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I’m convinced that 70% of the workforce of some large organisations is just white collar welfare / adult day care already. Maybe that goes to 80+% as a result of “AI” but doesn’t fundamentally change the model.


I never understood this take. Why do you think an employer would waste resources like that? I’m not saying that bullshit jobs don’t exist but I think you are off by an order of magnitude, and even that mostly applies to white collar workplaces with > 100 employees.

Good luck doing nothing of value in a restaurant with 20 employees.


The more money I've made in tech, the less I've worked. Granted, I have learned a lot and am far more efficient than in the 90s, but the amount of work has decreased substantially.

2011 Tigerlogic in Irvine, CA and 2018 JPMC in Seattle, WA, I would do NOTHING for days while collecting rather nice paychecks by today's standards. The fact I then chose to QUIT these jobs for a rather unknown working situation (and slightly more pay) astounded my friends.

At my current position, I make a great living and do very little. Maybe once every two weeks I work all day. Most of the time it's gaming metrics by picking (or creating) issues that are unknown, such that I'm writing the docs and specializing in code corners nobody else wants to. Numbers of developers are tight, so we don't see the redundancy from previous years. That's great for me.


How do you “get away” with that? Working remotely? What do you do instead with your time? Are you hiring? Lol

Because they are unaware of the scale of the problem. Especially at the top, managers think being in meetings all day is "work" even if nothing actually gets done in those meetings. Consider people like this [0] automating their jobs and not telling anyone, no one would know otherwise.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AutoHotkey/comments/1p7xrro/have_yo...


I know it won’t be popular but making resource investment decisions is actually getting things done.

You understand that for you to do “real work” all day someone and to research and decide to pay you to do that.

And before you say you are self guided answer me if you took up painting tomorrow would you be allowed to continue.


> Why do you think an employer would waste resources like that?

The parent post specifically mentioned large organizations, where the "employer" is not some person who hires and pays employees from their own funds. Hiring and personel management is done by middle managers with their own interests and incentives, which can differ substantially from those of the owners or capital providers.


I moderately agree here. The theory being that since 95 or so the office computer and internet frankly has already automated most work at the white collar level. We sort of just … like working with humans.

Which I think is much better take than that guy that wrote bullshit jobs.


Not quite 1000 on Codex as of last day or two!


Does it fully replicate XCode preview and torch your CPU for a full 5 minutes?


I may be wrong, but the simulators seem to be Intel binaries which mess with audio since the last macOS update I did, so no zoom calls with XCode open for me.


“Free”. Presumably tax payer funded in actuality.


That’s generally how good governments work yes.


At some point you run out of other people’s money and have bread lines.


But if you don’t spend money, you will also become a failed state because the infrastructure required to generate value has failed.


So far it looks like we're going to run out of people first.


What? Bread lines are a response to poverty caused by a failure of the market and typically involve institutions giving out free bread using other people's money.


Could you expand more on how bread lines in Soviet Union were a failure of the market?


We'll get the super wealthy in California, like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to pay for it. Oh wait, they just left.


And the title bars of the windows. On a 13” screen, that’s a fair percentage of available screen real estate down the toilet


From a company that spent decades harping on about taste, usability, human interface guidelines etc, it’s a train wreck. If Microsoft did it you’d just shrug your shoulders and carry on with life because good taste and usability was never a core promise.


Let’s be honest. It’s a mess targeting iOS. It’s like the old days with VB - first 80% done in no time, last 20% takes forever, requiring ever more elaborate hacks to get around stupid restrictions (eg try hiding the keyboard associated with a TextField when you tap on a Picker).


If the objective is to put files where you can’t find them again, I think you’d be hard pressed to find a better alternative.


Except any plain file server that you can connect to via ordinary protocols?


Hope you just overlooked the auto-playing video ads due to the pressure of the interview. When can you start?


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