[sumitkumar]

This happens in any industry where value/status are at a premium.

Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status.

Another change which has happened recently is that the economics of engagement farming have become common place wisdom as already proven effective for everything from selling books, personal brand, career skill/virtue signalling, staying relevant.

Due to this everyone is talking more without restraint and not keeping in their own lane of earned expertise.

[azalemeth]

Academia is the most relevant, toxic example that I can think of. Be horrible to others on a short term contract (grad students, postdocs) and break them whilst extracting maximum value -- get more papers, more grants written -- more money -- success.

Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic and managed into obscurity.

A great example of this is Peter Higgs, who famously said that he'd be unemployed pretty quickly in the academia of 2013. [0]

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...

[vidarh]

The challenge is to distinguish "think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute" from slacking.

I am not arguing for bullshit metrics - I personally love working on things that may or may not pay off on a 10 year+ horizon and wish I could do more of that. But at the same time I've seen enough people coast to accept that most places that either isn't - or won't be seen as - tenable, at least not until/unless you've established a stellar track-record first.

[altairprime]

A system that can’t tolerate occasional coasting is a system that can’t tolerate creative bursts. The trick is detecting “I secretly lost hope but my stream of income is very comfortable” when paying a costly salary; which would be mitigated somewhat by switching the tenure benefit of either pay enough to afford, or outright gift of, a single-family home (looks pointedly at Stanford) to a variation of residence halls, where the salary gift can be much less in exchange for benefits due creativity: reserved whiteboards, option for neighboring private rooms (table/bed/bath/shower) and research office, a couple of quiet floors, 120/240 and ether/fiber in every room, presentation rooms with ‘lives next door’ IT support, etc.

Hell, I’d take that IT job. Keeping projectors working for a bunch of impatient creative types in exchange for getting to listen in on their presentations and earn their confidence enough to discuss their research as an interested peer while I repair their computers? Eating good food in a mess hall as I listen to quantum physics in one ear and mathematical networks in the other?! Onto the dream jobs list it goes, impossible as it might be in today’s academia.

[vidarh]

Agree with this. Occasional coasting is great. Sometimes you need to recharge. Sometimes it's when you'll get inspiration or find time to do that experiment that feels like leisure because it's fun but ends up paying off massively.

Slack is important.

But so much so that you become a magnet for people who intend to do nothing, or somewhere where people who have fallen into doing nothing aren't noticed and dig their heels in and never leave quickly becomes a problem...

[zozbot234]

Academia has tenure which basically allows the most capable researchers to "coast" as long as they have previously proven their skills via their tenure-track work. It seems to work quite well.

[_DeadFred_]

Way back MBARI was looking for a role that in part included keeping the servers on their research ships going. That was my dream job. Only interview I completely failed because I wanted it so much and froze. Imagine eating Phils when it was still a hole in the wall, chilling in Moss Landing. Decades later I still daydream about that job.

[altairprime]

Their open house is next month; if you stopped by in the morning and asked to learn more about their vessel IT and told your story, odds are they’ll have someone with that role ashore from last month’s expedition that could chat with you for an afternoon. They exist because of dedication and are likely to respect it in kind. At worst you’d get to visit MBARI with seasoning, at best live another life-sheaf vicariously through someone else’s experiences :D

[a_bonobo]

Many billionaires are starting up ocean expedition places, surely they'll want IT. Off the top of my head I can think of OceanX (Ray Dalio), Inkfish (Gabe Newell), RevOcean (Kjell Inge Rokke out of Norway). They're all building or already have massive ships with sophisticated IT and research equipment.

[hattmall]

We shouldn't really seek to punish "slacking off" though. Because when the opposite of valuable contribution isn't slacking off it becomes unintentional sabotage. It's a lot less noticeable in jobs that don't have immediate consequences for poor performance, but it really stands out in jobs where it immediately matters like construction. In a lot of cases everyone is getting paid the same but talent stands out and some people work 5x faster, but at thing they are good at. If you aren't the guy that lays 10x tiles perfectly flat and straight per minute then just bring the materials, set out a couple tiles and wait around. You will literally see this play out on most construction projects as it looks like 10 people are standing around while 1 person works, but that's because everyone tends to recognize that it's better to do what you are best at or just don't do anything. And the foreman will tell you that too, when all the dirt has to be moved, the shovel guys are just as important as the guy that can separate two nickels with an excavator.

