
Why so many jobs are crappy - kevinburke
http://heteconomist.com/why-so-many-jobs-are-crappy/
======
rgbrenner
I didn't like this article. Felt the author gave no thought to what work has
been throughout human history: dull, physically demanding, etc.

He says work is meant to be interesting engaging and meaningful... It would be
great if that were true... But that is written nowhere. Work is simply things
that need to be completed that someone else is willing to pay for. Any other
definition is you projecting your ideals onto what the task really is.

So to answer the question: why are so many jobs crappy? Because that is the
way things have always been.

If you enjoy your work (like I do), count yourself lucky.

~~~
bendmorris
People who read Hacker News are naturally biased about what work is or should
be. If everyone did work that was interesting, engaging, and meaningful,
society couldn't function. There are plenty of jobs that are neither
interesting nor engaging but are necessary. How many garbage men or laundromat
employees really enjoy and are stimulated by their work?

~~~
untog
_How many garbage men or laundromat employees really enjoy and are stimulated
by their work?_

I think you can live two kinds of life. One where your job is your passion,
and takes over your life. A lot of startup folk are in this bracket. I'd argue
that if you aren't, then you shouldn't be doing a startup.

On the other side, people work to earn the money they need to pursue the
interests outside of work. I really don't think there's anything wrong with
that, and it annoys me when people in communities like HN get snobby about it.
The garbage worker is even getting a physical workout every shift- meanwhile,
the rest of us slowly get less fit sat at a desk, and end up sacrificing our
free time to go to the gym.

~~~
mejarc
One thing I liked about my time as "dog-collar labor" is that all my co-
workers had interesting non-work pursuits, and there was no penalty for
leaving work behind to engage in them. None of us mistook our stints as
cashiers, food servers, or book store clerks for our passions, nor did our
employers.

There was refreshing frankness that the whole thing was just business, nothing
personal: no, we weren't enticed with company-paid meals, but we also weren't
required to work limitless overtime.

~~~
coldtea
> _no, we weren't enticed with company-paid meals, but we also weren't
> required to work limitless overtime._

I.e exchange your little precious time in this world for some token BS
"handout", that's pre-calculated in your pay expenses anyway.

~~~
pmcg
I prefer company meals since it _saves_ my time. I don't have to go out and
get food or bring my own. This is assuming the food is good and healthy, which
it happens to be.

~~~
kelnos
Being served lunch at the office is certainly convenient, and _takes_ less
time, but I wouldn't say it _saves_ me time.

We have catered lunches 2-3 times per week. On those days, I will usually take
about 30 minutes for lunch, and get right back to work. On other days, I'll
take 45-90 minutes for lunch, and I'll get to take a walk, go outside,
possibly see some of my non-work friends, and have different food.

The bottom line is that I'm going to leave the office at the end of the day at
roughly the same time, regardless of the length of my lunch. That's almost
certainly not the case for everyone, but, as a data point, it is for me. Lunch
at the office only "saves" me time to get more work done that day. Don't get
my wrong: I love my job, but I also love being outside and seeing friends too.

------
coldtea
> _Why so many jobs are crappy_

Because there is no labor movement.

Jobs were even crappier back in the day: arbitrary work times with no overtime
(16 hours were not uncommon), child labour accepted, no holidays, fired for
whatever reason, blacks and women worked effectively under different laws, so
work safety measures, bizarre employer demands, etc.

In american a lot of those were fixed after long struggles by the workers and
the (glorious) american labor movement.

Nowadays a lot of the unions are BS (and viewed as suspect from the left and
"lazy" from the right), and one of the reasons is that they do not represent
enough of the workers anymore (in some fields, there is zero participation
even).

Those are now too apolitical, apathetic, and indoctrinated to "each one for
himself" to join them and shake them up to function properly.

~~~
smsm42
I don't know which country are you in, but in the US the unions is nowhere
near apolitical and apathetic. The unions such as NEA and SEIU are among the
most prolific political donors and most powerful lobbies, and routinely engage
in both local and national politics, and any politician who wants to take on
them takes huge risk. See e.g.:
<http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list_stfed.php?order=A>

>>>> blacks and women worked effectively under different laws,

You know that many labor measures - like minimal wages, etc. - were taken -
with wide support of unions - to exclude blacks from labor markets, and at the
time were openly acknowledged as such? See e.g.:
[http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2013/03/06/ma...](http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2013/03/06/mandated-
wages-and-discrimination-n1525477)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
> You know that many labor measures - like minimal wages, etc. - were taken -
> with wide support of unions - to exclude blacks from labor markets, and at
> the time were openly acknowledged as such?

This is one of those infamous libertarian myths formulated from taking a few
past statements to represent a consensus of the time; that somehow black labor
should have been cheaper than white labor if the free market was considered
alone. This racist crap doesn't belong on Hackernews.

