8 ms·
It is as if you were doing work
- bytesandbots 9y agohttps://pippinbarr.github.io/itisasifyouweredoingwork/js/data.js https://pippinbarr.github.io/itisasifyouweredoingwork/js/dat... Why are some inspirational quotes commented while others aren't?
- schindlabua 9y agoI ended up laying my fingers flat on the keyboard (thumbs still on space) so I can hit more keys while mashing, lifting them only to set calendar appointments. It's like I've become a parody of myself.
- Jaruzel 9y agoLikewise, until I realised that just holding down space kept the auto typing going. Always game the system!
- schindlabua 9y agoMan, I feel a bit silly now. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656945
- mattmanser 9y agoHa, reading that thread and this game reminds me of a temp job I once had. It was at a sandpaper factory that made sandpaper belts. My job was to pull a sheet from a roll until it hit a mark. Another guy pressed a button. Lift sheet onto pile. Pull sheet until it hits mark. Another guy pressed a button. Lift sheet onto pile. Pull sheet until it hits mark. Another guy pressed a button. Lift sheet onto pile. Pull sheet until it hits mark. Another guy pressed a button. Lift sheet onto pile. Pull sheet until it hits mark. Another guy pressed a button. Lift sheet onto pile. For 8 hours straight. I quit at lunch.
- duderific 9y agoWhat's amazing is that people do those kinds of jobs for years and years.
- Cumulonimbus 9y agoIndeed. I worked at a factory that had me do the following: Put bracket in machine. Press button to tap holes. Repeat. I got the loop down to about 3.85 seconds which was 115% faster than the engineers said I could do. I found I could listen to audiobooks at that job. It still didn't stop the existential dread. I worked there for 2 months before finding a better place.
- ccoggins 9y agoI was doing the same until I couldn't get the calendar widget to work. Opened up the dev console and noticed you can just call 'updateWorkUnits(x)' with x being any number. Instant promotion. You top out at CTO though.
- kzahel 9y agoIf you tried it out and were a little confused, here's a little blog post about the motivation and development of the "game": http://www.pippinbarr.com/words/2017/06/14/narrative-framing-in-it-is-as-if-you-were-doing-work.html http://www.pippinbarr.com/words/2017/06/14/narrative-framing... And some more information in form of a "press" release from the github: https://github.com/pippinbarr/itisasifyouweredoingwork/tree/master/press https://github.com/pippinbarr/itisasifyouweredoingwork/tree/... I found the "game" to be somehow interesting.
- mbrookes 9y agoOr just click the "About" icon...
- chickenfries 9y agoFun little game. Made it to Big Data Administrator before I was able to pry myself away. It would be fun if mashing different keys made typing faster.
- whatnotests 9y agoDoes not work on chrome on iPhone
- klodolph 9y agoNot really surprising, it's simulating a desktop with mouse and keyboard.
- whatnotests 9y agoAh well then!
- theworldisweird 9y agoYou remind me of just mashing buttons.
- pmontra 9y agoBut it works well on Android with Firefox. I didn't check with Chrome.
- mshenfield 9y agoEerily similar to how distracting an actual work environment can get.
- saghm 9y agoIs there anything after you get to Computation Administrator?
- GreaterFool 9y agoWho knew, I'm really good at it!
- ajpikul 9y agough windows
- Animats 9y agoUp to "Computational Administrator". Is there anything after that? Reminds me of "Papers, Please".
- jaredsohn 9y agovar jobTitler = { subject: [ "Screen", //100 "Input", //400 "Dialog", //900 "Interface", //1600 "Data", //2500 "Big Data", //3600 "Choice", //4900 "System", //6400 "Computation", //8100 ], // 9 position: [ "Administrator", //1000 "Technician", //4000 "Engineer", //9000 "Specialist", //16000 "Architect", //25000 "Executive", //36000 ] } https://pippinbarr.github.io/itisasifyouweredoingwork/js/data.js https://pippinbarr.github.io/itisasifyouweredoingwork/js/dat... I'm guessing Computation Executive might be the highest if it uses the position field. (Don't have time to see how this data gets used to set the title.)
- qbrass 9y agoTop job is Chief Technical Officer, but there's a (guessing bounds error) bug that causes it to stop valuing your work when you're supposed to be promoted from Computational Administrator to Screen Technician.
- justinjlynn 9y agoUnanticipated glitch ceiling in the HR autopromotion system, clearly.
- Klockan 9y ago> there's a bug that causes it to stop valuing your work when you're supposed to be promoted They always say that...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- qbrass 9y agothe bug is line 1486 of ui-generators.js < if (jobTitlePositionIndex >= jobTitle.position.length) { --- > if (jobTitlePositionIndex >= jobTitler.position.length) {
- fomojola 9y agoClearly it needs the following 3 things: 1. It needs a fake calendar that is randomly populated with meetings. 2. It needs to randomly require that you open Google Hangouts and chat with other users. 3. It needs to send random Slack notifications.
