps out!

Sure, they probably deserve to be wealthier than above average, but does the
wealth they have accumulated is proportional to their social contribution?

The intersection between those who have contributed to advancement of our
civilization in whatever small way _and_ the rich people is almost an empty
set. That's a clear enough indicator that those who are very wealthy really
don't deserve it and in fact snatched the wealth from others to start with!

~~~
klunger
Don't forget: 10\. Wal-Mart and Friends: Paying your employees an extremely
low wage with unpredictable shifts (so they can't get a second job). The end
result being that your employees need food stamps to survive, so your profits
are ultimately subsidized by tax payers.

~~~
zo1
Everyone loves the low-prices of WalMart, but they then turn around and
bitterly complain about the low-wages that WalMart pays their employees.

Even if these employees could get a second job, what makes you think they will
be able to find one? Unemployment is sky-rocketing in the US.

------
hawkharris
This reminds me of a study focusing on soccer games. It analyzed A) how often
players shot goals toward the left, middle and right sides of the net; and B)
how often goalies responded by jumping toward the left, middle and right
sides.

The stats revealed a surprising phenomenon. Though opposing players shot
toward each area of the goal evenly — about 33% of the time — goalies jumped
toward the left or the right 80-90% of the time.

So what explains the irrational behavior of these highly skilled goalies? The
researcher who presented this to me and others at a conference argued that it
came down to the appearance of productivity. If a goalie leaps left or right
and fails to stop the goal, he can claim that he tried his best. But if a
goalie remains in the center, even if doing so is the most effective option,
he risks looking like he did nothing.

I call this "productivity theater." In other words, there's sometimes a
disconnect between what it means to be an effective worker and what it means
to appear effective.

To offer just one example from the workplace: in some offices, the culture
dictates that employees must stay from 8 to 6 each day. Their schedules may
make them look like hard workers, but some are probably checking Facebook or
email much of the day. Contrast this with offices that emphasize owning and
completing projects rather than working an amount of time. With the second
policy, you're likely to find some workers who appear less busy but make more
meaningful contributions.

~~~
eaurouge
You're referring to penalty kicks. And I think the study you refer to is
discussed here: [http://www.scienceofsocceronline.com/2009/04/penalty-
kicks-b...](http://www.scienceofsocceronline.com/2009/04/penalty-kicks-by-
numbers.html).

That discussion gets a number of things wrong and trivializes the odds against
the goalkeeper. Any goalie preparing for a match in the sudden death stages of
a tournament, like the World Cup [1], would study previous kicks from the
opposing players. The players also study goalkeepers past shootouts. So any
pattern the goalkeeper chooses to adopt influences the direction of future
kicks by opposing players, and vice versa. In other words, if I know that the
opposing goalie stays in the center, as a rule, 30% of the time (heck even
10%), there's no way I'm going to shoot down the middle. I'm going to go for
the right or left corner to increase my odds.

Going down the middle actually requires more skill than the linked article
credits it with. As a player, you'll have to disguise the direction and you'll
want to aim for the upper half (if it's too low, the goalie can save with the
feet), meaning you could miss and hit the bar or worse, row Z.

The reason goalies don't just stay in the center is that it's more likely that
the opposing player would aim for the bottom left/right corners. And if a
goalkeeper spent more time in the center, he/she increases the odds further
that shots against that particular goalie would go to the bottom left/right
corners.

I think the reason most penalty kicks go to the bottom left corner (left from
the player's perspective) is that most players are right-footed and they can
strike the ball with more force to their left than (with the open foot) to
their right. With enough speed and accuracy, a shot to the bottom corner (just
sneaking by the post) will beat the goalie even if the goalie dives in the
right direction. A shot to the upper corner will always beat the goalie; just
can't get there in time. But shots to the upper half of the goal are tough,
especially when you consider that the player is very likely suffering from
nerves at the time.

1\. 32 days, 8 hours and 45 minutes from now, yay!!

~~~
hawkharris
Thanks for reviewing the study and offering your take on goalies' behavior. As
someone who knows very little about soccer, I was mainly interested in how it
might serve as a metaphor for productivity in the workplace. But it was
interesting to learn more about the context for the study as well as how
goalies and other players anticipatw moves.

