OT. Jobless Employed

Who cares?

That was me.

You're supposed to bring enough resources to win the battle. You wouldn't buy a printer that made lots of noise and took all day to print. I think a lot of the people who dominate meetings are like that. They work long hours have a lots of issues to discuss because they're struggling to do their job.I worked weekends at times. Usually in the beginning of the project when no one else would be there. I was analog, the interface to reality and my stuff must be done first. But then I went into support mode. I was the eye of the storm. I had PCB board designers, technicians, programmers and vendors all working on my stuff. I would read text books and charge part of my time to education. My bosses knew that I had free time and I would get the sustaining work and the compliance work. Part obsolescence, etc. The kind of stuff a lot engineers hate to do. I was also the relief pitcher. Brought in to help on the weird problems.

I then quit that job to go look for new challenges. At the new job, I got in trouble for charging time to education; so I quit. At the next job, I played the game and looked busy. Designed a CCD camera nobody wanted. Wrote an optics program for simulating lenses. The engineering head wanted to know why we didn't just buy a program to do that. I didn't tell him I was bored.

Engineers don't pick tomatoes. An engineering company is a bunch of smart people coming up with good ideas. Google had some rule where people could use part of their time to do what they want. I don't know about that, but I think engineers should charge part of their time to education. That way management knows what they are doing and their employees keep improving. They also have the resources in reserve to win the battles.

With physical deliverables, designs or assembled boards or faucets that work or waffles on tables, performance is pretty obvious. A lot of business stuff is fuzzy and productivity simply can't be measured.

I know several too-highly-paid people who work from home and, I'm convinced, are perfectly useless. They have long Zoom calls to share the uselessness.

Big software companies are laying off people in increments of 10K, and I suspect customers won't notice any difference.

Why would a web app like Twitter need tens of thousands of employees?

"Customer service" is mostly robots now.

When there is something that bean counters can count, some bean counter will set up a performance metric.

Assessing the quality of what is being counted is more difficult, unless the product is so hopelessly bad that nobody will buy it.

You do have to work quite hard to assess quality, and managers tend to be bad at it.

You are also convinced that the scientific evidence about anthropogenic global warming is perfectly useless, and that Doandl Trump has "common sense". Your judgement isn't to be relied on.

If you can't understand stuff - or don't want to understand stuff - you are always happy to declare it useless, If it goes over your head, it is of no use to you.

They did add validating ticks to tweets, and Elon Musk couldn't see the point.

So you use robots to look after your customers? I had one telephone conversation with Jim Williams at Linear Technology. The robot that replaced him would be an impressive piece of work.

One real dynamic was that terabuck giants like Google and Apple were hiring in Silicon Valley just to keep competitors from getting the people. That works in a region that is housing limited. Work from home changes that strategy.

To be precise, Elon first laid off anyone then at Twitter who could not provide a sample of a recently-written bit of code.

Yeah, often even the real human ones.

Joe Gwinn

I did that. I wrote a Basic+ program to fake my weekly time report.

Yup.

One time BITD I was working about 5% of my time on a DARPA project. The govt requirement was for everyone to keep a time sheet of their actual hours worked, not to exceed 8 per day.

In a fit of due diligence, my management insisted that everyone write up their hours every day, on pain of Severe Disapproval. Most unusually, they even did spot checks.

Soooo, naturally I wrote a script (in Rexx), running as a cron job, to put in 8 hours of non-govt work each evening, with a slightly random time stamp. That way I could just hack it up when I actually did some DARPA work, and wind up with a correct time sheet.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

"Maybe he could take more initiative and try to take on more, but he gets good performance reviews and raises as it is, so he figures, why bother?"

Yes, America was in large part _designed_ for white "educated" people from well-to-do families to fail upwards.

Whole point of the exercise!

I understand that a part of conservative philosophy is "when the government offers you money, you take it" but that the poor often tend to operate by the same philosophy seems to be a matter of consternation.

Sounds like their main "crime" is that they don't regularly help themselves to enough to reach the level of "good business sense" which lies beyond the moral turpitude of minor figures.

America was hardly designed. All sorts of adventurous and distressed people immigrated here from all over the world.

The highest earning demographic in the USA is now Asians.

A lot of them were religious nutters who wanted to be more unpleasant to people who didn't share their perverse ideas than established communities would tolerate.

when the UK government got to hear about it, they made sure that it didn't happen again, and the locals resented that, though they didn't revolt until more than a hundred years later.

They come for societies where bribery and corruption have been popular for a long time - the American culture is more about taking silly idea seriously, rather than milking them for all they are worth.

They can put casino's on their native lands.

I've dealt with a number of realtors lately, who are the apotheosis of a middle man.

They have a list of properties, and tell you "Here are some properties." and if you pick a property to lease or buy they take their fee. No salesmanship is required as in areas like this (or San Francisco for that matter) the properties basically move themselves, if you don't take it someone else will.

A piece of paper with a list on it could accomplish the same function adequately compared to most of 'em

Nowadays SF is littered with vacant commercial properties, both downtown and in the neighborhoods. The "move themselves" mode is gone and may never return.

There is a vacant building next to us and we inquired about maybe buying it. The sellers are a divorcing couple and there are no other buyers on the horizon for over six months now. The realtor is not only exercizing a lot of salesmanship but has become a marriage councelor in the process. He is trying to get the price *down* to get a sale.

Realtors are cold-calling too, trying to find buyers.

Covid and the resulting work-from-home have changed things, maybe forever. Business schools will have to have departments and courses on how to manage this.

Hey, we could sell an AI app to people so they can run it to pretend to be working.

Mouse jigglers are super helpful.

Yes, work-from-home and a general lack of supply has made the residential realtor's job very easy around here. Not sure offhand how many work both worlds.

Usually the residential realtor does have to use a key to let you in to look around, so I guess that's something.

Tesla markets an AI that pretends to drive and there's a lot of interest, sounds like a growth industry.

An artificially intelligent door lock could replace most residential realtors.

Or maybe just a timer.

I can think of much more useless jobs, though. Like landlords.