
The 40M dollar job - ibudiallo
https://idiallo.com/blog/the-40-million-dollar-job
======
mswen
In a related note. I had a new client in fall of 2018. The purpose was to
build a system that collected and tracked competitors prices across a
portfolio of enterprise products. When we first started talking the Director
of Operations indicated that they were looking at hiring an entry level
pricing analyst who would track competitors prices and use that market
information plus other internal information to set appropriate prices for
their own company. This was across about 4000 model/part numbers.

About 40 to 50 hours into the project I have a show and tell demo on what I
had developed so far. At the end of the meeting the Director of Operations
leans back and says. "What I envisioned as the never ending, never caught up
task of collecting and organizing competitive pricing is now going to be 1 or
2 hours a day for someone."

Developer me was proud to hear that. I heard/understood the real business
requirements and developed a system that automates away 90% of the repetitive
drudgery of the overall task leaving someone better able to spend time on edge
cases and what is changing in the market.

On the other hand I felt slightly guilty that maybe now someone who is already
too busy will get this added to their plate because it is just an hour or two
a day. And, that someone else who could really use an entry level analysis
job, won't get one because I automated it away before they could even get
started.

In the end developer me will keep building stuff like this because that is
what is valued and helps pay my bills.

~~~
harryh
_And, that someone else who could really use an entry level analysis job, won
't get one because I automated it away before they could even get started._

You didn't take a job away from anyone. You freed up someone from drudgery so
that they could do more valuable work instead. This is EXACTLY how society
gets richer. We have hundreds of years of evidence that this is the case.

~~~
egypturnash
On the other hand... in a lot of fields, doing the drudgery is the perfect
thing for apprentices and new hires to do. You can learn a lot of stuff from
grinding on the boring tasks that need doing but nobody wants to do. And while
doing this you make contacts, learn other processes, and end up being in the
right place at the right time when a better gig in the company opens up.

~~~
cvrjk
I guess, stuff that is getting automated, should become a part of the
education curriculum. That way, the hire will have the relevant know how, and
start doing useful work on joining.

------
franzb
I found this story particularly well written so I looked for the author's
name. Ibrahim Diallo... That name ringed a bell... Fired by a machine! That
was him too, a recommended read: [https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-
fired-me](https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me)

~~~
jmiserez
An instant internet classic...!

Discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645)

~~~
ibudiallo
Thank you all. I may just quote you on that.

~~~
syndacks
I came here to say the author is a good writer. So yea, you have a way of
saying saying something complex/deep in an eloquent, even simple way. I've
been reading a lot of Raymond Carver lately. You should read some of him if
you're keen. I like his WWTAWWTAL collection of short stories.

~~~
ibudiallo
Thank you so much. I'll check out Raymond Carver, thanks for the
recommendation.

------
barefoot
If the latest WEF report on employment is any indication
([http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2018.pdf](http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2018.pdf)),
a significant volume of workers are either already misemployed or are about to
be misemployed.

I get a strong sense of this any time I get out of my office. I'm sure part of
it is because I don't prefer interacting with humans but - as the owner of a
machine learning consulting company - I see few jobs that can't be automated
today with current technology given enough time.

Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased
and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI.

~~~
MSM
> Most jobs are bullshit jobs.

This has been true for hundreds of years though. It's been shown time and time
again that some kind of automation breakthrough eliminates jobs but people
need work so new jobs are created. Engines were created to eliminate tons of
manual labor jobs, we had looms, mills, automated mining, printing changes,
etc. and here we are still working.

Five years ago we started to automate the food service industry. Now instead
of driving to McDonald's to get a burger made by a human we can call up Uber
Eats to have a human go get us a burger that was made by a robot. Is it a
bullshit task? Maybe, but I can't see how one day we'll wake up and all of a
sudden there will be no jobs.

~~~
coliveira
One of the reasons is that we live is a class-based society. Americans, for
example, think it is Ok for Mexicans to cook their food for close to nothing,
and having African Americans clean for them for minimum wage. Of course, there
is no reason why these people should make close to nothing while other people
throughout the economy have bullshit jobs that pay really well. If we removed
artificial classes in society, everybody should at this point been working
very little (2 to 3 hours a day) and making good salaries to maintain a
consumption-based economy.

~~~
pathseeker
>Americans, for example, think it is Ok for Mexicans to cook their food for
close to nothing, and having African Americans clean for them for minimum
wage.

Where do you come up with this racist crap? As someone who grew up in a poor
white area in the North of the US I can assure you that race has absolutely
nothing to do with lack of low-paying jobs concern.

>Of course, there is no reason why these people should make close to nothing
while other people throughout the economy have bullshit jobs that pay really
well.

Supply and demand. It's economics 101. It's like claiming that there is no
reason people should be paying over a thousand dollars for an ounce of gold
when copper is only a couple of dollars a pound.

