Metadata
- Author: Benn Stancil
- Full Title:: We Were Hired to Do the Grunt Work
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://benn.substack.com/p/we-were-hired-to-do-the-grunt-work
- Read date:: 2025-09-27
Highlights
If you regularly talk to people who work at technology companies, you will discover something surprising: Everyone is doing the wrong job. (View Highlight)
Most data analysts are answering the same dumb2 questions that they answered last month, living every week at the intersection of Groundhog Day and LMGTFY. (View Highlight)
It is possible that all of us are constantly making irrational choices, and we are all asking each other to do distracting administrivia (View Highlight)
mundane tasks are the important tasks. There are only so much strategy to discuss (View Highlight)
Everything changes, and the indignities remain. (View Highlight)
The old boundary lines are blurring. Just as we’ll see fewer “pure managers,” we’ll also see fewer “pure ICs.” Instead, more people will live in the messy middle: sometimes executing, sometimes designing processes, sometimes coordinating. (View Highlight)
But there’s also a bizarro, Waluigi version of the Jevons paradox that can also be true: No matter how many things technology makes convenient, the supply of inconvenient things seems to remain constant. (View Highlight)
What will people who work at technology companies tell you, if you talk to them in ten years? I have no idea. But I suspect they will tell you that they are doing too much tedious grunt work, and they are hopeful that they will soon be saved. (View Highlight)