8 ms·

Rethinking Work

117 points by dnt404-1 11y ago

ojbyrne 11y ago
When I took a Human Resources course, there were 3 theories: Theory X (The oldest): People won't work unless you force them to, and without constant supervision, they'll slack off. Theory Y: People are looking for self-actualization, and you need to find what gets them excited, get them to do that, and get out of their way. Theory Z (currently the most popular): Both Theory X and Theory Y apply.
- Numberwang 11y ago
  I wish Swedish schools would stop basing all education on Y and reintroduce X as the main driver. For the last 15 years (Since Y became popular) the school system has done nothing but deliver absolutely worthless human beings.
  - anon4 11y ago
    Can you elaborate on that?
    - jkyle 11y ago
      Most Swedish educational experts feel the stark decline the OP is speaking of is a direct result of decentralization and the funneling of public funds into private, for profit, institutions. [1] Generally, conservative elements in Sweden discount educational experts assessment saying that kids are allowed to be 'too free' in the class (e.g. blaming it on the declining moral fiber of children or immigrants or what not). It served as a lab for what proponents of the voucher system in the U.S. are looking to do. 1. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/10/sweden-schools-crisis-political-failure-education http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/10/sweden-schools-...
      - Numberwang 11y ago
        No need to politicize it. I think both decentralization and the banishment of X for the benefit of Y have ruined the schools. Mostly I'm upset about them making everything social. Not allowing humans to wander amongst ideas on their own uninterruptedly and make their own connections have created shallow and empty workers. I wish what A.C. Grayling is doing would be taken more seriously before it is too late.
        digi_owl 11y ago
        > Not allowing humans to wander amongst ideas on their own uninterruptedly and make their own connections have created shallow and empty workers. Huh, is that not exactly what Y is about? As for turning everything social, welcome to the modern work environment. If you can do social you are out of a job, as the non-social jobs have been automated away.
        jkyle 11y ago
        > No need to politicize it. I was summarizing the linked reference which covered the politicized nature of the debate and quoted positions from both parties.
  - simplify 11y ago
    I find this fascinating, could you elaborate?
  - dpc_pw 11y ago
    Didn't Finland do the exact opposite, with opposite results? That's interesting given that this countries are neighbours.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      Similarly Norway is heading increasingly towards X (longer days, more testing, etc etc etc) and things have largely become a mess.
- tsotha 11y ago
  A lot of that depends on the job and the type of people involved. I once supervised a small group of computer operators. The work was more interesting than factory work, say, but it did get a little tedious after awhile. I could not trust them to work when I turned my back. Heck, I couldn't even trust them not to pop down to the local bar if I took the afternoon off. In my current workplace it's mostly theory Y. But it far more easy to get excited about the work.
danharaj 11y ago
Related: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/21/books-interview-david-graeber-the-utopia-of-rules http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/21/books-interview... The traditional capitalist view of human productivity is misanthropic and authoritarian. It makes sense if you want to justify hierarchical relationships and reduce the autonomy of the masses. There ought to be plenty of engineers and programmers on HN. They should know how valuable autonomy and meaning is to our productivity. This is universal: Everyone likes doing good work and doing exactly the right amount of work. No one likes working too little or working needlessly much. Yet, we live in a society where the politicians start honking like geese when there 'aren't enough jobs'. That's like saying there aren't enough bugs for me to fix. When the work's done right, there's no work to be done and we move on to something new. Not so in our system. When the work's done, you better find more work or you will fall into calamity and you will have deserved it. When you tie all human existence to producing value for your boss, work becomes a slavish social contract and not the means by which human beings improve the world for ourselves and each other. Trust people, and they act trustworthy. Respect people, and they act respectable. Give people the trust and respect required to give them autonomy in their work, and they will do amazing things for themselves and you. The most lovely software I work with is produced for free, and it tends to be amazingly good work, done from a position of respect, trust, and generosity. I'm sure many people are tired of my lefty whinging about capitalism, but the longer I live, the more it doesn't make sense for my personal productivity or fulfillment. I'm pretty tired of having a sword hanging by a thread over my head in a cynical attempt to make me 'be a productive member of society'. It makes me less productive! It makes me less happy! I'm tired of having to see everyone whose labor goes into the comfort of my life as a greedy adversary who would destroy me if this system weren't around to 'protect me'.
- tariqali34 11y ago