- cbhl 9y agoIf it's a video game, couldn't you still use real chat apps to chat with real other users?
- ed_cr 9y agoha ha yes random calendar items
- majewsky 9y ago> 1. It needs a fake calendar that is randomly populated with meetings. While we're on this, can everyone please post their favorite ridiculous meeting title that is really real? I'll start with a recurring meeting series from last year that was called "mid-sprint calibration".
- patmcguire 9y agoGoogle has a weekly meeting called TGIF every Thursday.
- rb1 9y ago[project name] iteration scrum Actual update (with the random capitalisation of actual)
- b3lvedere 9y ago- Teambuilding (mandatory) - Brainstorm session (mandatory) - Beer
- jordanmoconnor 9y agoMandatory Communications Meeting
- 9y ago
- monochromatic 9y agoDisappointed there was no Tayne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIXTNumrDc4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIXTNumrDc4
- eanzenberg 9y agoCan you kick up the 4d3d3d3
- fusiongyro 9y agoI once posited this video as answer to "what does the project management group do all day?" and giggled more than was appropriate while watching it over his shoulder. Great video! Underrated.
- Afal 9y agoHere you go http://celeryman.alexmeub.com/ http://celeryman.alexmeub.com/
- hayksaakian 9y agoIs computation administrator the last level?
- ClassyJacket 9y agoThis page is just a grey screen that pauses my podcast, on an iPhone.
- teknologist 9y agoSame on my desktop Chrome!
- rjbwork 9y agoDitto. I had to open in incognito.
- truetuna 9y agoOpening it up in incognito mode on the iPhone doesn't seem to work.
- davchana 9y agoOpened in Android Google Chrome, normal and incognito, also requested desktop site from menu, no luck only duck, just a grey page :(
- teekert 9y agoCould this be one of those very rare occasions when us FireFox user actually have the most optimized experience?
- brandonmenc 9y agoThis is equal parts eerie, depressing, and absolutely hilarious. I'm cracking up right now using it. Well done!
- flukus 9y agoI was particularly impressed with the focus stealing popups that emulate the real life windows experience.
- FlyingSideKick 9y agoHilarious! Thank you.
- jianzong 9y agoI wonder how many people input (or almost input) their real username and password in the first screen.
- justinjlynn 9y agoI would imagine that it's a number greater than zero.
- andai 9y agoI had to stop myself. The power of habit is strong!
- hacksonx 9y agoI typed my work username twice. Shows how simple social engineering can be.
- jimbo999 9y agothat is horrifying
- molloy 9y agoThe text that you end up "typing" is actually very motivational!
- mesozoic 9y agoI am upset I can't be promoted beyond "Computation Administrator" :(
- hamburglar 9y agoI determined that the most efficient way to play this game is to ignore every task that isn't typing for character count, including never actually saving once you get to the minimum character count for the current task. As you go up in levels, the number of work units you accomplish per character goes up, and you continue accruing work units even if you do "extra credit" on one of your tasks by exceeding the minimum. So it pays to just keep returning focus to whatever window you were typing in and never stopping. I think it also might stop giving you new tasks once you have a certain number stacked up, which lets you have uninterrupted keyboard-mashing time to get those promotions. :D Using this strategy, I managed to hit the Computation Administrator progress cap almost immediately after my first "well-deserved break".
- JabavuAdams 9y agoWow, way to game the system. Congratulations, you lose!
- Aissen 9y agoI love the "busywork" aspect of this game. You work like a drone, doing simple tasks with no intelligence whatsoever. This must be what most people working on a desk must feel like (not sure people on HN can relate to this). It's also a reflection on modern gaming in general. If only some games had busywork as part of their gameplay, they'd feel less tiring and more fun.
- stdbrouw 9y ago> It's also a reflection on modern gaming in general. If only some games had busywork as part of their gameplay, they'd feel less tiring and more fun. Like grinding in an MMORPG? I'm not so sure.
- ManlyBread 9y agoThat's why I never really got into MMORPGs, the gameplay feels like a task that should be automated.
- oswamano 9y agoOnce people start developing bots for a game it has pretty much reached this point. While usually not kosher, in some games I think developing a bot for them would be more interesting than the game itself
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ericdykstra 9y agoThere are plenty of games that have "busywork" aspects. The term for it in gaming is "grinding" (implies mindlessness, even though it is sometimes used in a different context). The vast majority of RPGs, especially old-school JRPGs and MMORPGs, require you do "grind" to get to a certain level to unlock more stages. Many modern mobile games are literally just mindless busywork with an option to pay money to skip some of the busywork. The whole "clicker" genre is totally mindless. There are plenty of games that fit your criteria, so maybe you're just playing the wrong types of games?
