The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)
annehelen.substack.com
annehelen.substack.com
There's an experience that lives rent free in my mind as well. As a teen, I worked at a bait shop that was on the Gulf coast. They sold mostly live shrimp but had other live stuff for bait as well. Salt water was pumped from the nearby innercoastal canal by two heavy duty swimming pool type pumps. From there, the water was split through several different pipes and manifolds and dumped into the live bait tanks. The overflow ran back out to the canal.
There was this one customer I was getting bait for and he meandered around the bait room randomly (customers weren't supposed to be in there but I didn't feel like saying anything). He ended up way in the back of the room where the pumps were and I could see him touching them. Figuring I needed to get him out of there politely I walked back there pretending to check on stuff. Before I could say anything, he says "You will need a new pump soon". Um "What?" I say. "Put your hand on this one". So I did, I felt nothing. "Now put your hand on this one". And that one had a really high frequency vibration coming through it. "The bearings are shot, it will lock up soon".
I was impressed. Granted for two more years I'd regularly "feel" the pump again, the vibrations were slowly getting worse. But then a hurricane came and flooded everything anyway so we got new stuff.
But still, anytime I see a high RPM electric motor running, I got to "give it a feel".
Disagree here (at least in spirit?) - code smell can also point to maintainability issues - if the codebase is continually changed some code is more likely to break than others.
When you're debugging a concrete issue and have a hunch what might be the cause, that's not a "code smell."
Sounds like you're basing your heuristic on dogma rather than experience.
I think if you’re talking about CS and code you’re right - it’s a very pure and deterministic system. But if you consider software engineering at scale, you do get scenarios where failure states emerge in a gradual fashion, like the OP example of a worn mechanism. An example would be monitoring error rates on a large fleet of servers. You expect a certain background level of failures, but when the rate starts to rise you might be observing the beginning of some kind of cascading failure mode. The errors might be manageable up to a point, but it isn’t always clear when the system will tip beyond that point. Post-mortems of cloud platform outages often mention these kinds of failures, because they typically arise from complex interactions between different layers which put the system into a state which nobody anticipated.
In a previous job in early 2000s they did have some legacy software that was originally written for VAX/VMS and run on an emulator. Even that environment wasn't stable enough so they maintained some real VAX hardware just in case. And as far as I know, the hardware was physically breaking down.
Well-running equipment almost always has a characteristic sound and rhythm. Variations from that become quite apparent.
All of us used to rely on the HDD distinct sound to know when the games were finished loading ;)
When I was a kid our BBC Micro used to do the same, you could “hear it thinking”.
I personally have also felt less concentrated and more mentally tired while trying to simultaneously cut brush and listen to music (let alone an intellectually challenging podcast). As a tinnitus sufferer, I use both ear plugs + best possible earmuffs to reduce the dangerous frequencies as much as I can. Works fine, and I can still hear the machine, too.
When I hit a nail in some salvage wood, or the moisture was a little higher than I estimated, I want to know about it before it becomes a problem. You can feel the slip, and hear the fence creak on the saw long before you get a kickback. Only ever once had a kickback because someone distracted me as I was cutting.
The rule in the workshop is: You don't talk or call to the guy operating any kind of machine or power tool, even handheld. You get in clear line of sight, and wait for him to acknowledge you. You don't signal or wave or point.
And with many of these the difference between a journeyman and a master is the journeyman is saying “it’s never done that” whilst the master is already running.
If a Macbook is asleep, it will just wake up, you'll see the keyboard light, there is no need to press the power button.
If there is a need to press the power button it is because the machine is off. Don't worry, it will make a distinctive and iconic sound once it is not off and display, you guessed it, a white apple logo on the screen.
What circumstances lead to your confusion about its state? I can't relate!
(It’s interesting in itself to track the history of power/sleep lights on MacBooks, since as far as I can remember they only turned on in the case where the internal display is off, or when the laptop was sleeping (pulsing light). Jony Ive even talked about it in the Objectified documentary: https://vimeo.com/7827217 )
You want to know what your stuff is doing and the reasoning behind the suggestion was litteraly "lets do it like Apple".
> Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: [...]
...with...
> Technology robbed workers’ highly valued physical knowledge about a job: [...]
Maybe the original sentence was the second one and was edited for clarity, but they forgot to remove the apostrophe.
(there's an old story of a guy sitting on ancient, giant disk drives to tune his program but not so much else I know of).
I’ve taken to using an audio spectrograph app on my phone to watch the white noise, and the band of resonances.
