Most of your analysis comes from low motivation grunt level coders here. Then beyond that you classify everything that isn’t deep breakthroughs not work.

Are a lot of engineers at big tech under utilized? Yes because they are often last on the line do what their told types. Could they do more? Sure. Are they not working? No.

This essays is at best naive, and at worst laughably stupid.

Okay. So he’s working. What do you want exactly?

What is mindlessly coding and how does that work? Seems like the author is dismissive of meetings and some coding tasks.

Working for 10 hours a week can either be embarrassingly bad or heroically productive depending on the situation you find yourself in. People can avoid work, of course, but generally avoiding work looks very different if you could be doing 30+ hours of real work each week. I recall (but cannot find) an article about the many months and meetings it took to add a single option to the windows shutdown menu. Depending on your organizational constraints, doing very little work each week may be optimal. Doing more work in the wrong direction would be a net-negative.

I just think it's very odd to say "no one is working" instead of "companies can't organize people to be able to work." If you are in an environment where you could actually do a lot of work and you do a little, you will not last long. The only way you last is if you're in the ballpark.

The article goes off the rails when it tries to explain high salaries with a generational wealth transfer scheme that is at odds with corporate incentives.

A better explanation exists which is that companies slowly become bureaucracies, everyone is playing politics, trying to get more resources and people around them to accomplish less and less. People are trying to do that locally, for their own interests, and it manifests globally as productive output tending towards zero and cost of labor tending higher. No society-wide scheme necessary. This is at odds with the shareholders, but its difficult to fix because bureaucracies are parasitic organisms which defend themselves.

There are 168 hours in a week, which is the max available for 1000x robots. So by OP's definition, a typical 1x employee works only for 10,08 minutes, and TikToks the rest of the week.

Maybe I'm getting old and out of touch myself, so maybe someone marketing-adjacent can tell me: is this sort of person actually real and employed in a typical corporation these days? This sounds like an obnoxious minor character in a poorly written Netflix Original.

The reasons not everybody can be this 10x employee is two-fold:

1. People are content with busy work just to appear busy and don't really care if they get anything meaningful accomplished.

2. For those who are better at managing their time to focus on more impactful issues, they lack the ability to actually resolve those issues in a way that has meaningful impact.

That's why the 10x employee is so difficult to find. But a 1000x employee? Get out of here!