------
dsirijus
My employee next to me is working hard. I'm in elinks in terminal on HN and on
IRC, with vertical split of htop in tmux. He thinks I'm working hard too, with
all those numbers, columns, scrolling output and blinking cursor.

I feel so bad right now. I'm going to go actually work.

~~~
xr09
When reading stuff like this I wonder, how do the Windows folks manage to do
the same? A browser disguised as Visual Studio? doubledesktop.exe? I'm so
thankful for my *nix with all these little toys.

~~~
TorKlingberg
[http://codereddit.com/](http://codereddit.com/)

Reddit that looks like source code. For opening in Visual Studio's built-in
browser. I am not a Windows dev.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Wow, the load-comments-inline functionality is beautiful.

In fact, the whole thing actually looks better than some of the subreddit
styles.

------
dantheman
"And then I thought, well, maybe that explains some other things, like why is
it there’s this deep, popular resentment against people who have real jobs?
They can get people so angry at auto-workers, just because they make 30 bucks
an hour, which is like nowhere near what corporate lawyers make, but nobody
seems to resent them. They get angry at the auto-workers; they get angry at
teachers."

I thought people were angry at these people because of their unions - all the
other jobs he listed are nonunion and thus the higher wage is actually a
market wage.

~~~
Artistry121
Lawyers are not unionized but the bar exam definitely does limit supply.

You are correct though - one major reason why teachers and auto-workers might
get criticism is because they pay an organization to make sure companies and
other individuals cannot contract freely.

------
jqm
The worlds wasted wealth...

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Worlds-Wasted-Wealth-
Environment/d...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Worlds-Wasted-Wealth-
Environment/dp/0962442321)

The book is poorly written to the point it seems less than credible but it has
some interesting takes on the situation. The author postulates something he
calls "waste distribution territories" that have risen to take advantage of
technological advancements. The basic gist is that instead of people working
less as technology advances, unnecessary jobs are added to society and people
work the same or even more at selling insurance, filling out forms in HR etc.
etc. He points out numerous specific examples of this waste and there are many
more he misses. He does offer some specific solutions to this problem that are
very unlikely to be rationally implemented without a major structural collapse
first. Overall, a poorly written book with some very insightful concepts.

------
3minus1
5 years ago I worked as a consultant at a large enterprise software company.
There were definitely large periods of time (months long) where I was
averaging 3 hours a week of actual work. Insane, insane work hours. There
would be a 5 person team (Analysts, QAs, developer) spending 5 weeks on a
release that consisted in 45 min worth of text changes. I don't usually hear
people on HN talk about not having work to do. I guess it's different at start
ups. It's just fucking unbelievable to me though that I would get paid so much
to do so little. And I feel like some kind jerk complaining about it.

------
higherpurpose
There's a saying in my country for this: "they pretend to pay us, and we
pretend to work" \- meaning the salary isn't great, and they're getting what
they're paying for.

~~~
tormeh
I've heard that one too. It's brilliant! I don't think it's really what we're
talking about here though.

------
danso
I've had this concept rolling around in my head occasionally...the best path
in becoming a better programmer is to _sincerely desire to automate yourself
out of your job_.

Instead of backing up a system via GUI every week, figure out the API calls
needed to hook up via a script. After a few weeks of triggering that script by
hand, write a cron job and a logger that logs the relevant transactions. After
awhile of manually SSHing into the backup server to verify the existence of
those backups, write some kind of litmus test that fails if the backups were
corrupted. Instead of checking the log every once in awhile, have it email you
(and just to be safe, use other kinds of push notifications too ) when success
or failure happens. And instead of lackadaisically running emergency drills to
see that the backups do work, write a automated deployment system that runs
off of those backups, and put that in a cron job.

At the end of all that, you still should want to be "the human". You should
still want to SSH in manually, check the checksums, deploy from backup on a
lazy Friday just to make sure...but those are _intentional_ actions...not just
some repetitive drill you do because you have to. And if something does go
clusterfuck, you're still there to handle things.

