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I agree wholeheartedly with this. Everybody needs a &^%$ job once in a while to reset their empathy scale. Walmart does something interesting for their softwar

I agree wholeheartedly with this. Everybody needs a &^%$ job once in a while to reset their empathy scale. Walmart does something interesting for their software development process. Say a developer is working on a warehouse automation system -- that dev. is then trained and works in the warehouse for a month. Same goes for checkout/cashier, or customer service, or whatever. You WORK that job for a month and you'll understand just how trying it can be to struggle with lousy software on top of a sometimes difficult public. You'll know the trouble spots and the workarounds, and can take that education back to a nice safe quiet desk where you can then go on to help solve the problems.

duxup 7y ago
Man I wish I could do the job for the software I wrote more often. That probabbly explains why there are such great free development tools out there too ;)
rogy 7y ago
I work on software for datacenter server technicians and try and spend a week every quarter on the floor doing their job, honestly find it one of the most enjoyably aspects to my role
eyepea2007 7y ago
...and imagine if the moonlighting software devs were only getting paid what the warehouse workers were receiving, instead of their normal developer pay.. the work becomes a lot "harder" / more thankless when your pay is 1/3 or 1/4 as much.
- jniedrauer 7y ago
  Add on the stress of wondering where your next meal is coming from, or how you're going to pay rent this month... every day, for the rest of your life, and your quality of life sinks dramatically.
  - amatecha 7y ago
    Yeah this stuff literally changes your life in pretty much every aspect. I have personally observed the shift in peoples' way of living and thinking as they move from one financial situation to another, whether upward or downward. I try to regularly reflect on my situation and recognize how comparatively lucky I am to be in the position I am in, and how it's never "set in stone".
  - exikyut 7y ago
    I've been in a weird variant of that for 16 years: I've had crippling anxiety that today might be the day that my computer dies. Try as I might, I cannot shake it - because it's not an irrational fear. I simply look at eBay and see the $200-$400 price tags to replace my current machine (10-year old ThinkPad T400) and try not to cry. (This one was given to me by a friend) I found an 800MHz AMD Duron with 128MB RAM on the side of the road in 2013. Browsing the web on that box was fun, even after maxing out the RAM with everything in the house and getting it up to 320MB. In 2005 I was running a 66MHz 486DX2 with 8MB of free diskspace (oh and 4MB RAM). The outlier was the Pentium 4 I used for a bit in 2006 - it had a crippled motherboard that couldn't do DMA to the HDD, only PIO, so the cursor would freeze if anything was accessing the HDD even for a fraction of a second. This was the Firefox 2.x era, so with 512MB of RAM I was mostly staring at "Task Manager (Not Responding)" instead of doing anything useful. My point with all this: it has taken me about 20 years to realize that my general lack of success at mastering computer science wasn't entirely due to the learning difficulties and other mental health issues preventing me from holding down a traditional job - it was access to sane equipment. I have had the ABSOLUTE HARDEST TIME EVER (emphasis appropriate and necessary) to FORCE myself to do ANYTHING with computers beyond what I'd describe "theoretical learning". "But what if I start this project and the computer dies tomorrow?????" is what a part of my head sort of screams/cries out anytime I have a new idea (with that many anxious questionmarks). Unresolvable problem, currently. And an interesting one, too, since if I _could_ start a project, and hold it together, I might actually be able to get somewhere and move up. ...Except for the fact that the disability support I'm currently eligible for only recognizes casual/part time work payment structures, not bulk post-payment consulting/bug-bounty up-front types of remuneration, which is the type of thing I have any confidence in my abilities with. (Since I can cram and do the work in a sprint, then run away and have a break for a million years afterwards.) So yeah, I am practically disabled because of how my mental health issues are classified, not directly because of the issues themselves (which have an impact but do leave me with some level of functionality which I am unable to effectively use).
- wolco 7y ago
  Guess you never tried upwork. Lucky to get warehouse worker salary.
soapboxrocket 7y ago
I did it in my first engineering job (mechanical) I would take training on all the manufacturing methods riveting, soldering, wire tracing. I was lucky that my group didn't want to train but we had a group average to hit, so I got to do all of it.
jdkdnfndnfjd 7y ago
