I understand your sentiment and I partially agree with it. But this kind of phrasing implies that "doing the bare minimum" (to put it in another way) is a strictly bad thing.
Sure, its easy to condemn someone "half-assing" a job by labeling him as lazy or something like that. But the reality is that most of the time we don't need the best nor we are willing to pay properly for this effort.
Imagine your baker, for example. Do you really need 100% of his effort and care to be put into every single bread he makes? For me this answer is "no". All I care is that he comply with all regulations and that his bread tastes good, I don't really mind if it's not best bread in the world. And even if it was the best I probably would find it too expensive to buy in a daily basis.
Another example would be blacksmiths, at some point they we our only option to make something out of metal, and they would put quite a lot of care and attention to every piece they made. But at some we created some machines that can create things out of metal. These machines, at first, weren't really good and the products they made were of inferior quality. But they had enough quality to be useful, were cheaper and were able to produce immense quantities of goods.
What I'm trying to say is that sometimes the "low effort" option is the correct choice. And I don't think this means the decline of knowledge work, this just means we will see a change in what is considered "relevant skills" for knowledge work.
Nope; just mine.
It sucks, because so few things in tech _are_ meaningful, and exist for a reason other than to enrich whoever owns the company making it.
It is. It shows a lack of character. Have some pride in your work. Have some pride in yourself. Being lazy is pathetic.
>Sure, its easy to condemn someone "half-assing" a job by labeling him as lazy or something like that. But the reality is that most of the time we don't need the best nor we are willing to pay properly for this effort.
There is no such thing as "need". You don't need anything. People lived for thousands of years on a diet of mostly grains living in uninsulated houses with open fires. Everything is a want. People's wants are never satisfied, you can always want more.
But even if nobody else will appreciate it, you should do the right thing anyway. You should do it because you take pride in your work.
>Imagine your baker, for example. Do you really need 100% of his effort and care to be put into every single bread he makes? For me this answer is "no".
Nothing to do with what I want. He needs to put in the effort. He needs to do it for himself.
>These machines, at first, weren't really good and the products they made were of inferior quality. But they had enough quality to be useful, were cheaper and were able to produce immense quantities of goods.
The men that designed the machine, or ran the machine, or made the moulds, or assembled the parts, all of them worked bloody hard and were proud to do so for their families and for themselves. Work ethic was prized. This wasn't low effort. It was a different tradeoff between material inputs and material outputs, but it required no lesser work ethic. It didn't permit laziness or idleness.
That's part of the issue. They ignore regulations and the bread has mold. But we eat it and say "well I'm not dead". Because we're being conditioned to eat, not taste. To consume, not question.
Meanwhile, I complain the bread tastes stale and moldy and I get argued down by fake bakers that "no you don't understand this is the future of bread". Well, it sucks. I don't csre how much you're paid to say otherwise or promise they it'll taste "good" (read: not crap) in a few years. I'll go to my bakery until then instead of having your bread shoved down my throat.
Make it taste like bread first instead of hyping up how it looks so close to bread. That's the whole issue causing the downfall of society.
Quiet quitting is having no safety net when you're no longer satisfied with your job for any reason but your Healthcare is tied to your employer as ransom.
Quiet quitting is realizing you are going to be terminated in the next wave of layoffs 3-6 months later and that your efforts will not save your job anyway, so focus on jumping ship.
Greed has always existed, this was just a new name companies tried to gaslight with. I don't want to hear about "lazy workers" in a time where layoffs (that aren't performance based) are only increasing in a society thst decides it lawful to treat an employment contract as as a toy to be thrown away at any whim.
The flip side is that "taking pride in your work" nearly always results in being taking advantage of from your employer, at least in salaried positions. And if you can spot the social patterns and games played such as valuing employees that work overtime (without pay), on weekends, etc, it is clear that employers love getting more value from employees without compensating them. Work extra hard for 6 months to maybe possibly get a promotion? People are generally waking up to this reality, hence the 'quiet quitting' mindset.
One can both take pride in their work, and respect their time by adhering to their employer-employee contract as written.
Lastly, in the baker example, they have a direct reason to put in their best effort (assuming the baker owns their bakery): they will gain goodwill and repeat customers if they bake very well. A salaried worker is so far removed from being directly compensated for their work. I predict the situation would be very different if salary work got commission based on sales and overtime pay.
And what’s more worrying is things where the negative impact is higher order.
If the bread has some poison that will kill you in 5 years time etc.
Currently we maintain a bar partially with human ethics and processes, whether that is directly preventing bad outcomes because of liabilities or reflecting on bad outcomes once they happen to improve regulations (a lot of which relies on introspectability).
Once AI starts replacing the decision-making layer, we lose the collective understanding of how processes fail. Once you start needing to constrain the space of machine error, you’ve basically arrived at almost solving the problem again.
But the analogy here is, if all bakers started using bread machines every day, and new bakers only learn how to ask the bread machine to make bread, the decline of baking will surely be a step closer.
And sure we can quibble over tools the baker uses such as ovens or dough mixers or what have you, but ultimately they must know how to make bread. AI platforms attempt to remove the need to understand the code, so that people don't need to learn how it works to make it.
I want to make things that respect the user and treats them with the love they deserve.