  "When the work's done right, there's no work to be done and we move on to something new." The work is never done right. You talk about engineers and programmers right? Well they should know that their work never ends; there's always the need to continually improve the product so that you don't "fall behind", fix the rampant bugs that occur when you add in new features, fix the bugs that were caused by you fixing the previous bugs, realize that the customers actually wanted something different, need to refactor the code properly to match the latest design fad, have to rewrite the program in a brand new language... And all this work has to be done. Because if you don't continually upgrade your product, then your product will quickly become old-fashioned and obsolete. So, when we say "there's no work to be done", it's a blatant lie. Either it is an excuse we make up so that we can leave something that we obviously hate doing, or it's because our employers are unwilling or unable to pay for it to be done. Lying may make you happy, but it makes me less happy. I prefer misanthropy over delusion.
1024core 11y ago
We don't have to look far: almost the entire OSS movement is driven by purpose, not money. Sure, money _can_ be made afterwards if one so desires (cf RedHat), but it's not the primary motivator (in most cases). I wonder if any academics have done studies on the OSS movement and what drives the contributors.
- mhale 11y ago
  Actually, this was the topic of my thesis for my Master's degree. Link: http://flowdelic.com/2005/03/03/learning-from-open-source/ http://flowdelic.com/2005/03/03/learning-from-open-source/ Abstract: In this paper, I study the workings of several successful Internet-based collaborative communities to identify what it is that enables them to succeed, even thrive, despite the highly-dispersed nature of their collaboration. This research reveals that while the practices and tools used by the referenced communities are important to their success, the most critical difference lies much deeper, in the economic-basis of their organizational structure. This economic mode of production, described by Yochai Benkler as “commons-based peer-production”, is studied to answer two key questions: First, does this economic model, in itself, encourage more successful virtual teamwork? Second, is the peer-production model of collaboration fundamentally tied to the open source model or can it also be applied in a commercial context to create proprietary products? A key source for the paper was "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm" by Yochai Benkler. Link: http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html In this paper Benkler describes a mathematical model for human motivation, which accounts for influence of money. Highly recommended read. Edit: fixed name typo
- gress 11y ago
  Most people do OSS to pad or establish their résumés or increase their professional profile. Additionally, most of the high profile OSS projects now have massive commercial support.
copsarebastards 11y ago
This article is basically a diluted version of Bob Black's The Abolition of Work[1]. I'm not sure how possible Black's vision is now because I think there's still scarcity, but it needs to be considered because it's a much better future than the one we're heading toward if we keep pretending that the capitalist work/ownership model is meritocratic. In the future, all jobs can be automated, and we're going to run into very deep issues long before even half are automated. [1] http://www.primitivism.com/abolition.htm http://www.primitivism.com/abolition.htm
HCIdivision17 11y ago
Just a note that the article (perhaps inadvertently) confuses a little: industrial manufacturing must be highly routinized and boring if it's working well. Tolerances are very tight for well made manufactured goods, since they have to be to be assembled into larger, more complex goods. Let an operator get creative with a running process, and all bets are off [0]. Besides! People are also terrible at that sort of work, so it's better to automate the job and have the people supervise machines. The machines do the terrible soul-crushing tedious work and the worker oversees the hiccups and glitches. (Machines are pretty lousy supervisors, and are difficult to program supervisory roles in the messy situations a lot of manufacturing happens in.) And keep in mind that's for a running line or process. I don't think there's room for creativity on carrying out the line's program, but there's endless opportunities for planning and improving the process off-line. People are great at deliberation, planning, and brainstorming. (Too good, some may cynically say :) I.e., you'll never get a better ROI than buying a group of operators lunch and let them rail at you about something that irritates them about a line. And include them in planning/upgrade meetings; they own the line, after all! And there's the exception of those times where it just makes economic sense to plop a person down for something boring and lonely. For example, the cost of vision control tech is getting ever more affordable and powerful, but it still takes a substantial amount of engineering work to actually install and tune the system for the specific situation it's in; by contrast, people are cheaper in the short-run and can be reasonably effective very quickly. (It's mind boggling when you see a failure that you think, "I could have paid a guy a year's salary to sit in a chair and watch for that one obvious, uncommon failure mode event.") [0] This is an interesting dichotomy: the workers must own the process they're working on, but they also need to not constantly fiddle with settings. If they're not actively tweaking stuff, then they feel disenfranchised, and if they are constantly messing with stuff then the operator is simulating a randomly tuned PID loop on whatever dials happen to be nearby. The root is that people are generally terrible at figuring out the difference between "normal variation" and "exceptional variation", and tune both. So when Deming talks of knowledge of variation, this has to be balanced by knowledge of psychology. And that balancing act brings us to this article's contention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principl...