[vidarh]

I agree we shouldn't, but until we're at a post scarcity point, we kinda have to at least keep it somewhat in check.

But if you're standing around because there isn't anything positive you can contribute at a given moment, that isn't "slacking off" to me. That isn't the problem.

The problem is if you create situations that effectively encouraged people to seek them out because slacking off won't get noticed.

[gnopgnip]

If you don’t “punish” slacking off your institution falls behind even if there is no sabotage

[_DeadFred_]

If an IT department doesn't appear to be slacking off it is doing a poor job. It's much better to pay someone who prevents fires and sits around appearing to not be doing much, than a team constantly running around putting out fires that are costing a tone via lost productivity but look really busy.

I imagine scientific inspiration/insight comes in flashes. The ability to be honest in the job/what is going on/realistic is going to get much better results long term with better mental health, and trust making better internal dynamics.

[fragmede]

We pay firemen to just sit in a house and hang out! I saw them the other day, just going for ice cream!

How do we apply the perception that that's a desirable state elsewhere?

[zemvpferreira]

In the end we have to face that systems have failed to replace competent managers. If there isn't a chain of accountability starting at the top that can manage people without extensive justification in metrics and is properly incentivised to keep the organisation healthy, whatever we are left with will be gamed to the detriment of everyone.

[joquarky]

Anyone relying on metrics should know about Goodhart's law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

[koverstreet]

The certainly don't teach you that in business school :)

[initramfs]

And the Xerox Alto had a budget for 10 years. Unthinkable in today's "What did you publish?? Publish or it didn't happen. No R01 for you! (2 year funding)" culture.

[jimbokun]

Why is publishing papers an unreasonable expectation?

Isn't that the primary mechanism for exchanging knowledge and driving discussion among academics?

If not, what should replace it?

[ryandrake]

I’m not in academia so I might not know what I’m talking about at all, but: “Number if papers published” smells an awful lot like bs industry metrics like number of lines of code written, number of features shipped, number of bugs fixed and so on, that the industry wrongly rewards.

I don’t know what you’d replace “number of papers” with, but it probably should not be so easily quantifiable and gameable.

[initramfs]

I have published all my papers since 2023 on the web. None were peer reviewed, but on pre-print servers.

Einstein's 1905 papers were published without peer review.

I still get spam emails asking me to pay for papers I've already uploaded to public servers years ago.

Here's one from this morning- already deleted by Google's spam filter: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h8YVu5-DEx-1mOibiLpfJHrErvX...

The actual article was intended as a joke: https://vixra.org/abs/2405.0051 yet fraudulent publishers continue to treat it as a serious article.

It would be nice if publishing a fake paper every now and then could serve like a sinkhole for scammers, but I would be too optimistic or naive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_sinkhole

[alsetmusic]

> A writer who is able to break free from the belief that his being is at his core, a writer, can break writer's block. He may also discover how to be a better waiter during his night shift.

Fantastic!

[initramfs]

Thanks!

[nradov]

And academia will become even more toxic as opportunities shrink along with declining student enrollment. A lot of the third-tier colleges will close entirely.

[pc86]

This seems good, honestly. A degree from a third-tier college doesn't do anyone any good except the administrators at that college.

[lacunary]

I feel great about my degree from my third tier college. I learned a lot I didn't expect to, got into a top tier grad school afterwards, and came away with no debt. Maybe me and the millions of other third tier college students are too dumb to know what's good for us, though.

[delusional]

I have been to a "third tier" college, but do you learn nothing there?

[musicale]

The competition for faculty jobs at any college is typically fierce, which means you can find excellent faculty almost anywhere.

[nathan_compton]

> Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic and managed into obscurity.

I'm in academy and I'm mostly quiet and seek to contribute honestly and I've been managed into obscurity but I'm also quite happy, pay the bills, and more or less enjoy the work. If you want glory you have to deal with bullshit. If you don't want glory, life provides many opportunities to live a modest but productive life.

[rdbl27]

Over 99% of students who attempt your "mostly quiet" strategy are managed entirely out of academia long before tenure.

You won the lottery, which is great for you, but it's not a strategy to promote to others as life advice.

[nathan_compton]

I'm not tenured and I doubt I will ever be and I'm not even interested in it. I have a support role in academia, get to teach, and am pretty well compensated (though I make 2-3x less than I could in the private sector. But its enough.)

