13 ms·

The Rise of Performative Work

184 points by version_five 5y ago

yawnxyz 5y ago
https://archive.is/RJQQX https://archive.is/RJQQX tl;dr: people are "performing the doing of work" by making sure they look like they're active on slack and paying attention in zoominars. The "theater" of work is a thing that's become celebrated. My take: I think I've met plenty of people who've pretended to work, especially back when I did some work with government contractors. Even minor requests would take days to weeks to even get a reply. So I don't think this is anything new; we've just adapted to new ways to pretend to work. But: as someone running a bootstrapped startup, there's more actual "doing" now than there ever was. Gone are the "networking opportunities" where you go out for real meetings. It's all zoominars now, which means there's more time to get stuff done (or more likely, get burnt out, then tricking myself I'm being productive)
olivermarks 5y ago
I feel the Economist is very behind the times on this and is actually one of the key magazines read by empty suits, who have been at the forefront of 'office theatrics' (as the print edition of this article was titled), for decades. Internet connectivity has undoubtedly added a valuable dressing up box of tools for this type of person/cliques but the fundamentals have been taught by HBS's various publications for decades also IMO
- cbozeman 5y ago
  > I feel the Economist is very behind the times on this and is actually one of the key magazines read by empty suits, who have been at the forefront of 'office theatrics' (a the print edition of this article was titled), for decades. It absolutely is... when I was in the Navy, a hotshot Academy grad got command of our unit and we ended up volunteering for every goddamned mission that Bravo Oscar needed done. It was fucking miserable. I saw him reading The Economist, Foreign Policy, and Financial Times every chance he got.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Bravo Oscar?
    - cbozeman 5y ago
      Bravo Oscar was the call sign given to the commander of Collation forces in the Middle East when I was over there.
    - codekansas 5y ago
      Presumably Barack Obama
- geodel 5y ago
  > I feel the Economist is very behind the times on this and is actually one of the key magazines read by empty suits, Absolutely. With their views on bullshit jobs (no such thing as per them), remote work they are very much a establishment sockpuppet. If their coverage of things which I know a bit first hand is so shallow/wrong, I wonder if even stories on international affairs are any solid at all.
  - olivermarks 5y ago
    The Economist used to be pretty solid IMO until about 12 years ago, about the same time the Harvard Business Review started to morph into a business version of Oprah! magazine. These days The E, HBR, MIT Review etc are mostly like last century women's magazines, complete with agony aunts and advice. The Economist's geopolitical stance seems to be closely aligned with the WEF along with the FT ( slogan 'A new world is possible. Let's not go back to what wasn't working anyway'). End of an era for these legacy media companies...
    - liketochill 5y ago
      What do you recommend instead?
      - olivermarks 5y ago
        I tend to rely on online recommendations of specific articles- including the Economist - and try to read as many views as possible. I feel for now the era of legacy media 'packaged' information and views that newspapers, magazines and TV became is over, and that mastheads have lost a huge amount of their prestige. (Joe Rogan's Neilsen ratings versus cable is pretty astonishing for example). Having said that I get up in the morning and look at the FT, WSJ & Zerohedge in that order and then typically read all sorts of things online throughout the day, often based on recommendations (thanks HN!) Twitter etc. My mother worked for the UK conservative party before I was born and taught me as a youth to read the Daily Telegraph 'so I would know what the buggers are thinking'. This rather cynical view is how I tend to consume most establishment products... Regarding the Economist I used to like their 'Schumpeter' free market ethos which they seem to have lost recently
- m10i 5y ago
  The author states as much: > Theatre has always been an important part of the workplace. They're expounding that it's gotten worse during the pandemic, which I think most of us would agree with.
- ojbyrne 5y ago
  I find it horrendous, it reminds me of Readers Digest, summarizing local stories from around the world into blancmange prose for people who aspire to global leadership.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Disagree with everyone here. I actually love the Economist. It is short bite sized articles that gives you a good overview of what's going on in the world. I admire how they correct themselves, how picky they are about British English and generally have broad scope of a particular topic, presenting multiple sides. Consistent styling and plots, excellent typography to top it off. There is nothing like that out there. Similarly, people of HN love the New Yorker and I find it unbereable. I like my news like a datasheet. Short, concise and to the point; not a long winded vocabular pornography.
  - suction 5y ago
