

Our Unpaid, Extra Shadow Work - trapexit
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/sunday/our-unpaid-extra-shadow-work.html

======
saucerful
Couldn't disagree more.

His vilification of these so-called "shadow jobs" boils down to this vague and
indirect reference to an increase in "fatigue". I don't find any substance to
this. The point of ATMs and ticket machines and self-service gas is that human
labor is usually inefficient. You pay for human labor by the hour. It doesn't
matter if the CPU time during that hour is 1 minute. In almost all cases, a
human worker will entail wasted VARIABLE costs. On the other hand, if the bank
buys too many ATMs, the waste is for the most part a fixed cost.

And notice, the quality of service can sometimes _improve_ with machines!
E.g., without ATMs we would still have to be concerned about whether we could
make it to the bank on time before it closed to withdraw cash or deposit a
check. In all of the cases mentione, the combination of machine and human
labor allows the seller to satisfy more customers at less cost. Now, it's
possible that we are also sacrificing something. But to be honest, in all of
the examples that he mentions, I personally do not feel any sacrifice.

What is plainly true, however, is the rise in such self service. And the
question of how this affects us, is interesting. I would speculate that one of
these effects is an increase in anti-social behavior.

~~~
bmj
I'm not sure the ATM is the best example, at least for simple transactions
like withdrawing or depositing funds. Aside from the social interaction with a
teller, using an ATM doesn't save me much time or work. Self-checkout kiosks
at the grocery store, however, allow the business to push costs on the
consumers because scanning and bagging my groceries does require more effort
on my part. I'm not sure that is contributing to more fatigue (perhaps this is
due to people working more hours?), however.

 _What is plainly true, however, is the rise in such self service. And the
question of how this affects us, is interesting. I would speculate that one of
these effects is an increase in anti-social behavior._

And this, I suspect, is what Illich was most interested in. (I've not read
this particular book, however).

~~~
yummyfajitas
_Aside from the social interaction with a teller, using an ATM doesn't save me
much time or work._

Do you live right next to a bank? Until very recently, the closest bank branch
was about 10 blocks away from my home. The ATM 2 blocks away (in a closet-
sized retail space too small for a real bank) saved me miles of walking.

------
nhashem
The problem with 'Shadow Work' is that it rarely benefits the people who have
to actually do the work.

My company has a homegrown A-B testing platform. Without getting too far into
the technical details, the process typically occurred as follows: A business
unit would suggest a performance increasing hypothesis to the statistical
analyst ("let's change the font size from 12 to 14, I bet that'll increase
conversions"), who would clarify the hypothesis into a statistically correct
terms ("let's set 1% of our traffic to size 14 font and segment the resulting
revenue this way") and submit a ticket to the engineering team, who would set
up the test using XML, then ran a script that would convert that XML into
MySQL insert statements, which populated a table that the web application
would read from.

Then we had layoffs and engineers were canned. To mitigate some of the work
for the engineering team's now reduced staff, I gave all the analysts the
necessary permissions to set up and execute the XML -> MySQL translation
themselves. On the one hand, they appreciate the direct control. On the other
hand, they've fucked up production more than once with malformed XML and the
like, which is something they never had to worry about before, which in turn
has caused huge headaches for my team.

Is this 'shadow work'? All I know is that my company used to employ more
people, and both engineers and analysts were happier. Now nobody is happy,
even if the productivity per person is higher, except maybe our executives who
have squeezed out more productivity out of fewer employees.

Hmm, maybe I should see what those OWS guys are babbling about after all.

~~~
patio11
There is a defensible reading of that story which goes "Our engineering and
marketing teams stumbled into a ridiculously inefficient process to do
something critical for the business. After a bit of reorganization, while the
new process has some kinks in it, we're increasing sales faster than ever
while simultaneously not wasting thousands of dollars using senior engineers
as glorified typists."

n.b. I don't want to criticize engineering choices from afar, but if people
can bork production with malformed XML, that suggests opportunity for further
process improvement to either check XML or render it unnecessary. Visual
Website Optimizer, for example, mostly abstracts that away.

P.P.S. Quantify the problem to management, fix it, get heavily rewarded. You
could even use the proceeds to take a trip to Wall Street, if that floats your
boat.

