Some interesting research

Researcher Christina Bodin Danielsson calls open office landscapes a “sea of ​​slaves.”

^^ more like tin can :)

In a statement on Tuesday, ILA President Harold Daggett said the union is “now demanding $5 an hour increase in wages for each of the six years of a new ILA-USMX Master Contract. Plus, we want absolute airtight language that there will be no automation or semi-automation, and we are demanding all Container Royalty monies go to the ILA.”

I am really happy that the younger generation is re-evaluating views on work.

From the article:

Yuki Watanabe used to spend 12 hours every day toiling away in the office. And that’s considered a short day.

Asking to leave work on time or taking some time off can be tricky enough. Even trickier is tendering a resignation, which can be seen as the ultimate form of disrespect in the world’s fourth-biggest economy, where workers traditionally stick with one employer for decades, if not for a lifetime.

In the most extreme cases, grumpy bosses rip up resignation letters and harass employees to force them to stay.

...She turned to Momuri, a resignation agency that helps timid employees leave their intimidating bosses.

For the price of a fancy dinner, many Japanese workers hire these proxy firms to help them resign stress-free.

At a cost of 22,000 yen (about $150) – or 12,000 yen for those who work part time – it pledges to help employees tender their resignations, negotiate with their companies and provide recommendations for lawyers if legal disputes arise.

“Some people come to us after having their resignation letter ripped three times and employers not letting them quit even when they kneel down to the ground to bow,” she said, in another illustration of the deferential workplace culture embedded in Japan.

Japan has long had an overwork culture. Employees across various sectors report punishing hours, high pressure from supervisors and deference to the company. These employers are widely known as “black firms.”

Human resources professor Hiroshi Ono, from Hitotsubashi University Business School in Tokyo, said the situation had become so pressing that the government had begun publishing a list of unethical employers to hamper their ability to hire, and warn job seekers of the dangers of working for them.

So why did these resignation agents only emerge in recent years? That, experts say, is down to young people’s changing approach to work.

Many of them no longer subscribe to older generations’ thinking that one should do whatever they are told regardless of the job’s nature, Ono said, adding that when there is a mismatch of expectation, they won’t hesitate to quit.

“We honestly think that our resignation agency service should disappear from society and we hope for that. We think it’s best if people can tell their bosses themselves, but hearing the horror stories of our clients, I don’t think that our business will disappear anytime soon,” she said.

For now, Momuri offers a 50% discount for those who seek their service to resign the second time.

Highlights

Broadly speaking, the role of an establishment economist is to come up with new ways of saying, "actually, your boss is right."

Now, Lowe's has 285,000 employees, half of whom earn less than $33,000/year. Divide Ellison's $18m among those workers and each of them would net a paltry $126/year. But if you were to share out the $43 billion Ellison had to piss up against a wall on stock buybacks among those workers, you'd be able to give every worker a $30,000 bonus, every year:

The largest 20 companies in the Low-Wage 100 spent nine times more on stock buybacks than they spent on worker retirement plan contributions. Chipotle spent $2b on buybacks – that's 48 times what the company put into its workers' 401(k)s. That's because 92% of Chipotle employees can't afford to have a 401(k).

In incentivizing CEOs to keep share prices high above every other consideration, establishment economists set the stage for a corporate America where CEOs were punished for investing in a living wage, a dignified retirement, or even a non-lethal product. Instead, we have a business environment that boils down to a competition to see who can eat their seed-corn the fastest.

Highlights

So the point of the American UI system is not to make it easier to quit a job. But a few economists are now beginning to ask: Should it be?

A safety net program that would encourage more Americans to quit their jobs has generally been seen as a bad thing.

Boosting UI generosity doesn’t affect overall employment rates one way or the other. Instead of loafing around in subsidized unemployment, more generous benefits can support people to quit their jobs in search of better ones, which benefits workers through higher wages and better job satisfaction, and the economy through enhanced productivity as people find better uses for their skills.

The real losers would be lousy jobs, which would struggle to retain workers with a greater cushion to quit and go looking elsewhere.