    This and most other mags sometimes present good starting points to do further reading, but someone who only reads magazines and thinks they even got the gist of some topic doesn’t know what they don’t know. Which is dangerous.
Apocryphon 5y ago
Y.T.’s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like this: Less than 10 mm. Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling. 10-14 min. Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attitude. 14-15.61 mm. Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important details. Exactly 15.62 mm. Smartass. Needs attitude counseling. 15.63-16 mm. Asswipe. Not to be trusted. 16-18 mm. Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details. More than 18 mm. Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break). - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- arrakis2021 5y ago
  Genius
- blitzar 5y ago
  The real solution here is for the writer of the memo must write tests to determine that the correct facts were digested by the reader. Monitor the time to read memo, and then have a test to ensure the memo was understood by the reader.
MattGaiser 5y ago
> But the prevalence of performative work is bad news—not just for the George Costanzas of the world, who can no longer truly tune out, but also for employees who have to catch up on actual tasks once the show is over. By extension it is also bad for productivity. Why, then, does it persist? Because I don't win as an employee if I achieve something. I win if my boss believes that I achieve something, whether I do or not. I win if the people interviewing me believe that I will be effective. Whether I am or not doesn't impact my compensation/career beyond my boss believing it.
- vasco 5y ago
  You win if by win you mean fool everyone to pay you for nothing, if you're someone who gets satisfaction mostly from feeling smarter than others and "winning", that sounds adequate It's also possible to get satisfaction from delivering a big project, doing something hard with your team and so on though, instead of a purely adversarial attitude.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    There are certainly intrinsic motivations as well, but what the company incentivizes is performing, whether or not you achieve anything. You can still achieve something if you wish, but achievement is not a requirement.
  - allenu 5y ago
    > You win if by win you mean fool everyone to pay you for nothing, if you're someone who gets satisfaction mostly from feeling smarter than others and "winning", that sounds adequate There have been many times in my career where I went the extra mile, but didn't communicate it well enough and ended up not getting rewarded for it. I also noticed other people over-communicated what they did, even in cases where I didn't think what they did was really that hard. If they get rewarded for that, is it fair? My opinion today is it doesn't matter. If I want that bonus or that promotion, I'm going to "perform" for my boss to make sure I get my share.
    - squabble 5y ago
jackcosgrove 5y ago
The problem is that salaried work is still coupled with time requirements rather than goal requirements. If you meet your goals early and announce that, you just get more work. Pretending to work covers the difference between expectations of time worked and expectations of goals met. As long as you meet your goals, I don't think most employers care about the fake work. Trying to work knowledge employees as if they are on an assembly line clocking in and out won't work and most employers know this. The only improvement to this situation is if employers let you not show up after completing your goals, within some unit of time like a two week sprint.
- lumost 5y ago
  I think a 4 day work week could be a good approach to this. I sometimes work weekends when we're behind, I could see an employer introducing a 4-day work week as an incentive for good planning.
  - black_13 5y ago
- allenu 5y ago
  > If you meet your goals early and announce that, you just get more work. Not only that, the larger the company you work for, the more likely the more people will be involved in your project. That leads to all sorts of inefficiencies. If you finish early, you may still need to wait on someone else before your next task. So the work you pick up will often just be busywork anyway, since you can’t do the important work until you’re unblocked. The incentives for working harder or faster are so decoupled from actual results in a large company (i.e. we shipped something and made X more dollars which means Y more dollars for me) that gaming the system and “performing” is the only real meaning you can derive from your actions.
  - switch007 5y ago
    > Not only that, the larger the company you work for, the more likely the more people will be involved in your project. I was very unprepared for this when I worked for my first large company. The first three months of a project was figuring out who was who, the politics and making connections.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
emilsedgh 5y ago
