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.

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plomme 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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Supermancho 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	plomme 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		How do you “get away” with that? Working remotely? What do you do instead with your time? Are you hiring? Lol

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em500 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

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satvikpendem 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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...

	▲	tsunamifury an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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tsunamifury 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.