quadrangle 11y ago
As per the famous Ghana postal workers recording ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=por5SopwHDc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=por5SopwHDc and http://faculty.weber.edu/tpriest/FacetsMdl_files/Postal%20Workers.html http://faculty.weber.edu/tpriest/FacetsMdl_files/Postal%20Wo... ), it's perfectly possible to enjoy even tedious work if you have a good attitude. It helps to have a healthy culture. In the U.S. we are culturally taught that we are supposed to dislike our work, especially if it isn't prestigious. If you dance around and have fun at work in the U.S. people look at you weird and generally discourage any such thing. But there's no reason not to bother enjoying your time. This is on top of the various other points they make in the article and related stuff…
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  >In the U.S. we are culturally taught that we are supposed to dislike our work, especially if it isn't prestigious. If you dance around and have fun at work in the U.S. people look at you weird and generally discourage any such thing. But there's no reason not to bother enjoying your time. Generalize much? While I don't doubt your experience, I don't think this is a very accurate characterization of the culture distribution across the US.
  - quadrangle 11y ago
    It's a generalization, yes. It's valid as such. It's comparison to generalizations that are valid for Africa. If this case doesn't apply to your exact experiences, it's because generalizations don't go that far. Do you have the anomalous U.S. experience of working in a place where people dance around and sing and have fun while working? You could share that with the rest of us who mostly do not have that experience.
- dropit_sphere 11y ago
  >In the U.S. we are culturally taught that we are supposed to dislike our work, especially if it isn't prestigious. If you dance around and have fun at work in the U.S. people look at you weird and generally discourage any such thing. But there's no reason not to bother enjoying your time. I can think of one: the same reason Steve Jobs paid himself $1 a year. Managing incentives is tough. If you try and reward someone for a task, you may find the incentives at some point misaligned. Let work be fun, and you open yourself to work being sacrificed to protect the fun. Therefore: abolish fun. I haven't made an eloquent case for it, but I think that's the reasoning, and I'm not sure it's wrong, frankly.
robotkilla 11y ago
I am a professional web developer (edit: actually i'm selling myself short with this title as I speak multiple programming languages, do UI and a host of other things) and haven't had a fulltime job in over 4 years. I try to get remote contracts that last from 1 to 6 months (3 months is the norm) and then I spend a month or two off self educating and making video games (trying to transition to indie game dev). I'm exponentially happier than when I had to wake up and head to a 9 to 5 even though I have less money and live much more sparsely.
- wslh 11y ago
  The challenging question is: do you have kids?
  - tspike 11y ago
    FWIW, I do, and I do essentially the same thing as OP. Your comment implies that the two are incompatible: why do you think that is the case?
    - robotkilla 11y ago
      Mind if I ask where you get your contracts? Mine have almost all been recommendations from past clients / colleagues. I also joined gun.io a while back but haven't been able to drum up work from it.
      - tspike 11y ago
        It's similar for me. Pretty much every quality contract I've had has come from friends or former colleagues.
    - colechristensen 11y ago
      Not incompatible, but less compatible. When you don't have dependents you can afford quite a bit more risk which goes hand in hand with a less structured work life.
vowelless 11y ago
> Its survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Is this true? That seems like an very high number.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  I presume the the survey saw "very engaged" as always on at all times, which is rather misleading as I love my programming job but when encountering the many frustrating and complicated problems that come across my path I'll often reach for my phone and go on HN. But I wouldn't say I'm "not engaged." I suspect many here would feel the same.
unabst 11y ago
Any labor with love is a privilege. Any labor without love is sacrifice. It's safe to say people are more than capable of being content with sacrifice. Foxconn workers protesting the enforcement of US labor restrictions is a good example. They're there to make a sacrifice, not live their lives. In the west, resistance towards sacrifice is appears to be mounting. But what is work but an activity that generates value for which you receive a kickback? And there are plenty of activities that are lovable and that generate value. Hence, the movement towards lifestyle jobs and placing passion first is only natural. Entrepreneurs could hold the key here, because they have proven they're capable of generating those jobs, beginning with themselves. “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” ― Confucius
- groutexpectatio 11y ago