If the people with low paying jobs were qualified to do the higher paying job,
the employer would happily hire them for a lower price to save money.

~~~
zjaffee
Organizing the price of labor around supply and demand is a choice that our
society has made that comes with tons of perverse incentives such as
organizing to make it more difficult for people to enter an industry.

This is especially true because if you don't work, you'll almost certainly be
homeless, hungry, ect so the entire premise of there being a fair market for
labor is false.

------
csours
Re: manual health checks - I worked in an automobile factory in the
mid-2000's. When I started, the healthcheck was a checklist on a website.

Some of the items were grouped on websites or application pages, but many of
them were spread out.

A year before I started, there wasn't even a checklist on a webpage.

After a while, I started scripting as much of the checklist as I could. My
point of view being: my job is to improve the tools needed to do my job. I
thought that the apps should be able to quickly and easily provide their
statuses.

What I wanted was something like spring boot's /health endpoint(s). I don't
know if I would ever have invented a health endpoint, but once I found out
about it, it's obvious.

\---

This wasn't my only job in the plant, I did quite a bit more: desktop support,
application support, hosting, app scripting, plant floor support, internet of
manufacturing things (PLC support). Anyway, that job is gone now. Some of it
is spread to other teams and ticket queues, but some of it is just gone.

Part of that is politics, part is bullshit, part is misemployment, a large
part was contract structure.

------
ianbicking
Reading the story, there's lots of possible reasons here:

1\. He was being told something was important, and it simply wasn't. They lied
to him to make him feel good. Probably not?

2\. He was doing something that was important to other people, and those
people incorrectly believed they were important. Given that the department was
closed, this might go several levels up.

3\. The approach of the department or group was misaligned. "Misaligned" being
a way to say that either (a) it wasn't a very good approach when the full
picture was taken into account (the picture from an altitude higher than the
department), or (b) it was a good approach, but someone else was able to
convince people higher up that it wasn't.

4\. It was important, and whoever cancelled it didn't realize it. The chickens
may eventually come to roost.

5\. It was an important thing embedded in an unimportant thing. Maybe the
department really was ready to be disbanded, dispersed, eliminated. It's
likely that the department had many duties. Did someone actually look
carefully at each one, and decide where they all should go?

6\. Someone needed the project (or whatever larger project his project was
embedded in), but didn't know it. This is a danger of a proactive project: if
the person who gets the value from it isn't asking for the thing, they might
not appreciate the value of the thing itself.

7\. It's a valuable project, but the cost (real or perceived) of carrying it
through other organizational change is considered excessive.

8\. Management was simply too lazy to decide if it was important. Maybe they
didn't have the resource leeway to keep it running without a fight, which
makes it easier to be lazy.

And there's yet more possibilities than that.

I'm thinking about this right now, as I'm in the process of tearing down a
large amount of my own work. I could believe it's just a sunk cost, a failed
investment... but I'm pretty sure it's not. It _might_ be the right choice to
throw stuff away. Strategies change. Old theories work themselves out until
they don't seem to offer much potential, and then everything based on the old
theory is in question. We've never really known what the underlying ROI on
anything is, though we're throwing it away so we can make room for other
similar things; the organization is trading a known unknown for an unknown
unknown. And none of us will really know what the right decision was. If I was
making the decision, I wouldn't know either.

------
LeonM
If so many people are being misemployed, why were they hired in the first
place? Did they start off doing important work, and then slowly became
irrelevant, or do big corporates just hire people without having a clear task
for them (yet).

I'm genuinely curious, I've been self employed for about my entire career, so
I have no experience with corporate lifestyle.

~~~
LanceH
Big companies definitely hire people -- at all levels -- who are completely
irrelevant. Managers have a big incentive to hire more people because they
will then have more direct reports. Directors want more managers. VP's want
more directors, etc...

I was on a small team at a big company in 1998. Due to recent mergers there
were duplicated teams across the company. A big initiative came out that our
team was in line to respond to. We (about 10 of us) put together a highly
functional prototype in a couple months, put it forward showing we could take
it on. Another team went out and hired 200 people and had no other
presentation than an org structure. They won, and I learned a lesson.

------
dugluak
Nice little story. I was kinda wondering what happened to Jason. At the start
I felt like Jason was the lead character and at the end the story would return
to him. Where is Jason ???

~~~
ibudiallo
Jason is doing just fine.

------
sailfast
Random editing feedback for the OP: was “closet” pronounced in a particular
accent? In US English it would probably sound more like “claw set” than “Cool
Set” so it took me a second to get that reference (in the end this detail
didn’t add much to the management’s character so I’d either refine it or
relate to the firing or overall narrative arc a bit more)

A good read - how the author will novelize this anecdote into a larger story
will be interesting!

~~~
ibudiallo
Thank you for catching that. Let's blame it on the guy that is not too versed
in sed[1] but still used it to find and replace a pattern and it all went
wrong.

[1]:
[https://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/x23170.html](https://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/x23170.html)

------
paulcole
If you don't think your job is a bullshit job, you just haven't thought about
it long enough.

------
draw_down
It's almost always a mistake to view your work as important, at least if you
work in a typical corporation. Shovel shit and get paid, try to find a better
pile of shit to shovel, and/or a better paycheck. That's all there is.

~~~
hathym
+1000