~~~
nhashem
Well, just a few counterpoints here:

\- I gave font size as very easy example, and there are dozens of products
that make that very easy. But a lot of our testing ends up being very heavily
backend-oriented (e.g. "let's try this new optimization engine combined with
this optimization engine"). So any third party tools probably won't be plug
and play unless we made some fundamental changes to our web applications.

\- And I have quantified making those changes long before the layoffs
(although I had another in-house solution in mind, not one that used third-
party tools), because even if 1% of engineering time is spent executing
scripts like robots, that's 1% that could be better deployed into a profit
center for the company. The problem is, like I'm sure many engineers
understand, is dealing with executives who don't quite grok the technical
limitations of the current system, and who have a hard time prioritizing
anything that doesn't directly lead to more money in the bank account.

\- And this is my main point... so we had layoffs, and ended up coming to a
defacto more efficient solution, which would be okay if me or anyone else
involved in this solution was compensated accordingly. Instead it's executives
that will get lauded for cutting costs, even though the current solution now
introduced a high risk of impacting our ability to actually execute on the
aforementioned initiatives that would lead to directly more revenue.

\- So basically, what I'm most frustrated about, is this: I had a proposal
that would have improved an inefficient process. That proposal got ignored,
then we had layoffs, then we were forced to improve on that inefficiency in a
way that wasn't that much more efficient. If we ultimately get this all to
work, the executives get bonuses for increasing profit by lowering headcount.
If it doesn't, they get cut loose with what I assume is some generous
compensation package.

I'm not trying to just rattle some populist chains here or complain about "the
1%." My point is, it's not the actual elimination of jobs and creation of
'shadow work' that is a problem, but the context of which is eliminated. In
most cases it sucks for the people whose jobs got eliminated, and it sucks for
the people who now have do the shadow work because they're not seeing the
rewards of the new efficiency (e.g. lower prices at the grocery store).
Instead, some layer of people highly detached from the process typically gain
the most benefits.

------
ashearer
In the middle comes the refrain "But instead, the _computers_ are controlling
_us_ ".

Does anyone here have a good understanding of that belief? I wonder whether
it's universal, or correlates with being a non-programmer, or with growing up
without computers, or with bad experiences due to poorly-designed user
interfaces. I've haven't talked with enough people who share that feeling to
figure it out.

Most times I see it stated as fact, but this article does attempt to justify
it, though the explanations were unsatisfying. Perhaps the lawyer doesn't view
bagging groceries as losing control and taking on extra work: it may be an
improvement over passively waiting in line, which is its own kind of work. She
could then say that the technology is letting her take control of checkout,
instead of waiting for a cashier, which was the bottleneck that customers
previously couldn't avoid no matter how much shadow work they were willing to
do.

~~~
Natsu
Computers don't control us, no, we control them. But for someone like a
factory worker or call center rep, the computers might as well control them,
because the humans in charge will gladly manage based on automatically-
measured performance numbers without knowing or caring about what's actually
happening.

The computers can track, measure and grade everything they do. For example,
when I go to Target, I can't help but notice that their checkout screens have
a pass/fail system grading whether the checker has processed the person
quickly enough. In other places, computers may even make decisions on who to
fire based on the rules fed to it. For example, the computer's report might
say that employee #12345 has high average call lengths. They don't care if
it's because that phone rep was unusually helpful. The computers enable them
to enforce their policies to the letter. Even if the rules present no win
situations at times, they'll just fire the guy for breaking the rules and hire
someone new.

So like I said, the computers are never going to control us. We'd hack the
damn things if necessary to do things right. But for the people at the bottom
of the food chain, a computer might already be their boss.

~~~
wladimir
Good point. Many low-level jobs are already driven by tight bureaucratic rules
enforced by based computer statistics and ubiquitous surveillance. Computers
empowered the bureaucracy to such a point that it (figuratively spoken) took a
life of its own.

 _So like I said, the computers are never going to control us_

I don't buy that "never". It's not that black and white. Computers are making
high-level decisions already, for example, what about automated trading
algorithms? (especially those based on AI).

What if the shareholders that control public companies are, at least, heavily
motivated in their decisions by computers?

Then it will be the computer allocating capital, and what choices do humans
have? We just follow the way that our computer algorithms point to the profit.

Sure, strictly spoken there will still be humans in control. But in the worst
case they will have at most a ceremonial function, to explain in human terms
what the numbers say. If they decide to not follow the computer's "advice"
they take a great risk.

