The Rise of Performative Work
economist.com
economist.com
Because I don't win as an employee if I achieve something. I win if my boss believes that I achieve something, whether I do or not. I win if the people interviewing me believe that I will be effective. Whether I am or not doesn't impact my compensation/career beyond my boss believing it.
It's also possible to get satisfaction from delivering a big project, doing something hard with your team and so on though, instead of a purely adversarial attitude.
There have been many times in my career where I went the extra mile, but didn't communicate it well enough and ended up not getting rewarded for it. I also noticed other people over-communicated what they did, even in cases where I didn't think what they did was really that hard. If they get rewarded for that, is it fair? My opinion today is it doesn't matter. If I want that bonus or that promotion, I'm going to "perform" for my boss to make sure I get my share.
You need to both do good work and take responsibility to communicate this to your manager.
If you just do good work, but don't communicate it, your manager might not know and won't reward you properly.
If you don't do good work but only "perform", you lack integrity, you're not developing yourself, you're cheating your customers, and you are a drain on your employer and society.
“Tell me how you will measure me, and then I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way, don’t complain about illogical behavior.” – Eli Goldratt
A drain on the people that are enabling this type of attitude in the first place? I have a hard time understanding your reasoning here.
I see this a lot in our industry (and other industries) as well. People will endlessly bikeshed for a perfect solution until well past the point that "any action at all" was a better choice than continual bikeshedding. This dynamic is often used by stakeholders with a significant investment in the status quo to politically kill any change while appearing to be onboard with change.
It's hard to keep that adversarial attitude at bay when that is the lifeblood of management.
and then getting fired because obviously don't need you anymore!
I have a hard time faulting people for attitudes or behaviors that are adversarial considering that the system seems to be designed to be adversarial, although I must admit I find myself unable to play those games as they seem too tiring than just trying to work hard and deliver and hope that works out.
So while I don't fault them (as being immoral or unethical) I sure can be annoyed by them.
Satisfaction from good work turns into resentment quickly when you find yourself respected less then peers.
This isn't a zero-sum game, at the IC level at least. Winning doesn't mean others lose. It just means you get paid. There are many roads to victory, including empty performance.
Unless you count browsing the internet, gossiping about karen in marketting, sitting in meetings that have no relevence to you and checking email as a daily task that requires 6 hours of work; at most there is a half days work done each day.
Have you examined the possibility you may be ignorant to what 90% of those jobs entail? Not being able to understand their output and complexity doesn't make them performative.
The fact that polluters have been allowed to leave ticking time bombs all around our country without having to pay for the clean up, that we are still mining coal, that our obesity crisis could be solved by walking and taking the bus, but politicians are terrified of letting gasoline rise to its actual price?
I dunno man, you want more?
I have examined this, and many other subjects, in great detail; it is true.
Thanks, I'm cured!
If you can't provide an example it is fine, I understand, I already think you are wrong about it, and this just confirms it.
Even worse, the boss might not care what is true/false.
The boss might win if she has many reports that seem to be working hard on hard problems, not achieving something measurable.
tl;dr: people are "performing the doing of work" by making sure they look like they're active on slack and paying attention in zoominars. The "theater" of work is a thing that's become celebrated.
My take: I think I've met plenty of people who've pretended to work, especially back when I did some work with government contractors. Even minor requests would take days to weeks to even get a reply. So I don't think this is anything new; we've just adapted to new ways to pretend to work.
But: as someone running a bootstrapped startup, there's more actual "doing" now than there ever was. Gone are the "networking opportunities" where you go out for real meetings. It's all zoominars now, which means there's more time to get stuff done (or more likely, get burnt out, then tricking myself I'm being productive)
Pretending to work covers the difference between expectations of time worked and expectations of goals met. As long as you meet your goals, I don't think most employers care about the fake work.
Trying to work knowledge employees as if they are on an assembly line clocking in and out won't work and most employers know this. The only improvement to this situation is if employers let you not show up after completing your goals, within some unit of time like a two week sprint.
Not only that, the larger the company you work for, the more likely the more people will be involved in your project. That leads to all sorts of inefficiencies. If you finish early, you may still need to wait on someone else before your next task. So the work you pick up will often just be busywork anyway, since you can’t do the important work until you’re unblocked.
The incentives for working harder or faster are so decoupled from actual results in a large company (i.e. we shipped something and made X more dollars which means Y more dollars for me) that gaming the system and “performing” is the only real meaning you can derive from your actions.
I was very unprepared for this when I worked for my first large company. The first three months of a project was figuring out who was who, the politics and making connections.
A 4-day work week would formalize this and reduce the stress, though. Some companies allow it: for example, I know google engineers who work 80% time (with a corresponding pay cut). 80% of Google pay is still plenty for most people.
