why5s

Mistakes Were Made by Carol Tarvis and Elliot Aronson. It's a long discussion on the mechanics of cognitive dissonance and self-justification.

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"A man travels many miles to consult the wisest guru in the land. When he arrives, he asks the great man:

'O wise guru, what is the secret of a happy life?'

'Good judgement,' says the guru.

'But, O wise guru' says the man, 'how do I achieve good judgement'

'Bad judgement,' says the guru"

I don't regret staying at my last role for 5 years but I do regret not spending more time looking and getting a better understanding of my value on the market while I was employed there. I wasn't underpaid but I certainly could've been positioned better to leave when I finally decided to. This is all recency bias of course but relearning how to interview was a difficult and humbling experience.

I gotta be honest: I aspire to create something as valuable and as cool as lichess one day.

I've been asked this (on a scale from 1 - 5) and have had some success referencing previous performance reviews (i.e. meeting expectations or exceeding expectations). YMMV obviously.

Some thoughts (from a very biased fan of the original article and book):

If you own a copy, consider reading it an act of meta-anthropology, exploring why a professional anthropologist could be so relentlessly, aggressively incurious about the lives and experiences of others.

Graeber solicited testimonies from people who felt that they have a bullshit job.

public transportation workers can, indeed, shut some cities down if they decide not to work. But this is not a characteristic of the job, but of how employment is structured: if all the workers are declining to show up at once, the term is a "strike," and their employer can't just swap them for someone else. There are plenty of people who would do these jobs, at their current pay, if that were an option, so the ability to paralyze a city like this is a function of unions, not of the job itself

Unions are intended to protect workers. If their jobs are required to keep the city running, the city (and society at large) should do what's necessary to keep these employees happy. This has nothing to do with the "structure of employment" and everything to do with corporate greed.

In a sense, the book is a work of pathological optimism about the capitalist system. Graeber estimates that roughly half of all work fits his fake job categorization, which implies that the economy's productive capacity is roughly twice the output we actually get. It would be a pretty big deal if this were true: we could have a lot more leisure, and a lot more stuff.

I'd argue that I'd be able to produce 50% more value in my own role if my employer gave me 50% of my time back. But instead it's spent on politics, baby-sitting and duck tape. It's not their fault (nor my own) but rather a consequence of the system we're in. And I see no issue with having someone actively critiquing it.

Anecdote: I attempted to volunteer with the Microsoft TEALs Program at a local school. I'm not sure what we did wrong but the instructor never really utilized myself or the other volunteers. For about a month, he asked us to "review the syllabus" and "consider ideas" to implement with the classroom. We pitched a few ideas ranging from writing simple sorting algorithms to building a rudimentary search engine... But the school year kinda just progressed. We never met with any of the students. E-mail response time spanned weeks. And at some point, he asked us to join some "Advisory Board". So I more or less checked out since it all seemed kinda lame.

but I consider relying on people's own answers to be a methodological error in the research. Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing.

Is it not problematic that so many people feel that their jobs are bullshit? Is that an issue with the individual or society at large?

From personal experience: no it is not. This mentality leads to nothing but frustration and burnout as upper management sends you to tackle your "staff"-project.

Titles are all based on organizational politics and the macroeconomics at the moment. Were you hired during the 2021-2022 hiring spree where companies would give anything to keep engineers from getting poached? You probably were hired at Staff. If not, then what were you doing? Lol these folks were the first ones laid off.

Personally, I received my highest raises in 2021 and 2022. Multiple salary (and equity) bumps; a title bump. Life was fucking good.

Nowadays, you can just be glad not to get laid off. Instead of the promotion they promised, you get a slap in the face and some chump change.

I know I sound jaded but the fact that there are MULTIPLE books on "Staff"-level engineering (all un-ironically written by managers and executives rather than ICs) is completely laughable.

/rant

it doesn't have the same $1500 aesthetic though..

Don't landlords more or less already have access to this via credit scores, background checks etc? I don't think there's a reasonable equivalent to this for tenants.

Various things:

- Non-technical explanations. Useful for the pointy-haired boss. And his boss as well.

- Stack Overflow (but on steroids).

- Summarizing long-form articles my friends send me.

- Generating rudimentary programs/scripts I'm too lazy to write on my own.

- Tutorial-style resources for unfamiliar technology (like writing CRDs in k8s).

- Generated a working Makefile.

- Sometimes, I'll take existing small programs in Go and have them rewritten in another language. It's just fucking cool to watch.

- Rudimentary translations from English to French.

Can't use CoPilot for work yet since, well, they can (and will) upload proprietary IP. But for everything else in life, the productivity gain has been enormous.

Enlarged font sizes and periodic breaks where I get up and walk around do wonders for me.

For work-related stuff: I disagree. We're not even at Uber's scale at my company and I hate having to manage the ever-changing set of dependencies that I have no control over.

I just can't imagine not wanting to explore a new area and have distance from your parents. I love my parents, we talk a couple times a week, but I don't need them physically close to me. (last couple years being the exception for obvious reasons).

We want to. But between housing prices and student loans, we can't afford to.

Computer programming work only counts at half the normal rate because debugging isn’t quite the same as deep thought.

This mentality is the reason why most software originating from academia is awful. Productivity is measured by research output (i.e. conference/journal papers) rather than the artifacts (i.e. code/software) built to support said research.

I get the sentiment here. But I can understand why someone would want to optimize towards writing more code than dealing with organizational politics. I guess the tradeoff would be to go to a smaller company.

I’ve learned something new today. I guess I’ll have to try one of these out.

Based on the comments in this thread, I’m guessing the majority of HN doesn’t cook. The switch from an induction stove to a proper gas stove changes the way you cook. No more waiting for the coils to warm up, being able to dynamically adjust the heat, being able to sear bell peppers against an open flame, etc. I’m almost certain I will never go back to an induction stove for cooking.

I can relate to this. Often times, my notes don't serve as a reference but rather as an append-only stream-of-consciousness intended to reinforce my understanding of something.

I’ve been looking for a decent alternative to Quora. Maybe this fits the bill?

"Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing... After all possibilities have been exhausted"

- Somebody that's not Winston Churchill

My old company used a mix of Slack and RocketChat. Functionally, it's fine but I was never a big fan of the UI and how attachments were handled. Also, cross-channel search was kinda bad. Mind you, this was well over a year ago so I'm sure things have improved.

I don't think it's a waste. A good chunk of my reading involves content unrelated to my job (software engineer). Not every hour of the day has to be spent chasing "productivity". Unstructured free time outside of work is essential to keeping me productive at work.

Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs

https://www.amazon.com/Gig-Americans-Talk-About-Their/dp/060...

It's basically a series of interviews with people across various industries talking about their jobs. Not exactly "memoir"-style but more of an anthology.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp...

A personal favorite that I read alongside the first recommendation. Just puts a lot of things in perspective with respect to finding meaningful work.

Not a list of exercises, but Julia Evan's pandas cookbook has been incredibly helpful for me.

I don't think that there's anything wrong with wanting to find meaning in your job.

The time has come to stop sidestepping the debate and home in on the real issue: what would our economy look like if we were to radically redefine the meaning of “work”? I firmly believe that a universal basic income is the most effective answer to the dilemma of advancing robotization. Not because robots will take over all the purposeful jobs, but because a basic income would give everybody the chance to do work that is meaningful.