So the test is: now that you've automated the robot-part of your work...which,
the fact that you could automate it means it would have been automated _some
day_...what do you feel free to do now? Does your company have the foresight
to reward you, both in salary, and in discretion to pursue projects that truly
require human insight and expertise? Or is the culture such that it's just
better to keep your automated-workflow to yourself, and spend the day surfing
the internet? Not that either of those choices are wrong...I mean, when I'm
near retirement age, I will definitely choose the latter happily...but if that
first option of moving ahead isn't available, then that's a sign that you
might have to open your horizons.

Of course, if you can't automate any of your work...congratulations, it just
might mean you're working on exciting, non-repetitive things that (...for now)
require the best of human insight and intelligence.

edit: forgot to add the best bit...no matter what the outcome at the end of
the automation process, you'll still have become a better developer by just
building it out. I think 99% of my experience and knowledge of the command-
line (and also, much-needed appreciation of functional design) grew out of an
impatience with perfectly good GUIs. Just one of the other upsides to being a
programmer...you can appreciably lessen your own workload so directly through
improvement of your personal craftsmanship.

~~~
zanny
> Does your company have the foresight to reward you

More like to they have the foresight to patent your ideas in their name, take
your IP and restrict it via copyright, and then make fortunes off of it while
the rest of the world withers in squalor.

There is a huge market movement in the IP industry not just because of how it
is an obvious quick buck today to just sue everyone and put money down the
legal black hole, but that in the long run when the means of production are
wholly automated, you rule the world if the men with the guns give you
exclusive rights to those ideas.

~~~
danso
Sure, I think this is a legit fear -- which is why keeping it to yourself and
whistling while you work may be the path to take.

But again, if you were able to automate it, then someone who is not you will
be able to. And more likely, that someone will be a SaaS who _really_ doesn't
give a shit about fair labor as it pertains to your situation.

It's likely automation _will_ eat the world...but my hope is that rather than
virtual enslavement (or SkyNet), society will have reached a political point
where living wages is a popular, enforceable concept, and the human race
overall has risen above the economic rat race...but that's a long path (or may
require World War 3, in the case of the Star Trek universe). In the mean time,
for that political environment to even become favorable, more individual
agents -- who are also hopefully, forward-thinking and not-entirely-selfish --
have to push the idea that humans have real value even after their initial
grunt work has been automated.

edit: also, this is why I meant "automate" in the most pedant, grinding
way...as in, take care of the crap work, even if it means learning how to
write a script that has surely been done before (the GUI app is likely based
on such a script)...now, if in your automation of the backup routine, you are
hit with a Eureka moment and come up with an incredible, unrivaled compression
scheme to store your backups...consult a lawyer before writing your idea on
paper.

------
gosub
Seinfeld already did it.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd9ma2UVLHM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd9ma2UVLHM)

------
hippich
If you are developer or some sort of IT engineer, don't automatically think
your job is not BS. Like job of developing thin client to a windows server
running licensed software to get around license costs of software, where price
is based on number of users... Yes, this types of businesses generate TONS of
money from essentially the fact, that supplier and customer could not get in
agreement for more reasonable license...

~~~
zanny
I'd argue (as would most of the free software community) the creation of
proprietary software is entirely bullshit. Because you have to eventually
reinvent it with either permissive or copyleft licenses to just avoid the huge
black hole that is legal bullshit and bureaucracy around licensing rights to a
number that is not even scarce once its made. And until it is foss, you are
just denying the users their freedoms to the stuff they are paying you for,
and until it is sufficiently free it really isn't even a working product in my
book.

Hell, even projects like Tizen vs Android and ZFS vs BTRFS vs XFS and KVM vs
Xen vs Vmware vs Virtualbox are all bullshit jobs and unnecessary work
reinventing the same wheel over and over to either satisfy a boss need out of
the chief developers, the inability for the forerunner to accept others
opinions into their project, or just raw license and legalese incompatibility
bullshit.

It is, though, 99% bs. And every time someone tries to reinvent IMing after
xmpp (without being able to, in a paragraph, describe the intrinsic flaw in
xmpp you can't fix through amendments to the standard, and how their
alternative immediately fixes them) it is just more BS. All the photo sharing
websites, all the web apps, 99.99% of them are all bullshit because someone
already did it before, and you just want to tweak a few knobs (which you could
have easily done if all involved projects were open contribution and pliable
to change and forking) and had simple results, but no, you have to start from
scratch and spend a million LOCs reinventing wordpress. And you still write it
in Lua! If you wrote it in, say, python, I'd be all over that because that
presents a tangible benefit - "Lua is awful, I don't like it, and as a user of
my software, you don't like it either, and you can't just patch fix that, so
here is a replacement in python".