Quite interesting in probably far too geeky away, I’ve not been called up for suspicious activity whilst innocuous I’m not sure how I’d be able to explain it.
I’ve also been thinking about tracking the sound of the bath filling to gauge how much is in it, just to track not to use. I guess air pressure, and water temperature play key parts.
It has been done for decades.
I guess for auto stuff there's so many embedded sensors in a modern engine there's little need these days.
“$850?” the surgeon exclaims, in shock. “I’m a surgeon and I don’t make that much!”
“Yeah,” says the plumber, wistfully. “I didn’t make that much when I was a surgeon, either.”
However, rewards for work is also highly nonlinear, and usually rank based. For example, Usain Bolt is not twice as fast as the second fastest runner but Bolt is rewarded many multiples more than the second fastest runner.
What is rational is to think of the payoff or reward space, and think how even a tiny incremental increase in productivity (which compounds) can result in disproportionately large payoffs.
I wish HN wasn’t so damn depressing. Reading some of cynical stuff here is sometimes harmful for my own mental health.
I sometimes browse local shops websites to buy products, but if the page loads too slowly or there are some hiccups, I tend to quickly search on Amazon to see if I can buy with a single click.
The total amount of time spent shopping at local website may be only a tiny bit more than if I browsed Amazon, but the improved experience at Amazon is enough to tilt my spending away from local websites.
Amazon probably spends multi millions to shave off fractions of seconds off their page loads, and the rewards pay off handsomely.
This society only operates because a lot of people don't care to understand how it really works. You get your trinkets more quickly, but the negative externalities for others are huge and damaging.
And there's a good chance that sooner or later those negatives will affect you too.
Meanwhile the lift from increased efficiency is often temporary anyway.
The target essay could have stopped in the first couple of paragraphs and there would still be plenty of societal problems to discuss.
Effort and energy spent will be somewhere between 1 to 2... but as soon as stress and exhaustion set in (which may happen fairly soon) you may find actual productivity tanking well below 1 and even into the negatives, due to all the mistakes and bad decisions you start making.
Take a delivery truck. Regular maintenance detects, and prevents breakdowns during deliveries. EG, oil changes, lubing, brake pad changes, etc.
Scheduled repairs are far cheaper, and take less time than unannounced repairs.
If the truck breaks down during deliveries, the repairs are still needed, may be more severe.
It also require loads of extra work, a replacement truck must show up and offload deliveries, a tow truck dispatched, someone had to organize this, customers upset and called, etc, etc.
As you say, humans are the same. Reduced sleep and leisure time (scheduled maintenance)?
Well, it's far more work to deal with in the long run. It takes more maintenance to recover from a lack of it.
The more tanks, trucks, fighter jets you lose, the more sorties/tasks the remaining fraction has to pull off. Which means more wear and tear, higher risk of failure.
https://igda.org/resources-archive/why-crunch-mode-doesnt-wo...
Like imagine Elon Musk works 80 hours a week and he doesn’t suffer any negative consequence, he just becomes the most productive human ever according to the market.
And then a bunch of other people work 80 hours and they do suffer burnout and become slightly less productive than if they had worked 40 hours.
If you say “What’s the expected value of working 80 hours rather than 40?” in that scenario, it’s extremely positive, because the tiny chance you become Elon and have half the wealth in America offsets the very high probability you become a burnout who does no better than average.
I don't know Elon, so maybe he is different. But in the end, I'll believe it when I see it.
I have seen a lot of people do more and better. But different work, not coding.
Like leading and managing people is very possible for some elite people to do for say 70 hours a week and mostly involves talking, persuading, answering emails and phone calls, and most importantly making good decisions.
The value of good leadership and good decisions is directly proportional to the number and quality of people being led.
So that could be a huge value. Doing twice as much of it could way more than double that value with compounding.
Quality of work beats quantity any day of the week. And at 80 hours, there just cannot be any quality left. At that point, your mistakes will cost you more. Maybe the people below you might offset your stupidity at that point.
I had managers doing 60+ hours. They were not the greatest, in fact, they were terrible.
Been doing this for years :-). Software development.
I love my job. It's not for money; it has a purpose. I guess that otherwise I would not recommend this o.O
As Elon, by virtue of his massive wealth now, is depriving an ungodly amount of people of financial resources and opportunities. I mean on that scale I venture to say it's like a Usain Bolt sucking up nearly all the sponsoring for 100m sprinting so there are very few left to even challenge him in a professional sense which makes him even more "valuable". [Of course in this analogy (achievements in sports/wealth) there is a external natural limit in sports all acknowledge: "age"].