~~~
whatshisface
I think you are missing his logic: It doesn't matter what the nonstandard
group can _produce_ , it matters what the bosses _think_ they can produce. If
I think someone is worth $4/h, I won't pay them more, even if I am wrong.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
There are two problems here.

First, the myth is widely pushed by groups with certain ideologies without
much grounding in real history. They take a couple of quotes from way back
when and make a sweeping generalization. But when we go back through unbiased
sources, the argument falls apart; the minimum wage was mostly well
intentioned.

Second, that poorly educated blacks were somehow inferior to poorly educated
whites is extremely racist in itself. The argument then should NEVER be "the
minimum wage hurts blacks", it should rather be "racism hurts blacks". No
would here would argue with that.

~~~
smsm42
Racism hurts blacks. Minimum wage hurts blacks too, among other low-skilled
workers. If you think blacks are absent among low-skilled workers - well, it
must be nice living on your planet, welcome to Earth.

>>>> the minimum wage was mostly well intentioned.

How you then explain the quotes about "colored labor"? Ah, yes, I know - they
never said that, despite the sources, evil libertarians invented that. Maybe
on your planet they didn't indeed.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
> If you think blacks are absent among low-skilled workers

I said given two poorly educated workers, one white, one black. Any big delta
in their treatment is due to racism, not the minimum wage.

> How you then explain the quotes about "colored labor"? Ah, yes, I know -
> they never said that, despite the sources, evil libertarians invented that.

You cherry picked your sources and then made a broad generalization.
Libertarians aren't racist, they are just dishonest for using racism to
further their own ends: to make the minimum wage sound like a racist plot when
there is no real evidence for that.

~~~
smsm42
>>>> I said given two poorly educated workers, one white, one black. Any big
delta in their treatment is due to racism, not the minimum wage.

Big delta in treating two specific workers can be due to anything, not
excluding racism of course. But we weren't discussing specific people, we were
discussing the fact that the unions contributed a lot to the fact that blacks
effectively worked under "different laws" then whites, back at 19th and early
20th century. It is a fact, and your claim that it is a "libertarian myth" is
false, and if you ask any historians knowledgeable in the subject, they will
tell you that the same as I am.

>>>> to make the minimum wage sound like a racist plot when there is no real
evidence for that.

I don't know what you call "real evidence". There are quotes from prominent
labor officials. There are history books. There are articles by historians who
research the question. I gave you a number of links, you can find more by
simple google reseqrch on labor relations and African Americans. If you
willing to deny the facts because your ideology says something you now support
can not have bad roots - well, I can not help you with your willful ignorance,
I can only feel sorry for you. You still know what the truth is, even if you
can't admit it.

------
nhashem
Most jobs are selling your time in exchange for money. If your time is mostly
fungible compared to someone else's time (ie. most low-skill labor), then I'd
say all the algebraic equations expressed in the OP are true. He is
essentially modeling supply/demand curves of typical scenarios involving
"human capital."

In the past, the value of human capital -- the amount you got paid for selling
your time for money -- used to be more lucrative. At one point nearly half of
Americans were in a labor union, which artificially constrained the supply of
human capital so it would be worth more. Conversely, our previous industrial
revolutions required a great deal of human capital (building factories,
sewers, etc), generating lots of demand that would keep the value of human
capital high. Due to political and technological changes, this is basically no
longer the case.

If you're a software engineer, then none of these models apply to you because
you are _high-skill_ labor (also sometimes called "talent.") You're paid for
your time, but your productivity can be orders of magnitude higher than your
pay. In the OP's "expendability of labor" graph, the "sweet spot" is enormous.
In my nearly ten years as a software engineer, I've seen colleagues laid
off/fired for all sorts of reasons, but _none of them_ were due to, "well we
did the math, and we decided your production is not worth your salary." I've
seen layoffs where the executives _literally admitted_ they would make less
revenue/profits due to the lost productivity of the laid off workers not
offsetting the savings in salary, but they had to hit a certain "profit
percentage" or some other absurd reason that justified the layoffs.

