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.).
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.
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 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.
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
Companies need software to make profits, and so, at least for the moment, need people who can do that software. That raises prices.
I thought this was going to be a witty officespace reference.
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.
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.
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.
We are. One app at a time, building/growing becomes easier to do at scale, with less people, quicker, and more environmentally friendly.
You are directly contributing to the success of these activities, even if you are "just organising data".
(what a nihilistic way to say it. I wonder if nihilistic builders also say "i'm just stacking bricks 24/7 fml")
... 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
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.
If it works for you, great. But don’t assume it’s better than regularly scheduled meetings.
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.
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.
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.
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]
Is this the future?
[1] https://community.secondlife.com/knowledgebase/english/worki... [2] http://weekendclub.co/
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?
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.
Have you heard of https://founderscafe.io
Basically gather.town but with an intimate group of founders from Stanford/Yc/Harvard etc. Thought you might be interested in it!
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?
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.
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.
I work on the thing I love & care deeply about (newscience.org) and I'm most happy when I work 10, 12, 16 hours straight, 60, 80, 100 hours a week.
What wrong with that?
Everything when it isn't. Or when you're making others do it for you.
The difference is spending time on your hobby or passion project, vs. being employed by a dictator.
Now I'm thinking about what 'sitting' actually means.
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.
But is that the fault of the occupation or the occupee?