~~~
pdkl95
While I'd agree with that sentiment for most _sold_ software, there's another
aspect to consider. There are some jobs that don't ever really go away, and
software is one of them. It's similar at times to the traditional "trades"
such being a plumber or electrician.

So while "proprietary" (i.e. closed source or limiting who has access to it)
may not be the precise description, a LOT of software is (and will be) "in-
house" stuff. This is because while commodity solutions are great in many way,
the are general tools, and will never map _exactly_ to the current task and
needs of a business.

Just like how the plumber is happy to buy common solutions to piping problems
(e.g. standard sizes, common specialized parts that solve problems that show
up all the time), a software engineer can pull from Free Software as his
"standard parts". In the end, though, because every need is at least
_slightly_ different, a business will always need to hire somebody to put
those parts together - just like they hire an in-house plumber or other
specialist.

A consequence of this, though, is that all that specialized work is not going
to be particularly useful outside the place where it was originally used. The
occasional useful features can be pushed back upstream, but that still leaves
a lot of glue around.

As time goes on, and the collection of "standard tools" grows, I expect the
ratio of "glue" to "useful new feature" to increase.

~~~
ufo
My guess is that the ratio of custom to glue stuff should be more constant
over time. As old custom stuff becomes standard, it simply enables people to
start tackling harder problems and create more custom stuff.

------
keypusher
No, I'm not, and it's one of the things I enjoy about programming. Some weeks
I work 30 hours, others I work 60. But if I did the things I committed to
doing this week, then I go home. Why sit in the office and pretend to be
working? It makes no sense.

~~~
paulhauggis
Most managers would not accept this. Since most developers are paid salary (as
opposed to hourly), many feel like if you were leaving early, you aren't
working hard enough.

I've seen it at every place I've ever worked. At one place, my manager
directly told me I needed to stay until 6 or 7 every night or the boss will
think that I'm slacking.

~~~
keypusher
That seems completely backwards. You are being paid salary but treated as if
you were hourly. If your managers think it's important for you to be in the
office 9-5 every day, why don't they just set up an hourly rate and make you
punch a timecard? To me, the reason to have salary is that you are paying a
worker to do a job. Highly paying jobs usually require highly skilled workers,
and those workers should be judged on their results. Completion of the job and
all of its duties is worth $XXX,000 per year, and it is up to the employee to
determine how best to allocate their time and resources. The fundamental
mistake of the approach you describe is that software development is not a
profession in which merely showing up and putting in labor is of great value.
I can pay Jim the Janitor $10/hour to show up and sit in front of a computer.
He is never going to write me a distributed map-reduce powered vectorized
graph search in Erlang (or whatever).

Let's say my boss tells me to write a TPS report collector. So I come in for
10 hours every day for a month and slave away on a bunch of crufty repetitive
boilerplate code which is low on creativity and high on required hours. I
eventually manage to hack together a custom report finder and parser, and
generate the necessary solution as described by his email. What if my coworker
wakes up after a good night's sleep, comes into the office and talks to
everyone involved about the project, then realizes that what the VP of
MarketResources really wants is some nice graphs of the TPS trends? He finds
an open source TPS report analysis framework, spends a couple days integrating
it into the workflow, learns a great solution for dynamically generating
graphs while out for drinks after a local dev meetup, submits it all to the
boss after two weeks and then takes a vacation. Who has really provided more
value to the company here? My point isn't about frameworks vs custom software,
it's about good solutions to hard problems. Salary employees, especially
software developers, should be evaluated on their ability to come up with
great solutions to hard problems and provide value to the team and company.
Not whether they showed up at 7am or 10am.

Programming is not like digging a ditch, where 17 man hours are required to
dig a ditch of length 14 and width 5. It is quite possible and even common to
spend a lot of time working on widgets, features, and implementations which
are completely unnecessary, non-optimal, or completely wrong. It is well
understood that one great programmer can be worth many, many novice
programmers because even 20 novice programmers given twice the time will not
come up with the brilliantly simple and elegant solution of the veteran
expert. So the more you can do to make the programmers you do have happy and
as effective as possible, the better.