  Confucius didn't say that http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/02/job-love/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/02/job-love/
- Apocryphon 11y ago
  I think the idea is that modern society provides plenty of amenities (automation, delegation, abstraction) that should lessen the sacrifice necessary. Yet we work longer number of hours for pay that has not grown on par with previous generations.
omouse 11y ago
This is similar to what Lewis Mumford has said in Technics and Civilization. Basically, more abundance means everything gets cheaper. Unfortunately the wealth created is locked up within a few classes and barely trickles down. Like the farmer who only produces cash crops and has no food to feed their family or the shoe maker whose children have no shoes. Mumford suggests that with such abundance we need "basic" communism which goes further than a guaranteed basic income. People will still have an incentive to work but they'll be spared the starvation and homelessness. It's hard to get used to an abundance mindset but we're definitely at that point where we absolutely must. It's like pre-AWS and post-AWS: in the former we have to worry about provisioning more hardware and virtual machines and worrying about running out of space (I'm in that situation now where we have a private cloud and maybe 2 more VMs can be spun up and that's it). In the latter situation we would be able to provision as many VMs as needed. Sure your costs increase because you went overboard and provisioned one too many VMs but at least you got to worry about over-abundance rather than scarcity!
- norea-armozel 11y ago
  I think the other side of that argument is why the capital gets locked up in the first place? I can't imagine someone like Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett actually wanting to keep people from resources or excess wealth if they had no use for it. Especially if it was just idling there doing nothing for anyone (themselves included). It just seems like that our situation is one born out of the interplay between institutions that have long since lost significance like a vestigial organ that only exists because the evolutionary cost to 'remove' it is greater than it is to keep it. But in this case, I think we can overcome these institutions it's just a matter of how.
  - normloman 11y ago
    " I can't imagine someone like Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett actually wanting to keep people from resources or excess wealth if they had no use for it." 1. Na, some wealthy people would totally do that. It's their hard earned money and they're entitled to spend it however they want, after all. Get a job and stop looking for handouts! http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/fact-checking-the-gop-conventions-opening-night/2012/08/29/ee54a05c-f18b-11e1-892d-bc92fee603a7_blog.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/fact-c... http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/17/romneys-theory-of-the-taker-class-and-why-it-matters/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/17/ro... 2. Who says they even have excess wealth to begin with? I may make a billion dollars a year, but I'm living in this cramped mansion, and I've still got payments on my super-yacht. Living this lavish lifestyle is expensive! http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-fears-of-the-super-rich/308419/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-f...
ilaksh 11y ago
Left out of these discussions is the division between worker and owner. Classism and elitism are main problems for our society. That is not to suggest everyone start quoting Marx, give up money, and assume some kind of techno-communist utopia will just fall out. I think technology and decentralization are key, but we have to do quite a lot more thinking and engineering and integration of viewpoints than most people assume.
hackuser 11y ago
It's clear that people will work hard for many things besides money; to suggest otherwise is absurd. The evidence is right in front of our noses, every day: Consider artists, scientists, scholars, soldiers (some of whom risk their lives in the worst working environment you can imagine, and need food stamps), teachers, FOSS software developers, explorers, parents, political and social movement leaders and members, etc. (I wonder how much Adam Smith made? I also wonder if he really said the things he represents to us now.)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
dunkelheit 11y ago
The article contains a charming contradiction which really shows how in the end "scientific management" gets its dues: it tries to show that scientific management is so much worse than so-called "enligtened management" using... methods of scientific management! (e.g. hard metrics like sales growth).
bceagle 11y ago
I have found people that are often the most satisfied at work are the ones that have figured out the best way to play a game with their own emotions and instincts. They understand when they are tired and what makes them tired. The know how to dangle the carrot in front of themselves to get to the next level. Sure, they may dislike work at some instinctual level just like everyone else, but they control that along with everything else in their lives.
hencq 11y ago
I'm a great fan of Sociotechnical systems [1] for exactly the reasons mentioned in this article. A lot of focus is put on making jobs more meaningful and giving workers more responsibilities. The theory is that this will ultimately lead to higher productivity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociotechnical_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociotechnical_system