This is an excellent policy. I think people should also be forced to live in a dangerous ghetto before voting to take away my guns and capital punishment. I wasn’t a staunch supporter of either of those things until I had experience with situations that they are relevant to.
- blotter_paper 7y ago
  Wanting guns to protect yourself with seems like a position that could come from this experience. Why capital punishment? IIRC it hasn't been shown to reduce crimes of passion, and there are other ways to keep dangerous people off the street, so I don't see how it follows. I'm not fundamentally opposed to capital punishment (though I recognise that it's more expensive than life in prison given the current system), I just don't see how it relates to living in a shitty area. I have lived in neighborhoods where I was accosted by strangers on a fairly regular basis, and those experiences have made me glad to own a firearm, but they haven't moved my views on capital punishment in either direction.
noer 7y ago
That's a great idea. Buffer, the social media automation tool, does (or did) something similar. IIRC, every new employee spent a week doing customer support. Doing customer support work is a really good way to figure out customers issues & pain points very quickly.
ALittleLight 7y ago
I think this is a phenomenal idea. The last project I worked on was designed to look good in a demo or on mocks but not really to be usable. I was constantly asking our designers and PMs to try using our product as a user might. I'd write up little scenarios that I knew our users struggled with and invite people to try them out with our product. Sadly, I found it impossible to persuade anybody to design for anything except what looks good on a presentation of UX mocks.
- StacyRoberts 7y ago
  I begged to job shadow the future users of my software at my last job and I was told there not enough time.We are all too busy. Keep your head down. Do what you're told. But I'll be able to understand their job better and what the software really needs to do to make than more efficient and productive. They'll appreciate that and be more likely to buy in and adapt to the product they'll be using. That's not your job. Your job is to implement the features you're told to implement. But the users saw those features and said that is not what they asked for. So? Why do you care if the project fails? It's not on you if it fails. Just do what the BA's said to do. Boss, they aren't translating the business needs correctly. We have to rebuild features 2 or 3 or 4 times. Is we could see what they do and talk to them it'd only take once. That's happened a couple times during user acceptance. They said that's not what what we asked for. I said what did you ask for? I coded it right there on the spot and they signed off on the user story. Go back to work. I'm busy. This isn't a productive conversation.
buzzert 7y ago
Definitely a good idea. Apparently some of the top architecture schools do this as well. They'll make students cook for everyone in a kitchen for a couple of weeks with the assumption that you won't be able to design a kitchen if you haven't really worked in one. Same should apply for software as well imo.
irrational 7y ago
Recently I had to try to do a task using our software because the person that normally uses it was not available. The process sucked and I quickly made changes to make it much more useable. The person was nearly in tears after trying my fixes. I asked the person why they never said anything and they said they thought it would be too hard to fix (it wasn't) and that I always seemed busy so they didn't want to bother me.
austincheney 7y ago
Working a shit job only produces empathy if the external consequences are similar: no savings, no disposable income, poverty, etc. You don’t need that extreme to have high empathy, such as understanding context and limitations. Some people just aren’t good at empathy and even that scenario wouldn’t help. This is also complicated in that many people cannot differentiate empathy from sympathy. * empathy - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy * sympathy - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathy
freeflight 7y ago
> Everybody needs a &^%$ job once in a while to reset their empathy scale. Imho that's trying to solve a symptom, not the actual problem. Why does society tolerate &^%$ jobs in the first place? Why not strive to make jobs non-&^%$? Instead, it somehow has become completely normalized that these kinds of jobs exist, and anybody who doesn't want to work them is considered "too entitled", which all goes back to this notion of "work as a virtue". And while the idea that this experience might help change something from the desk job, the reality is most people will just be glad to be having their desk job, with a lot having a mindset of "I went through the &^%$ jobs to get here, everybody else should have to suffer like I did!".
- scarface74 7y ago
  So are you saying that we shouldn’t have any jobs like the ones at McDonalds, the convenience store, etc?
