‘Lie Flat’ If You Want, but Be Ready to Pay the Price
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I think I know what's going on here. I've been learning machining for the past couple years. The first thing you learn are feeds and speeds, and everyone tells you to look them up in the Machinery's Handbook. What they don't tell you is that the feeds and speeds there are targeted at high volume industrial output; how to turn every watt of electricity you put into your 5 million dollar CNC machine into profit. It targets a 15 minute tool life. If you're making $10,000 parts 24/7, then buying a new drill every 15 minutes is nothing. But it isn't what hobbyists want; their machines can't drive the tool that hard, and they don't have the money to buy new tools every 15 minutes. (To be fair, 15 minutes is not as short as it sounds, which is why you can get away with using their feeds and speeds as a hobbyist.)
Similarly, I think the software engineering practices project management techniques that we commonly use have similar "15 minute engineer life" targets, it's just that nobody knows that. A big problem that project management tooling tries to address is "student syndrome". That's where someone gives you 3 weeks to do a 2 week project, and humans naturally spend two weeks slacking off and then 1 week doing 50% of the project. The "solution" is to just give you only one week to do the project. It's half done, whatever, but at least you didn't slack off for two weeks. Unfortunately, you do that for a year and then burn out. There is never the mental satisfaction of a job well done, there is only more work and constant negotiating for the time and space in which to do the work. Basically, they think that people will have 40 year careers, but run them at feeds and speeds that only let them last for 15 minutes. Of course everyone is quitting due to burn out, and "lying flat" instead.
To your point, I think everyone has been getting tighter and tighter schedules. To be fair to the author, they could even be a good example of this. Where there's so much nuance to this topic they have deadlines, do they deep dive and outline possible effects and differences, maybe find some other seemingly unrelated studies to compare economic conditions? Or get the writing equivalent of the MVP out, so we can have these conversations about the nuance of it and just drive more traffic to the article in the process.
I know its not efficient but I'd love to just do an entire process end to end instead of many iterations of one piece of it - endlessly and without closure or satisfaction.
It's not just time off, getting stock in the company or get a bigger return on your investment time wise could easily factor into it. If I was working for minimum wage at some company, I had no other financial benefits from working harder for why should I? That extra leisure is 5-8 hours more, so effectively not making an extra $58 vs having a full day back of your life is immediately more appealing. Meanwhile, back in the 60s their getting paid equivalents $10 an hour with what was much more common than today stock options being like at a factory like Ford. So that 8 hours off is now $80 and possibly less performance company wise so maybe even less stock later, naturally they'd work it.
The reality is, employers are taking advantage of this huge productivity to wage gap and not putting that money into their employees, and they are noticing.
"Lie Flat" is a totally understandable phenomena in China, where tech (and other) companies not only want to gain an advantage on the backs of employees working 80+ hour weeks, but also want to skirt laws prohibiting overtime, and the government closes their eyes, Xi forbid productivity goes down.
Forcing employees to do long hours without pay has it's consequences, and no sensible employee will go on doing this, especially in the era of social media, even when Chinese state censors constantly fight to hide "Lay Flat" posts, and Chinese denizens constantly finds new ways to communicate their fatigue to their peers.
Some companies in China are changing and are being sensitive to the needs of their employees, but examples are few and apart, for now.
In the States, companies have similar issues, trying to make it in a competitive market, by forcing productivity through luring employees with stock options, salaries, amenities and so on, but it's both very transparent that they don't give a damn about burnout, and also very obvious that they have no plans to keep you around after your stock options mature.
It's ok to take a break, start a new career, go somewhere where greedy corporate overlords cannot reach you and you can live like a king on very little money.
Bloomberg can shout all they want at the people fed up with long hours, overtime, on-call and so on, but the gig is up, and this whole generation of people looking out from their gilded cages are learning that it's not always worth it.
Nothing sounds more horrifying to me than to find out that I lived a life on autopilot on the cusp of retirement. Better to pivot early, no?
The struggle is that you may perceive yourself as 'Behind' others in your peer group.
I'm not interested in the standard "I make a penny and my boss makes a dime" and I think a lot of other people aren't either. I'm not comfortable with exploitation. I think (or hope, at least) some people are realizing that "making it" for the most part means becoming part of the exploiter class and they're not comfortable with it.
During the Nixon Recession it got real weird real fast without there being a pandemic.
Everything else compared to wages had skyrocketed for quite some time, and inflation seemed to be intentionally allowed to run wild as long as possible to lock workers out of productivity gains, before locking in the foundation of a new disparity gap with the Wage & Price Freeze of 1971.
It's a great example of survivorship as those who were able to avoid the financial devastation, often through exploitave models, would end up in the strongest position to build into the 21st century the financial shenanigians we know of so far.
Like now, there was a growing population of low-wage workers who already could barely have any hope of advancement beforehand, knocked a big notch down by the sharp upset, which of course turned out to be permanent.
Everyone else's buying power was greatly diminished too and it was like the whole country was suddenly unexpectedly working for survival rather than prosperity over a very short period of time.
Dramatically fewer people than ever were going to have anything to show for the way they had been working previously. Major regrouping was going to be necessary. Don't let people downplay this deer-in-the-headlights moment for the US middle class. This is what pushed the middle class downward with unsurmountable momentum against the rising unionized workers, for more certain descent together into the lowest-opportunity categories possible.
Well, if nobody was making money any more doing the same thing anyway, less people were going to want to do the same thing after that point.
For me survival instinct was better satisfied doing things that would be worth something someday rather than concentrating on the money which wasn't worth what it was a few years earlier.