In any event -- I've thought a lot about the macro-society impact of this new
model of economy, if we're truly destined for a world where human capital is
just not that valuable. My interest in politics and healthcare has largely
been based on this -- what should we consider "subsistence living," and what
happens if we reach an inflection point where most jobs paying for human
capital are below it?

It's possible, of course, that this will all be moot, and our next industrial
revolution will have a huge demand for locally-based human capital (e.g. a
"renewable energy industrial revolution scenario," where there is a huge
demand for laborers that can install solar panels on houses, or something),
and the median income for Americans will increase. Or it's possible for a more
gradual shift to happen (e.g. the graying of the baby boomers causes a gradual
increase in demand for local caretakers of the elderly). But I'm not sure it's
a good idea to just assume that will happen.

~~~
zanny
> where there is a huge demand for laborers that can install solar panels on
> houses, or something

Here's the kicker - any new industry, at any point in the future, that pops up
demanding labor, is much more likely to invest (since they are investing
anyway - it is new industry and new markets) in automating the labor out of
the equation from the start. Industries are only slow in that transition today
because they have established infrastructure around the usage of meat bags on
two legs as units of work, but for anything brand new (like semiconductor
plants, or the Tesla auto factory) even in the short term it makes more sense
to automated the expletive out of any physical work because I'd imagine in
even just a year at minimum wage it would pay for itself factoring in the fact
you have to build everything up from scratch.

So the solar panel installer in 10 years would _probably_ be a self-driving
fork lift truck that carries a bed of industry-standard packed and oriented
solar panels, where the vehicle has GPS and will drive to all customer homes
and install the panels automatically, with only the need for an electrician to
come wire them into the houses electric.

But that is short term. You can easily replace the electrician with some hand
held spider robot that will use the blueprints for the house and sensors to
find and rewire the electrical into the panel. In a hundred years, you aren't
installing new panels, because every new house is factory made (by automated
assembly) with the panels preinstalled, and they all have interchangeable
parts quality electric systems that dumb non-sensing robots can rewire because
they are standardized if necessary.

It is _glorious_ that we are eliminating the need for human capital to make
things happen. We are removing people from so many equations you would
otherwise be wasting someones time on. We may have some bumps in the road and
some dark ages of depravity and extremely concentrated ownership of the means
of production and all that, but a thousand years out (assuming we haven't
destroyed ourselves yet) any human still alive (albeit with a nebulous
definition of human if we start gene splicing and installing cybernetics
pervasively) will almost certainly have no need to "labor" at all, because the
machines and infrastructure built up over a thousand years will provide for
them.

~~~
nhashem
_We may have some bumps in the road and some dark ages of depravity and
extremely concentrated ownership of the means of production and all that_

Well, this is what I'm personally concerned about. I agree with everything you
just said. But what is the politically optimal way to cross over that
inflection point? Or to rephrase: what kind of rules should we have in
government/society so that the transition doesn't effectively cause a
revolution and end up derailed? Should we consider an education system
oriented around high-skill labor? Should our system of taxation and assistance
account for this new concentration of capital? And can you do this without
impeding the very technological/economic growth you're accounting for? Too
much taxation may stymie private sector advancement, too little taxation may
cause an elective or literal revolution, and the wrong adjustments can easily
introduce moral hazards (e.g. nobody working at all before our technology is
advanced enough to require zero human capital).

~~~
Retric
I think adding a living wage _and_ removing the minimum wage is the way you
get though this bump. If you make human labor cheap enough someone is always
going to want to have their lawns mowed by people or whatever. Assuming they
can afford to do so. Basically, people with minimal skills end up working not
for food, but to have toy's etc. The trick is finding a number where people
can have a little disposable income, but working 20+ hours a week even at 3$
an hour gives them several times as much fun money.

I suspect in the US we could do that now with around a flat 40% tax without
deductions. Note: Living wage would need to be a national number ~12 to 15k
and not what it takes to get by in NYC or whatever.

PS: What makes the numbers work out is you also get rid of social security,
unemployment insurance, food stamps, and the lower tax brakes as well as all
other tax breaks. Also, people making the average income are revenue neutral
in this scheme as they get back the same amount of money as there paying into
it minus whatever overhead is involved in running the program.