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    It's pretty obvious that @freeflight mean these jobs don't necessarily have to be shit. They can be low / lower pay and still be a fairly reasonable place to work with fairly reasonable people to work with. But, if we accept that work conditions fit some kind of natural distribution / bell curve, it's probably unrealistic to believe there will be no shit jobs.
  - TomVDB 7y ago
    He's saying that those jobs at McDonalds etc should be made easier on the employees.
  - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
    I believe they're saying that we, as a society, could make some effort to make those jobs less soul-sucking.
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  > Why does society tolerate &^%$ jobs in the first place? Why not strive to make jobs non-&^%$? We do strive, which is why we have non-shit jobs now. After the advent of agriculture, overwhelming majority of people has worked mundane, tiring, repetitive and straining jobs. It’s only recent increases in technology allowed us to produce immense amounts of wealth, finally allowing huge swaths of population to enjoy light, interesting and fun jobs. We still have lots of shit jobs out there, but don’t worry, we’re working on that.
apatters 7y ago
You can tell who was born with a silver spoon in their mouth by their response to this. The "why can't we just make all jobs great forever" responses crack me up. It's classic virtue signalling by liberal elites: demand that life be a perfect fantasy land for everyone, then put forward zero realistic proposals to achieve it. Doesn't matter that it will never happen because you've already gained your social capital with your circle of people who think and act just like you. It seems to me like it used to be a lot more common for people to take up a "shitty" (e.g., low paying, menial, and hard) job when they were young, to help pay their way through school, for some extra pocket money, etc. You would do this during the summers, or part-time, or both. This was just considered an ordinary part of life and a character building experience. It seems like this experience is a lot less common now. In part because we're coddling our children and our young adults (hard work increasingly seems to be a dirty word and something no one should ever have to do), in part because we're handing off all the worst jobs to illegal immigrant labor. I'm sure this will prompt some "ok boomer" type responses (I'm not that old btw) but that's just how it was when and where I grew up. I was expected to work and make money as soon as I was able, because my family wasn't rich. They were also super clear with me that there was no free rent after I turned 18, and that if I wanted to go to college I needed to pay for it myself. So this fantasy land "we'll have only perfect jobs for everyone and work will always be a fulfilling endeavor" crap does not connect with me and I suspect does not connect with 90% of Americans. It is popular with techno-fantasists who went to Stanford and work in SV and drink the kool-aid from their employer about how they are changing the world by optimizing the profitability of some billionaire's advertising inventory. (None of this is to suggest that Cierra Brown's situation is fine and we don't need to change anything about the system btw! Biggest practical issues I saw in that article were that she doesn't have healthcare and she walks away from 2 weeks of work with only $215, something is very wrong there.)
- Spooky23 7y ago
  It is funny that the dog whistle for conservatism these days are the immigrants whom are supposedly taking peoples jobs. When the Reagan administration changed the regulations around meatpacking to break the unions and ship the industry back to 1910 standards to rural places, none of the principled conservatives were complaining about cheap meat packing and illegal workers who didn’t collect workers compensation or have pesky demands for health insurance. Likewise, none of the large apple growers around me were too concerned about guest worker visas when they were able to hire on Jamaicans for a few months, house them in onsite dormitories and pay below market rates. They love to bitch about Mexican construction guys though. When I worked in the mall in the 90s, the struggle of unskilled workers was obvious and sad. At that time, most workers made $4.25, and the barrier to moving up for folks not in college was a car. Getting a $12/hr job as a line cook at Pizza Uno or $15/hr job cleaning offices meant freedom for those people. If labor standards didn’t allow the abysmal working conditions that only desperate Latin American or other immigrants are willing to take, the market would take care of that problem. Instead of shipping in Apple pickers from 4,000 miles away, you could hire folks 10 miles away and bus them in.
argonaut 7y ago
That's commendable but also sounds like a great way to scare off potential software developer candidates.
- sah2ed 7y ago
  On the contrary, it’s a pretty good filter for the kinds of engineers they want working for them.
sgallant 7y ago
I love this. The best software is created by people who intimately understand and live the problem it’s trying to solve. A+

