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Why your boss is incompetent

December 17, 2009 / Klint Finley

Researchers are studying “The Peter Principle” and finding that it may well be true:

There are good reasons to expect that bosses can’t help but be incompetent – adrift on a sea of troubles they neither understand nor can control. Better to take pity on the poor souls: there with the grace of the promotion committee go all of us.

The idea that high-level incompetence is inevitable was formulated in the 1969 best-selling book The Peter Principle: Why things always go wrong. Its authors, psychologist Laurence Peter and playwright Raymond Hull, started from the observation that while jobs generally get more difficult the higher up any ladder you climb, most people only come equipped with a more or less fixed level of talent that corresponds to their intelligence, knowledge and energy. At some point, then, they will be promoted into a job they can’t quite handle. They will, as Peter and Hull put it, “reach the level of their own incompetence”. And there they will stay, fouling up operations until they either retire or some egregiously inept act gets them fired. […]

The “Peter principle” undoubtedly appeals to the cynic in all of us. It is also quite possibly true, if subsequent academic studies are to be believed. The longer a person stays at a particular level in an organisation, the more most measures of their performance fall – including subjective evaluations and the frequency and size of pay rises and bonuses. It is a finding entirely consistent with the idea that people eventually become bogged down by their own incompetence.

New Scientist: Why your boss is incompetent

(via Atom Jack)

Amazon Mechanical Turk

September 15, 2009 / Klint Finley

The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is one of the suite of Amazon Web Services, a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do. Requesters, the human beings that write these programs, are able to pose tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a storefront, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk’s Terms of Service) can then browse among existing tasks and complete them for a monetary payment set by the Requester. To place HITs, the requesting programs use an open Application Programming Interface, or the more limited Mturk Requester site.

Requesters can ask that Workers fulfill Qualifications before engaging a task, and they can set up a test in order to verify the Qualification. They can also accept or reject the result sent by the Worker, which reflects on the Worker’s reputation. Currently, a Requester has to have a U.S. address, but Workers can be anywhere in the world. Payments for completing tasks can be redeemed on Amazon.com via gift certificate or be later transferred to a Worker’s U.S. bank account. Requesters, which are typically corporations, pay 10 percent over the price of successfully completed HITs (or more for extremely cheap HITs) to Amazon.[1]

Fascinating. It’s named after The Turk:

The name Mechanical Turk comes from “The Turk”, a chess-playing automaton of the 18th century, which was made by Wolfgang von Kempelen. It toured Europe beating the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. It was later revealed that this ‘machine’ was not an automaton at all but was in fact a chess master hidden in a special compartment controlling its operations. Likewise, the Mechanical Turk web service allows humans to help the machines of today to perform tasks they aren’t suited for.

There’s also some criticism that Amazon Mechanical Turk constitutes a sort of virtual sweatshop.

Wikipedia: Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk page

Knowledge as infrastructure

September 11, 2009 / Klint Finley

Applies equally well to Portland:

It’s not difficult to infer that this all happened when it did, where it did, because of the post-dotcom-crash emergence of a healthy cohort of talented (and relatively well-capitalized) folks hungry to make something with their lives just a little more tangible than some evanescent Web portal. I’m also willing to bet that the relatively low barriers to entry involved in successful push-button publishing of the early blog era convinced a whole lot of people in the Bay Area that it was safe to try their hand at other, more ambitious endeavors – that is, that blogging constituted a kind of gateway drug.

And yeah, sure, this can occasionally be a little insular and precious, a little twee: the kind of hipster-doofus affectation that makes a nice fat target for equally nitwit parody. But it’s also, hopefully, something that speaks to Russell’s more general point, and is therefore replicable elsewhere, in whatever ways are most true to those places and desires. The San Francisco resurgence would not – could not – have happened if there were not at this point literally several hundred years of insight into craft technique just lying on the ground, for just about any domain of productive activity you can imagine.