~~~
agsamek
This idea was evaluated by comunism in eastern europe. Most people do not have
enough drive to fight beyond minimum. If you additionally give them political
power they will be able to bring outlayers down efectively.

~~~
zanny
Eastern Europe was about state control of the market, though. Getting a
government stipend for living expenses doesn't mean you take control of
everything.

What it _does_ mean is that jobs like waiting and cleaning that are currently
easily replaced by automation, but are not due to the artificial need to
maintain the wasting of hours to get food. I don't think the traditional
restaurant industry would survive such a transition, for example, because it
is much more economical to have a local food generator that knows all the
recipes and can ship freshly prepared meals via automated vehicle to consumers
than to have them go to a restaurant, get served, get waited on, get cooked
for by kitchen chefs (who are usually doing something between heating up
frozen food to following an instruction sheet from corporate) when we can
eliminate all that work for most of us, and anyone who cares enough to get the
waited experience can _pay_ a real wage for it, because labor demand is more
reasonable in such a circumstance - people would only work for you if you gave
reasonable value for their time, not just because they need to eat and our
progressively greater per-worker output and ability to eliminate human capital
in many endeavors all together makes most labor unnecessary.

------
mcartyem
Many jobs are crappy because companies want guarantees. They would rather have
peace of mind that things are moving at a known rate compared to any risk of
uncertainty.

The jobs are not necessarily crappy because companies are interested in
keeping wages down. Companies are more interested in boosting profits compared
to keeping wages down.

The humorous part is so many jobs continue to remain crappy even when you make
a boss look good by generating orders of magnitude more value than he
bargained for when hiring you.

Even if you explained to the boss how you could generate such value at the
time of hire, they still wouldn't be able to assimilate it's possible. They
don't see how one can generate such much value, even when you present plans on
how it can be done.

It's as if the boss is trying hard not to let you generate more value than
expected.

------
lalc
_> Work, being a core part of life, is meant to be interesting, engaging, and
meaningful. Otherwise, why are we wasting our time on this planet?_

A little early for April Fools'. Let's try this again.

 _> Work, being a core part of life, is meant to get things done. If your work
is useful to other people, you will be able to enjoy life on this planet for a
long time._

~~~
usablebytes
Not really. The work must be enjoyable for self before it help others. And
that won't happen unless we know our interests.

E.g. Everyone at the restaurant admires good service; but not every waitress
enjoys her job; those who do, keep their own as well as others' interests.

~~~
rhubarbquid
> The work must be enjoyable for self before it help others.

The garbage man who doesn't enjoy carrying your trash away still helps you get
rid of your trash. The truck driver who doesn't enjoy driving still gets your
food to the store...

Sure there are a lot of jobs that people can do better if they enjoy them, but
that's certainly not all of them.

Getting to have a job you enjoy is a luxury that most people in the world
don't have.

------
A1kmm
The problem with the theory around mid-range-λ-jobs is that people with a non-
zero t can compete for jobs as well - for example, they may have increased
their skill level through training, volunteer work, formal education, or there
could be a flood of skilled workers following layoffs at a competitor. A
skilled employee is therefore potentially competing both against 'green'
replacements and skilled replacements.

At times when there is a surplus of skilled employees, the market price for
skilled employees will tend towards the marginal cost of living for skilled
employees, which is roughly the same as the costs of new employees, and so new
employees would be prevented from gaining experience on the job (they could
offer to work for less than their cost of living in the hope of a future
payoff from their skills, but even that won't necessarily make sense to the
employer, because the employer has costs per employee beyond just wages and
employee benefits, and it might still be cheaper to hire fewer skilled
employees at a higher price than to incur more per-employee costs hiring more
unskilled employees at a lower rate). On the job learning therefore becomes
less relevant, and new employees are forced to overcome the activation costs
through other means, or try a different industry. If there is no credible
alternative to on the job learning, this might cause a dynamic effect where
the attrition of skilled employees combined with an absence of trained new
employees raises the skilled employee price towards the utility to the
employer, and makes it cost-effective to take on new employees again.

------
jacob019
Looter mentality, bosses and jobs just exist? Be grateful for the opportunity
to have your efforts compounded by the contributions of others. If you were
alone on an island, what would you have to show for your work at the end of a
day? A meal? Temporary shelter? Even the lowest wage jobs offer us security,
health, and a life much easier than our ancestors. Don't like what a job can
offer you create one? Think you're worth more? Be your own boss, if you
succeed then you'll create jobs and you can be the change you want to see.
What has happened to our generation that everyone thinks they have something
coming to them and are slighted by those who succeed? Want your fair share,
then take it.

~~~
A1kmm
Unfortunately, many resources are finite; for example, there is a finite
amount of land, and in many places, society has for quite some time been about
extracting more value from the same resources, rather than being a case of the
resources being there but with insufficient labour to exploit them.