A major barrier facing lasting reform has been that most people do not care about improving the unemployment system long enough to build the kind of political momentum that gets laws through Congress.

Without financial support, quitting in search of better work just isn’t always a viable option, especially for the more than one in 10 US households that have zero wealth to fall back on.

The unemployment insurance system was established during the Great Depression as part of the Social Security Act in 1935, when the unemployment rate was about 20 percent; helping those workers who still had jobs quit wasn’t exactly a policy priority. About half of American workers were excluded from coverage, including agricultural and domestic workers (many of whom were Black).

The surge of quits during the pandemic and the expansion of unemployment insurance created a unique dataset that caught the attention of economists Zhifeng Cai and Jonathan Heathcote.

After an extra $600 was added to weekly UI checks, along with a major expansion to who is eligible for the benefits, studies found no connection between the boosted UI and laziness or joblessness (echoing findings around unconditional cash transfers more broadly, where giving people cash doesn’t undermine their desire to work).

Economists have historically held equality and efficiency at odds with each other, with higher UI benefits seen as an equality booster that trades off against economic efficiency. But Cai explained in an interview with Vox that “if you give nothing to people who quit, it’s actually not an efficient choice, because there are too few people quitting. Our point is that even from an efficiency perspective, you still want to have some UI going to quitters.”

Alice Evans is diving into a new Econ paper.

Ingrid Haegele finds that junior men are more likely to apply for promotions, primarily due to a greater desire for team leadership.

Startling differences between humans and jukeboxes

Metadata

• Author: Adam Mastroianni
• Category: article
• URL: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/startling-differences-between-humans?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Highlights

Similarly, when you survey people about what motivates them at work, they go “Feeling good about myself! Having freedom, the respect of my coworkers, and opportunities to develop my skills, learn things, and succeed!” When you survey people about what motivates others, they go, “Money and job security!” In another survey, people claimed that they value high-level needs (e.g., finding meaning in life) more than other people do.3

I’m saying “people” here as if I wasn’t one of them, but I would have agreed with all of the above. It was only saying it out loud that made me realize how cynical my theory of human motivation was, and that I applied it to everyone but myself. Yikes!

It’s not that hard to give people skills. It’s way harder to give them interests.

The best way to use incentives, then, is to:

1. find the people who already want what you want

2. help them survive

in a department where an internal survey revealed low morale among the graduate students. A town hall was convened to investigate the issue. The students knew that one of the biggest problems was that a handful of professors terrorize and neglect their underlings, and the fastest way to fix this would be to put those faculty members on an ice floe and push it out to sea. This, of course, was difficult to bring up (some of those faculty members were in the room), and so instead we talked about minor bureaucratic reforms like whether there should be some training for advisors, or whether bad advisors should have fewer opportunities to admit students. Nobody could name who these mysterious bad advisors were, of course, so even these piddling suggestions went nowhere.

If you hire someone based on the shininess of their CV and then hope that, somehow, the employee handbook will show them how to also be a good person and not just a prolific paper-producer, you’re going to end up with a department full of sad graduate students.

If you’re writing a constitution or a code of conduct, by all means, do a good job. But if you’re counting on something like “SUBSECTION 3A: Being evil is not allowed” to stop people from being evil, or if you think Roberts Rules of Order are going to turn an insecure despot into an enlightened ruler, well, strap in for some Dark Ages and some bad improv.

discovering your inner motivations takes time and experience, and we gum up the process with lots of strong opinions about what should motivate us.

If you believe that people need to be treated like jukeboxes or secret criminals, you are accepting the behaviorist premise that we need to put people inside a giant [operant conditioning chamber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber#:~:text=An%20operant%20conditioning%20chamber%20(also,graduate%20student%20at%20Harvard%20University.) that dispenses food pellets for good behavior and electric shocks for bad behavior.

The habits of effective remote teams

Metadata

• Author: PostHog
• Category: email
• URL: mailto:reader-forwarded-email/1c3a1c8d6e553790a7809f3edb62d8f3

Highlights

Remote work doesn't work without a strong writing culture.