117 points by dnt404-1 11y ago

When I took a Human Resources course, there were 3 theories: Theory X (The oldest): People won't work unless you force them to, and without constant supervision, they'll slack off. Theory Y: People are looking for self-actualization, and you need to find what gets them excited, get them to do that, and get out of their way. Theory Z (currently the most popular): Both Theory X and Theory Y apply.

Numberwang 11y ago
I wish Swedish schools would stop basing all education on Y and reintroduce X as the main driver. For the last 15 years (Since Y became popular) the school system has done nothing but deliver absolutely worthless human beings.
- anon4 11y ago
  Can you elaborate on that?
  - jkyle 11y ago
    Most Swedish educational experts feel the stark decline the OP is speaking of is a direct result of decentralization and the funneling of public funds into private, for profit, institutions. [1] Generally, conservative elements in Sweden discount educational experts assessment saying that kids are allowed to be 'too free' in the class (e.g. blaming it on the declining moral fiber of children or immigrants or what not). It served as a lab for what proponents of the voucher system in the U.S. are looking to do. 1. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/10/sweden-schools-crisis-political-failure-education http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/10/sweden-schools-...
    - Numberwang 11y ago
      No need to politicize it. I think both decentralization and the banishment of X for the benefit of Y have ruined the schools. Mostly I'm upset about them making everything social. Not allowing humans to wander amongst ideas on their own uninterruptedly and make their own connections have created shallow and empty workers. I wish what A.C. Grayling is doing would be taken more seriously before it is too late.
      - digi_owl 11y ago
        > Not allowing humans to wander amongst ideas on their own uninterruptedly and make their own connections have created shallow and empty workers. Huh, is that not exactly what Y is about? As for turning everything social, welcome to the modern work environment. If you can do social you are out of a job, as the non-social jobs have been automated away.
      - jkyle 11y ago
        > No need to politicize it. I was summarizing the linked reference which covered the politicized nature of the debate and quoted positions from both parties.
- simplify 11y ago
  I find this fascinating, could you elaborate?
- dpc_pw 11y ago
  Didn't Finland do the exact opposite, with opposite results? That's interesting given that this countries are neighbours.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Similarly Norway is heading increasingly towards X (longer days, more testing, etc etc etc) and things have largely become a mess.
tsotha 11y ago
A lot of that depends on the job and the type of people involved. I once supervised a small group of computer operators. The work was more interesting than factory work, say, but it did get a little tedious after awhile. I could not trust them to work when I turned my back. Heck, I couldn't even trust them not to pop down to the local bar if I took the afternoon off. In my current workplace it's mostly theory Y. But it far more easy to get excited about the work.

danharaj 11y ago

Related: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/21/books-interview-david-graeber-the-utopia-of-rules http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/21/books-interview... The traditional capitalist view of human productivity is misanthropic and authoritarian. It makes sense if you want to justify hierarchical relationships and reduce the autonomy of the masses. There ought to be plenty of engineers and programmers on HN. They should know how valuable autonomy and meaning is to our productivity. This is universal: Everyone likes doing good work and doing exactly the right amount of work. No one likes working too little or working needlessly much. Yet, we live in a society where the politicians start honking like geese when there 'aren't enough jobs'. That's like saying there aren't enough bugs for me to fix. When the work's done right, there's no work to be done and we move on to something new. Not so in our system. When the work's done, you better find more work or you will fall into calamity and you will have deserved it. When you tie all human existence to producing value for your boss, work becomes a slavish social contract and not the means by which human beings improve the world for ourselves and each other. Trust people, and they act trustworthy. Respect people, and they act respectable. Give people the trust and respect required to give them autonomy in their work, and they will do amazing things for themselves and you. The most lovely software I work with is produced for free, and it tends to be amazingly good work, done from a position of respect, trust, and generosity. I'm sure many people are tired of my lefty whinging about capitalism, but the longer I live, the more it doesn't make sense for my personal productivity or fulfillment. I'm pretty tired of having a sword hanging by a thread over my head in a cynical attempt to make me 'be a productive member of society'. It makes me less productive! It makes me less happy! I'm tired of having to see everyone whose labor goes into the comfort of my life as a greedy adversary who would destroy me if this system weren't around to 'protect me'.

