Work slop

Jason Koebler reports on a study that defines “work slop” (truly a cursed phrase) as work that “masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” Predictably, the study shows that the prevalence of work slop is a torpedo to collaboration and trust: if you have to hunt around for hallucinations in your colleague’s work, how can you trust anything they say or do? And perhaps that is actually the point of this whole phenomena: in the same way that slop across our social networks makes it impossible to believe in even a semblance of reality, work slop makes it unwise to treat your coworkers as human. But who wins when we see each other as little more than faulty tools? Not us.