[afavour]

It's the money side that applies pressure there. It's great that you're able to make enough money but a lot of people who aspire to the quiet academic life are stuck in the lower tiers making a pittance.

[jimbokun]

This is because there are far more people wanting a quiet academic life than there are jobs providing a quiet academic life with a livable wage.

And this is likely to become even more out of balance as college enrollment declines and there are smaller and smaller cohorts of freshmen as fertility continues to decline.

[nathan_compton]

There are pittances and then there are pittances. I make a bit more than a typical adjunct or whatever because I have very specialized skills, but its ok not to make a lot of money.

I mean this is a place where the founder just wrote a blog post about being a billionaire. I'll never be a billionaire, thats for sure.

But I genuinely believe that pursuing that goal is vanity, bad for people mentally and "spiritually" and bad for the world.

[jimbokun]

There's a lot of wisdom here.

[TremendousJudge]

Great little article. 12 years later, he is still right on every count. Who would have thought that Peter Higgs was a very clever, clear-thinking man

[impendia]

I'm an academic mathematician in a US research-oriented department.

I'm happy to report that I've observed very little of what you describe.

[nerdsniper]

Law was good people when? During the era of the 3/5ths compromise? Dredd Scott? Plessy? Lochner v NY? Buck v Bell? Korematsu?

Finance was good people when? When Swiss banks captured all the war spoils of WW2? When they ran Penny Auctions during the Great Depression? When they financed slave ships? When the Medici financed endless war across Europe?

I’m not saying people are all awful, but I don’t think there’s any “before times” where people were better than they have been since then in any ageless profession. Perhaps there’s some degree of variance or even ebb-and-flow patterns.

[newaccountman2]

> Law was good people when? During the era of the 3/5ths compromise? Dredd Scott? Plessy? Lochner v NY? Buck v Bell? Korematsu?

All of those are only things because there were lawyers willing and eager to sue the government over the evils at issue, so your point is much weaker than you think.

[nerdsniper]

That’s actually exactly my point. That all these fields have had good and bad people the entire time and that the ratios probably don’t change all that much.

It sounds like you’d agree with me.

[newaccountman2]

Well, yeah, I suppose I don't disagree with your overall point lol, sorry if comment sounded overly combative

Law and finance were sources of and avenues to money and power from the outset. Took some time for tech to emerge as such.

[miltonlost]

Artistophanes lampooned the Sophists and lawyers in his Greek comedies. When using words as your literal way to power and change, you will have demagogues.

[hattmall]

I think you miss the point, it's not that they were morally good or only in pursuit of lofty goals. But the culture was different and the profession wasn't dominated by monetary opportunity seekers. Look back in historical newspapers and you won't find a single ad for personal injury attorneys.

[wk_end]

That's because it was illegal for lawyers to advertise their services until 1976. See Bates v. State Bar of Arizona:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bates_v._State_Bar_of_Arizona

[JumpCrisscross]

> That's because it was illegal for lawyers to advertise their services until 1976

I'd have thought limited-liability partnerships (and with it, the mega shops) did more damage.

[hattmall]

Yes ultimately it's advertising the leads heavily to the enshifification of any industry.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Law was good people when?

I'm a fan of Cicero.

[sapphicsnail]

Cicero was so obnoxiously pompous and vain. Maybe go further back to Solon?

[boringg]

How do we remove that? Those are the exact kind of people most intelligent people find quite grating in an organization - though because they self-promote so much its difficult to unpack the truth until they have kind of weaseled their way into an entrenched position (normally they are reasonably good at politics).

I'll use the All-in podcast as a perfect example of the type of person described. They have some value in that they have palace intrigue + arguably asymetric access to information.

[sevenzero]

>Those are the exact kind of people most intelligent people find quite grating in an organization

Most intelligent people contribute to this as well though. Being intelligent doesn't automatically remove egoistical traits, for some it's even supercharged if it results in personal growth within the organization.

[Gud]

None of those categories were ever “nice”, wtf.

[DaedalusII]

public defender lawyers who fought for workers rights and against items like company towns, abolitionists, etc. many good lawyers

finance people who invented life insurance, health insurance, car insurance, friendly societies. as much as we complain about insurance here in the US, life was immeasurably worse when there was none. there was no such thing as state health care or social security in those days

you would be surprised to find that there are many people in finance who never tried to make a quick buck, and are pretty altruistic. this is evidenced by the large amount of family owned banks

tech now going through what finance did in the 1980s, shift to greed and excess

[lou1306]

The "good lawyer" is/was a major archetype in modern Western culture. See "The Devil and Daniel Webster", "To Kill a Mockingbird", "Paths of Glory", just to name a few examples.