- nice_byte 9y agoWow, this is extremely annoying. Guess the point is to portray a constant stream of interruptions, so job well done :-)
- drakonka 9y agoThat was stressful.
- jstoja 9y agoThank you for making my job better!
- Firegarden 9y agoThis is stupid its funny how long I keep it going. It's a little stressful when your trying to get your characters quota typed out and you have to keep selecting other modal windows but all in all it feels like "I am on track" with my fake work life.
- j7ake 9y agoThis game chills me to the bone.
- ducttapecrown 9y agoDoes anyone know where the text in the emails comes from?
- davidsong 9y agohttps://github.com/pippinbarr/itisasifyouweredoingwork/blob/master/js/data.js https://github.com/pippinbarr/itisasifyouweredoingwork/blob/...
- reacweb 9y agois there a forum to discuss about our progress in the game ?
- olavolav 9y agoSo amwesome! :-) Nostalgia + sillyness. Made my morning
- dsun176 9y agoI played if for 8 hours straight. My team thought I was very busy and diligent so they better not interrupted me.
- erikb 9y agoOh no! You should take a break after 4 hours. Otherwise you lose focus in the afternoon and become less productive!
- floho_hh 9y agoI hate the fact that this "game" did not feel overly strange, and I played for a good while until I realized that a) I was not required to keep doing those mindless tasks b) my real work was still waiting
- erikb 9y agoBefore you switched back, did you also realize that c) you're also not really required to do most of your "real work"?
- hosh 9y agoI wished I could find this article again -- it was an analysis of games that were designed to be deliberately addictive but not fun. Examples were things like ProgressQuest. This was right around when gamification became a fad on the internet (around 2012). It's all dopamine hacking.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- titzer 9y agoThis. is. freaking. genius.
- tempestn 9y agoThis just makes me sad that windows stealing focus, grabbing a randomly typed space bar, and submitting themselves before you can even read them is still a thing.
- narrowtux 9y agoJust like real life. I am sure this is intentional.
- eckza 9y agoOne of my favorite things about OSX is the fact that applications rarely / never are allowed to steal focus.
- pinum 9y agoIt's better than on Windows but it still happens to me, especially with update alerts.
- otachack 9y agoIt most definitely does, such as Google Calendar event alerts at least under Chrome. I'm not sure why it doesn't have unobtrusive desktop alerts instead. I'll have to take a look later to see if that's an option.
- girvo 9y agoChrome on macOS always drove me mental, because of their absolutely terrible and reimplemented notifications system. Drove me batty. Nowadays I browse in Safari and develop in Firefox and Safari, so I don't know if it still does this
- emilecantin 9y agoThey actually switched to native notifications as of about two weeks ago.
- renegadesensei 9y agoI recently started working for a very big corporation and this hit a little too close to home.
- _pdp_ 9y agoAnd if you want to pretend that you are hacking open this: https://haxor.secapps.com/ https://haxor.secapps.com/
- giancarlostoro 9y agoSurprised these kind of apps aren't available as a plugin for a text editor. Would be bit more fun. :)
- factsaresacred 9y agoHaving worked in an insurance company this brought a pang of PTSD. A stream of minor frustrations, just mild enough to not trigger an audible and cathartic 'f*ck', over and over and over again. The only thing missing was a mandatory health & safety quiz. Now excuse me while I go thank the Universe that I no longer work in such a place.
- yttrium 9y agoMy god, I'm starting to think Post Insurance Trauma meetings are in order. Everyone else I've met who worked/started in Insurance feels the same way. I can still recall those janky 'Internet Safety' etc. web seminars that restart if you accidentally click the wrong button and inexplicably take 45 minutes.
- Ntrails 9y agoI have spent more time trying to hack my way through web-flash-etc training courses than I've spent actually doing them. It was very rare I was able to actually get to the end without having to resort to an ahk script pressing "next" every 10 minutes overnight
- dmarlow 9y agoScreengrab --> ocr --> index makes for easy q/a at the end...
- Ntrails 9y agoYou have sensitive client data to send to your client. Do you: a) Put it on pastebin and send them a link b) email it to them c) put it on a securely encrypted pen drive, courier that to the client, and provide the password via a second communication channel. (You did not have to do the course to answer the quiz, the answers would generally reveal themselves through the art of sounding super corporate - whilst simultaneously being the thing you've literally never ever seen anyone do)
- likelynew 9y agoI can totally relate to the superficial points. In my work, I can cut my work to half if I do what I think is best and achieve the same end goals. A big proportion of my work goes to useless things, doing what anyone think is right, and I am instructed to try them all. And even worse, I have to report what I did everyday in nice readable way, due to which I sometimes build temporary things that I know I will have to rework completely later. I complained about daily reporting and my senior said I can say I could not achieve anything in a day, but I have to report. I haven't done that any time. Can anyone here advise if it's fine for me to report that.