duxup 7y ago

Man I wish I could do the job for the software I wrote more often. That probabbly explains why there are such great free development tools out there too ;)

rogy 7y ago

I work on software for datacenter server technicians and try and spend a week every quarter on the floor doing their job, honestly find it one of the most enjoyably aspects to my role

eyepea2007 7y ago

...and imagine if the moonlighting software devs were only getting paid what the warehouse workers were receiving, instead of their normal developer pay.. the work becomes a lot "harder" / more thankless when your pay is 1/3 or 1/4 as much.

jniedrauer 7y ago
Add on the stress of wondering where your next meal is coming from, or how you're going to pay rent this month... every day, for the rest of your life, and your quality of life sinks dramatically.
- amatecha 7y ago
  Yeah this stuff literally changes your life in pretty much every aspect. I have personally observed the shift in peoples' way of living and thinking as they move from one financial situation to another, whether upward or downward. I try to regularly reflect on my situation and recognize how comparatively lucky I am to be in the position I am in, and how it's never "set in stone".
- exikyut 7y ago
  I've been in a weird variant of that for 16 years: I've had crippling anxiety that today might be the day that my computer dies. Try as I might, I cannot shake it - because it's not an irrational fear. I simply look at eBay and see the $200-$400 price tags to replace my current machine (10-year old ThinkPad T400) and try not to cry. (This one was given to me by a friend) I found an 800MHz AMD Duron with 128MB RAM on the side of the road in 2013. Browsing the web on that box was fun, even after maxing out the RAM with everything in the house and getting it up to 320MB. In 2005 I was running a 66MHz 486DX2 with 8MB of free diskspace (oh and 4MB RAM). The outlier was the Pentium 4 I used for a bit in 2006 - it had a crippled motherboard that couldn't do DMA to the HDD, only PIO, so the cursor would freeze if anything was accessing the HDD even for a fraction of a second. This was the Firefox 2.x era, so with 512MB of RAM I was mostly staring at "Task Manager (Not Responding)" instead of doing anything useful. My point with all this: it has taken me about 20 years to realize that my general lack of success at mastering computer science wasn't entirely due to the learning difficulties and other mental health issues preventing me from holding down a traditional job - it was access to sane equipment. I have had the ABSOLUTE HARDEST TIME EVER (emphasis appropriate and necessary) to FORCE myself to do ANYTHING with computers beyond what I'd describe "theoretical learning". "But what if I start this project and the computer dies tomorrow?????" is what a part of my head sort of screams/cries out anytime I have a new idea (with that many anxious questionmarks). Unresolvable problem, currently. And an interesting one, too, since if I _could_ start a project, and hold it together, I might actually be able to get somewhere and move up. ...Except for the fact that the disability support I'm currently eligible for only recognizes casual/part time work payment structures, not bulk post-payment consulting/bug-bounty up-front types of remuneration, which is the type of thing I have any confidence in my abilities with. (Since I can cram and do the work in a sprint, then run away and have a break for a million years afterwards.) So yeah, I am practically disabled because of how my mental health issues are classified, not directly because of the issues themselves (which have an impact but do leave me with some level of functionality which I am unable to effectively use).
wolco 7y ago
Guess you never tried upwork. Lucky to get warehouse worker salary.

soapboxrocket 7y ago

I did it in my first engineering job (mechanical) I would take training on all the manufacturing methods riveting, soldering, wire tracing. I was lucky that my group didn't want to train but we had a group average to hit, so I got to do all of it.

jdkdnfndnfjd 7y ago

This is an excellent policy. I think people should also be forced to live in a dangerous ghetto before voting to take away my guns and capital punishment. I wasn’t a staunch supporter of either of those things until I had experience with situations that they are relevant to.