Was catching up with a friend who hast some IT work in a trading company. He says their computers will be locked down after a period of inactivity. And their work is measured by how active they are. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mouse+jiggler&crid=I2FW85QSN9CW&sprefix=mouse+jiggle%2Caps%2C124&ref=nb_sb_noss https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mouse+jiggler&crid=I2FW85QSN9CW&s... So there are these devices on Amazon that move the mouse for you so the inactivity algorithm breaks and you're always online and active! As a very hard working person I sometimes feel like an idiot.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- titanomachy 5y ago
  Slacking off doesn’t really make you happy, it kind of just saps your energy. In my experience as a reforming slacker.
  - Shugarl 5y ago
    There's a difference between slacking off and being forced to always be "productive"
  - sascha_sl 5y ago
    Having (untreated) ADHD and spending 8 hours in an office is quite literally torture. Even being able to only spend 2 hours max on actual work I was still seen as one of the more productive people in the company, ironically. But those 6 hours of either doing nothing or trying really hard to force your attention to come together are the actual work. I'm very happy with remote work. I can actually find things to do in between that would definitely not be considered working that lets me spend more time being productive overall.
sydthrowaway 5y ago
As a non american in tech, Ive found this scarily accurate https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ45ZpIzpzUBuK5rvzZ16TFtwVzJQQOjLXMTA&usqp=CAU https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ45ZpI...
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Sounds about right to me, a Brit.
  - cosmodisk 5y ago
    So it's fine then,right?
    - blitzar 5y ago
      Its fine.
- maerF0x0 5y ago
  where does this come from?
dagmx 5y ago
I find it's easier to do performative work in the office. Having face time with people can be a really good way to imbue the feeling that you're working. "I saw that person working, therefore they weren't slacking off" Whereas at home, maybe it's easier to trick an inattentive manager, but you have to let your work represent you even more.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Just schedule lots of emails and Slack messages.
RapperWhoMadeIt 5y ago
Performative work is just another term for one of the main topics exposed in the book "Bullshit jobs" by David Graeber. I finished the book last month and it was a very compelling read. It tries to explain the psychology behind trying to understand why almost everyone knows that it is unrealistic to expect employees to be productive and hardworking for 8 or more hours a day, but at the same time nobody is ending our current corporate wage slavery system, in which actually being there is more important that actually doing a meaningful job!
- ajtulloch 5y ago
  I think the two key texts here are Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs and Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, specifically his riff on “market Stalinism”: > The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.
  - ruined 5y ago
    the worst part is, there's no way around it. if you're trying to motivate any individual or group whose desires are not fully coherent, no matter what your intentions and ideology are, any effort to incentivize and document performance approaches Borges. by transitive property the incentive is to create appeasing documentation. the strain of the actual loses out to the efficiency of the plausible. this is, i think in part, why there is a modern desire towards "local" products and personalities in media, and full diy cottagecore fantasies. it is the only way to at least convince yourself that you could confirm authenticity, even if that is a delusion, because anything else is obviously superhuman in scale. at least you can assign responsibility to a face at a farmers' market, even if they're no less hired than the person minding self-checkout at the grocery. at least a parasocial relationship with a social media personality feels realer and more responsible than traditional mass media, even if they're delivering the same talking points. the winner of this paradox will be either an anarchist culture relentlessly dismantling everything and enjoying the unknowable, or a vertically integrated police consciousness that simply is/does everything and doesn't need to convince/believe anyone else.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I’ve been shipping software, my entire adult life (over 30 years). Kind of hard to fake. That’s one reason that I was so blindsided by what I encountered, when I was looking for work, a few years ago. I had an enormous library of finished, high-quality, polished, complete work, already in the public venue; but people were only interested in small, impractical, competitive exercises. It didn’t take me long to realize that it was more important to consider people who “played the game,” than it was, those that could provably deliver product. So I stopped looking, and went to work with some folks that couldn’t afford to pay me, but were interested in actually delivering software.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  I posted this a while back and it echoed a lot of the same sentiments of your comment. Wondered whether it was just a relative junior complaining, but evidently not. https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/pzofk7/this_career_feels_like_a_few_key_hours_every_year/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/pzofk7/t...