That's one of the reasons many people feel that we live in a "machine state"
(an automated bureaucracy with humans trained as mere robots) these days, or
that is going to happen...

~~~
Natsu
> I don't buy that "never". It's not that black and white.

We, the hackers, would (by definition) simply hack any computer trying to
control us. Granted, it's not quite so black and white as that, but I think
that the HN crowd would be able to do something if their workplace tried some
of the computer monitoring crap that is currently foisted upon those at the
bottom of the food chain.

That said, I wonder if middle management types won't start to vanish a bit
more. I mean, they already let the computer make almost all of their decisions
for them. At some point, they have pretty questionable utility. Sure, maybe
they want a babysitter or two, but they hardly need a full management crew if
the computer does all the work.

------
nagrom
" In 1998, the Internal Revenue Service estimated that taxpayers spent six
billion hours per year on “tax compliance activities.” That’s serious shadow
work, the equivalent of three million full-time jobs."

Does that mean that the U.S spends about 1% of its productive time as a
population merely to comply with the tax code? If so, that's really an
indication that the tax code is ridiculously over-complicated.

~~~
TruthElixirX
I make <20k a year (student). I spend about 1 hour doing my taxes, and I don't
have any investments or anything.

I cannot imagine how long it takes someone with property, 401ks, etc.

~~~
patio11
Anecdata: I have a _very_ complicated return due to self employment while
overseas, and it takes 3 solid days.

Of course, most of the compliance burden is on tax professionals working for
business.

~~~
econ101
I think we're probably losing 3 to 6 new software features every year due to
the administrative burden on you alone. We all lose out when the labor of any
of us is destroyed needlessly.

------
muhfuhkuh
"Go into a Wal-Mart or Target or Staples and find someone to help you locate
and choose a product."

I honestly have no problem flagging down a redshirt for help at Target.
They're everywhere with their Secret Service headsets and automated customer
service PA system.

Wal-mart, OTOH... well, there's a reason why I haven't gone there in almost 5
years, and the cockroaches crawling on the stock pallets and in the grocery
aisles are but one.

------
philwelch
This article is the 21st century equivalent of someone complaining that live-
in servants are no longer affordable.

~~~
ansgri
Or maybe a hidden suggestion that this market may soon become very hot?

------
Newgy
This is a symptom of government policy. High employment taxes, workplace
liability, and an inefficiently high minimum wage, combine to create an
artificial demand constraint in the labor market.

Businesses substitute technology for workers, from salad bars to checkout
kiosks.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
Heck, sales and income taxes contribute to this. Why is Home Depot so busy on
weekends with DIY-ers? Shouldn't an amateur's effective "wage" for finishing
his basement be incredibly low compared to a professional with
knowledge/tools/etc.? So low that he/she would gladly work a few more hours at
the office rather than spending his weekend figuring out how to lay tile? The
problem is that I am not taxed on my "earnings" from the weekend work I might
perform around the house, but a professional is (unless paid under the table,
of course). So, providing labor to myself is effectively subsidized.
Furthering this is my employer's subsidy of my weekend labor in the form of
health insurance, disability insurance, etc. The professional (or his boss)
would have to pay for Workman's Comp insurance (at a pretty high rate for
construction labor), but my weekday employer would foot the bill -- just as if
I had hurt myself while out walking around the block.

Now, take into account the US's common labor arrangements -- salaried and
hourly employment (as opposed to piece work, commissions, etc.). Let's say you
are paid a fixed salary. The benefit of spending a Saturday in the office
doing extra work to impress the boss has an uncertain payout far in the future
-- one which might rationally be discounted. However, the benefit of finishing
one's own basement instead of shelling out an extra few thousand in labor is
tangible and much more immediate. It is no wonder mid-level salaried employees
show-up at Home Depot on weekends. The lot for hourly employees is worse. For
some strange reason, the US requires that they be paid 1.5x/hour for work
beyond a 40 hour week. 2x on Sundays. This is a huge dis-incentive for an
employer to offer his existing employees the opportunity to work weekends when
business is heavy. It might be possible for someone to pick-up extra, part-
time work in areas where he has expertise, but this work often is hard to come
by. So, Home Depot flourishes and basements are finished with off-kilter
walls.

Personally, I have had multi-month periods as a software contractor where a
client said, "work as many hours as you can, please!" So, every hour not
working had a real, easily-quantified opportunity cost. I would have been
crazy to have mowed my own lawn. It would have been nice to have been able to
purchase other "services" like a doctor's visit without a wait. I even tried
to offer the doctor's office a premium to be seen in a high-priority queue,
but most insurance plans don't allow such upcharges on top of pre-negotiated
rates. You can probably look at my HN posting history and figure out the
periods when I had effectively unlimited earning potential -- there are huge
gaps where I barely had anything to say.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
A random thought in response to myself:

My uncle recently retired as a plumber. He is in his mid-60's, and the
physical part of the job got to be too much for him. Imagine a service like
oDesk where my uncle could sit in front of his computer and be paid by the
hour to consult with DIY-ers on their plumbing problems. A guy with a leaky
faucet could wear a camera on his head, and my uncle could give him
instructions as he took the thing apart. Let's say 1/2 hour of consulting was
required @ $50/hour. My uncle would be delighted to earn even 2/3 of that in
retirement, and the guy doing the work would have less applied time than if he
had to wait at home to let the plumber in. Furthermore, 1/2 hour is less than
the plumber's expected commute to the customer's house.

How many in-home shadow work tasks could be done more efficiently if the
physical labor was separated from the knowledge aspect of the work?

------
irrationalfab
On the other hand shadow work is exactly what empowers people: 1\. Automation
allows to DIY tasks that previously were too expensive to acquire in the
market in exchange of a bit of your time. 2\. People can spend their financial
resources more wisely and achieve MORE. I think that the example of the gas
station is striking, because people, given the choice might prefer a smaller
and cheaper service.

I believe that those changes are the result of companies competing in a free
market. They are the consequences of consumers choice and are beneficial.

Nonetheless, the article highlights a good point about one hidden cost of
automation. A cost important to take into account in product/service design.
If too high it would hinder market acceptance of a product.

Now I understand better why automation is less used by companies in their
business. I would be interesting to understand what other subtleties and
hidden cost should be taken into account.