So, while form a individual perspective (one-dimension) the expected value investing 80hr/week in becoming a centibillionaire is "positive" on the whole this approach can at aome point severely limit the space of possibilities in terms of technology. I guess that's why Elon - certainly aware of this - tries to push concepts like "rate of innovation" where he makes his patents "open source" so he can offset his own stifling influence.
That doesn’t make any sense at all. His wealth isn’t made up of financial resources and opportunities that other people could have used - his wealth is the price that other people would be willing to pay him to own shares in the companies he created.
I think it’s a common misconception out there that paper billionaires like Elon and Jeff Bezos have like a giant pile of cans of food in a warehouse somewhere that they could give out to people but don’t because they like having the biggest pile.
That’s not really the case.
https://ncarteron.medium.com/the-billionaires-arent-liquid-a...
Which it is.
They absolutely could, and the only reason they don't is because they like being in the club of biggest-pile-havers.
I'm wondering if "getting rid" of that much money, using it for good things, but without most of it disappearing in corruption, is more than a full time job
This is literally how profit works. You make sure your costs (salaries you pay your workers) are less than the value they produce. In other words, you keep some of the financial resources and opportunities that others could have had.
Imagine that a novel creation is worth 100 units of value to society. It’s entirely possible for society to take 50 units, the workers to share 25 units, and the CEO to keep 25 units and for literally everyone to be better off than if that creation was never made.
The view above compares against an alternative split of 60/35/5 while ignoring the case where the split is 0/0/0.
Even in a 90/9/1 split, why are the workers depriving society of such a large share by hoarding 9% for themselves?
Those workers needed to be organized in such a manner that the value they produce is actually worthwhile and their productive output sustainable over a long period of time.
Think about the example of a production line worker in a Tesla factory -- is that individual worker being paid less than the overall value they produce for the company? Hopefully, or else Tesla will soon be going out of business (simplified obviously, but I think you'll see my point). Now consider if Tesla failed to profit off of their workers, and the factory did go out of business. Does that line worker now have more financial resources and opportunities than they would have had, which you claim were being in a sense taken from them by Musk?
Of course not! Instead, they're just out of a job entirely, because their productive output on that production line is worthless if the rest of the line isn't working (and the rest of the company isn't functioning). And chances are, that line worker doesn't have the vision, drive, knowledge, skills, etc. of Musk to get the Tesla factory up to being something economically sustainable and productive all on his own. That's not a knock on the production line worker, it's just a simple fact that such a feat is insanely difficult, and very few people have the characteristics, judgement, and luck to build anything of the sort.
So in the case of Tesla profiting off the worker, the worker gets some financial resources and opportunities, whereas in the case that Tesla fails to profit off the worker, the worker gets zero financial resources and opportunities (plus the world gets zero Teslas, battery tech improvements, etc). In the ideal, free enterprise truly is a positive sum endeavor.
Regardless if it's cash, stocks, land or a pile of cans of food - if I have a piece of it you don't have the same piece.
So yes "by virtue of his massive wealth now, is depriving an ungodly amount of people of financial resources and opportunities" is exactly how wealth works.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-t...
I also assume that over 1 or 2 generations that his wealth will mostly circulate around.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this.
However if the product is being sold you are still taking someone's money. If you wanted to purely increase wealth for everybody you would be giving away the product for free. Many no-profits do that. (duh)
Yet, the tradeoffs are complex and some economic activities are purely exploitative.
In fact, inequality is rising across various societies and quality of life is actually decreasing for hundreds of millions.
Wealth redistribution through taxes has been a cornerstone of modern society and one of the biggest push to move societies out of feudalism. And now we are witnessing something described as technofeudalism.
> If Elon hadn’t created his businesses, his wealth wouldn’t be in the hands of other people, it just wouldn’t exist.
Either Musk made cars entirely by himself (which is not the case) or his employees did it. You are assuming that such workers would have all been unemployed if Musk did not exist, which is very unlikely.
Also, it's false that ALL of Musk's wealth would not exist. Only the fraction due to value created by the company (if any). [And I repeat, the products are obviously created by the workers]
An interesting question would be: if company X never existed, could the workers be doing something more beneficial instead? Plenty of organization has been described as a net negative for humanity.
And this is without accounting for negative externalities, e.g. causing pollution, or making another company go bankrupt, regulatory capture, creation of monopolies and the list is pretty long.