Kind of hard to fake.
That’s one reason that I was so blindsided by what I encountered, when I was looking for work, a few years ago.
I had an enormous library of finished, high-quality, polished, complete work, already in the public venue; but people were only interested in small, impractical, competitive exercises.
It didn’t take me long to realize that it was more important to consider people who “played the game,” than it was, those that could provably deliver product.
So I stopped looking, and went to work with some folks that couldn’t afford to pay me, but were interested in actually delivering software.
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/pzofk7/t...
Also, many companies on the lower end don’t provide equity, so you are essentially just rented on a two week basis.
I work at a recently IPO'ed unicorn that is doing extremely well and can confirm that in the early days (sub 100 employees when I started) we were more concerned with people who could ship software/solve real problems and had data/experience to confirm this. Now that we are public and growing, it's all leet code style questions to get hired, and I can say first hand that the velocity of development, as well as innovation has dropped off a cliff.
It's to the point that I've stated to leadership that I would fail the interview for the job I've been a top performer in for the past 5 years as the interview format doesn't actually focus on real world skills, but memorising algos.
We've essentially imported this culture into what was once, one of the most dynamic companies I had ever seen. It's awful and I can't wait to leave. Most of the older timers are already going for similar reasons.
More of a rant then a comment I guess, but I just really related to your experience.
In my case, it has never been about the money. It has always been about the joy of development, and, in some cases, a desire to be a part of an elite team.
When I started looking, I would have been absolutely ideal for early-stage startups. I was willing to work for a ludicrously low wage and take risks (I had my retirement set, so I just needed to keep the lights on, and medical insurance), had (still have) an enormous breadth of experience, along with some really lucrative specialized skills. I had years of experience, selling complex projects to very skeptical managers (Japanese, so a tough room. Make American VCs look like friendly puppies). I have actually shipped completed, supported software, since my very first project (I can prove it, I still have the manual[0]). I had a lot of extra time on my hands, was willing to put in long hours, and I also had this massive portfolio[1] of finished work, writings, code, and years of commit history, for anyone that wanted to see. It was plainly obvious what I had to bring to the table; good and bad. I am an open book. Really easy to find out, if you know how to click a mouse button.
Even early-stage startups were obsessed with "cultural fit" (which I didn't have), and don't get me started on the recruiters. They were the worst. The insults and power games were ridiculous (and highly unprofessional). I realized that, even if I got hired, they would treat me very badly.
This tech industry has changed a lot. I had been at my previous gig for 27 years straight. It was one of the biggest brands in the world, synonymous with Quality, and I was on a peer basis with some of the finest engineers and scientists in the world. I was often the dumbest person in the room, and I'm smarter than the average bear. In fact, that was a big reason for my staying so long. I think that it is important to be in an environment where I'm challenged (one of the reasons I hang out here).
Didn't mean a thing. In fact, it seemed to be something that actually elicited scorn.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/TF30194/TF30194-Manual-1987.pdf
I am someone who spent years frustrated by the performative BS at my workplaces. Actually being proactive was not as important as achieving some superficial engineering task that didn't actually solve anything.
So, I flipped the script and leveraged this silliness into a 7 figure salary by working multiple remote jobs. I work 4 SWE jobs, spend about 10-15 hours per week per job, act like I'm "working" for the rest of that time, get paid. Works for me, works for them!
However, you are likely in violation of employment contract. Where I currently work, and my previous job, you could actually find a way through the official channels by just not being totally accurate about the other job(s).
If challenged it comes down to the details. Moonlighting is a perfectly normal activity for driven people (I did tech blogging for a previous employer once while employed by someone else, so I have navigated this system at one company), and by structuring your disclosures very strategically you could likely avoid any legal impacts.
All that said, working multiple jobs like that will definitely get you fired if you are found out. Even in a state with strong worker protections.
And again, all that said: Don't do this.
Also, finding a new job has never been that difficult, especially in this market.
I don't doubt that some contracts state you can't work another job, but I would consider rereading some of your contracts. Especially in work friendly states, it's hard to enforce those types of clauses and companies are really good at wording things like it's a restriction when it's really a legal suggestion.
> and they found out
How exactly would an employer easily find out? I also worked multiple jobs at FAANG level big tech, you would have to explicitly say something to get found out. In fact, the big tech jobs I've had were genuinely the most administratively bloated and least likely to find out.
As for getting fired, I've never been fired but I've also never been caught. Getting kind of good at it, doing this for the past 5+ years. I would assume the nice thing about getting fired in this situation is having multiple incomes to fall back on. I've never had trouble finding new jobs.
Maybe call it the "144 Hour Work-week"
Employee is one person doing the jobs of four people - fraud??
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We need to stop praising businesses/execs who work the system while condemning people who do it. Uncaring, amoral corporate culture sees people as mere resources, to be mined for value until they're depleted.