blotter_paper 7y ago
Wanting guns to protect yourself with seems like a position that could come from this experience. Why capital punishment? IIRC it hasn't been shown to reduce crimes of passion, and there are other ways to keep dangerous people off the street, so I don't see how it follows. I'm not fundamentally opposed to capital punishment (though I recognise that it's more expensive than life in prison given the current system), I just don't see how it relates to living in a shitty area. I have lived in neighborhoods where I was accosted by strangers on a fairly regular basis, and those experiences have made me glad to own a firearm, but they haven't moved my views on capital punishment in either direction.

noer 7y ago

That's a great idea. Buffer, the social media automation tool, does (or did) something similar. IIRC, every new employee spent a week doing customer support. Doing customer support work is a really good way to figure out customers issues & pain points very quickly.

ALittleLight 7y ago

I think this is a phenomenal idea. The last project I worked on was designed to look good in a demo or on mocks but not really to be usable. I was constantly asking our designers and PMs to try using our product as a user might. I'd write up little scenarios that I knew our users struggled with and invite people to try them out with our product. Sadly, I found it impossible to persuade anybody to design for anything except what looks good on a presentation of UX mocks.

StacyRoberts 7y ago
I begged to job shadow the future users of my software at my last job and I was told there not enough time.We are all too busy. Keep your head down. Do what you're told. But I'll be able to understand their job better and what the software really needs to do to make than more efficient and productive. They'll appreciate that and be more likely to buy in and adapt to the product they'll be using. That's not your job. Your job is to implement the features you're told to implement. But the users saw those features and said that is not what they asked for. So? Why do you care if the project fails? It's not on you if it fails. Just do what the BA's said to do. Boss, they aren't translating the business needs correctly. We have to rebuild features 2 or 3 or 4 times. Is we could see what they do and talk to them it'd only take once. That's happened a couple times during user acceptance. They said that's not what what we asked for. I said what did you ask for? I coded it right there on the spot and they signed off on the user story. Go back to work. I'm busy. This isn't a productive conversation.

buzzert 7y ago

Definitely a good idea. Apparently some of the top architecture schools do this as well. They'll make students cook for everyone in a kitchen for a couple of weeks with the assumption that you won't be able to design a kitchen if you haven't really worked in one. Same should apply for software as well imo.

irrational 7y ago

Recently I had to try to do a task using our software because the person that normally uses it was not available. The process sucked and I quickly made changes to make it much more useable. The person was nearly in tears after trying my fixes. I asked the person why they never said anything and they said they thought it would be too hard to fix (it wasn't) and that I always seemed busy so they didn't want to bother me.

austincheney 7y ago

Working a shit job only produces empathy if the external consequences are similar: no savings, no disposable income, poverty, etc. You don’t need that extreme to have high empathy, such as understanding context and limitations. Some people just aren’t good at empathy and even that scenario wouldn’t help. This is also complicated in that many people cannot differentiate empathy from sympathy. * empathy - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy * sympathy - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathy

freeflight 7y ago

> Everybody needs a &^%$ job once in a while to reset their empathy scale. Imho that's trying to solve a symptom, not the actual problem. Why does society tolerate &^%$ jobs in the first place? Why not strive to make jobs non-&^%$? Instead, it somehow has become completely normalized that these kinds of jobs exist, and anybody who doesn't want to work them is considered "too entitled", which all goes back to this notion of "work as a virtue". And while the idea that this experience might help change something from the desk job, the reality is most people will just be glad to be having their desk job, with a lot having a mindset of "I went through the &^%$ jobs to get here, everybody else should have to suffer like I did!".

