I am 42. I am still coping with a question I've had since I was young and was able to get my first office job.
Why am I paid so much money to basically do data organization. I'm organizing data.
There are other people that build houses, grow food, prepare food. Then there are others that are simply entertainers - but that does provide societal value. I mean I guess in order to have entertainment, we have to have this giant other house of cards built upon just BILLIONS of people that just sit and think all day and talk to other people.
I'm just at a huge loss why we don't all focus on growing food and building interesting structures, ponds, waterfalls, arenas.
No, instead our society has billions of organizers of data. Eh, it's late and I'm tired right now maybe I'll feel more useful tomorrow.
> "He's a parasite. He mimics the workers here. He runs around with data desks, he sleeps in their dormitory rooms, he eats their food. It's a common pattern in communities like this. The genuine clerks are busy with their own tasks -- and here, you aren't supposed to ask questions anyhow. So Tek gets away with it. He's just like a genuine clerk. Except that you don't do anything useful, do you, Tek?"
This is from an SF book from Baxter, characters went to a community of humans to gather information about something. The excerpt stayed on my mind because it relates to other questions (alienation, at what point is work still work if it's so far removed from the first objective (yak shaving), is someone creating its own useless workload a parasite, etc.).
Exultant (novel)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Exultant is a science fiction novel by British author Stephen Baxter. It is part two of the Destiny's Children series. The book was published by Victor Gollancz Ltd in September 2004.
Overview
Much of the book is written as large sections of prose explaining theoretical exotic-matter physics. Baxter also sketches the evolution of the Xeelee and an imaginary history of the universe in which life is ubiquitous even under the most extreme conditions.
I often wondered why doesn't everyone want to be a construction worker. We've all seen what they can do. Make huge structures appear out of thin air. Change the way space is. It's magic. And all the gadgets. Gigantic hydraulic arms, cranes, tractors of all sizes.
Instead we're paid heaps for programming. Which kind of makes sense. In my mind, programming is about making sense of a mess. Untangling all the seemingly conflicting wishes, concepts and circumstances into something simple. Programmers live off complexity the way insects live off a compost bin. Or, to be more romantic, the way a lotus flowers in dirty water. We recycle, break down and refine. Apparently, it has its place.
Because it's not as fun as a kid using building blocks. You'd just be doing a single job over and over again into monotony and it's filled with permits, inspections, waiting, etc so projects get dragged out and you don't get thr same gratification as you would if it were done faster and all parts done by you.
I know you said that, I just disagree. I think it's in the person. You can reframe anything: air conditioning (horrible), sitting at a desk (oh no), your work not having any tangible results (get me out of here), being indoors all day (why is this happening to me).
This deeply resonates with me. I LOVE building things, I just happen to build things in my head instead of the real.
I've always described my job as taking a bunch of funny shaped pieces and artfully filling in the gaps so they connect in a cohesive manner. The thinking part is the artful and cohesive bit. Kinda like kintsugi but with made-up languages and scrums and PMs/DMs.
> I often wondered why doesn't everyone want to be a construction worker.
I don't like hard physical work. I don't like sweating. Much prefer to sit on my ass in front of a computer and pretend to work while i scroll endlessly through twitter.
It's easy to look at those construction workers and think "Wow, those dudes have real jobs" because they get to build huge skyscrapers or subways.
But they're looking right back at you thinking the same exact thing, because you get to work on your laptop in an air conditioned office and don't go home smelling like sweat, dirt, and fumes.
There's a great quote from Bud Smith's book Work that has much better wording with the same idea, but I can't find it
I’m not surprised, it looks really fascinating. The view alone is probably often amazing, and imagining getting into a flow state while operating a crane seems like it would be amazing. I would assume you begin to embody the crane over time the way people do when they drive a lot, the feeling must be expansive. You probably feel quite powerful.
We organize data so people can be more efficient with their time. We're not data-organizers, we're profit & time multipliers. Sometimes I wonder what % of HN are regular LOB engineers; I bet it's quite a bit.
Whenever anybody gets uppity about scale, I remind them that not only is our 'scale' limited to the physical growth of the company, our job can be summarized as shuffling data around in a database with some touchpoints for human interactions in the workflow so our coworkers can be more productive. Every. Single. Company. around the world could probably benefit for some automated data shuffling, and despite being rote, the multiplier effect on small businesses and local economies is an important second-order-affect of helping build 'boring' LOB software that just shuffles data.
Who pays for the interesting structures, ponds, waterfalls, and arenas? It ultimately always boils down to where does the money come from -- think of "data organising" as the circulatory system of an extremely complex, multi layered, and global economy. It's not the most efficient and a lot of people learn to live in the cracks getting paid for doing virtually nothing, but it's necessary if we want to continue to create.
