I think the most tragic of all is that, based on my experiences in both startups and corporate cultures, most of that work people are killing themselves for is just "busywork" handed to them by managers who themselves don't know any better.
The amount of waste in human energy & effort in pointless jobs that optimise for "being busy" is, as far as 1st-world problems are concerned, a humanitarian tragedy.
TPS reports exist in many places. However companies like EY are predicated on performing incomprehensible amounts of busywork ground out by legions (literally: EY alone has nearly 100 Roman legions of headcount) of minions, constructing a illusion that the busywork is essential to any respectable Real Business Factory and lobbying for their flavor of busywork to be a legal requirement in as many jurisdictions as possible. It's like gun companies selling body armour.
You could nuke most of these organisations to dust and all that really would happen would be an adjustment as everyone realises the complicated TPS reports weren't very useful anyway and the world keeps turning.
Having worked with or seen up close the results of more than one of these firms in various capacities and practices they provide, I wholeheartedly agree.
There are some areas where there’s an argument to be made about cost effectiveness, but experience has demonstrated to me that if you’re retaining the services of groups in these firms that you realistically could afford much better service from somewhere else. Like direct hiring for the talent you need or recruiting your own contractors, working with vendors directly, etc.
I’ve never seen results from these firms that make me go “oh wow! That’s worth what was paid!”
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. For my experiences, I’ve just never seen it.
I saw a similar situation to the headline, where a pregnant woman working for an Indian outsourcer was worked to the point that the stress caused a miscarriage. She was forced to return back to work the same day, directly from the hospital.
The work being done by that team was utterly pointless. It was a software deployment that had failed twice already because they hadn't followed the procedure in the manual, and were trying the same guaranteed-to-fail process a third time just in case it would succeed. They all knew it would fail, but their manager insisted they go through the motions anyway, for 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week. The manager knew it wouldn't work either, but his boss had signed some document that basically said that they "had to" do things this way. His boss had no idea about anything, wasn't there, and didn't care about the technical details to begin with.
It was an incredible farce, with deadly consequences, for no tangible results.
I think that the pressure to constantly do something often leads to wasted effort on tasks that don't contribute meaningfully to the bigger picture. The human potential being wasted.
your last sentence I think puts the 2nd pillar into the problem, which is not only technological (i.e. the abstraction problem mentioned in the original article) but also cultural
VICE seemed to make sense at a given time + place + context:
* Gonzo journalism: "On my way to North Korea I'm gonna stop by my auntie where over lunch she'd beg me not to go"
* Peak hipster: pre-pandemic hyper-urbanised young white collar people who started making money
* Excitement about Web 2.0 weirdness and the over-sharing culture
all of the above created a compelling package back then, but don't seem to scale to a "global media empire" Shane Smith wanted to make, one that would topple the incumbents.
interesting how certain industries were never "disrupted" by startups, no matter the amount of hype that was generated in the mid-2010s [1]; banking is a major example (no startup bank overthrew JPMC) but the same seems to apply to legacy media.
[1] Shane Smith (VICE founder) quote about Murdoch during an FT interview:
"I have Gen Y, I have social [media], I have online video. You have none of that. I have the future, you have the past."
https://www.ft.com/content/61c51d64-4a9c-11e2-968a-00144feab...
Yes, see "Instagram is just to keep up appearances." Still in use but out. As in out of style, not cool, for the parents, etc. Teens are using it to keep the parents at bay for what they are doing on TikTok/Snap.
as reluctant as I am to trust this kind of anecdata, for the sake of argument let's assume it's true. What matters is usage, not the reason for the usage
Shazam belongs to that class of iPhone apps that when they were released I was like "wow, the future is here" -- this alongside the first accelerometer and AR ones