  - hibernator149 5y ago
    The job of HR is to hire people. So HR absolutely loves job hoppers, even depends on them. Given this system, this reddit story is the logical conclusion.
  - astrange 5y ago
    I’ve always wondered why I didn’t see people at my employer doing this “change jobs every year for huge gains” thing, but if the huge gains are $180k TC I guess that’s why. FB probably pays the interns more than that.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      Yeah a lot of the jumping is that junior at a no name company isn’t anything at FAANG, but senior at a no name can be intermediate/junior at FAANG. Also, many companies on the lower end don’t provide equity, so you are essentially just rented on a two week basis.
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/RJQQX https://archive.is/RJQQX
lngnmn2 5y ago
This is just the tip of an iceberg. Virtue signalling is at the core of everything nowadays. Meaningless verbiage in speaking and writing, full of current memes, current useless abstract concepts and other bullshit. Piles upon piles of useless, redundant abstractions, tons of bullshit code as in J2EE or current node_modeles mass idiocy. And the real virtue is in making minimal, just right, as close to "what is" as possible, and almost no one of current imposters could do or even understand this. They think Haskell is about monads lmao.
- astrange 5y ago
  > Virtue signalling is at the core of everything nowadays. An interesting thing about this phrase is that virtue signaling is obviously good (it's an important leadership technique) but is only ever used as a negative term. Also implies "vice signaling" should exist as a positive term, but I've never seen that used.
  - fatbird 5y ago
    Ironically, using the phrase "virtue signaling" has itself become a form of virtue signaling to the crowd reading Reason and others around here who see it as a negative. This is like the phrase "politically correct", which started as a neutral term for labeling language that was (or wasn't) up to date with our aspirational norms. I don't think I've ever heard anyone use the phrase except with contempt.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      Stewart Lee or someone inspired by him oughta do a bit on virtual signaling similar to his routine on PC: https://youtu.be/x_JCBmY9NGM https://youtu.be/x_JCBmY9NGM
Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago
There's the opposite to be argued too - going fully remote over the pandemic has negatively impacted the kind of office sociopaths whose contribution was ONLY performative work. There's one or two I used to put up with pre-pandemic, you know the types, management brown nosers, desk dropping all day long, and trying to command attention where it's simply not warranted. They've dropped off the radar altogether since they can't perform their schtick in person.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Do they not perform or do they just not perform to you? As at a prior job, they didn't disappear, but rather focused on managers and utterly ignored ICs like myself.
  - Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago
    They're still there, but what they do day-to-day must have changed... I'm not 100% sure what they get up to now, but they could be focusing their A-game on zoom calls with management alright. However, pre-pandemic they would poll the IC's like myself for whatever information they needed via "casual" desk dropping, then present it to some manager as original thinking. The higher friction of setting up video calls, and being called out in group Slacks seems to have reduced this. One went as far as requesting a desk move in order to be closer to a manager, so that at least has all changed.
drewcoo 5y ago
This is entirely upside down. In the meaty past, humans gathered in offices in close proximity and tried to appear busy during "core office hours," which were often more than 40 a week. Many people wrote about how most of that time could not be spent doing valuable work, but everyone kept the act up. Now, in the days of plague and distance, we don't need to fake all of that and can focus on accomplishing valuable things. The problem is that many managers grew into their positions playing the politics of meat space. They "provided value" by being very visible to people. They are having a hard time now that we're all starting to question their previous value. This entire piece is garbage.
- blitzar 5y ago
  > we're all starting to question their previous value. And that is when management put the zoom wine and cheese evening into your calendar for 19:00 on a thursday evening.
black_13 5y ago
RandomLensman 5y ago
The simulation of change is just so much easier than actual change... Anecdotally, I'd say in middling companies executives seem absorbed with performative work which in turn filters down the ranks into more performative work. Only the top places seem to be able to escape this somewhat (there is always some performative stuff).
- blitzar 5y ago