Speedbird: Installed infrastructure, latent knowledge and the small-batch aesthetic

The president is a prisoner of the cult of neoliberalism

August 25, 2009 / Klint Finley

Beginning in the Carter years, the Democrats later called neoliberals supported the deregulation of infrastructure industries that the New Deal had regulated, like airlines, trucking and electricity, a sector in which deregulation resulted in California blackouts and the Enron scandal. Neoliberals teamed up with conservatives to persuade Bill Clinton to go along with the Republican Congress’s dismantling of New Deal-era financial regulations, a move that contributed to the cancerous growth of Wall Street and the resulting global economic collapse. As Asian mercantilist nations like Japan and then China rigged their domestic markets while enjoying free access to the U.S. market, neoliberal Democrats either turned a blind eye to the foreign mercantilist assault on American manufacturing or claimed that it marked the beneficial transition from an industrial economy to a “knowledge economy.” While Congress allowed inflation to slash the minimum wage and while corporations smashed unions, neoliberals chattered about sending everybody to college so they could work in the high-wage “knowledge jobs” of the future. Finally, many (not all) neoliberals agreed with conservatives that entitlements like Social Security were too expensive, and that it was more efficient to cut benefits for the middle class in order to expand benefits for the very poor. […]

Instead of the updated Rooseveltonomics that America needs, Obama’s team offers warmed-over Rubinomics from the 1990s. Consider the priorities of the Obama administration: the environment, healthcare and education. Why these priorities, as opposed to others, like employment, high wages and manufacturing? The answer is that these three goals co-opt the activist left while fitting neatly into a neoliberal narrative that could as easily have been told in 1999 as in 2009. The story is this: New Dealers and Keynesians are wrong to think that industrial capitalism is permanently and inherently prone to self-destruction, if left to itself. Except in hundred-year disasters, the market economy is basically sound and self-correcting. Government can, however, help the market indirectly, by providing these three public goods, which, thanks to “market failures,” the private sector will not provide.

Salon: Can Obama be deprogrammed?

(via Disinfo)

Parents Paying Thousands of Dollars to Firms That Help Their Kids Get Unpaid Internships

August 10, 2009 / Klint Finley

With paying jobs so hard to get in this weak market, a lot of college graduates would gladly settle for a nonpaying internship. But even then, they are competing with laid-off employees with far more experience.

So growing numbers of new graduates — or, more often, their parents — are paying thousands of dollars to services that help them land internships.

Call these unpaid internships that you pay for.

“It’s kind of crazy,” said David Gaston, director of the University of Kansas career center. “The demand for internships in the past 5, 10 years has opened up this huge market. At this point, all we can do is teach students to understand that they’re paying and to ask the right questions.”

New York Times: Unpaid Work, but They Pay for Privilege

(via Cryptogon)

American brain drain: college graduates moving to China

August 10, 2009 / Klint Finley

Shanghai and Beijing are becoming new lands of opportunity for recent American college graduates who face unemployment nearing double digits at home.

Even those with limited or no knowledge of Chinese are heeding the call. They are lured by China’s surging economy, the lower cost of living and a chance to bypass some of the dues-paying that is common to first jobs in the United States.

“I’ve seen a surge of young people coming to work in China over the last few years,” said Jack Perkowski, founder of Asimco Technologies, one of the largest automotive parts companies in China.

New York Times: Shut Out at Home, Americans Go to China

(via Don)

“Overextended Class” = Precarity

August 7, 2009 / Klint Finley

Since about 1991, it’s been like that for me. From the moment I woke up till the moment I went to bed, I was working on something. The day job or the cartoons or something else. Sure, I’d have girlfriends come and go out, but the girlfriends never lasted too long, and I also ended up inventing, in 1997, an art form that would allow me to carry on working WHEN I was going out to the bars i.e. the “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”.

I’ve not had a proper vacation in ten years, either. Nor am I planning one.

Call Chris and myself, and probably over 50% of the people who read this blog, members of “The Overextended Class”.

You know who you are. And you know what? In terms of percentage of the population, there were less of us twenty years ago. And there’ll be more of us in two decades.

