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Performative work reflects the reality that the output of most office jobs just doesn't matter that much.

Jobs like trash collector, produce harvester, chicken plant worker, and snowplow driver actually matter and as we've seen during the pandemic when they aren't done it causes real problems.

Office work is just something to keep people occupied in our economy because it's anathema to recognize that we can produce more than enough necessities to keep everyone comfortable without most people working more than a few hours a week.



> Performative work reflects the reality that the output of most office jobs just doesn't matter that much.

I disagree. Performative work reflects the reality that most office jobs have concrete results that are hard to measure individually, separated in time and/or space from the work, and highly dependent on other office work that shares the first two features.


Also, a lot of them are asynchronous and you’re only actually needed around all the time to keep the latency down when there is a task.

Or if you’re in QA you’re running tests that almost always pass but they do fail sometimes.




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