[neuropacabra]

Totally. I feel the author, we just used to nerds, but now the space is occupied by social media and false narrative that revolves around founders. No ego hurt here of course - but it is hard to imagine Woz or Stallman to ask for a mass surveillance program or ads in AI or pushed AI search in internet search. I believe this article actually went to this realm - tech for tech, having fun…but all we get is maxxxx enshitification.

[sigmoid10]

Yeah, for law I imagine these "nice" beginnings were 2000 years ago at best. If they even existed at all. But all these jobs where talking to other humans is paramount will be dominated by extroverted quacks by default. Same goes for the capital raising college dropout pseudo-tech-bros. They were never nice, they just weren't so engaged in public discourse before, when billion dollar net worths still meant you actually had revenue and not just a vague trendy idea.

[sumitkumar]

Not that far. Lawyers had a great deal of influence in creation of all modern nation-states, human rights, international law and maintenance of the core social contract in the modern society.

Similarly lawyers/bankers were the ones who built in trust in capital, contracts, businesses and protection of investor rights. Delaware c corp is not an outcome of bad guys.

[PaulHoule]

That’s a system though that seems to be at the breaking point.

[plaidthunder]

Yes. It might be a general property of all human organizational structures, to degrade over time in terms of intent drift and erosion of public goodwill.

It offers some predictive power if so, like OBAFGKM + luminosity is enough to determine where a star is on its lifecycle. Maybe there's a similar domain that maps some human coordination structure onto a deterministic trajectory from birth to death.

If that were the case, I wouldn't be surprised to see venture capital--as an organizing principle for the tech industry--reaching a later stage of life.

[oliculipolicula]

Hey it's the one that Turchin managed to have not named... psychohistory. Fair enough, that's not absolutely about a one-way life-cycle (From not overly much to sometimes less than zero, or its counterpart There and back again).

For VC, go back to the Medicis? Obsession with Roman over Athenian (ie, not even Macedonian or ahem Florentinian, whom, as you know, were blessed-- by themselves-- with nonTrumpian^W (-"anti"-)papist perturbations) can only push them closer to all of extant theory. They don't get to have Germanics explain their early policy failures, eg

Update: for the record, I hold the opinion that libertarianism and liberalism (social, political but not to forget the far less trendy "fiscal") should be right next to each other in parameter space. One may be allowed to define a metric that puts a firewall, or, if you are less amused, an event-horizon _around_ them. I'd suggest "make things people want"

[chongli]

You don’t have to go back that far. Read To Kill a Mockingbird for an example of a really nice lawyer.

[ang_cire]

I mean, it is a work of fiction.

[chongli]

A work of fiction which has been revealed to be semi-autobiographical.

[mhh__]

Along these lines always watch the flow of entrepreneurial Asians.

[paulcole]

> This happens in any industry where value/status are at a premium.

So, all of them?

[jameshart]

Right? Isn’t that just tautology? This happens in industries where value is valued and status confers status?

[goodpoint]

> guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status

aka techbros

[biofox]

I got into programming and computers due to their intellectual depth, and the exciting opportunities they opened to explore everything from electronics to obscure areas of mathematics... through to theory of mind and the dream of making silicon think.

The combination of endless trend-chasing, software churn, and techbro culture made me hate everything about software, so I jumped ship to biology.

[jimbokun]

> ... through to theory of mind and the dream of making silicon think.

I think part of your naiveté was thinking this goal was likely to turn out as a net benefit for humanity. Maybe it eventually will. But the current scenario was always the most likely scenario for machines rivaling or surpassing humans in intelligence.

[zelphirkalt]

Well, and now with the push towards AI slop and letting agents do work for you, it is even less about creativity and talent. You can't even chase trends in libraries while still being clever about it any longer, you gotta chase more and more braindead ways of getting code generated based on tons and tons of mediocre code found online, gobbled up by big tech without the original creator s' consent.

[zozbot234]

I think that plenty of 'nerds' would very much disagree about that. Steering agents effectively is something that can take massive amounts of creativity and talent and be quite helpful wrt. the final result. There's no real analogue of this in traditional programming.

[marmarama]

Sure there's an analogue.