> The global GDP increases over time, which I interpret has new wealth being created
That's incorrect. Part of GDP is due to production of products and services, but a significant part is due to speculation that is not backed by any increase in productivity.
Additionally, GDP is in no way able to measure overall real wealth, quality of life, access to opportunities and so on: not destroying the environment does not increase GDP. As much as going for a walk with your SO does not increase GDP.
> I also assume that over 1 or 2 generations that his wealth will mostly circulate around.
This is provably false.
No, they would work, but would they be more productive in those other jobs? Possibly not.
I wonder what would happen if current engineers at SpaceX were suddenly "redistributed" to Boeing or Blue Origin. Maybe they would raise the technical aptitude of those companies. Or maybe not, maybe the companies would grind them down to their corporate level.
You can demotivate smart people and reduce their creativity to almost zero by insisting on idiotic corporate rules and punishing them for "transgressions" (e.g. innovation that wasn't approved beforehand). They will still be working in highly qualified positions, but their collective effort won't be as productive.
It is notable what a big portion of contemporary technology is attributable to relatively small organizations (such as Bell Labs) which were able to motivate smart and creative people to do their best.
On possibly yes - it depends. Yet, the company mission and priority is usually "maximize shareholders value".
Not "maximize worker creativity and happiness and empower them as much as possible".
Not "maximize technology, wealth, quality of life for humanity"
The last two might sometimes happen as fortunate side effects. Often not. See all the complaints from Tesla workers around safety and anti-union activities.
1. the wealth of such people corresponds solely to an increase in the pool of available wealth (as opposed to just redistribution from other people), and
2. that increase is solely attributable to them,
it remains true that the distribution of the wealth pool is an arbitrary social choice. Billionaires being billionaires deprives other people of resources, by definition.
Not everyone can deal with stress, and even those that "successfully" deal with it, often break down, earlier in life than others (Look for old pro football players, or old pro wrestlers, for instance).
Congratulations! You're rich!
Which is good, because you'll need good nursing care, in your sixties.
It's not something that can be applied in generalities. Individual variance is key, until we get to a "Gattaga-style" society, where everyone is "tuned" for maximum performance.
This was something that I was thinking about, the other day, in a different context (long story).
I can't in good conscience, tell anyone that they "shouldn't go for the brass ring," but the chances are pretty high that they may not make it, and punish themselves for the rest of their lives, as a "failure," or, maybe even worse, get it, and end up regretting it.
In my case, I was forced into a situation where I had to eat humble pie, and accept a lower-echelon lifestyle, yet I'm deliriously happy. When I finally accepted the terrain, instead of gazing longingly at the map, things suddenly "clicked."
The key is acceptance, discipline, and moderation, for me.
To be honest, the greediness of the managerial/investor class is kinda dumb. I keep thinking about how Amazon/Starbucks could have worked with their employees rather than exploiting and harassing them so relentlessly that now the labor movement is growing rapidly to their detriment. It was really stupid to think they could get away with being shitty forever. Incentive structures should be created that don’t bias so heavily towards the short term.
Greediness is not a flaw of the system, it is a core value of it.
Serious long term thinking by those running companies (on the time-scale of 7-10+ years) is extraordinarily rare and represents a massive competitive advantage for those who actually do it (almost no one).
Companies do not adequately select for or reward long term thinking behavior by CEOs and upper management. Mostly you only see this coming from company founders who actually have enough of a stake and political capital to make doing so viable.
But regardless, it’s impossible for a business to focus entirely on the long-term. Why? There are short terms costs that have to be paid as well. So there has to be a trade off “if we do X we can keep the lights on and people employed while we work at Y which pays off in 10 years”.
Private companies typically have it a bit easier since they don’t worry about stock price, but I’ve seen plenty of private companies make stupid decisions too. At least stupid in hindsight, but not stupid at the time they were made.
Greed is a vice: it’s depraved and immoral. If you’re religious, it’s a venial sin! If greed becomes too commonplace in a persons life, it could even become a mortal sin.
My point is this: greed is a flaw, and not a small one. To frame it otherwise speaks to exactly the type of corruption we’ve become numb to.
No, I think not. Rising above our base nature is a task all humans should engage in. I’ll admit it seems that the ideals of Enlightenment are dying out, but surely we must fight against that with every ounce of our will, lest we descend back into another dark age?
I think it's still important to acknowledge what is part of our nature, and even if we can improve on that, it probably doesn't work to go too much against it, or deny it.
I do think it’s a flaw. Its an overreach to say it’s the singular cause of all the worlds problems, but boy does it seem like it sometimes!