~~~
twistedpair
Have you ever seen cost plus government dev projects? They make more money the
more pointlessly complex and slow to develop your solution it. If only the
world was a sensible meritocracy.

------
reboog711
The bulk of my clients pay me hourly, on an as needed basis.

I've had a few clients; where it sometimes it feels like they are making stuff
up for me to do just so I'll be available when real work comes down the pike.

I have mixed feelings about this.. on one hand--billable hours. On the other
hand--it is not satisfying to do things with absolutely no business value.

~~~
KMag
If your client is a medium to large sized company, it may also be a case of
needing to use budget or have budget reduced the next year.

A place I once worked one year had a big budget surplus. They bought a
Winnebago, affectionately named the Waltabago after Walt, the guy who ran the
team. The next year, Walt bought a Sunfire V1280 with his leftover budget.
Walt was a good manager and generally a good guy. It's just that the nature of
his business had unpredictable ups and downs, so he was incentivized to make
justifiable but wasteful purchases in order to avoid over-spending in peak
cost years.

~~~
keithpeter
Did you get to borrow the Winnebago?

We call this need to spend the budget thing 'slippage' in the UK. Once we had
a little bit of slippage, about £1k, so we bought some Sony Mavica floppy disk
cameras when they were new and exotic. We just lent them out to staff to learn
how to take digital pictures. That lead to digital editing, storyboards &c and
quite a lot of upskill. Much better powerpoints.

Just a thought...

------
frik
_Office Space_ (1999) is a great and rather funny movie about this topic: [7,9
stars on IMDb]

* IMDb: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/)

* Trailer: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IwzZYRejZQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IwzZYRejZQ)

------
comatose_kid
I would read this article but I am busily typing my name over and over into a
word document.

~~~
girvo
I think Black Books[0] sums this phenomenon up nicely...

[0]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVGdhAetJaQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVGdhAetJaQ)

~~~
mattbee
And how to suceed at board level -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WGrmTJnfIg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WGrmTJnfIg)

------
Roboprog
Is my job a bullshit job? No, but...

I'm miserably reminded every week when I do my TPS^H^H^H timesheet just what
proportion of my job is bullshit activity that I have to get through _so that_
I can get to the part where I am actually going to work on something that will
matter to someone. ("Look! I actually spent almost 10 hours this week
[designing/] writing [/testing] code!") Knowing _what_ needs doing is of
course important, but after the third time of hearing it, it's time to shut up
and go to work, people!

So many meetings, so many... (sobs bitterly in corner)

~~~
albemuth
My employer pays for my internet connection but requires you to file an
expense report, I never do because it feels like part of the job
responsibilities to get a fraction of the salary is to file the damn thing.
I'm basically giving my employer a discount in order to avoid paperwork.

------
qwerty_asdf
There's an aspect of this frustrating, forced busy-work behavior that can get
baked into software development, and it isn't going away anytime soon.

Technology innately gives rise to a behavior called yak shaving, and it's not
limited to software development, but pretty much any form of technology-
related behavior is prone to it, when layers upon layers of technology
compound one another and accumulate their own accretion disks of cruft.

[http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/old-archive/gsb-
archive/gs...](http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/old-archive/gsb-
archive/gsb2000-02-11.html)

A very simple example is needing anti-freeze to drive a car. If there were no
chemical companies producing millions of gallons of anti-freeze a year, and no
auto-stores to distibute periphery car necessities, and gas stations, and auto
mechanics didn't supply anti-freeze, because it's beyond the scope of their
expertise, how would I produce the right anti-freeze for my car on my own?
Well, what _are_ the requirements for producing industrial grade ethylene
glycol?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene_glycol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene_glycol)

A similar open-source software example would be dependency hell.

Just compare the differences in dependencies between two very popular open-
source web browsers:

[http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/web/chromium-
browser](http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/web/chromium-browser)

[http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/web/firefox](http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/web/firefox)

In order to accurately compare the two applications, how would you take
advantage of the fact that these are open-source projects, and actually review
the source code, and then build from source?

Each application is built upon many other independent software projects, each
sub-project with it's own disciplines, specializations and dependencies. It's
time consuming and painstaking behavior to dig into the source trees for these
programs and all their dependencies.

How deep can you go before you give up?

------
hownottowrite
For Reference:

David Graeber's original article: [http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-
jobs/](http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)

David Graeber's Book, "Debt: The First 5,000 Years":
[http://www.amazon.com/Debt-
First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290/](http://www.amazon.com/Debt-
First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290/)

------
tormeh
Combine this with how miserable low-rank work like shopping bag packers and
store work is, and you have a great clusterfuck of a society.