If this is fraud, then expecting somebody to do the workload of multiple people while only receiving one person's salary is also fraud, and that's a conversation I'd be very willing to have.
Getting the right meeting cadence down is the toughest part. I make sure to understand the company's meeting culture well before taking any offer. If the meeting schedule doesn't work I leave, it's the biggest factor in any job for me.
In all seriousness, I create a new profile whenever I get a new job and would not be sharing any details here.
I also underachieve in terms of moving up the corporate ladder. I've been asked to move into management for more money, and I always reject those types of promotions since it usually means more unavoidable meetings. Also, I don't bother working on difficult projects, I choose to work in roles where I have clear expertise and can complete work in 2-4 times the expected timeline.
How do you secure additional SWE jobs? Are they FTE roles? How's the recruitment process work?
For example, you may be asked "So froaway, why are you leaving company X?" During an interview or such.
Likewise, how do you promote yourself? Surely you can't have all four roles on your CV given the overlap? So do you choose the most relevant for the upcoming new job?
> The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.
this is, i think in part, why there is a modern desire towards "local" products and personalities in media, and full diy cottagecore fantasies. it is the only way to at least convince yourself that you could confirm authenticity, even if that is a delusion, because anything else is obviously superhuman in scale. at least you can assign responsibility to a face at a farmers' market, even if they're no less hired than the person minding self-checkout at the grocery. at least a parasocial relationship with a social media personality feels realer and more responsible than traditional mass media, even if they're delivering the same talking points.
the winner of this paradox will be either an anarchist culture relentlessly dismantling everything and enjoying the unknowable, or a vertically integrated police consciousness that simply is/does everything and doesn't need to convince/believe anyone else.
I like your theory about local goods/thought products.
if your benchmark is long-term societies, anarchic cultures are it, and anything else including our modern state is an outlying extreme. but here we are.
technology provided the possibility of control, and by current trend, advancing it seems to make some of those possibilities more thorough and more resilient. but moving past the dialogue of incentive and metric by integrating all experience would be a different thing altogether. it's more of a singularity fantasy than anything a human could possibly worry about.
Indian society - not the country because that’s a new creation - has been around for a few thousand years. It hasn’t devolved into anarchy, neither is it totalitarian in the way you are using the word.
They (well, “we” since I’m Indian) figured out that imposing self-censoring through the caste system would lead to social stability. People were born into a certain way of life and they’d die inside it.
From within the straitjacket of caste came inventions like 0, astronomical analyses, religions, Kama sutra, literature, languages, and engineering achievements.
I don’t glorify caste. It’s wrong.
But, a society between the two extremes you posited exists today and it exists because caste based social engineering worked.
It has suffused society to the extent that Indian Muslims will sometimes complain that a Muslim tanner (considered low caste because they work with carcasses) wanted to marry into an upper caste Muslim family. Islam rejects caste per se so this caste based thinking is endemic to Indian society, not religion.
Edit - I am not justifying caste. I’m just pointing out that the previous commenters above me were needlessly limiting the types of societies to anarchy and totalitarian. They should include fatalist societies too.
it's possible the only reason we aren't at an "extreme" now because we're still tipping between steady states. there was no structured society for, effectively, forever. pretty stable, long enough that it is hard to consider the current world a normal situation.
we've had a few thousand years of confusing buildup, as we maybe transition to a total structure, lasting who knows how long, but i can't see something like that being short-lived.
yes the society between extremes exists and we're in it. but none of this around me looks stable or capable of withstanding what the future holds. and the longer-lived examples, though impressive on an individual timescale, are still a sudden late flash in the deep and mostly unknown timeline of all human history.
A guy by the name of Max Stirner clearly articulated what this new culture would be and would look like. It's too bad that's he's been sort of side-lined by history...
Good corporate management is constantly fighting it: Downsizing, firing all people in bullshit jobs. "We release you to seek new opportunities!". Using only the bottom line as a measure of success is another one. No indirect performance measures.
David Graeber was a polemical writer, he never offered viewpoints that steered readers off from narrative he had in his mind. For example, the idea that bullshit jobs are something that can be removed by more ruthless and goal oriented management.
Less than 10 mm. Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.
10-14 min. Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attitude.
14-15.61 mm. Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important details.
Exactly 15.62 mm. Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.
15.63-16 mm. Asswipe. Not to be trusted.
16-18 mm. Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.
More than 18 mm. Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break).
- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ45ZpI...
In the meaty past, humans gathered in offices in close proximity and tried to appear busy during "core office hours," which were often more than 40 a week. Many people wrote about how most of that time could not be spent doing valuable work, but everyone kept the act up.
Now, in the days of plague and distance, we don't need to fake all of that and can focus on accomplishing valuable things.