  > middling companies executives seem absorbed with performative work which in turn filters down the ranks into more performative work Performative executives promote the finest performative workers into management I have been to the top, its only marginally better the main difference being the performance continues on later into the night so proportionally more gets done.
froaway4job 5y ago
I genuinely love the rise of performative work culture. I am someone who spent years frustrated by the performative BS at my workplaces. Actually being proactive was not as important as achieving some superficial engineering task that didn't actually solve anything. So, I flipped the script and leveraged this silliness into a 7 figure salary by working multiple remote jobs. I work 4 SWE jobs, spend about 10-15 hours per week per job, act like I'm "working" for the rest of that time, get paid. Works for me, works for them!
- rambambram 5y ago
  Flipping that script is bad ass! Sounds like stuff for a separate post.
  - swader999 5y ago
    Or a sitcom.
- ahtihn 5y ago
  So, fraud then?
  - habeebtc 5y ago
    I have been arguing with people on Blind about this. Not actually fraud! However, you are likely in violation of employment contract. Where I currently work, and my previous job, you could actually find a way through the official channels by just not being totally accurate about the other job(s). If challenged it comes down to the details. Moonlighting is a perfectly normal activity for driven people (I did tech blogging for a previous employer once while employed by someone else, so I have navigated this system at one company), and by structuring your disclosures very strategically you could likely avoid any legal impacts. All that said, working multiple jobs like that will definitely get you fired if you are found out. Even in a state with strong worker protections. And again, all that said: Don't do this.
    - 5y ago
viktorcode 5y ago
The show clip which is mentioned at the beginning of the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOQmxNPTJwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOQmxNPTJwc
xnavra50 5y ago
jerome-jh 5y ago
I am more or less in this rut now. I do SW planning which I now will be impossible to meet. Hopefully we never hit the deadline because priorities, requirements and resources constantly change. So planning is always revised. I am not the only one in this game. One rule I learnt is to never tell the plan cannot be realized. When this is all too obvious though, I let more experienced coworkers handle the situation with appropriate business speak I am far from mastering yet. Kind of a strange situation for an engineer.
throw0821374 5y ago
Wonder if US jobs are now split into 2 distinct roles - doing the work vs taking credit for the work. My limited experience in the Bay area seems to indicate that complaining about other people's work is more career beneficial than doing the work. Is this an effective method for credit/risk re-assignment after the fact? edit: typos
megamix 5y ago
This is just inflation of knowledge work. We all have that paper turning guy at the office pre pandemic. Now it’s just evident how many that don’t perform any value
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jvandonsel 5y ago
The first sentence of the article grabbed me the most. “…Seinfeld”, a vintage TV sitcom…”. I guess most of my life is now considered “vintage”.
- blitzar 5y ago
  I cant wait till you realise you too are considered vintage!
dopylitty 5y ago
Performative work reflects the reality that the output of most office jobs just doesn't matter that much. Jobs like trash collector, produce harvester, chicken plant worker, and snowplow driver actually matter and as we've seen during the pandemic when they aren't done it causes real problems. Office work is just something to keep people occupied in our economy because it's anathema to recognize that we can produce more than enough necessities to keep everyone comfortable without most people working more than a few hours a week.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Performative work reflects the reality that the output of most office jobs just doesn't matter that much. I disagree. Performative work reflects the reality that most office jobs have concrete results that are hard to measure individually, separated in time and/or space from the work, and highly dependent on other office work that shares the first two features.
  - astrange 5y ago
    Also, a lot of them are asynchronous and you’re only actually needed around all the time to keep the latency down when there is a task. Or if you’re in QA you’re running tests that almost always pass but they do fail sometimes.
ubermonkey 5y ago
It's a fair thing. Being really great at your job but never doing anything to market yourself puts you at a disadvantage. Being great at your job and having a healthy level of "look at what I did" happening is better. It unfortunately but necessarily follows that there will be people who decide to spend all their time promoting themselves and very little on meaningful work, but this is not a new development.
qwertyuiop_ 5y ago
Having recently left a workplace that turned into performance art I can assure you it’s a growing trend. Constant brownnosing, polluting slack threads as soon as there is a new topic, speaking overly enthusiastically about the CEO s actions.