scarface74 7y ago
So are you saying that we shouldn’t have any jobs like the ones at McDonalds, the convenience store, etc?
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  It's pretty obvious that @freeflight mean these jobs don't necessarily have to be shit. They can be low / lower pay and still be a fairly reasonable place to work with fairly reasonable people to work with. But, if we accept that work conditions fit some kind of natural distribution / bell curve, it's probably unrealistic to believe there will be no shit jobs.
- TomVDB 7y ago
  He's saying that those jobs at McDonalds etc should be made easier on the employees.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  I believe they're saying that we, as a society, could make some effort to make those jobs less soul-sucking.
xyzzyz 7y ago
> Why does society tolerate &^%$ jobs in the first place? Why not strive to make jobs non-&^%$? We do strive, which is why we have non-shit jobs now. After the advent of agriculture, overwhelming majority of people has worked mundane, tiring, repetitive and straining jobs. It’s only recent increases in technology allowed us to produce immense amounts of wealth, finally allowing huge swaths of population to enjoy light, interesting and fun jobs. We still have lots of shit jobs out there, but don’t worry, we’re working on that.

apatters 7y ago

You can tell who was born with a silver spoon in their mouth by their response to this. The "why can't we just make all jobs great forever" responses crack me up. It's classic virtue signalling by liberal elites: demand that life be a perfect fantasy land for everyone, then put forward zero realistic proposals to achieve it. Doesn't matter that it will never happen because you've already gained your social capital with your circle of people who think and act just like you. It seems to me like it used to be a lot more common for people to take up a "shitty" (e.g., low paying, menial, and hard) job when they were young, to help pay their way through school, for some extra pocket money, etc. You would do this during the summers, or part-time, or both. This was just considered an ordinary part of life and a character building experience. It seems like this experience is a lot less common now. In part because we're coddling our children and our young adults (hard work increasingly seems to be a dirty word and something no one should ever have to do), in part because we're handing off all the worst jobs to illegal immigrant labor. I'm sure this will prompt some "ok boomer" type responses (I'm not that old btw) but that's just how it was when and where I grew up. I was expected to work and make money as soon as I was able, because my family wasn't rich. They were also super clear with me that there was no free rent after I turned 18, and that if I wanted to go to college I needed to pay for it myself. So this fantasy land "we'll have only perfect jobs for everyone and work will always be a fulfilling endeavor" crap does not connect with me and I suspect does not connect with 90% of Americans. It is popular with techno-fantasists who went to Stanford and work in SV and drink the kool-aid from their employer about how they are changing the world by optimizing the profitability of some billionaire's advertising inventory. (None of this is to suggest that Cierra Brown's situation is fine and we don't need to change anything about the system btw! Biggest practical issues I saw in that article were that she doesn't have healthcare and she walks away from 2 weeks of work with only $215, something is very wrong there.)

Spooky23 7y ago
It is funny that the dog whistle for conservatism these days are the immigrants whom are supposedly taking peoples jobs. When the Reagan administration changed the regulations around meatpacking to break the unions and ship the industry back to 1910 standards to rural places, none of the principled conservatives were complaining about cheap meat packing and illegal workers who didn’t collect workers compensation or have pesky demands for health insurance. Likewise, none of the large apple growers around me were too concerned about guest worker visas when they were able to hire on Jamaicans for a few months, house them in onsite dormitories and pay below market rates. They love to bitch about Mexican construction guys though. When I worked in the mall in the 90s, the struggle of unskilled workers was obvious and sad. At that time, most workers made $4.25, and the barrier to moving up for folks not in college was a car. Getting a $12/hr job as a line cook at Pizza Uno or $15/hr job cleaning offices meant freedom for those people. If labor standards didn’t allow the abysmal working conditions that only desperate Latin American or other immigrants are willing to take, the market would take care of that problem. Instead of shipping in Apple pickers from 4,000 miles away, you could hire folks 10 miles away and bus them in.

argonaut 7y ago

That's commendable but also sounds like a great way to scare off potential software developer candidates.

sah2ed 7y ago
On the contrary, it’s a pretty good filter for the kinds of engineers they want working for them.

sgallant 7y ago

I love this. The best software is created by people who intimately understand and live the problem it’s trying to solve. A+