Many people in urban environments cannot afford their own island of land to
produce food on; they don't own the enough means of production to support
themselves even if they supply the labour themselves, so they are obligated to
work for someone who has the capital already (the 'gatekeepers') on whatever
oppressive terms they offer to obtain the minimum needed to survive. As a
result, the next generation of gatekeepers hold an even greater proportion of
the wealth.

Economic problems arise when the gatekeepers no longer need everyone to supply
everyone with everything they need and want - now those who aren't gatekeepers
find that they cannot get a job, and they don't have the capital to create a
job.

Some will try to 'gate jump' - e.g. take a revolutionary idea that is highly
profitable, bootstrap it on a shoestring, and become a gatekeeper themselves.
However, this is not a scalable model for the whole population, since it
relies on luck and there is intense competition among potential gatejumpers
and between gatejumpers and enterprises run by existing gatekeepers (who have
the resources to crush gatejumpers if they become a threat).

Ultimately, I think the only solution will be some form of income
redistribution scheme; perhaps it would work best if the government made it a
condition of the income redistribution scheme that beneficiaries work on
creating and discovering things, such as science, art, public interest
software, civil engineering projects and so on (essentially creating a larger
government sector that produces things that don't have a commercial model but
benefit society at large, employing the surplus people that are not needed to
produce what is needed commercially).

~~~
jacob019
"income redistribution scheme" Ones views on this tends to be religious, as I
am certain your perspective could not be swayed by any logic, nor can mine.

Do you live in America like me? Redistribution schemes move power from
producers to bureaucrats, who are notoriously bad with it. This has been tried
repeatedly with the same results every time.

There are two kinds of people, people who happen, and people who things happen
to. I choose to be the former.

We are not limited by finite resources, we are resources.

~~~
aspensmonster
>There are two kinds of people, people who happen, and people who things
happen to. I choose to be the former.

We are all both. Nobody gets to "choose" to be one or the other.

~~~
jacob019
True, but you can choose which defines you.

------
alecbenzer
> Or maybe it's just because it feels good [to dump you at the drop of a hat]

Stopped reading. Wtf is this?

~~~
smsm42
Same here. And I wonder with such adversarial approach to (work) relationships
why his (work) relationships look bad? Try it in any other relationship - try
building a friendship or romantic relationship on the premise that the other
party wants to exploit you and then dump you at the first opportunity - and
see how well it works out. Even if the job is not something you dreamt of -
and that happens in life - the adversarial approach is more likely to make it
suck than otherwise. There are bad relationships, there are abusive
relationships - but no reason to approach to any (work) relationship from the
start expecting it to be the sucky one.

------
scotty79
... and that's why programmers change employers every two years.

------
kenferry
The math is kind of fun, but the conclusions in this article rely on a rather
irrationally 'rational' view of how people behave, as well as far too much
zero-sum reasoning. Clearly, the respect you feel from your boss has no impact
on your productivity, and thus he wishes to reduce your wages to just above
the point where you'd quit?

Bosses are people too! If you ask any "boss" if they want the best for the
people working for them, the vast majority will say that they do. A useful
theory of how others make decisions needs to not completely discount
non-"rational" factors like emotion, fairness, and morals.

~~~
calibraxis
Yes, let's note that this blogpost had the "humor" tag. While there's truth to
it, he seems to poke fun at economists' pseudoscientific use of mathematical
models.

That said, there's endless case studies throughout history where bosses bleed
people down to minimum subsistance, and even below that. And their
subordinates may fight back and win things like 40 hour workweeks. (Consider,
what is a boss? An order-giver whose commands you obey the whole day. Some
understandably call this wage slavery. The morality of bosses turns out to be
pretty flexible, depending on how much of a fight they encounter.)

Of course, some privileged people do well despite being subordinates. In those
cases, their managers use a lighter touch because they're trusted to act in
their boss's interests, even when arguing against the boss in technical
matters. (The main function of professional codes, explained in Jeff Schmidt's
"Disciplined Minds". <http://disciplinedminds.com>)

------
usablebytes
I believe there are two types of workers. One who clearly knows what they
enjoy doing and they seek their career in the same; others who never
understand what their true interests are. The second type end up spending
their lives doing the so called 'crappy' jobs; majority of human being falls
under this category.

~~~
camus
well do you really think people always have the choice ? do you really think
everybody can afford a good education ? your message is really arrogant.

------
rayiner
Management consultants.