~~~
markbnj
I don't think that's the point at all. Even low-wage work would be more
satisfying, in the author's view, because your labor is directly beneficial.
You can see the results of it. Of course we'd all like to make more money than
a store clerk, but in the quest for money we might end up doing things that
satisfy us much less than simple labor would. For my part, as a developer, I'm
among the fortunate.

~~~
twistedpair
Have you ever unloaded a truck with a group of teamsters? I did one summer. I
was shocked how aggravated they became at me for hustling. I got sent back to
my department because "at that rate we'll have it unpacked in an hour and
we've got 4 hours to do it."

Nothing special about white collar jobs here.

------
jacques_chester
My employers are actually serious about pair programming, so I am easily
getting more work done now than I've ever done before.

We take lunch, we take breaks, we work fixed hours, but holy moly we also get
a helluva lot done every day. It's both exhausting and refreshing.

------
sidcool
I was in Houston for a couple of years in 2011-2012 for a big bank in the
capacity of a Software Engineer. The environment there was caustic and anti-
relaxation. The people introduced artificial stresses to sound and seem
important (mostly to avoid being laid off). There's one manager especially who
reminded me of a wolf on prowl. He roamed about in the office from time to
time and shouted orders arbitrarily at people. Most of them ignored him, but
he seemed important to many. I got tired of the constant bickering and
unnecessary meetings, left the job.

------
neovive
This reminds me slightly of the scene in the movie "Office Space" when the
consultants were interviewing one of the employees and he was discussing
"People Skills".

------
acc01
Relevant short, "el Empleo":
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxUuU1jwMgM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxUuU1jwMgM)

------
Totient
The guy I work for really has no idea how easy certain tasks are once you
automate them. I have done nothing to correct his misconceptions.

(I'm a CS grad student, working under a professor who somehow got tenure
despite being unable to program his way out of a cardboard box. I swear, half
of this job is tricking him into thinking I'm doing his work, so I can focus
on doing actual research. ...I really need to find a new advisor.)

~~~
sillysaurus3
What research are you working on?

------
zobzu
well they sure have a point. then i work from home (telecommute then) i dont
work "as long" but i certainly get much more done AND i am also happier.

thats mainly because i dont have to "look busy" or "browse sites for a moment
until my brain is able to function decently enough to work again" instead i
can go for a job, do the laundry, what not. works much better than sitting on
the computer.

------
torbit
Just two weeks ago I was talking to a guy in the military. His government job
was to monitor military test taking. At times only 2 people would show up in
one day to take a test. He gets paid $20+ an hour. I didn't ask how many hours
a week he worked, but I got the impression it was his current main job.

------
noonespecial
When all you pay for is butts in the seats, don't be surprised if the only
thing you get is a bunch of asses.

------
appreneur
I always felt most people in IT offices occur very busy, when their work is
harldy any time consuming, just to keep their job, they act busy all the
time...I felt this false pretense is the primary reason most people loose
confidence in trying new things and being experimental.

------
Tycho
Case in point: last week Barclays bank announced they were laying off 20,000
staff. Share price immediately went up 8%.