tariqali34 11y ago
"When the work's done right, there's no work to be done and we move on to something new." The work is never done right. You talk about engineers and programmers right? Well they should know that their work never ends; there's always the need to continually improve the product so that you don't "fall behind", fix the rampant bugs that occur when you add in new features, fix the bugs that were caused by you fixing the previous bugs, realize that the customers actually wanted something different, need to refactor the code properly to match the latest design fad, have to rewrite the program in a brand new language... And all this work has to be done. Because if you don't continually upgrade your product, then your product will quickly become old-fashioned and obsolete. So, when we say "there's no work to be done", it's a blatant lie. Either it is an excuse we make up so that we can leave something that we obviously hate doing, or it's because our employers are unwilling or unable to pay for it to be done. Lying may make you happy, but it makes me less happy. I prefer misanthropy over delusion.

1024core 11y ago

We don't have to look far: almost the entire OSS movement is driven by purpose, not money. Sure, money _can_ be made afterwards if one so desires (cf RedHat), but it's not the primary motivator (in most cases). I wonder if any academics have done studies on the OSS movement and what drives the contributors.

mhale 11y ago
Actually, this was the topic of my thesis for my Master's degree. Link: http://flowdelic.com/2005/03/03/learning-from-open-source/ http://flowdelic.com/2005/03/03/learning-from-open-source/ Abstract: In this paper, I study the workings of several successful Internet-based collaborative communities to identify what it is that enables them to succeed, even thrive, despite the highly-dispersed nature of their collaboration. This research reveals that while the practices and tools used by the referenced communities are important to their success, the most critical difference lies much deeper, in the economic-basis of their organizational structure. This economic mode of production, described by Yochai Benkler as “commons-based peer-production”, is studied to answer two key questions: First, does this economic model, in itself, encourage more successful virtual teamwork? Second, is the peer-production model of collaboration fundamentally tied to the open source model or can it also be applied in a commercial context to create proprietary products? A key source for the paper was "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm" by Yochai Benkler. Link: http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html In this paper Benkler describes a mathematical model for human motivation, which accounts for influence of money. Highly recommended read. Edit: fixed name typo
gress 11y ago
Most people do OSS to pad or establish their résumés or increase their professional profile. Additionally, most of the high profile OSS projects now have massive commercial support.

copsarebastards 11y ago

This article is basically a diluted version of Bob Black's The Abolition of Work[1]. I'm not sure how possible Black's vision is now because I think there's still scarcity, but it needs to be considered because it's a much better future than the one we're heading toward if we keep pretending that the capitalist work/ownership model is meritocratic. In the future, all jobs can be automated, and we're going to run into very deep issues long before even half are automated. [1] http://www.primitivism.com/abolition.htm http://www.primitivism.com/abolition.htm

HCIdivision17 11y ago

Just a note that the article (perhaps inadvertently) confuses a little: industrial manufacturing must be highly routinized and boring if it's working well. Tolerances are very tight for well made manufactured goods, since they have to be to be assembled into larger, more complex goods. Let an operator get creative with a running process, and all bets are off [0]. Besides! People are also terrible at that sort of work, so it's better to automate the job and have the people supervise machines. The machines do the terrible soul-crushing tedious work and the worker oversees the hiccups and glitches. (Machines are pretty lousy supervisors, and are difficult to program supervisory roles in the messy situations a lot of manufacturing happens in.) And keep in mind that's for a running line or process. I don't think there's room for creativity on carrying out the line's program, but there's endless opportunities for planning and improving the process off-line. People are great at deliberation, planning, and brainstorming. (Too good, some may cynically say :) I.e., you'll never get a better ROI than buying a group of operators lunch and let them rail at you about something that irritates them about a line. And include them in planning/upgrade meetings; they own the line, after all! And there's the exception of those times where it just makes economic sense to plop a person down for something boring and lonely. For example, the cost of vision control tech is getting ever more affordable and powerful, but it still takes a substantial amount of engineering work to actually install and tune the system for the specific situation it's in; by contrast, people are cheaper in the short-run and can be reasonably effective very quickly. (It's mind boggling when you see a failure that you think, "I could have paid a guy a year's salary to sit in a chair and watch for that one obvious, uncommon failure mode event.") [0] This is an interesting dichotomy: the workers must own the process they're working on, but they also need to not constantly fiddle with settings. If they're not actively tweaking stuff, then they feel disenfranchised, and if they are constantly messing with stuff then the operator is simulating a randomly tuned PID loop on whatever dials happen to be nearby. The root is that people are generally terrible at figuring out the difference between "normal variation" and "exceptional variation", and tune both. So when Deming talks of knowledge of variation, this has to be balanced by knowledge of psychology. And that balancing act brings us to this article's contention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principl...