If a decision is made on a call and nobody writes it down, was a decision even made?

Writing is thinking, so it helps you think through both what you’re trying to achieve and how you want to communicate it, making everyone more intentional.

But the manager's schedule is the enemy of remote work. Successful remote teams avoid it entirely, which makes them incredibly good at getting shit done.

We optimize for productivity, not presence.

The biggest (and stupidest) argument against remote work? It makes people less productive. This is demonstrably untrue.

So, if productivity isn't the problem, what is it? It’s trust. If you trust people to do their very best work, and create a culture that values transparency, they'll deliver.

We trust people to do their best work and, in return, they deliver.

Simply put, when something goes wrong, the investigation of the root cause is, as the company puts it, blameless. This encourages everyone to speak up without fear of punishment. People are trusted to make mistakes and, as a result, problems that do arise are easier to solve.

Successful remote companies build everything out in the open. This gives everyone the context they need, and eliminates the political squabbles that plague less transparent companies.

As Buffer co-founder and CEO Joel Gascoigne wrote almost a decade ago, “transparency breeds trust, and trust is is the foundation of great teamwork.” It’s still true today.

Would be nice ;)

Don't read if you don't want to ruin your day.

The One About The Web Developer Job Market

Metadata

• Author: Baldur Bjarnason
• Category: rss
• URL: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-one-about-the-web-developer-job-market/

Highlights

Many organisations are also resorting to employee-hostile strategies to increase employee churn, such as forced Return-To-Office policies.

Finding a non-bullshit job is likely only going to get harder.

• Finding effective documentation, information, and training is likely to get harder, especially in specialised topics where LLMs are even less effective than normal.

as soon as you start to try to predict the second or third order consequences things very quickly get remarkably difficult.

In short, futurists are largely con artists.

you need to do something Note: ah.. the famous "you need to do something" This is not a one-off event but has turned into a stock market driven movement towards reducing the overall headcount of the tech industry.

What this means is that when the bubble ends, as all bubbles must, the job market is likely to collapse even further.

The stock market loves job cuts

Activist investors see it as an opportunity to lower developer compensation

Management believes they can replace most of these employees with LLM-based automation

Discovering whether it’s true or not is actually quite complicated as it, counter-intuitively, doesn’t depend on the degree of LLM functionality but instead depends entirely on what organisations, managers, and executives are using software projects for.

Since, even in the best case scenario of the most optimistic prediction of LLM power, you’re still going to need to structure a plan for the code and review it, the time spent on code won’t drop to zero. But if you believe in the best-case prediction, a 20-40% improvement in long term productivity sounds reasonable, if a bit conservative.

The alternate world-view, one that I think is much more common among modern management, is that the purpose of software development is churn.

None of these require that the software be free or even low on defects. The project doesn’t need to be accessible or even functional for a majority of the users. It just needs to look good when managers, buyers, and sales people poke at it.

The alternate world-view, which I think I can demonstrate is dominant in web development at least, is that software quality does not matter. Production not productivity is what counts. Up until now, the only way to get production and churn has been to focus on short-term developer experience, often at the expense of the long term health of the project, but the innovation of LLMs is that now you can get more churn, more production, with fewer developers.

This means that it doesn’t matter who is correct or not in their estimate of how well these tools work.

You aren’t going to notice the issue as an end-user. From your perspective the system is working perfectly.

Experienced developers will edit out the issues without thinking about it, focusing on the time-saving benefit of generating the rest. Inexperienced developers won’t notice the issues and think they’ve just saved a lot of time, not realising they’ve left a ticking time bomb in the code base.

The training data favours specific languages such as Python and JavaScript.

• The same tool that enhances their productivity by 20-30% might also be outright harmful to a junior developer’s productivity, once you take the inevitable and eventual corrections and fixes into account.

From the job market perspective, all that improved and safe LLM-based coding tools would mean is more job losses.

Because manager world-views are more important than LLM innovation.