184 points by version_five 5y ago

https://archive.is/RJQQX https://archive.is/RJQQX tl;dr: people are "performing the doing of work" by making sure they look like they're active on slack and paying attention in zoominars. The "theater" of work is a thing that's become celebrated. My take: I think I've met plenty of people who've pretended to work, especially back when I did some work with government contractors. Even minor requests would take days to weeks to even get a reply. So I don't think this is anything new; we've just adapted to new ways to pretend to work. But: as someone running a bootstrapped startup, there's more actual "doing" now than there ever was. Gone are the "networking opportunities" where you go out for real meetings. It's all zoominars now, which means there's more time to get stuff done (or more likely, get burnt out, then tricking myself I'm being productive)

olivermarks 5y ago

I feel the Economist is very behind the times on this and is actually one of the key magazines read by empty suits, who have been at the forefront of 'office theatrics' (as the print edition of this article was titled), for decades. Internet connectivity has undoubtedly added a valuable dressing up box of tools for this type of person/cliques but the fundamentals have been taught by HBS's various publications for decades also IMO

cbozeman 5y ago
> I feel the Economist is very behind the times on this and is actually one of the key magazines read by empty suits, who have been at the forefront of 'office theatrics' (a the print edition of this article was titled), for decades. It absolutely is... when I was in the Navy, a hotshot Academy grad got command of our unit and we ended up volunteering for every goddamned mission that Bravo Oscar needed done. It was fucking miserable. I saw him reading The Economist, Foreign Policy, and Financial Times every chance he got.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Bravo Oscar?
  - cbozeman 5y ago
    Bravo Oscar was the call sign given to the commander of Collation forces in the Middle East when I was over there.
  - codekansas 5y ago
    Presumably Barack Obama
geodel 5y ago
> I feel the Economist is very behind the times on this and is actually one of the key magazines read by empty suits, Absolutely. With their views on bullshit jobs (no such thing as per them), remote work they are very much a establishment sockpuppet. If their coverage of things which I know a bit first hand is so shallow/wrong, I wonder if even stories on international affairs are any solid at all.
- olivermarks 5y ago
  The Economist used to be pretty solid IMO until about 12 years ago, about the same time the Harvard Business Review started to morph into a business version of Oprah! magazine. These days The E, HBR, MIT Review etc are mostly like last century women's magazines, complete with agony aunts and advice. The Economist's geopolitical stance seems to be closely aligned with the WEF along with the FT ( slogan 'A new world is possible. Let's not go back to what wasn't working anyway'). End of an era for these legacy media companies...
  - liketochill 5y ago
    What do you recommend instead?
    - olivermarks 5y ago
      I tend to rely on online recommendations of specific articles- including the Economist - and try to read as many views as possible. I feel for now the era of legacy media 'packaged' information and views that newspapers, magazines and TV became is over, and that mastheads have lost a huge amount of their prestige. (Joe Rogan's Neilsen ratings versus cable is pretty astonishing for example). Having said that I get up in the morning and look at the FT, WSJ & Zerohedge in that order and then typically read all sorts of things online throughout the day, often based on recommendations (thanks HN!) Twitter etc. My mother worked for the UK conservative party before I was born and taught me as a youth to read the Daily Telegraph 'so I would know what the buggers are thinking'. This rather cynical view is how I tend to consume most establishment products... Regarding the Economist I used to like their 'Schumpeter' free market ethos which they seem to have lost recently
m10i 5y ago
The author states as much: > Theatre has always been an important part of the workplace. They're expounding that it's gotten worse during the pandemic, which I think most of us would agree with.
ojbyrne 5y ago
I find it horrendous, it reminds me of Readers Digest, summarizing local stories from around the world into blancmange prose for people who aspire to global leadership.
systemvoltage 5y ago
Disagree with everyone here. I actually love the Economist. It is short bite sized articles that gives you a good overview of what's going on in the world. I admire how they correct themselves, how picky they are about British English and generally have broad scope of a particular topic, presenting multiple sides. Consistent styling and plots, excellent typography to top it off. There is nothing like that out there. Similarly, people of HN love the New Yorker and I find it unbereable. I like my news like a datasheet. Short, concise and to the point; not a long winded vocabular pornography.
- suction 5y ago
  This and most other mags sometimes present good starting points to do further reading, but someone who only reads magazines and thinks they even got the gist of some topic doesn’t know what they don’t know. Which is dangerous.

Apocryphon 5y ago

Y.T.’s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like this: Less than 10 mm. Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling. 10-14 min. Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attitude. 14-15.61 mm. Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important details. Exactly 15.62 mm. Smartass. Needs attitude counseling. 15.63-16 mm. Asswipe. Not to be trusted. 16-18 mm. Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details. More than 18 mm. Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break). - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

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arrakis2021 5y ago
Genius
blitzar 5y ago
The real solution here is for the writer of the memo must write tests to determine that the correct facts were digested by the reader. Monitor the time to read memo, and then have a test to ensure the memo was understood by the reader.