~~~
dhume
_On the other hand shadow work is exactly what empowers people: 1. Automation
allows to DIY tasks that previously were too expensive to acquire in the
market in exchange of a bit of your time._

Quite the opposite: this is all the dull, menial stuff that distracts people
from their primary tasks. These are jobs that were "supposed to" get automated
out of existence and didn't. The store has not automated the bagging of your
groceries. This only frees up an employee by having you do it instead.

------
rythie
You can definitely see this in the workplace, where people are wasting time
doing admin tasks that someone on a 1/3 of the salary could have done. Often
they are slower at it too, due to less practice/interest.

Usually this is caused by job cuts, where an _increase_ in low level employees
could actually make the highly paid more productive.

~~~
tomjen3
Yeah, that is the point I never really understood. If you get people to fill
up their own gas, that is one thing since it makes sense from a business
perspective.

But why have a $200 lawyer do admin work? That makes no sense whatsoever.

~~~
lsc
>Yeah, that is the point I never really understood. If you get people to fill
up their own gas, that is one thing since it makes sense from a business
perspective.

More importantly, a professional can't fill the tank any faster than I can,
and on modern cars, it's less important to check the oil every fill-up. (Still
a good idea, but it's not as important as it used to be.) So from my
perspective, why should I pay extra to have someone else do the task, no
matter what the wage differential?

So yeah, I think self-service gas stations make sense, and self-service
groceries make more sense than making people wait in line for too few checkers
(though, I think if you have sufficient checkers, professional checkers make
more sense. A professional is a /lot/ faster at that job than I am)

Yeah, though 'support staff' I think, is pretty important, and it's one of the
major reasons why I like having my own company rather than working for someone
else. Nobody has support staff for SysAdmins, and yeah, while I recognize the
need for bureaucracy and tight bookkeeping, I don't enjoy dealing with those
things and I'm not very good at it. It's really nice to hand a wad of receipts
to someone else and say "yeah, this was for the conference last week" and have
them handle the paperwork.

