Metadata
- Author: mataroa.blog
- Full Title:: The Failed Commodification of Technical Work
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: Company culture,
- URL:: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/the-failed-commodification-of-technical-work/
- Finished date:: 2023-11-24
Highlights
it turns out that even if you don’t hold the quality of the output in particularly high regard, the optimizations and discipline required to ensure that two different acne-ridden teens with wildly varied education levels, separated by oceans, are capable of producing the same burger are non-trivial to say the least. (View Highlight)
The pitches were entirely focused on something I wouldn’t have noticed prior to reading all those books - they were focused on the reproducible delivery of work that was good enough to accomplish business objectives, without having to rely on all those pesky technicians to be good enough to do the job correctly. (View Highlight)
Or in another context:
If you buy a BurgerMaster 5000, you can just drop any teenager behind this thing with thirty minutes of training, and they’re going to be able to turn out a burger that’s good enough to sell! It’s going to be the same burger every time, wherever you ship it! (View Highlight)
we haven’t figured out how to commodify a lot of this work (View Highlight)
There’s plenty of work that consists of simply churning out widgets faster, and I’m happy to see that work disappear (so long as we find a way for people to continue living healthily without it), but it must be acknowledged that many of the things we value in society come from an ill-defined, more vital place, and there is an intersection of that spark with the realities of production (View Highlight)