Now I’m left wondering something I’m sure philosophers have grappled with better than I can: can a creature’s inherent nature be wrong? Are right and wrong even applicable to nature? Seems like it’s more that it just is and we can only apply our morality after the fact.
I guess that means I take your point :)
> can a creature’s inherent nature be wrong?
Yes I think it will always be morally wrong, because it will be selfish and greedy at it's very core.
They’re doing the dickhead corporate thing, closing the store for a day or two at a time, etc. It’s nuts - the management is so emotional they are throwing money away. Habits change; if Starbucks isn’t reliably open, many substitutes exist.
Yes can we please just get this done already, it would solve a whole heap of issues. I think it's almost comical how it's brewing under the surface but no political party wants to touch it, seems like it would be a pretty sure way of winning the next election, what's the hold up
And part of working smarter is understanding that you can't work too much or at every opportunity or you're efficiency will be shot. It's why people who work 60+ hour weeks seemingly get the same or less done than people who work 35-hour weeks. Your brain processes information and is "brainstorming" while you're sleeping, and I imagine it does this while you're on vacation or taking a walk as well.
Trying to "maximize" productivity is perfectionism, and as the author points out, perfectionism has diminishing returns. You should definitely try to look for ways to be more productive. But don't stress about it, because, well, stress hurts productivity.
Why did George Jetson go to work every day? Was it just to have a reason get away from his family? Wasn't the goal of that society that no one had to work, and everyone could be creative and leisureful all the time? Did George want to buy a newer robot? Was he cheating on Jane? What's going to happen to everyone when there's a universal basic income and nothing to do but doomscroll... are they really going to become artists?
Why not just consume media all the time? That's what most of unemployed people are doing at the moment, they aren't creating art. Besides doomscrolling, there's infinite amount of tv series and video games to consume very cheaply. In a world of abundance, more expensive passive activities, like travel, visiting restaurants etc. will also be available. Hardly anyone has the tenacity to make art for art's sake.
What's the point of a species that just consumes media? I mean, I guess, what's the point for a species like ours of maintaining a huge group of individuals that act like a flock of birds or a school of fish? Assuming they aren't necessary for defense - i.e. as cannon fodder - and they're consuming resources. Evolutionarily speaking, what's the upshot of having a huge class of media consumers who produce nothing?
Raising your kids, growing, cooking and preserving healthy food, helping your parents, your neighbors and your community. Taking hike, exercise. Clean your house, prepare it for summer/winter. Maintain it.
All those things take time and energy. I outsource most of it and I would actually prefer to do it myself.
And that just what I can think of from the top of my head.
In that future where we have UBI, not everyone will want to be an artist. Some will still want to just make things while following instructions. And there will likely be a beneficial place for it, even alongside all the robots.
From times before the concept of employment existed, to aristocrats and wealthy people in the last 2k years?
They dedicated themselves to culture, music, art, philosophy, science, architecture and so on. They wrote books and plays and music, did research, played instruments, sang and danced, painted, played games.
Search any list of the 20 most important scientists in history and count how many of them where money-driven. Very very few.
E.g. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-10-greates...
Wall St. is a sort of special type of pathology due to the sheer amount of high frequency, arbitrary deadlines that must be met. What's worse is that the work is incredibly repetitive and boring. A buddy at GS showed me what they did and it's incredibly dry. Literally Excel docs, pivot tables, slide decks. It's not even creative. Ironically they recruit top tier students (well, as much these days, but still) from Harvard, Stanford, etc. You can tell they're just putting in the work to eventually go work at a Hedge Fund or whatever.
There's certainly diminishing returns, but I'd say the average engineer at Big Tech has not reached that point. That being said, it's hard to care when said companies are making 5-12X your salary in profit, and projects keep getting shuttered and requirements are changing and there's a bunch of delays due to bureaucracy, lol.
In some ways I actually think it's better if everyone is lazy as it quickly reveals what's important. The problem with everyone acting busy is that it can be hard to tease out what's meaningful.
All were progressively less work, but my god consumer tech isn’t even close. The people working the hardest seem to be the most keen on useless bureaucracy and bridges to nowhere somehow.
I’ll never go near it again. I also don’t think I’ll ever not be adjacent to manufacturing & construction again. “Tech” people are insane.
I don't blame you at all, by the way. Tech is insane! Just curious why you're haunting HN, though!