MattGaiser 5y ago

> But the prevalence of performative work is bad news—not just for the George Costanzas of the world, who can no longer truly tune out, but also for employees who have to catch up on actual tasks once the show is over. By extension it is also bad for productivity. Why, then, does it persist? Because I don't win as an employee if I achieve something. I win if my boss believes that I achieve something, whether I do or not. I win if the people interviewing me believe that I will be effective. Whether I am or not doesn't impact my compensation/career beyond my boss believing it.

vasco 5y ago
You win if by win you mean fool everyone to pay you for nothing, if you're someone who gets satisfaction mostly from feeling smarter than others and "winning", that sounds adequate It's also possible to get satisfaction from delivering a big project, doing something hard with your team and so on though, instead of a purely adversarial attitude.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  There are certainly intrinsic motivations as well, but what the company incentivizes is performing, whether or not you achieve anything. You can still achieve something if you wish, but achievement is not a requirement.
- allenu 5y ago
  > You win if by win you mean fool everyone to pay you for nothing, if you're someone who gets satisfaction mostly from feeling smarter than others and "winning", that sounds adequate There have been many times in my career where I went the extra mile, but didn't communicate it well enough and ended up not getting rewarded for it. I also noticed other people over-communicated what they did, even in cases where I didn't think what they did was really that hard. If they get rewarded for that, is it fair? My opinion today is it doesn't matter. If I want that bonus or that promotion, I'm going to "perform" for my boss to make sure I get my share.
  - squabble 5y ago

jackcosgrove 5y ago

The problem is that salaried work is still coupled with time requirements rather than goal requirements. If you meet your goals early and announce that, you just get more work. Pretending to work covers the difference between expectations of time worked and expectations of goals met. As long as you meet your goals, I don't think most employers care about the fake work. Trying to work knowledge employees as if they are on an assembly line clocking in and out won't work and most employers know this. The only improvement to this situation is if employers let you not show up after completing your goals, within some unit of time like a two week sprint.

lumost 5y ago
I think a 4 day work week could be a good approach to this. I sometimes work weekends when we're behind, I could see an employer introducing a 4-day work week as an incentive for good planning.
- black_13 5y ago
allenu 5y ago
> If you meet your goals early and announce that, you just get more work. Not only that, the larger the company you work for, the more likely the more people will be involved in your project. That leads to all sorts of inefficiencies. If you finish early, you may still need to wait on someone else before your next task. So the work you pick up will often just be busywork anyway, since you can’t do the important work until you’re unblocked. The incentives for working harder or faster are so decoupled from actual results in a large company (i.e. we shipped something and made X more dollars which means Y more dollars for me) that gaming the system and “performing” is the only real meaning you can derive from your actions.
- switch007 5y ago
  > Not only that, the larger the company you work for, the more likely the more people will be involved in your project. I was very unprepared for this when I worked for my first large company. The first three months of a project was figuring out who was who, the politics and making connections.

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emilsedgh 5y ago

Was catching up with a friend who hast some IT work in a trading company. He says their computers will be locked down after a period of inactivity. And their work is measured by how active they are. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mouse+jiggler&crid=I2FW85QSN9CW&sprefix=mouse+jiggle%2Caps%2C124&ref=nb_sb_noss https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mouse+jiggler&crid=I2FW85QSN9CW&s... So there are these devices on Amazon that move the mouse for you so the inactivity algorithm breaks and you're always online and active! As a very hard working person I sometimes feel like an idiot.

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titanomachy 5y ago
Slacking off doesn’t really make you happy, it kind of just saps your energy. In my experience as a reforming slacker.
- Shugarl 5y ago
  There's a difference between slacking off and being forced to always be "productive"
- sascha_sl 5y ago
  Having (untreated) ADHD and spending 8 hours in an office is quite literally torture. Even being able to only spend 2 hours max on actual work I was still seen as one of the more productive people in the company, ironically. But those 6 hours of either doing nothing or trying really hard to force your attention to come together are the actual work. I'm very happy with remote work. I can actually find things to do in between that would definitely not be considered working that lets me spend more time being productive overall.

sydthrowaway 5y ago

As a non american in tech, Ive found this scarily accurate https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ45ZpIzpzUBuK5rvzZ16TFtwVzJQQOjLXMTA&usqp=CAU https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ45ZpI...

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
Sounds about right to me, a Brit.
- cosmodisk 5y ago
  So it's fine then,right?
  - blitzar 5y ago
    Its fine.
maerF0x0 5y ago
where does this come from?

dagmx 5y ago

I find it's easier to do performative work in the office. Having face time with people can be a really good way to imbue the feeling that you're working. "I saw that person working, therefore they weren't slacking off" Whereas at home, maybe it's easier to trick an inattentive manager, but you have to let your work represent you even more.

MattGaiser 5y ago
Just schedule lots of emails and Slack messages.

