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Comment by heather45879 | Hacker News Reader

The problem with folks in America is they’ve lost their entrepreneurial spirit. If people are given a shorter work week—great—they’re nice and relaxed. But I’ve witnessed folks getting more-and-more lazy these days.

There needs to be a better method of incentives put in place that coincides with an extra day off.

I would propose not an extra day off, but perhaps an extra day of personal development instead? Something relaxing but related to work maybe?

People are simply too distracted with all the crack social media and Netflix’s auto-play algorithm. So I’d wager that sometimes people will use that day productively, but maybe 7/10 it’ll be wasted down some rabbit hole.

In fact, you could probably argue that people are so distracted these days that they’re productivity and happiness would both go up if they were no longer wasting time online and you ADDED another work day.

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Alternative thesis: most people are getting tired of working hard only for the lion's share of the reward to go to a small handful of people at the top.

I recently did a qualification in leadership and management, and I think it had the exact opposite effect from the one intended. It made me realise how much of management is about finding ways to squeeze more work from people without extra compensation - motivation theory, time management, mentoring, coaching etc. Very little is for the employee’s benefit.

It’s really this all the way down. Even if your a top worker, manager, or sometimes even a founder. The next rung up the ladder is taking so much more of the pie that it just doesn’t feel worth it. I know of a major tech co that will only give out 10% if you work your but off and get promoted. You’ll never see a raise otherwise.

Ironically, with the advent of leaf code as the sole yardstick for measuring incoming engineers we’ve also removed any incentive for “working for the next job”.

Yep it's 100% then. I lost my "entrepreneurial spirit" after being burned more than once by management that wanted me to work my ass off for just a salary and the promise of something nice someday.

Granted I got mine in the end of the last job like that, but it came through pure leverage and nobody's happy about it, myself included.

Here’s a brief history on how people don’t want to work anymore

1894-2002

https://twitter.com/paulisci/status/1549527748950892544

> the problem with the most productive civilization in history is that it’s lazy

To add to that beautiful quote:

https://humanparts.medium.com/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e...

Employers used to train employees. They don't anymore. Employers used to offer pensions. They don't anymore. Maybe people have become lazier. I could see such an argument. But maybe people are also tired of getting treated as nothing more than a line item on a balance sheet and exchangeable pawns. At a lot of companies, a lot of managers (people, project, product) are basically unneeded, and people are tired of these managers doing nothing and providing friction for the actual work going on.

If I had stayed at my first company, I guaranteed would be making less than 50% of what I make now. There's plenty more I would have missed out on, especially relating to career growth. And that first company was often in the top 100 places to work.

Have you a source for that criticism? Any ‘these days’ criticism seems to favour a past that never existed.

Productivity in the US is up as far as I can tell.

https://www.bls.gov/productivity/

Well, to be honest, consider the following:

Windows 11 is designed to suck peoples attention away from productivity by gamifying the operating system with rewards for useless mind-drifting, monitizing people’s attention.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Netflix, etc are designed to distract people and keep them similarly hooked.

If the majority of the population is using those platforms, then the majority of the population is more distracted today than ever. How is that trend not tending toward reduced productivity?

> How is that trend not tending toward reduced productivity?

Because every study of productivity shows this to not be the case.

I agree with the idea that Windows 11 is worse than what came before it, but people appear to be more productive when you look at sources like the one I provided. So despite the distractions (or maybe because they aren’t actual distractions), productivity is going up.

This isn’t something you can assess by feeling, intuition or one’s personal observation. It requires truely massive data sets.

I love the idea that people’s leisure time should be judged on its productivity. Netflix? Okay but only educational stuff, otherwise it’s back to the mine with you. I mean almost literally with your last paragraph. “We’re making you work more for your own good” is a capitalist/fascist dream.

Arbeit macht frei.

Exactly

Kind of generalizing an entire workforce I think. How are you measuring lazy? You say that people are nice and relaxed with a shorter work week. But it seems you expect that a team that isn't as relaxed will be more effective?

Who are you to decide if people use their days off "productively?" And most orgs that have a day in the office scheduled for personal development/training, inevitably end up pushing other responsibilities into those hours, eventually making them useless. If someone is in the office, it's just too easy for them to be pestered for "real work."

The idea isn't that to get more work out of people, it's to provide them with a healthy WLB; so they don't get burned out, so they're more productive when they're "nice and relaxed" from their time off.

>So I’d wager that sometimes people will use that day productively, but maybe 7/10 it’ll be wasted down some rabbit hole.

Judge not lest ye...

The young people I work with now are the laziest I've ever seen. I think the job market has been so strong for so long they dont know what the real world is like. If/when we get a proper recession these people will all start working properly or get fired.

Young people should be lazy considering how fucked they are with inflation, the rising costs of housing, the looming climate disaster, stagnating wages, and they get to watch as the wealthiest people and corporations gobble up more of the world around them with every passing year.

20 years of essentially no inflation and zero percent interest rates, with nothing like stagnating wages for this HN crowd and you trot out how bad things are based on the last 6 months?

Based on the last 6 months, the hell are you on about? Literally no part of my earlier comment said the last 6 months. Gotta also love that you mention the last 20 years as if nothing happened in those 20 years that completely fucked over young people.

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