Personally, I find if I've got a very clear road ahead of me with few complex decisions, I can just steam ahead, maybe for 12+ hours with few distractions. However, when it gets into the weeds, it's harder to keep going like that. Spend a little while thinking, have a break, read the latest tech news, walk around a bit, come back, think some more - eventually figure out the answer. I could fill that time with busy work, but I personally feel that I find a better solution if I have some room to think.
Procrastination is definitely a thing too, and it can be hard to stay motivated when the feeling of progress is so non-linear and lumpy. It can feel like nothing is being done for weeks at a time, then suddenly everything fits together.
Meanwhile I have no issues doing, say, physical gardening work. Can spend hours digging, weeding, building planters. Lots of time between decisions to think about what you're doing next and simple, linear, visible progress throughout the day.
In that regards, I think that tech jobs are much worse than traditional labor jobs.
At least this is true of myself with my prior labor jobs have been military, construction, and clerk at retail pharmacy. None of those ever left me as exhausted, tired, still anxious/stressed and in this weird state of wanting to just crash on the couch and close my eyes when the day's over. Now maybe it's age, but I feel it is more about the type of work itself and the surrounding expectations.
Everyone I similarly know who've transitioned to work in tech feel the same. I know people who were waiters, musicians, bar tenders, other construction workers, all hate their tech jobs moreso, though also wouldn't go back given the drastic pay cut and the worse leeway in choosing vacation and time-off/sick time.
And that's true even for "slacker" tech worker. Like I too slack off in comparison, if I'm on a construction job, I might work a 10 hour straight, moving constantly, while I really put out 4h to 6h of actually working in tech, but I'm still more tired at the end of the day.
Would be interesting to study the phenomenon.
P.S.: I'm really not comparing it to all jobs, I have no idea what farm work, or manufacturer work is like, mining, oil rigging, paving, etc. Those might leave you more tired and pay less, be strenuous on your health, etc. Just speaking of the ones I specifically mentioned.
Now I work in big tech, and let me tell you the amount of
people slacking off during work is incredible
Meetings, alerts, waiting for CI, waiting for builds to complete, whatever. There's no flow. I experience flow at my job maybe once or twice per month, tops.
But, I could do a better job at seeking out workplaces where that's not the case. In that sense it's self-imposed.
Gives me the feeling that the author really tries to misuse the workplace for lifestyle, meaning, socialising etc which they really are responsible for themselves in their free time.
People just want to get their work done and proceed with their own lives outside of work, I think maybe this individualism is actually what the article is complaining about.
This gives me the feeling that you really believe that pretending to not be human during work hours makes one more productive. As far as I know it doesn't work like that even for assembly line jobs.
I've worked on the assembly line, it was like being in the army, they screamed at us like drill sergeants to make us work faster. I'll leave it up to you to decide how humanising that environment is.
Where do you think all the nice things come from, getting shit done and not from grooming each other all day.
The engineer side of my brain says that yes, of course it's possible. You could run a very tight engineering ship with just the right level of autonomy between a number of exactly-right-sized teams. You would employ some percentage of your engineers to ensure that the other engineers were maximally productive. Etc. This stuff is all extremely possible in a vacuum.
The pragmatic side of my brain says that, while technically possible, any organization that has grown to include a medium-to-large engineering team has almost surely done so in ways that preclude the sort of "ideal" engineering environment mentioned above.
The typical failure mode here is, of course, a company that manages to defy the odds and experiences success, but takes on a large amount of technical debt during their early days of manic growth and then spends the next N years dealing with it.
If you're like a typical colleague of mine, you aren't needed at 80% of the meetings you attend, and you don't get any value out of those meetings either. Your attendance at these meetings is essentially a mindless way to run out the clock on the day.
At my first corporate programming job, there was a guy in the cube (we still had cubicles at least) next to mine who would spend most of the day doing anything but writing code. He would be on the phone with his wife arguing about some random thing or on the phone yelling at his kids or whatever.
I was astonished. In the factory, there was nothing like that. The machines ran, and you did your part that they hadn't figured out how to automate yet, and if the machines were down, the boss came through and told you to pick up a broom or something like that.
The guy worked an hour a day at most and spent most of the rest of the day on the phone.
He was irreplaceable. In the tiny bit of time that he actually spent working, he wrote Monte Carlo interest rate simulations in C that apparently worked since the financial company I worked for is still solvent given what happened in 2000 and 2008.
I'm like that now. Not the irreplaceable part.
So I'm goofing off on HN while background processing the design of a thing. Sure I could be staring at an IDE window when doing it, but instead I just open it to check things when needed.
