A thousand times this! This puts into words something that's been lurking in the back of my mind for a very long time.
> The first chapter of the book claims, "The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature". The book approaches sociological or 'political' problems such as group chemistry and team jelling, "flow time" and quiet in the work environment, and the high cost of turnover
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...
I feel that the development of psychology and sociology has been lost on the workplace and it isn’t well applied. Executives want everyone to be widgets except themselves, even when study after study shows that for companies to perform optimally their workers must feel well compensated, well valued, balanced freedom in the workplace, chances for advancement etc.
In many respects you could apply psychology and sociology to how products should / could behave etc. as well, which I’m sure due to the monetary component some companies have taken seriously at least in some periods of their lifecycle, like Apple under Steve Jobs in his comeback
This is true even of (theoretically simple) things like retail jobs, because even if you're proficient in the basic skill set on day one, coming up to speed on the rhythm of a specific workplace still takes time.
I'm buggered if I can remember where I saw it, but there was a study once that showed that (in that specific instance, I have no clue as to whether or not it generalises) a minimum wage increase actually *saved* retail/service employers in the area money overall, just because the reduced churn meant that over the lifetime of an employee with the company the fact that said lifetime was longer meant they were getting enough more value per hour out of each employee to more than compensate for the higher cost per hour.
Of course the study could always have been wrong, but it didn't seem obviously so back when I looked at it and it at the very least seems plausible to me.
Of course. This maximizes their relative power within the company.
Some executives are focused on the health of a company as a whole but not many. To most of them the pie can be assumed to be a fixed size and their job is to take as much of it as possible.
> Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. — Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?
Being able to overlay an 80x24 terminal over one of my eyes (and drive it with a bluetooth keyboard or whatever) would've been fantastic for me.
Unfortunately for me, this is enough of an outlier desire that it doesn't seem likely anybody will ever want to sell me that at a price point I can convince myself of.
Not sure I can convince myself to spend the money to find out, but they're definitely going in the direction I was thinking of.
Ta.