quadrangle 11y ago

As per the famous Ghana postal workers recording ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=por5SopwHDc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=por5SopwHDc and http://faculty.weber.edu/tpriest/FacetsMdl_files/Postal%20Workers.html http://faculty.weber.edu/tpriest/FacetsMdl_files/Postal%20Wo... ), it's perfectly possible to enjoy even tedious work if you have a good attitude. It helps to have a healthy culture. In the U.S. we are culturally taught that we are supposed to dislike our work, especially if it isn't prestigious. If you dance around and have fun at work in the U.S. people look at you weird and generally discourage any such thing. But there's no reason not to bother enjoying your time. This is on top of the various other points they make in the article and related stuff…

jsprogrammer 11y ago
>In the U.S. we are culturally taught that we are supposed to dislike our work, especially if it isn't prestigious. If you dance around and have fun at work in the U.S. people look at you weird and generally discourage any such thing. But there's no reason not to bother enjoying your time. Generalize much? While I don't doubt your experience, I don't think this is a very accurate characterization of the culture distribution across the US.
- quadrangle 11y ago
  It's a generalization, yes. It's valid as such. It's comparison to generalizations that are valid for Africa. If this case doesn't apply to your exact experiences, it's because generalizations don't go that far. Do you have the anomalous U.S. experience of working in a place where people dance around and sing and have fun while working? You could share that with the rest of us who mostly do not have that experience.
dropit_sphere 11y ago
>In the U.S. we are culturally taught that we are supposed to dislike our work, especially if it isn't prestigious. If you dance around and have fun at work in the U.S. people look at you weird and generally discourage any such thing. But there's no reason not to bother enjoying your time. I can think of one: the same reason Steve Jobs paid himself $1 a year. Managing incentives is tough. If you try and reward someone for a task, you may find the incentives at some point misaligned. Let work be fun, and you open yourself to work being sacrificed to protect the fun. Therefore: abolish fun. I haven't made an eloquent case for it, but I think that's the reasoning, and I'm not sure it's wrong, frankly.

robotkilla 11y ago

I am a professional web developer (edit: actually i'm selling myself short with this title as I speak multiple programming languages, do UI and a host of other things) and haven't had a fulltime job in over 4 years. I try to get remote contracts that last from 1 to 6 months (3 months is the norm) and then I spend a month or two off self educating and making video games (trying to transition to indie game dev). I'm exponentially happier than when I had to wake up and head to a 9 to 5 even though I have less money and live much more sparsely.

wslh 11y ago
The challenging question is: do you have kids?
- tspike 11y ago
  FWIW, I do, and I do essentially the same thing as OP. Your comment implies that the two are incompatible: why do you think that is the case?
  - robotkilla 11y ago
    Mind if I ask where you get your contracts? Mine have almost all been recommendations from past clients / colleagues. I also joined gun.io a while back but haven't been able to drum up work from it.
    - tspike 11y ago
      It's similar for me. Pretty much every quality contract I've had has come from friends or former colleagues.
  - colechristensen 11y ago
    Not incompatible, but less compatible. When you don't have dependents you can afford quite a bit more risk which goes hand in hand with a less structured work life.

vowelless 11y ago

> Its survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Is this true? That seems like an very high number.

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
I presume the the survey saw "very engaged" as always on at all times, which is rather misleading as I love my programming job but when encountering the many frustrating and complicated problems that come across my path I'll often reach for my phone and go on HN. But I wouldn't say I'm "not engaged." I suspect many here would feel the same.