------
michaelochurch
That's not why.

Bosses aren't trying to fuck you over. If they're aligned with the company,
they're trying to maximize A - B, where A is what you contribute, and B is
what you cost.

For most of the industrial era, it's been considered easier to reduce B than
to increase A. Why? Many reasons, but the fundamental one is that most of the
work was concave, which is what OP describes when he has cost per unit
approaching asymptote m, which is equivalent to performance approaching 1/m
from below, with more learning.

He's focusing on concave, commodity work and he's right about that stuff.
Machines are also taking over the commodity work, leaving only the convex for
humans. See: [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/gervais-
macle...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/gervais-
macleod-9-convexity/)

With convex labor, the managerial assumption that A is at a maximum falls
flat, because no one even knows what that "maximum" might be. With concave
work, management could assume that A was near its maximum value and
occasionally fire a slacker.

What this means is that, for convex work, A-maximizing is a worthier goal...
but almost no one has figured out how to manage that kind of work. [ETA: a
more cynical view is that someone else gets a bonus/credit for reducing B, but
the worker himself gets all credit for improving A.]

------
OGinparadise
_Work, being a core part of life, is meant to be interesting, engaging, and
meaningful._

Actually it's meant to more or less enable us to fill our stomachs and to help
to provide for our kids. "Work" started quite a while ago, millions of years
before iPhones, nice cars, paid vacation and houses. We might go back to
basics one day too. Maybe a solar storm, volcano explosion or asteroid might
just wipe the last 100 or so years away.

 _Otherwise, why are we wasting our time on this planet?_ Why is dog or an
antelope?

~~~
guard-of-terra
"Work" means you do things for hire, do not own the result of your efforts but
instead you are taken care of.

This is a relatively new thing, few thousand years but not millions by any
means.

~~~
OGinparadise
I think we're splitting hairs. if I plant tomatoes on my backyard for myself,
and "work" there for a few hours a week, what is it?

~~~
guard-of-terra
You can't be fired, you own the output, there is no workplace competition,
your neither your boss tries to make you more efficient not you can bargain
your salary.

------
andrewcooke
remember when HN was for people who had good jobs? because it was full of good
people?

~~~
dictum
Remember when HN was for people who didn't correlate having a good job with
being a good person?

~~~
andrewcooke
good as in technically competent, not good as in morally good / emotionally
valued (i would have thought that was obvious from the context - not sure if
you're so dumb you really can't understand, or just desperately trying to find
a way to be offended).

why would you stay at a crappy job if you're (technically) good enough to move
elsewhere? this kind of complaining, about stereotypically bad bosses that
treat programmers as commodities is, predominantly, either exaggerated fiction
or the problems of commodity programmers. back in the day, commodity
programmers didn't read hn - or at least, they didn't comment.

it reminds me of the dilbert cartoon where someone is complaining that their
boss micro-manages them all day. and dilbert asks if they've tried doing their
job so well that the manager doesn't need to.

this thread is an archetypical example of the crap that is overwhelming hn
these days.

~~~
dictum
"Good people" is more likely to mean "people who are morally good" than
"people who are good at what they do" even in this context. Sorry for
misunderstanding your comment. I've seen the association of moral goodness to
technical competence before and thought your comment meant that.

>Why would you stay at a crappy job if you're (technically) good enough to
move elsewhere?

People are complicated. They have complex motives, are influenced by
irrational thoughts and have a tendency to prefer known evils to unknown
evils. I'm not saying this is the right course of action, but this is a good
opportunity to start a Ask HN thread (or blog post) about the attitude of
commodity programmers.

I don't like when people complain about their jobs. I don't agree with the
article. But a snarky comment in response to a long article (even if it's
factually wrong, or draws the wrong conclusions from the facts) won't make HN
better. I don't mean to discount your contribution to HN, but you can spend
your time on HN complaining bitterly about the new regulars, or you can try to
understand the problem more deeply and help HN in the process. Misguided
elitism isn't helpful and only heightens the Dunning–Kruger effect in a
community.

Sturgeon's Law still stands—90% of everything is crap, and 90% of workers in
any field are mediocre at best. Do you really want to spend your next years on
HN complaining about the mediocre newbies? The thing that makes HN good is the
HN users' ability to write well-thought refutations of any argument presented.
HN doesn't have only good arguments and subjects, but people do a good job
pointing out flaws and making helpful suggestions to what gets posted here.

Instead of tilting at the mill of crappy articles on HN, we should point out
what's wrong about them.