------
bennyfreshness
Less employees equals less overhead. Less overhead means lower cost. Cost
could be said to be "work" monetized. So less employees equals less work in
the long run, shadow or not.

~~~
pacaro
I used to work (circa 1989) at a pharmaceutical company that still had a
typing pool. So if I needed to write up a technical document, I was expected
to provide a handwritten manuscript to the pool, and then would receive back a
draft typed copy, which I would annotate, rinse and repeat (with a combination
of my terrible handwriting and technical vocabulary, this could be 3 or 4
repeats). This seemed totally ridiculous at the time - I had access to a
terminal and would have spent less time typing it myself once than this
process took.

At the same company, meetings typically had an official "minute taker" in
attendance and a couple of days later our in-trays (physical) would contain
beautifully typed and formatted minutes. I now work at a large bureaucratic
software company, typically the person taking notes at a meeting: a) does a
terrible job; b) earns upwards of $100K; c) contributes little meaningful to
the meeting (a and c are sometimes inversely correlated). Having a pool of
people who were good at taking notes and weren't attempting or pretending to
participate at the same time might end up being more cost effective

~~~
tomjen3
It just hit me that the person doing the minutes could have been replaced with
a dictaphone and you could have it typed in India at a few dollars and still
have the beautiful minutes.

~~~
abalashov
Yeah, maybe if it's a monologue, or at best maybe a dialogue. Ever tried to
have a real multi-party meeting (let's say 5+ people) transcribed from a
recording? It doesn't actually work, mostly due to poor echo cancellation,
variations in volume, people interrupting each other, etc.

If you put that much more clearly (not recorded) into the ear of someone who
is physically in the room and is somewhat accustomed to listening to the
personalities involved, perhaps rudimentarily familiar with technical
vocabulary, names of the participants, proper nouns in which the discussion
commonly traffics, etc., it might stand a chance.

If you think sending a recording of a 12-person strategy session to an off-
shore non-native English speaker would actually work, my guess is that you
have not tried it. :-)

------
ZipCordManiac
People check themselves out to avoid human interaction, not work.

~~~
robryan
Interaction with someone working checkout can barely even be thought of as
human interaction most of the time, the way they generally say the exact lines
the shop has told them to.

It's also usually a faster to do it yourself.

~~~
georgemcbay
IME it is never really faster to check yourself out, even if you're good at
it... at best and assuming you only have a couple of items you'll be just
about as fast as non-self-service. And most people are not very good at it
(I've sat in line behind 4 people all using the available self-service
checkout machines, all 4 seemingly completely stumped by the whole process),
so those people will be significantly slower than just using the cashier aisle
and they'll slow everyone else down too just by the bottleneck nature of
queue/lines.

When self service machines first arrived on the scene it was faster to use
them because nobody else did and thus there were no lines for them even when
lines for the cashier-aisles were crowded. Now more people are using them
(often VERY slowly compared to a real cashier) and now the lines move
significantly slower than cashier-manned lines. I no longer use the self-
service aisle unless it is empty and all the non-self-service lines are
occupied.

YMMV depending upon where you are and how recently self-service has showed up,
but here in Southern California where they've been around for years it was a
great option that turned into a very bad option once a critical mass of
consumers felt comfortable enough to use them.

Also of note, particularly here, is that the usefulness of the self service
devices depends a lot on their UI/UX. Around here the Ralph's stores have a
system that is very streamlined, and the Vons stores have a system that sucks
(you have to switch back and forth between using two different screens like 4
times if paying by debit/credit), so that factors into it as well.

~~~
robryan
Your right that whether it's faster is going to depend on queuing time. Just
counting the time being served or self serving a decent person on checkout
will do it faster. Generally here though the time to wait for self checkout is
zero or under a minute whereas the line for being checked out can take a lot
longer.

------
RachelSklar
I read this and didn't love the term "Shadow Work" because I found it
imprecise. I have always used the term "transaction costs" to account for the
additional requirements of doing XYZ. So with airport kiosks, the benefits of
being waited on by a ticket agent (if that is a benefit) are vastly outweighed
by the saved transaction costs of waiting in a huge long line. Nor did the
article address the other reasons that automation is good for business:
customers appreciate saving time, and will pay for it. It is true that the
things that were supposed to save us time create new transaction costs
(otherwise "email bankruptcy" and "inbox zero" would not now be the lingo du
jour). But I think this article needs to be way more nuanced to address the
difference between shadow work and the benefits derived therefrom.

------
abalashov
In my profession (engineering consulting to VoIP companies), I hear this a lot
from customers who are building new companies or products and emphasise that
what they need has to be "low-touch", and that the "user experience" needs to
be "self-service oriented".