unabst 11y ago

Any labor with love is a privilege. Any labor without love is sacrifice. It's safe to say people are more than capable of being content with sacrifice. Foxconn workers protesting the enforcement of US labor restrictions is a good example. They're there to make a sacrifice, not live their lives. In the west, resistance towards sacrifice is appears to be mounting. But what is work but an activity that generates value for which you receive a kickback? And there are plenty of activities that are lovable and that generate value. Hence, the movement towards lifestyle jobs and placing passion first is only natural. Entrepreneurs could hold the key here, because they have proven they're capable of generating those jobs, beginning with themselves. “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” ― Confucius

groutexpectatio 11y ago
Confucius didn't say that http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/02/job-love/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/02/job-love/
Apocryphon 11y ago
I think the idea is that modern society provides plenty of amenities (automation, delegation, abstraction) that should lessen the sacrifice necessary. Yet we work longer number of hours for pay that has not grown on par with previous generations.

omouse 11y ago

This is similar to what Lewis Mumford has said in Technics and Civilization. Basically, more abundance means everything gets cheaper. Unfortunately the wealth created is locked up within a few classes and barely trickles down. Like the farmer who only produces cash crops and has no food to feed their family or the shoe maker whose children have no shoes. Mumford suggests that with such abundance we need "basic" communism which goes further than a guaranteed basic income. People will still have an incentive to work but they'll be spared the starvation and homelessness. It's hard to get used to an abundance mindset but we're definitely at that point where we absolutely must. It's like pre-AWS and post-AWS: in the former we have to worry about provisioning more hardware and virtual machines and worrying about running out of space (I'm in that situation now where we have a private cloud and maybe 2 more VMs can be spun up and that's it). In the latter situation we would be able to provision as many VMs as needed. Sure your costs increase because you went overboard and provisioned one too many VMs but at least you got to worry about over-abundance rather than scarcity!

norea-armozel 11y ago
I think the other side of that argument is why the capital gets locked up in the first place? I can't imagine someone like Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett actually wanting to keep people from resources or excess wealth if they had no use for it. Especially if it was just idling there doing nothing for anyone (themselves included). It just seems like that our situation is one born out of the interplay between institutions that have long since lost significance like a vestigial organ that only exists because the evolutionary cost to 'remove' it is greater than it is to keep it. But in this case, I think we can overcome these institutions it's just a matter of how.
- normloman 11y ago
  " I can't imagine someone like Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett actually wanting to keep people from resources or excess wealth if they had no use for it." 1. Na, some wealthy people would totally do that. It's their hard earned money and they're entitled to spend it however they want, after all. Get a job and stop looking for handouts! http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/fact-checking-the-gop-conventions-opening-night/2012/08/29/ee54a05c-f18b-11e1-892d-bc92fee603a7_blog.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/fact-c... http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/17/romneys-theory-of-the-taker-class-and-why-it-matters/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/17/ro... 2. Who says they even have excess wealth to begin with? I may make a billion dollars a year, but I'm living in this cramped mansion, and I've still got payments on my super-yacht. Living this lavish lifestyle is expensive! http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-fears-of-the-super-rich/308419/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-f...

ilaksh 11y ago

Left out of these discussions is the division between worker and owner. Classism and elitism are main problems for our society. That is not to suggest everyone start quoting Marx, give up money, and assume some kind of techno-communist utopia will just fall out. I think technology and decentralization are key, but we have to do quite a lot more thinking and engineering and integration of viewpoints than most people assume.

hackuser 11y ago

It's clear that people will work hard for many things besides money; to suggest otherwise is absurd. The evidence is right in front of our noses, every day: Consider artists, scientists, scholars, soldiers (some of whom risk their lives in the worst working environment you can imagine, and need food stamps), teachers, FOSS software developers, explorers, parents, political and social movement leaders and members, etc. (I wonder how much Adam Smith made? I also wonder if he really said the things he represents to us now.)

deleted 11y ago

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dunkelheit 11y ago

The article contains a charming contradiction which really shows how in the end "scientific management" gets its dues: it tries to show that scientific management is so much worse than so-called "enligtened management" using... methods of scientific management! (e.g. hard metrics like sales growth).

bceagle 11y ago

I have found people that are often the most satisfied at work are the ones that have figured out the best way to play a game with their own emotions and instincts. They understand when they are tired and what makes them tired. The know how to dangle the carrot in front of themselves to get to the next level. Sure, they may dislike work at some instinctual level just like everyone else, but they control that along with everything else in their lives.

hencq 11y ago

I'm a great fan of Sociotechnical systems [1] for exactly the reasons mentioned in this article. A lot of focus is put on making jobs more meaningful and giving workers more responsibilities. The theory is that this will ultimately lead to higher productivity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociotechnical_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociotechnical_system