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

Squeezed Workplaces & Overmeasurement

• Many long‑tenured tech workers report far less slack than in the 90s–00s: every hour accounted for, endless backlogs, constant justification of work.
• Agile + Jira/metrics are seen as creating a parallel “model of the work” that must be maintained in addition to the work itself, consuming huge effort and locking in bad architectures/tech debt.
• Attempts to run people at near‑100% utilization are compared to overloading machines or CPUs: latency and quality blow up, burnout follows.

Management, Metrics & Organizational Scale

• Strong theme that measurement culture (Jira, dashboards, KPIs) drives “productivity theater,” Goodhart/McNamara effects, and overfitting to what’s countable.
• Unmeasured contributions (unblocking others, building robust systems, preventing incidents) are invisible in promotions/layoffs.
• Some defend Jira‑style systems as necessary for investors, customers, and regulators at scale; critics argue most numbers are guesses, so the whole structure is largely theater that “works” only in a narrow, scaled sense.

Slack, Burnout & Career Dynamics

• Calls for sustainable pace, explicit slack (e.g., 20% time, 2 hours/day for self‑directed work) as prerequisite for good work.
• Recognition that workers respond to impossible demands by gaming metrics, padding stories, or quietly doing less.
• Self‑promotion is increasingly required to survive; this promotes ladder‑climbers and fire‑starters over quiet, competent engineers.

Gig Economy, Low‑Wage & “Unskilled” Work

• Multiple anecdotes about TaskRabbit/Angi‑style jobs (furniture assembly, deliveries) being poorly done, with undertrained workers churning through jobs under time pressure.
• Gig work seen as structurally worse than traditional low‑wage jobs: no advancement path, no coworkers/network, algorithmic control, race to the bottom.
• Strong pushback on the label “unskilled”: driving, bagging, handyman work, etc., all demand real skill and experience, but are systematically devalued.

Quality Decline, Outsourcing & Enshittification

• Broad sense that service quality and documentation have declined even as tools improved; many tie this to outsourcing, XaaS/public cloud, private equity, and short‑term incentives.
• Outsourcing is framed as leaders externalizing responsibility: infrastructure, support, and even internal IT become consulting problems, not owned capabilities.

Consumer Role, Information & Policy

• “Pay more for better work” is appealing but hard to execute: pervasive obfuscation (reviews, branding, platforms) makes it difficult to identify genuinely better providers.
• Some argue individual “voting with dollars” is insufficient; they call for stronger labor laws, enforcement, and regulation of deceptive business models.
• Underlying divide: are bad outcomes mainly about bad systems and incentives, or also about individual work ethic and ethics? Most comments lean systemic but note individual responsibility still exists.