The problem is that many managers grew into their positions playing the politics of meat space. They "provided value" by being very visible to people. They are having a hard time now that we're all starting to question their previous value.
This entire piece is garbage.
And that is when management put the zoom wine and cheese evening into your calendar for 19:00 on a thursday evening.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mouse+jiggler&crid=I2FW85QSN9CW&s...
So there are these devices on Amazon that move the mouse for you so the inactivity algorithm breaks and you're always online and active!
As a very hard working person I sometimes feel like an idiot.
Even being able to only spend 2 hours max on actual work I was still seen as one of the more productive people in the company, ironically. But those 6 hours of either doing nothing or trying really hard to force your attention to come together are the actual work.
I'm very happy with remote work. I can actually find things to do in between that would definitely not be considered working that lets me spend more time being productive overall.
Internet connectivity has undoubtedly added a valuable dressing up box of tools for this type of person/cliques but the fundamentals have been taught by HBS's various publications for decades also IMO
It absolutely is... when I was in the Navy, a hotshot Academy grad got command of our unit and we ended up volunteering for every goddamned mission that Bravo Oscar needed done. It was fucking miserable. I saw him reading The Economist, Foreign Policy, and Financial Times every chance he got.
Absolutely. With their views on bullshit jobs (no such thing as per them), remote work they are very much a establishment sockpuppet. If their coverage of things which I know a bit first hand is so shallow/wrong, I wonder if even stories on international affairs are any solid at all.
These days The E, HBR, MIT Review etc are mostly like last century women's magazines, complete with agony aunts and advice. The Economist's geopolitical stance seems to be closely aligned with the WEF along with the FT ( slogan 'A new world is possible. Let's not go back to what wasn't working anyway').
End of an era for these legacy media companies...
Having said that I get up in the morning and look at the FT, WSJ & Zerohedge in that order and then typically read all sorts of things online throughout the day, often based on recommendations (thanks HN!) Twitter etc. My mother worked for the UK conservative party before I was born and taught me as a youth to read the Daily Telegraph 'so I would know what the buggers are thinking'. This rather cynical view is how I tend to consume most establishment products...
Regarding the Economist I used to like their 'Schumpeter' free market ethos which they seem to have lost recently
> Theatre has always been an important part of the workplace.
They're expounding that it's gotten worse during the pandemic, which I think most of us would agree with.
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.
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.
Or if you’re in QA you’re running tests that almost always pass but they do fail sometimes.
edit: typos
Having face time with people can be a really good way to imbue the feeling that you're working.
"I saw that person working, therefore they weren't slacking off"
Whereas at home, maybe it's easier to trick an inattentive manager, but you have to let your work represent you even more.
Being really great at your job but never doing anything to market yourself puts you at a disadvantage.
Being great at your job and having a healthy level of "look at what I did" happening is better.
It unfortunately but necessarily follows that there will be people who decide to spend all their time promoting themselves and very little on meaningful work, but this is not a new development.
Meaningless verbiage in speaking and writing, full of current memes, current useless abstract concepts and other bullshit.
Piles upon piles of useless, redundant abstractions, tons of bullshit code as in J2EE or current node_modeles mass idiocy.
And the real virtue is in making minimal, just right, as close to "what is" as possible, and almost no one of current imposters could do or even understand this.
They think Haskell is about monads lmao.
An interesting thing about this phrase is that virtue signaling is obviously good (it's an important leadership technique) but is only ever used as a negative term.
Also implies "vice signaling" should exist as a positive term, but I've never seen that used.
This is like the phrase "politically correct", which started as a neutral term for labeling language that was (or wasn't) up to date with our aspirational norms. I don't think I've ever heard anyone use the phrase except with contempt.
There's one or two I used to put up with pre-pandemic, you know the types, management brown nosers, desk dropping all day long, and trying to command attention where it's simply not warranted. They've dropped off the radar altogether since they can't perform their schtick in person.
As at a prior job, they didn't disappear, but rather focused on managers and utterly ignored ICs like myself.
However, pre-pandemic they would poll the IC's like myself for whatever information they needed via "casual" desk dropping, then present it to some manager as original thinking. The higher friction of setting up video calls, and being called out in group Slacks seems to have reduced this.
One went as far as requesting a desk move in order to be closer to a manager, so that at least has all changed.
Anecdotally, I'd say in middling companies executives seem absorbed with performative work which in turn filters down the ranks into more performative work. Only the top places seem to be able to escape this somewhat (there is always some performative stuff).
Performative executives promote the finest performative workers into management
I have been to the top, its only marginally better the main difference being the performance continues on later into the night so proportionally more gets done.
Constant brownnosing, polluting slack threads as soon as there is a new topic, speaking overly enthusiastically about the CEO s actions.