Also: if people were interested in endless artificial ponds, waterfalls, and interesting structures, and there was any money to be made in it (vs the cost of building them), there would probably be a market for it. I suspect not many people are interested, and they'd rather protect what nature already has.
I have similar thoughts. I basically make pixels change color all day long, and the effect of it is mostly that it changes the color of pixels on other peoples screens as well. Somehow that's valuable and while I understand why, it also seems deeply surreal at times.
Ultimately, you could abstract from any kind of computer work with such a general description. Another example: "Basically I am just pressing buttons all day and I am getting paid for it. shrugs"
I observed a while ago that the more directly your work helps someone else, the less it tends to pay. I'm not sure what that says about our psychology, but I suspect it's something to do with shame/pride.
There's a lot of replies about how you're organizing data so others can do their jobs more efficiently, but that's a fairly romanticized view of tech work. I get where you're coming from.
How do you think the other people can a) build houses, grow, and prepare food effectively, and b) know what houses and food to prepare to provide the most benefit? Communication and organisation are extremely valuable, even if the structures we set up are not the most efficient at doing so and may have a tendancy to create their own busywork (but computers have made that efficiency skyrocket. You're paid so much because you replace a small army of people shuffling paper around, and there's not enough people who can do that well).
In the Army they say for every person in the field there's 10 people behind the scenes handling the logistics of keeping that person fed and supplied with what they need to be effective. Those people behind the scenes are every bit as important as that person in the field. That's what we do. We're the "behind the scenes" people that makes everything possible.
How do you calculate value, and even what is value, is a question that's been asked by philosophers, economists, and every day people for thousands of years but is still debated about.
... although one that stuck with me was "you're worth about how much it would be to replace you". And with that perspective you can see why you earn more than a subsistence farmer
The average web developer (i.e. most of this site's users) is exactly that though: an organizer of data. Glue some API code together to slurp data out of one system and make it normalized for your own system.
Working 10 to 12 hours straight with only one or two half an hour breaks is no goal one should thrive for. Neither working 80 hours a week.
Heck, it would even be against the law in my country and it favors companies over people...
We tried gather.town in my team (we develop web services for a big news site) and dropped it after a week or two. While some people seemed to like it, others disliked it very strongly. I personally disliked it as well:
It drew lots of resources of my PC. It was like having MS Teams constantly running in meeting mode.
For me it felt childish to push a pixel avatar around in a virtual office. And also tiresome (its one more thing you have to keep in mind alongside your work). Having the camera on all the time is a no-go. And walking into the private space of a desk and talking to a person working there is as invasive and interuptive as it was before in the office. The app brought the worst of the office days into my remote days.
So all in all, it was a cute little game for a few minutes, but it made work feel miserable.
> And walking into the private space of a desk and talking to a person working there is as invasive and interuptive as it was before in the office.
Hmm, do most people think that? Do they like or dislike it? In my experience, some of the less technical people seem miserable when they can't organically engage in conversations.
Personally i prefer remote work on my own for similar reasons, yet in my experience any sort of privacy or deep focus are impossible in an open office setting from the get go. And there's little difference between someone waving their hand at you from across the room and wanting to converse and them just actually coming into your private space, since the end result is the same.
That's the very same reason why i kind of dislike that Skype/Slack just lets you call people without asking them first whether they're available for a call at that time, same with phone calls. Now, as technical workers we might be spoilt in that regard, but somehow i feel like one's attention should be requested first, not just stolen like calls/ad hoc conversations do.
> That's the very same reason why i kind of dislike that Skype/Slack just lets you call people without asking them first whether they're available for a call at that time, same with phone calls
Whenever someone would do that to me, I would always reject the call and say that I'll be available in 5-10 minutes. I would then tell them I would like to discuss having a call in text before actually having it, because it's an interruption. It seemed to cause people to stop just outright calling, which I hate.
Nothing is wrong with that. Many, maybe most, people don't work on things they love and care deeply about so the idea of working 10+ hours straight sounds awful.
Yeah… I’ve found audio-only is far more conducive to ad-hoc conversation. The closest I’ve ever felt to virtually “hanging out” with people had nothing to do with the modern era of group video chat. It was back when I’d jump into Ventrilo / Teamspeak / Mumble. Sure, there were video games as well, but I’d sit in there doing homework and other random crap too.
Reminds me of a piece of software that was part of some human-computer interaction study that I can't find right now. I swear it was called "Glance" but that's proven to be ungoogleable
It was a mac menu bar icon (or systray icon) of a closed eye. You could click on and see a menu of who was "in the room" with you. However, if you hovered or interacted with this menu for a bit, the eye would open on everyone else's screen indicating that someone was "looking around." From this menu you could initiate a chat with whoever was also "in the room"
The whole idea was to try and emulate glancing up from your desk and catching the eye of someone who was also glancing up at the same time, so people wouldn't be interrupting people currently "in the zone" Thus you could create the feeling of working in the same space with people while teleworking, but not have to commit to the definite action of messaging someone in order to feel out whether it was good to talk with a "hey"
I think an always-open connection is good for this too, but I agree that I'd much rather it be audio-only.
