Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?

I have been in the workforce for almost 30 years now and I believe that everybody is getting more squeezed so they don’t have the time or energy to do a proper job. The expectation is to get it done as quickly as possible and not do more unless told so.

In SW development in the 90s I had much more time for experimentation to figure things out. In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. So you just hurry through your tasks.

I think google had it right for a while with their 20% time where people could do wanted to do. As far as I know that’s over.

People need some slack if you want to see good work. They aren’t machines that can run constantly on 100% utilization.

> In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. So you just hurry through your tasks.

This has been my exact experience. Absolutely everything is tracked as a work item with estimates. Anything you think should be done needs to be justified and tracked the same way. If anything ever takes longer than the estimate that was invariably just pulled out of someones ass (because it's impossible to accurately estimate development unless you're already ~75% of the way through doing it, and even then it's a crapshoot) you need to justify that in a morning standup too.

The end result of all of this is every project getting bogged down by being stuck on the first version of whatever architecture was thought up right at the beginning and there being piles of tech debt that never gets fixed because nobody who actually understands what needs to be done has the political capital to get past the aforementioned justification filter.

It's fascinating that you end up sort of doing the work twice, you build an excel (or jira) model of the work work along with the actual work to be done.

Often this extends to the entire organization, where you have like this parallel dimension of spreadsheets and planning existing on top of everything.

Eats resources like crazy to uphold.

Jira is already almost like "productivity theater" where engineers chart the work for the benefit of managers, and managers of managers only. Many programmers already really resent having to deal with it. Soon it will be a total farce, as engineers using MCP Jira servers have LLMs chart the "work" and manage the tickets for them, as managers do the same in reverse, instructing LLMs to summarize the work being done in Jira.

It'll be nothing but LLMs talking to other LLMs under the guise of organizational productivity in which the only one deriving any value from this effort is the companies charging for the input and output tokens. Except, they are likely operating at a loss...

Managers (as in PMs, EMs, and C-Suite) don't like JIRA either - there just isn't an alternative.

Customers and investors ask for delivery timelines and amount of resources invested on major features or products, and you need to give an accurate-ish answer, and you as a company will be dealing with hundreds if not thousands of features depending on size.

In that kind of a situation, the only way you can get that visibility is through JIRA (or a JIRA type product), because it acts as a forcing function to get a defensible estimate, and monitor progress.

Furthermore, due to tax laws, we need to track investments into features and initiatives, and JIRA becomes the easiest way to collect that kind of amoratization data.

Once some AI Agent to automate this whole program management/JIRA hygiene process exists, it will make life for everyone so much easier.

This explanation is not incompatible with calling the whole business a "theater".