I'm sure I'm less productive per minute than if it is all I was thinking about but I'm more productive on the scale of a full day if I am only half focusing on certain things. I have ADHD though so I'm probably not typical, but my point is that for intellectual work just because you can't see it doesn't mean it isn't happening
Other professions are similar. Pilots need to be independent but suited to strictly internalizing procedures.
Agreed. That said, it's quite nice to be the lazy person amongst all the ones trying to look busy. 80/20 rule applies; learning to focus on the 20% that will give you 80% of the value means you can be delivering more than most of your peers, while also not having a hard time managing work/life balance. Everyone else is trying to hit 100%, failing, and not even getting the 80% of value you're capturing due to all the noise.
lol. I run IT. Nobody at my workplace knows what I do.
Contrary to TFA, my automation gains accrue to myself and my company. It seems difficult to see this as anything but win-win. I get respite and time to think, and my company gets improved responses and uptime.
Specialization means everyone's chasing their own frontiers in their companies, which leads to less toe-stepping?
"Everyone knows" IT is complex. So as long as things are working, there's no real impetus for other people in the company to sully their shirtsleeves.
I simply don't care if your CNC machine-sitting job bores you and it's making you anxious about your skills as lathe worker: quit that job and do something you like, and let some unemployed off the streets operate the CNC. Regardless of who is doing the sitting, that machine will produce so much more parts, cheaper and better that one skilled worker could.
And herein lies the problem. The real problem. The lathe worker turned CNC-sitter or the skilled typist inhaling copier ozone aren't oppressed by "productivity culture", whatever that may mean, they are oppressed by a highly polarized jobs market that no longer offers them alternatives at their professional level. So they are forced to accept dumbed down machine work that anyone could do, for less pay.
It's as if a great chasm has opened: you are either a highly skilled professional in some un-automated market that can still wield power against capital due to your very rarefied skill-set, or some version of the manual labor monkey pushing buttons for a near minimum wage.
Automation has transformed economy and greatly improved our standards of living, but has also robed workers of their human capital, the only leverage they traditionally had against financial capital. The resurgence of unions is just a simptom of workers grasping for some form of leverage in a labor market that turned against them. The dramatic rise in inequality is another.
What machines we are pushing against are the limits of human society to create and use high creativity jobs, the biological limits of humans to adapt to the intelectual requirements of such jobs, and the strongly ossified structure of academia and class that fundamentally prevent most people from even entering social groups that beget such jobs.
The book fascinated me as a kid; as an adult I notice I tend to keep working when I objectively know I could log off and sculpt or paint instead. On a personal level, it’s hard to switch mental gears. Inertia happens in society too.
I suspect we generally undervalue our finite actual and potential free time. Unlike in Childhood’s End, though, long term stability is not yet assured for us. It would probably take centuries (as Clarke implied) of stable abundance for societies to adjust and establish new norms based on it.
So, whenever there is a shift, such as industrialization, that facilitates productivity growth, the bulk of the gains compared against economic growth will come early on and comparatively diminish over time.
It’s not that productivity growth declines, but that we’re comparing something that grows linearly (productivity) with something that grows exponentially (GDP).
Or, y'know, not be so fragile.
My generation, GenX, didn't get to where we are as semi-successful slackers by whining, we did it by actually just arranging our own gigs and either accepting or rejecting the abuse of the capitalist system on a case-by-case basis. Appealing to the collective "but we're all so fucked, we're the first generation to have lower economic prospects than our parents" was fun for movie plots, but not something that would make us quit a job.
It took two things to reach this point of maximalist outrage at the unfairness of working: 1. Boomers raised their kids to be snowflakes, 2. Then Boomers got old and started using their kids as beasts of burden.
That's really all there is to it. Obviously, if you're stuck in that situation you want to tear down the whole system, but what do you think would happen if "we" rejected limitless growth and endless productivity? Nothing in this piece suggests a replacement for the drive to work, or the virtues of working and earning. Nothing in it contemplates what a society without those virtues might look like or what meaningful thing would replace the continuity of work in peoples' lives.
You want to hang out with GenX'ers? Okay, here's me at 22: DUDE I DON'T WANT TO WAKE UP AND GO TO WORK. AGAIN.
Here's me at 40: Thank God I kept going to work.
You'll feel the same way. Hopefully. If our economic and political system manages to digest the double demographic humps of an elderly, uptight conservative group of selfish fools and their entitled, progressive and whining children.
It's blaming the victim. It denies the problem. And it only works to the point it doesn't.
Someday, someone you care about may wake up and discover that what was once possible is no longer. And that person might very well be you.