Thanks for mentioning this. I would get incredibly tense in a situation like this. Did I pick my nose? Did I spill water all over my shirt again because my bottom lip decided to give out? Does my bed look wrinkled? Did I smell myself? etc. etc. etc.
> Did I spill water all over my shirt again because my bottom lip decided to give out?
This happened to me around a week ago, just before a job interview. Fortunately it was just water and I was wearing a dark shirt, but it didn't help with stress. I'm glad I'm not the only one that does that.
I'm honestly exhausted just reading the article. What I was taking away from it was micromanagement/excessive control.
12-16 hour sessions, obsession with productivity and not efficacy, camera always on, notifying whenever leaving for 5 minutes, only a couple of 30 minute breaks (which in some countries like the UK would actually be illegal), no personal email or social media, and a skeuomorph of walking up to someone's desk.
It doesn't matter what the rules are, just that there are many of them and that there is no flexibility. This and the 12+ hour shifts, under total observation, are major red flags.
I question how many people were genuine when they said they enjoyed this, or if they were afraid of being honest with the guy who has exerted an unreasonable level of control over two thirds of their day.
This sounds like a nightmare to me. Working for 16 hours, checking in with somebody every 30 min, only getting maybe 3x30 min break, telling people if I’m gone for more than 5 min, and just so much more. Seems like a great way to burn out.
Setting Alexey's personal working style and focus aside, what are people's thoughts on virtual co-working in general?
Seems like there is a huge portion of people that have long since discovered that cities are not for them, but still yearn for some kind of group form of working.
There's been attempts as far as 2008 in Second Life[1], but also others in platforms such as discord, slack, minecraft. One popular zoom-based community for this is called Weekend Club [2]
I have personally found that whenever I pair with someone and I'm explaining to them my thought process as I'm programming, my productivity and focus goes through the roof. If my work were open source, I would just stream it on twitch. I might just do that for my side-projects though. But I wish I could have a buddy that just sits with me. We don't even have to talk all the time, just having someone there flips a switch for me.
I've been using gather for months now. The free 25 user plan is more than enough for the small side project I'm working on with a few friends, and even normies absolutely fall in love with Gather once they get into it. The art style is low-quality enough to not feel uncanny, and the maps are beautiful with great effects.
I hate these solutions that drive people towards having more and more meetings and working in committees.
If this is how you want to work with some people who prefer this mode of working, good for you. Go ahead and do that with that group of people, but just please leave me alone.
I want to work alone in a solitary and quiet setting with focus.
[Edit] I read a bit more, and it's even worse than I thought. You want me to be online all the time, and break my concentration every 30 minutes to talk to other people? How do people work this way? Perhaps I have a strong introvert bias when it comes to work, but even then, how do you build something creative with quality working like this?
The purpose seemed aimed at people that procrastinate a lot and have small-ish tasks. If you have to account for your efforts, then you might work more efficiently ?
Inspired by this, I created a study/work Discord server that is focused on frontend design and development (arata.page/circle). Unlike the article in this thread, there are a few differences in our approach: first, the server doesn't enforce regular check-ins. Because the members are strangers from all over the places, we set our own schedule and do asnychronous chat during the break. Secondly, we tend to completely mute the input and output devices (some people like myself do a screenshare to keep them focus). This works alright for a tiny community like us.
"One thing that I usually do when focusing is difficult despite these check-ins (which happens occasionally to me when doing something really hard or unpleasant), is I can tell my partner about the difficulty focusing, set the timer for 5 minutes, and write whether I was focused in gather.town chat every 5 minutes until the next check in. I find that these 5-minute text check-ins are sufficient for full focus on pretty much any task, however unpleasant."
This reads like satire to me. How can people work like that? Wouldn't it be easier to focus without the interrruptions?
Did you do that at the office too, stand up every 5 minutes and tell everyone you are focusing?
Gather.town seems fun if you're having a discussion or some kind of meeting as you can truly visualize and see who's interacting but to make it as your virtual co-working space, I do think that there are a lot of people who's going to struggle with this one and I'll probably get uncomfortable around the space.
Why am I paid so much money to basically do data organization. I'm organizing data.
There are other people that build houses, grow food, prepare food. Then there are others that are simply entertainers - but that does provide societal value. I mean I guess in order to have entertainment, we have to have this giant other house of cards built upon just BILLIONS of people that just sit and think all day and talk to other people.
I'm just at a huge loss why we don't all focus on growing food and building interesting structures, ponds, waterfalls, arenas.
No, instead our society has billions of organizers of data. Eh, it's late and I'm tired right now maybe I'll feel more useful tomorrow.