If the technology is what’s promised, the churn world-view managers will just get more production, more churn, with even fewer developers. The job market for developers will decline.

they will still use the tech to increase production, with fewer developers, because software quality and software project success isn’t what they’re looking for in software development. The job market for developers will decline.

The more progress you see in the automation, the fewer of us they’ll need. It isn’t a question of the nature of the improvement, but of the attitudes of management.

Even if that weren’t true, technical innovations in programming generally don’t improve project or business outcomes.

The odds of a project’s success are dictated by user research, design, process, and strategy, not the individual technological innovations in programming. Rapid-Application-Development tools, for example, didn’t shift outcomes in meaningful ways.

What matters is whether the final product works and improves the business it was made for. Business value isn’t solely a function of code defects. Technical improvements that address code defects are necessary, but not sufficient.

tech industry management is firmly convinced that less is more when it comes to employing either.

Whether you’re a bear or a bull on LLMs, we as developers are going to get screwed either way, especially if we’re web developers.

Most web projects shipped by businesses today are broken, but businesses rarely seem to care.

Most websites perform so badly that they don’t even finish loading on low-end devices, even when business outcomes directly correlate with website performance, such as in ecommerce or ad-supported web media.

The current state of web development is as if most Windows apps released every year simply failed to launch on 20-40% of all supported Windows installs.

If being plausible is all that matters, then that’s the literal, genuine, core strength of an LLM.

This is a problem for the job market because if all that matters to these organisations is being seen plausibly chasing cutting-edge technology – that the actual business outcomes don’t matter – then the magic of LLMs mean that you don’t actually need that many developers to do that for much, much less money.

Web media is a major employer, both directly and indirectly, of web developers. If a big part of the web media industry is collapsing, then that’s an entire sector that isn’t hiring any of the developers laid off by Google, Microsoft, or the rest. And the people they aren’t hiring will still be on the job market competing with everybody else who wouldn’t have even applied to work in web media.

The scale of LLM-enabled spam production outstrips the ability of Bing or Google to counter it.

But it gets even worse as every major search engine provider on the market is all-in on replacing regular keyword search with chatbots and LLM-generated summaries that don’t drive any traffic at all to their sources.

It’s reasonable to expect that the job market is unlikely to ever fully bounce back, due to the collapse of web media alone.

Experience in Node or React is not a reliable signifier of an ability to work on successful Node or React projects because most Node or React projects aren’t even close to being successful from a business perspective. Lack of experience in Node or React – such as a background in other frameworks or vanilla JS – conversely isn’t a reliable signifier that the developer won’t be a successful hire.

Lower pay, combined with the information asymmetry about employer dysfunction, would then lead to more capable workers leaving the sector, either to run their own businesses – a generally dysfunctional web development sector is likely to have open market opportunities – or leave the industry altogether. This would exacerbate the job market’s dysfunctions even further, deepening the cycle.

The first thing to note is that, historically, whenever management adopts an adversarial attitude towards labour, the only recourse labour has is to unionise.

As employees, we have nothing to lose from unionising. That’s the first consequence of management deciding that labour is disposable.

Diversifying your skills has always been a good idea for a software developer. Learning a new language gives you insight into the craft of programming that is applicable beyond that language specifically.

But the market for developer training in general has collapsed.

Some of it is down to the job market. Why invest in training if tech cos aren’t hiring you anyway? Why invest in training your staff if you’re planning on replacing them with LLM tools anyway?

After all, as Amy Hoy wrote in 2016:

Running a biz is a lot less risky than having a job, because 1000 customers is a lot less fragile than 1 employer.

The tech industry has “innovated” itself into a crisis, but because the executives aren’t the ones out looking for jobs, they see the innovations as a success.

The rest of us might disagree, but our opinions don’t count for much.

But what we can’t do is pretend things are fine.

Because they are not.

Thoughts?

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

Specific case about teachers

The big picture: Employers don't offer parental leave out of the goodness of their hearts.

What to watch: So far, no other firms have followed suit — but Big Law is a lock-step world, so it's not something to rule out.

Forward to your manager

What is your experience?

Some Soma