Yeah and nothing acknowledges that this "dehumanising" exploitation also happens to be the source of all the nice things that we want and need, or admit that we will have to make sacrifices, and where and how these sacrifices should be made.
Always throwing out the bathwater and just pretending that there is no baby.
The hard thing about any political change is that change will always worsen things for some people, in some situations, there is no such thing as 100% positive change.
And getting those people on board to actually make the sacrifices is the actual challenge, and in this case the author could at least bother to suggest how he/she would be willing to sacrifice to make up for these productivity losses, and/or how society will cut back on the rewards.
I think we should keep the efficiency and use tech to its fullest potential, but just shorten the working hours, as a means to share the productivity gains.
Companies don't exist for their owners, or their employees. They exist for their customers, and if you can finish more tasks for the same effort your customers will have better lives. And that's what propels us forwards: each company (or winning company in each segment) makes our lives better, or simpler, or easier.
On a re-read, this sounds harsher than I meant. My central point is around how companies don't primarily exist to employ, but to provide something to customers, and not understanding that could lead people to make bad decisions about how much they should count on their employer.
Quite the opposite, people used to be way more replaceable in the 80s than today. The real issue with the latest technology developments (say from the 80s) is that they require more and more cognitive skills to be adopted, which makes it harder to replace a worker while preventing a larger and larger part of the population from enjoying these productivity gains. This explains a large part of income inequality.
Here's why. Task B is the bottleneck and one could never 'ship' on average on any given day, any more than what worker-B would be able to produce. Worker-a would be piling a lot of 'intermediate work product' (or work-in-process) for worker-B while worker-c may be starving for work and will likely be idle. Sure there would be a lot of busy work for workers a and b and a lot of work-in-process, but not much changes in terms of volume of widgets shipped to customers.
If the goal was to achieve the lower cost of production for the same volume, one approach might be to remove worker-c and cross-train worker-a in task C in addition to task A. Now, worker-a can alternate between task A and task C (50% of time between the two tasks) and we would produce the same quantity of widgets as three people were producing earlier.
If the goal was to achieve higher volume at the same (labor) cost of production, one approach might be to train worker's b and c in task B and train worker a in tasks A and C. So, the deployment is {a} -> {A, C} and {b,c} -> {B}. Now, all three workers are occupied the entire time and the rate of production for task B is now doubled i.e, the shop doubles its throughput thereby increasing revenues, profits etc.,
In either case, the pursuit of productivity in itself is not a bad thing. If the firm failed to choose the suitable rational option, in the long run, it would have higher costs of production (and hence eroding margins over time) or a higher price that customers abhor (and hence losing market share), considering other things constant.
This is a management issue. When management prefers the status quo, you have dysfunctions such as worker-a potentially complaining about the effort vs. reward when (s)he is paid the same reward as worker-c ("they have an easier job while I slog my ass off!") or when management doesn't explain the change (i.e., cross-training and the benefits to the company, customers and workers) properly and faces resistance to the change ("what's in it for me?").
This is sloppy and wrong. A good counter example is child labor. That used to be common and fully integrated into corporate operations. Then it was made illegal and most people believe that economic systems work better without child labor. What appeared to be a simple optimization took away childhood happiness and opportunities for education. The problem we have is not some nebulous struggle with Capitalism as it is deciding on appropriate boundaries and regulations for work. Benefit corporations are keenly competitive Capitalist entities yet their primary goal is to enrich workers and customers alike. Employee ownership has well demonstrated benefits not only for workers but also managers and investors. What we need to do is figure out where our current systems go to far and need to favor human needs first.
You're better off just trusting your gut and playing things by ear since information, and even your own motivations, change constantly.
I've liked personal wikis a lot more than GTD-like stuff.
In mindfulness practice, we learn that sometimes “being, rather than doing” is important. As a Knowledge worker/AI practitioner, I consider myself so very, very lucky to be able to have a surfeit of time for quiet reflection because quiet times are important for the creative process.
Income inequality is getting the attention it deserves, but there is also an inequality in having time to enjoy human centered activities. I have young people in my life who have great careers, financially, but at least to me don’t seem to have enough quality down time.
Thinking less, working more is a shitty way to live and make a living.
Typical matriarchy, always men working as a secret cabal. How is it possible to take this stuff seriously with such unsubstantiated nonsense.
For me I'll as soon a possible take myself my own and check out. Because we all have fears ,surprise surprise, and my greatest fear is this matriarchal narrative and what it means for my sons.