This is generally a euphemism for, "I don't want to hire real support staff",
and to some extent, is understandable given the low margins and race to
commoditisation in the general VoIP service provider space.

And to some extent, the self-service aspect is objectively more efficient. I
wouldn't want to call someone like Vitelity to order my DIDs; I'd rather just
order them myself instantly on the web.

But there are certain things that you'd rather call or e-mail someone to open
a request to address, and then just let go of the problem and let someone else
solve it. I think porting requests rank fairly high on that list, although
most of the bureaucratic complications with that are imposed by regulatory
requirements--meaning, the task isn't _inherently_ "high-touch". But the point
is, these, too, are things that companies are trying to keep from crossing the
customer-vendor barrier.

I think anyone that can figure out how to get their customers to pay a premium
for good service (at a large scale), but still actually provide said good
service, wins.

------
Vandy_Travis
One aspect of self service that I particularly like is the alignment of
incentives. I'm incentivized to bag my groceries / deposit my checks quickly,
because I want to get out of there. Employees (esp. in low end service jobs)
are generally unconcerned with speed or quality, because they're making $6 /
hr.

Much of the time I'd simply _prefer_ to self-serve, because it's more pleasant
and faster for myself. (Note that grocery checkers don't really fit this
category in the States, because they tend to be fairly well paid.)

------
lsc
one interesting aspect of this is that workers often need to maintain capital
goods; equipment to do this 'shadow work' - if you want a job in most parts of
the country, you need a car. But guess what? that car isn't tax deductible,
even if you only use it to commute to and from work.

The interesting bit here is that some companies, especially here in silicon
valley, seem to be putting effort into doing more and more of this 'shadow
work' for you and thus paying for it out of pre-tax money. Google's free food
is the prime example, but nearly every large silicon valley employer not only
will pay for public transit out of pre-tax monies, but will also provide
shuttles from the train station to the office.

A company can also provide a 'company car' but, well, the tax implications of
that get complicated. If you get audited and you didn't keep a careful log of
personal travel, (and commuting to and from work is personal travel) and pay
income tax on the miles you used for personal stuff? you are in deep trouble;
this is why I own my vehicles outside of my corporation; I get reimbursed for
business-related miles by the business and handle gas and maintenance out of
post-tax dollars.

------
sp332
Funny, this reminds me of <http://Zirtual.com/> founded by "maren" here on HN
[http://www.escapingthe9to5.com/delegation/do-what-you-
love-m...](http://www.escapingthe9to5.com/delegation/do-what-you-love-
mercilessly-delegate-everything-else/)

------
brehardin
I had never heard of the term Shadow work before this article. I'm am curious
how much of my time is focused on shadow work. Probably the majority of my
weekends are spent cleaning, shopping for the next week, etc. How much money
would it cost me to get my time back?

------
jeffool
I think the article makes a good point about the disappearance of service
jobs. But then, I'm one of those "the jobs are disappearing, it's time we
renegotiated the social contract" people.

~~~
jhancock
How would you renegotiate the social contract? Do you have a draft of a plan?
If we keep our monetary/debit systems similar to what we have, do you feel
there is a need to redistribute equity/money/capital? If so, how would we go
about this?

~~~
sp332
For a very simple start, people who have money are just sitting on it instead
of investing it in companies that actually hire people. That means that money
tends to go up the ladder and never comes back down. Maybe we can change the
"social contract" to get rich people to hire working-class people again.

~~~
natrius
I've never understood this claim. I presume rich people don't shove money
under their mattresses. They invest the money in companies, loan the money to
companies, or put the money in banks that loan money to companies and
individuals. How is that sitting on money?

~~~
drumdance
Exactly. Even buying treasury bonds is helpful because much of the money pays
federal employees and the military, and the rest goes to the private sector in
the form of contracts.

~~~
Tycho
Not to mention, the recent financial crisis stems to a large extent from banks
being 'under-capitalized,' i.e. not enough rich people just leaving their
money in an account.

~~~
snowwindwaves
or the banks lending out every cent they do have

------
RandallBrown
Jobs die out when they're no longer needed. In all of the examples provided in
the article, better (in my opinion) alternatives displaced the service jobs.

------
rythie
Seems like at Google they tried to tackle this with free dinners, doing your
washing, cleaning cars etc.