It's being the tech lead of a team of junior to mid level developers. You design roughly what the solution should look like, split it into reasonable sized tasks so they don't go off the deep end, advise them on some of the details, then assign them the tasks and let them get on with it, keeping an eye on what they're doing, reviewing their output, and course correcting them when they go wrong.

Just like with a team of humans, you have to use your judgement as to how much supervision they need individually and how large a task you can give them without them going off the rails.

[anygivnthursday]

Thats my thought as well, LLM agents put you in the role of a (often micromanaging) tech/team lead of a small team, but the speed and fast feedback loop makes it look different.

[jimbokun]

Yes.

As AI improves every white collar job becomes a management job. With the previous conception of an Individual Contributor role disappearing.

[eequah9L]

Hm, on each interview since ever, every time the inevitable "where do you see yourself in X years" question popped up, I was like, I have no ambition of getting promoted to managers, if that's what you mean. I like coding. I want to keep coding. I can advise juniors if _that's_ what you mean. But I want to code.

And here I am. Coding is becoming management in front of my eyes.

Meh :-|

[pjmlp]

Sure there is, offshoring, now the chat window is with my computer instead on the other side of the planet.

Not everyone wants to be a team lead not doing coding any longer.

[tripledry]

Also, I'd rather lead a team of humans that I can interact and talk with in real life instead of a team of bots.

[jimbokun]

How so?

The models get better and better at understanding the intent of a prompt and doing more useful work with less intervention.

[nearlyepic]

You keep telling yourself that.

[jimbokun]

The problem was very few nerds realized this was the most likely outcome as they devoted themselves to improving machine intelligence.

[lossyalgo]

And yet even more nerds than ever are devoting themselves to AI. I just wonder - to what end?

[jimbokun]

It’s the only path for being able to pay your rent or mortgage without leaving the technology field altogether.

[pesus]

The phrase "fuck you, I got mine" comes to mind.

The logical end seems to be another case of pulling up the ladder behind them as they climb up, others be damned. Sadly seems to be a pretty universal human trait, whether intentional or not.

[mystraline]

> Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status.

Those career paths were always crooked. We see that going back to my great grandparents time with Black friday of 1929. They fucked around with unrestricted capitalism, and found out. Quite a few killed themselves by throwing themselves off of buildings.

It was only when FDR took office and worked with Congress to make tons of rules keeping the money hoarders from destroying the economy yet again. And it bloody worked. For those of you who say FDR was a communist, absolutely not. He was fighting against a large contingent of the population who were socialists and communists. He did appease some of their demands, bit not many.

FDR led us into our most glorious 20 years, the 1950's to 1960's. Cheap education, cheap homes, plentiful well paying jobs, only needed 1 worker per house. Thats what the boomers remember and want.

And it was systematically dismantled piece by piece.

'VC guys were good too'?!?! I take it you do t remember the 1980's Mergers and Acquisitions crisis? Thats when enough data was available for a company, that mergers, acquisitions, and liquidations coukd make a handful of people scads of money, and destroy the economy to boot.

And i also scarce remember a time when 'Finance' was good. Their slur was beancounters. Something costs $20 but saves $1000? Nope, its -20$. The loss is never analyzed. Every job Ive woeked in has had this perverse logic.

And especially with money, Goodharts Law comes to mind. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

"Men living in democratic ages have many passions but most of their passions either end in the love of riches or proceed from it." Alexis de Toqueville

[iwontberude]

Unless you were black then you might think good god these yts gonna displace us again with a new new deal.

[mystraline]

I know youre trying be inflammatory, but also accurate.

US culture has always had an out-group that could be sacrificed to the capitalist machine. And even Northern rhetoric woukd have people believe that slavery didnt exist there. Ive been in Boston at the slave docks. Banned in 1830's btw there. And slavery also benefitted the North even if banned.

And after the Civil war, black folks were still 3rd class. Took another 100 years to get the same legal rights. And even now, blacks are underpaid compared to the same jobs by whites.

Most of wealth extraction to black communities is mostly complete. Musk runs datacenters using methane generators in black communities, horrifically polluting them. And the republicans who run the cities/states dont care.

But the USA has effectively run out of people to sacrifice. Now, theyre coming for the middle-income whites. Thats the squeeze we're seeing. And thats not going to end well. Likely will be horrifically violent.

[iwontberude]

I pray you are right, this country deserves a good spanking.