- sleepychu 9y agoIn general I'd expect the backlash from an unsatisfactory daily report to be low, there's a lot of opportunity to coach you and it lets your supervisor coach you/steer you if you've developed an inconsistency. It's also an opportunity to get domain specific knowledge of pitfall you might experience integrating with an existing system. I think that deliberately making a to-be-scrapped system just to generate some work-done for the report is a waste of your time and you'd be better just making the real progress you can within the day and then reporting on how it's going/what (if anything) is stopping you from making progress; in general I don't think that tasks which take more than a day are expected to be complete. The report is really about making sure that you're not sitting there unable to make any progress for days/weeks/months at a time resulting in an unexpected failure to deliver at the other end. HTH.
- pmiller2 9y agoI would say that if you've done any work in a productive direction, you've achieved something that day and can feel ok reporting your work in progress. Not all tasks may be able to be finished in a day, but you can make incremental progress on anything, even if it's only to find out a particular approach is infeasible.
- bmh100 9y agoThe report should show what you are working on, where you are spending your time, etc. It is about time spent more than achievements per se. It can alert your senior that you need training on a particular task that is taking too much time or that the task itself is too difficult.
- iamben 9y agoMy brother and I have been laughing about something like this for a while. 1. Create a 'real time office / trading simulator' game and market it well to folks who like playing playstation / xbox. 2. Connect it to 'the cloud'. 3. .... 4. Profit :-)
- brianzelip 9y agocheckout this author on instagram, his "game idea" thread is hilarious! https://www.instagram.com/pippinbarr/ https://www.instagram.com/pippinbarr/
- dpwm 9y agoAt first I thought this was a satire of modern work. Now I'm convinced it is at least as much a satire of GUI toolkit widget developments or, more generally, corporate User Interface design. The game emphasises just how close to being terrible most UI widgets are, and illustrates beautifully that the difference that makes them terrible is usually the only thing that differentiates them from validated text input components. My favourite two are the calendar and the spinner. The calendar only goes back month by month. Some calendar components I have had to use actually do this, especially those on the web. There is no way to choose a year and there is no text entry of dates. A validated text entry field would be superior if your use of them consisted of anything but picking dates in the current month. The genius of the spinners in this game is that you can't just use them as text entry fields. You can only use the tiny little buttons, so if you have to enter -13, then you have to click 13 times. Text entry would be superior if you had to pick a value far from zero. The only widget that does what it's supposed to is the text entry field. But even that feels alien initially because the wrong letters come up. It is only when you see words appear when you hit backspace that you realise that you're just meant to mash keys.
- LanceH 9y agoIt is just as much an indictment of managerial input on UI, or anything really. "This is important, it should grab focus." The same basic mentality that gets all issues listed as priority 1.
- nattofriends 9y agoYou do realize that calendar picker is the stock jQuery UI picker
- pattisapu 9y agoVaguely cognate with the Tim & Eric Awesome Show Good Job! Celery Man / Cinco products type skits [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maAFcEU6atk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maAFcEU6atk
- nkg 9y agoThat is just wonderful.
- geuis 9y agoDoesn't work on mobile safari.
- gt_ 9y agoclickbait titles should be banned from HN
- valine 9y agoMake it randomly and forcibly install updates and it will be perfect. A "Preparing to install updates [Confirm] [Delay for 10 sec]" message would be funny.
- larodi 9y agoall suffering from ADHD - the text in the emails is the cure. couldn't' have been chosen more appropriately.
- pmoriarty 9y agoI would like to see a vim/emacs + shell version of this, with maybe IRC for chatting with coworkers. No mousing or clicking around, just have a tiling window manager controlled fully by the keyboard.
- strictnein 9y agoReminds me of Cookie Clicker: http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/ http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/
- medalist 9y agoHoly shit this is frustrating. Pretty great little art game. Does anyone know if it goes anywhere?
- hasbot 9y agoIt reminds me of that game Papers Please.
- collinmanderson 9y agoThe dialog boxes remind me about space-team. Totally nonsense instructions. :)
- pavlov 9y agoAnother super-fun take on this concept is Job Simulator, available for the big three VR platforms: https://jobsimulatorgame.com https://jobsimulatorgame.com
- oliv__ 9y agoThis is brilliant.
- throwaway1892 9y agoI wonder if this submission would have gone to the front page if I had added game (or [game]) in the title as I first intended when posting it...