but if no one is paying attention?
That probably means that their line manager stopped doing their work first.
Finding out who is working on what can be complicated e.g. if the person is assigned to multiple projects at the same time, and can tell everyone "sorry, the last few weeks I was too busy with the other projects".
But checking in Jira "which tickets did this person close during the last 30 days" should be simple. If you don't have a query for that, then you could still show all tickets assigned to this person, make a screenshot, and one month later check which of those tickets were closed if any. And you can set up Jira to show the links to the related commits (if you put the Jira task id in the commit descriptions, which was a rule at my recent jobs) in the ticket.
I would expect some companies to be so low on the technical skills that they couldn't set up the system this way, but not the ones on the list.
I don't doubt the stories, it's just... one of those situations where other people seem to have skills that not only I don't have, but can't even imagine.
I find the idea of the Ghost jobs fascinating, and thank you for publishing the list of specific companies! But I still can't imagine how that works.
My typical work experience (and I've had many jobs) is that there are sprints, you get some Jira tasks assigned, and you are supposed to have them finished by the end of the sprint. There is simply no way to accomplish that without making a few nontrivial commits in the version control; if you don't close your Jira tasks the managers will notice; and if you perhaps tried to close the Jira task without writing the code, the testers would notice, and if not them, then definitely the customer would. Could someone please explain to me how specifically this works?
I think that when people find meaning ‘without work’ it is because we are using too narrow a meaning of ‘work.’ Many things in life are work without counting as labor force participation, starting with raising one’s children, and also lots of what children do is work (schoolwork, homework, housework, busywork…).
This.
Also, there are things that would almost count as "work" even today, but many people don't do them because they cannot connect them to a reliable source of income. Science research is "work" if you do it in academia, but not if you do it at home. Writing books is "work" once you get published and become famous, but not before that moment. Taking care of the sick or poor is "work" if someone pays you to do that, but not if you do it on your own. Liberating people from "work" could allow them to do more non-"work" work.
Without daily "agile" meetings, how will people communicate? Or will we stop communicating completely?
Without all the bureaucratic paperwork, will literacy disappear?
If people will be able to spend more time with their loved ones, won't they get bored?
Jobs give our lives meaning. So does death. Decades of jobs, followed by death -- could anything be better?
...yeah, when you look at it closely, it does sound quite silly.
Could we get some of that value by making an occasional, uhm, Open Thread focused on a specific topic? For the topics you would want to get a subsection on; one topic at a time.
We need some coordination mechanism to prevent this from being annoying, but maybe a rule of thumb "don't make an Open Thread for the same topic more often than once in a month" could be a good start.
If you have no secrets in the island, but you need to keep them from the rest of the world, then you need to imprison everyone who tries to leave, possibly for life. Consider the following situations:
If you put all these categories in prison, that would be seen as quite evil, at least from outside.
Then again, horrible things happen e.g. in Saudi Arabia, and we mostly seem to be okay with that.
But I guess the problem is that if you are unimportant, then anyone can start a crusade against you, probably quite successfully if you are seen as obviously evil. And if you are important, then the governments will obviously want to send spies to the island.
I have 20 years of experience, and also keep getting spammed.
I think that applying directly to companies is the worst possible approach. That already sets the playing field where many people are competing for one position. On top of that, many companies are not even serious about wanting to hire someone, they just keep the old announcement online because they forgot to take it down, or because who knows maybe one day a genius willing to work for peanuts will randomly appear, in which case I guess we would find some work for him.
The lesson from You Are Not Hiring the Top 1% also applies here. Just like the best programmers get the job, and the worst programmers keep applying, getting rejected, and applying again (and therefore are overrepresented at the job market), also the best companies find people to fill the roles quickly, and the worst companies keep losing their employees and need to recruit new ones all the time (and therefore are overrepresented at the job announcements).
In my experience, the best way to find a job is to be recommended by a friend who already works there. The second best way is to contact a job agency and let them find the job for you.
At some moment, someone will decide that they want to leave the island. Could be a result of them feeling unhappy on the island. Could be a result of something that happens in the outside world.
If there is anything potentially interesting for the audience about Pierre Raymond de Montmort, you could also put a sentence or two in a footnote.
Some behaviors are red flags, for example "isolating you from unsupervised talking to people outside the group" or "expecting you to report your private thoughts to your superiors".
I wish we had a convenient handle for this set of red flags, and in a better world perhaps "cult" could be the word, but unfortunately in our world people mostly focus on things like "different from my group" and "seem weird".
EDIT: 1a3orn already said it better.