Our parents and grandparents spent their Cognitive Surplus watching television. That’s a thing of the past… a historical accident of the old factory-worker age meeting the modern mass-media age. Of course it wouldn’t last forever. We humans as a species were designed to compete, not to sit around on our asses.

Welcome to the Overextended Class, People. You may opt out of it if you want, but over time it’s going to get harder and harder to make ends meet, let alone be successful, if you do.

gapingvoid: welcome to the overextended class

There’s a much older word for this: precarity. It’s a long and storied labor concept. It’s nothing new, and for most people it’s nothing good (it can be good if you have a choice in the matter, and fewer and fewer people do).

Craig’s List Portland: Who wants to manage a Fairy Store?

July 29, 2009 / Klint Finley

This post, formerly found here, has been removed. But it’s a classic Portland job ad so I’m reproducing it here for posterity:

Successful entrepreneur is wanting to start a new concept in Portland.

I am looking for the one special person that I can count on to manage a store in happening Northeast Portland specializing in Fairies! We will have all things related to Fairies and perhaps even elementals.

The right person will:

Have retail management experience
Be mature
Have a successful background in retail
Be able to prove volunteer or community service work.
Be able to handle stress and boredom.
Believe in Fairies
Be able to work any days/hours.
Be able to lift 50 pounds.
Be knowledgeable in MS Office applications.
Have a fantastic personality.
Believe in the Secret.
Have a relaxed professional appearance.
Operate the store as their own without direct guidance from me.

The right person will not:

Have visible body modifications.
Have emotional baggage.
Need time off to go to Burning Man.
Depend on this opportunity to survive.
Use any drugs.

IF interested please:

Respond with a Resume
Tell me what “The Secret” means to you.
Tell me why you would make the perfect manager.
Tell me what you need or expect for a salary.

Future of work?

July 9, 2009 / Klint Finley

I’m trying to compile non-draconian visions of “the future of work.” I’m interested in both fiction and non-fiction – anything that rethinks the way people in large organizations get their work done. Examples:

–Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling, and his vision of a large multinational co-op.
–Hacking Business Models
–Get Back in the Box by Douglas Rushkoff. Not sure about this one, haven’t read it yet.

I’m particularly interested in:
-Anything that deals with larger scale organizations (it’s relatively easy to have an “alternative” work organization in a group of 10, much harder as it scales up to 50, 150, 5,000, etc)
-Anything that deals with non-knowledge work – manufacturing, restaurants, etc.

What I’m not interested:

-Orwellian visions of work (ie, Snow Crash)
-Regressive visions of work (returns to small tribal systems – ie, primitivist visions, Bolo’Bolo, etc.)
-Anything that deals only with establishing worker owned co-ops without any other rethinking.

Chris Anderson Is Worse Than Wal-Mart

June 30, 2009 / Klint Finley

On known plagarist and hack Chris Anderson’s terrible business practices:

What he is actually proposing is the complete divorce of capital and earnings from those who make the product that is being sold. The only thing that is “Free” in this instance is the labor of the people who earn Chris Anderson money.

What he is literally saying is that the business side of an editorial operation—which is, in this case, the owners, not merely the part of the organization that handles the business of the site—is the complete authority of the editorial operation. That they retain all of the value, and that they have no obligation to share any of that income with any other part of the business. (In his description, this website in question “makes good money,” which then pays the people who make the website something “nominal; a few bucks,” or nothing at all.)

All of which is to say that the owners provide none of the product which is actually being sold and retain nearly all of the profit of that labor.

What he is proposing is down somewhere, on the scale of ethics, well beneath Wal-Mart’s policies of no longer hiring any full-time workers so as to avoid health and unemployment insurance. It is in fact some weird sort of neo-feudal, post-contract-worker society, in which he will create a dystopian and eager volunteer-slave system of “attention-paid” enthusiasts (which is to say, people with no other options, and no capital of their own) to create products from which rich people can get richer.

The Awl: Chris Anderson Is Worse Than Wal-Mart

(via Richard Metzger)

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