Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

I’m surprised not many people talk about this, but a big reason corporations are able to do layoffs is just that they’re doing less. At my work we used to have thousands of ideas of small improvements to make things better for our users. Now we have one: AI. It’s not that we’re using AI to make all these small improvements, or even planning on it. We’re just… not doing them. And I don’t think my experience is very unique.

I think people need to get used to the idea that the West is just going backwards in capability. Go watch CGI in a movie theatre and it's worse than 20 years ago, go home to play video games and the new releases are all remasters of 20 year old games because no-one knows how to do anything any more. And these are industries which should be seeing the most progress, things are even worse in hard-tech at Boeing or whatever.

Whenever people see old systems still in production (say things that are over 30 years old) the assumption is that management refused to fund the replacement. But if you look at replacement projects so many of them are such dismal failures that's management's reluctance to engage in fixing stuff is understandable.

From the outside, decline always looks like a choice, because the exact form the decline takes was chosen. The issue is that all the choices are bad.

My personal theory is that this is the result of an incompetent management class where no self corrections are happening.

In my work experience I've realized everybody fears honesty in their organization be it big or small.

Customers can't admit the project is failing, so it churns on. Workers/developers want to keep their job and either burn out or adapt and avoid talking about obvious deficits. Management is preoccupied with softening words and avoiding decisions because they lack knowledge of the problem or process.

Additionally there has been a growing pipeline of people that switch directly from university where they've been told to only manage other people and not care about the subject to positions of power where they are helpless and can't admit it.

Even in university, working for the administration I've watched people self congratulation on doing design thinking seminars every other week and working on preserving their job instead of doing useful things while the money for teaching assistants or technical personnel is not there.

I've seen that so often that I think it's almost universal. The result is mediocre broken stuff where everyone pretends everything is fine. Everyone wants to manage, nobody wants to do the work or god forbid improve processes and solve real problems.

I've got some serious ADHD symptoms and as a sysadmin when you fail to deliver it's pretty obvious and I messed up big time more than once and it was always sweet talked, excused, bullshitted away from higher ups.

Something is really off and everyone is telling similar stories about broken processes.

Feels like a collective passivity that captures everything and nobody is willing to admit that something doesn't work. And a huge missallocation of resources.

Not sure how it used to be but I'm pessimistic how this will end.

This started when companies decided that labor is fungible.

The moment you admit failure as an employee, you are out of the company. And no for most people it is not easy to find a job that will not disrupt their lives (aka move cities, change financial planning, even health insurance).

So employees do what they have to do. They will lie till the last moment and pretend that the initiatives they are working on are huge value add for the company.

In the past you knew you would retire from your company, also the compensation differential was not that huge across levels, so there was little incentive to BS.

Today everything is optimized with a horizon of a financial quarter. Then a pandemic hits, and we realize that we don't even know how to make freaking masks and don’t even have supplies of things for more than a week.

Great points. I was also shocked to see on an example recently that even basic computer literacy is gone. We visited a couple of friends of ours recently. And as things go, at some point they (non-tech folks) asked me to help them with some printer settings on their new laptop - I am sure we all had experienced this many times over. So they pass me the notebook, not connected to power source. I noticed the battery was low and ask for the adapter to connect it. I proceed to tell them it was not a good idea to let the notebook battery go so low and that they should operate it on battery only when they don't really have access to power supply. The response - they had thought, they way you use a notebook was analogous to the mobile phone, i.e. you charge it up then use it all the way until the battery drops low, then rinse and repeat, etc. The smartphones have ruined our society in more ways than one.