RapperWhoMadeIt 5y ago

Performative work is just another term for one of the main topics exposed in the book "Bullshit jobs" by David Graeber. I finished the book last month and it was a very compelling read. It tries to explain the psychology behind trying to understand why almost everyone knows that it is unrealistic to expect employees to be productive and hardworking for 8 or more hours a day, but at the same time nobody is ending our current corporate wage slavery system, in which actually being there is more important that actually doing a meaningful job!

ajtulloch 5y ago
I think the two key texts here are Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs and Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, specifically his riff on “market Stalinism”: > The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.
- ruined 5y ago
  the worst part is, there's no way around it. if you're trying to motivate any individual or group whose desires are not fully coherent, no matter what your intentions and ideology are, any effort to incentivize and document performance approaches Borges. by transitive property the incentive is to create appeasing documentation. the strain of the actual loses out to the efficiency of the plausible. this is, i think in part, why there is a modern desire towards "local" products and personalities in media, and full diy cottagecore fantasies. it is the only way to at least convince yourself that you could confirm authenticity, even if that is a delusion, because anything else is obviously superhuman in scale. at least you can assign responsibility to a face at a farmers' market, even if they're no less hired than the person minding self-checkout at the grocery. at least a parasocial relationship with a social media personality feels realer and more responsible than traditional mass media, even if they're delivering the same talking points. the winner of this paradox will be either an anarchist culture relentlessly dismantling everything and enjoying the unknowable, or a vertically integrated police consciousness that simply is/does everything and doesn't need to convince/believe anyone else.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I’ve been shipping software, my entire adult life (over 30 years). Kind of hard to fake. That’s one reason that I was so blindsided by what I encountered, when I was looking for work, a few years ago. I had an enormous library of finished, high-quality, polished, complete work, already in the public venue; but people were only interested in small, impractical, competitive exercises. It didn’t take me long to realize that it was more important to consider people who “played the game,” than it was, those that could provably deliver product. So I stopped looking, and went to work with some folks that couldn’t afford to pay me, but were interested in actually delivering software.

MattGaiser 5y ago
I posted this a while back and it echoed a lot of the same sentiments of your comment. Wondered whether it was just a relative junior complaining, but evidently not. https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/pzofk7/this_career_feels_like_a_few_key_hours_every_year/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/pzofk7/t...
- hibernator149 5y ago
  The job of HR is to hire people. So HR absolutely loves job hoppers, even depends on them. Given this system, this reddit story is the logical conclusion.
- astrange 5y ago
  I’ve always wondered why I didn’t see people at my employer doing this “change jobs every year for huge gains” thing, but if the huge gains are $180k TC I guess that’s why. FB probably pays the interns more than that.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Yeah a lot of the jumping is that junior at a no name company isn’t anything at FAANG, but senior at a no name can be intermediate/junior at FAANG. Also, many companies on the lower end don’t provide equity, so you are essentially just rented on a two week basis.

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/RJQQX https://archive.is/RJQQX

lngnmn2 5y ago

This is just the tip of an iceberg. Virtue signalling is at the core of everything nowadays. Meaningless verbiage in speaking and writing, full of current memes, current useless abstract concepts and other bullshit. Piles upon piles of useless, redundant abstractions, tons of bullshit code as in J2EE or current node_modeles mass idiocy. And the real virtue is in making minimal, just right, as close to "what is" as possible, and almost no one of current imposters could do or even understand this. They think Haskell is about monads lmao.

astrange 5y ago
> Virtue signalling is at the core of everything nowadays. An interesting thing about this phrase is that virtue signaling is obviously good (it's an important leadership technique) but is only ever used as a negative term. Also implies "vice signaling" should exist as a positive term, but I've never seen that used.
- fatbird 5y ago
  Ironically, using the phrase "virtue signaling" has itself become a form of virtue signaling to the crowd reading Reason and others around here who see it as a negative. This is like the phrase "politically correct", which started as a neutral term for labeling language that was (or wasn't) up to date with our aspirational norms. I don't think I've ever heard anyone use the phrase except with contempt.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Stewart Lee or someone inspired by him oughta do a bit on virtual signaling similar to his routine on PC: https://youtu.be/x_JCBmY9NGM https://youtu.be/x_JCBmY9NGM

Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago

There's the opposite to be argued too - going fully remote over the pandemic has negatively impacted the kind of office sociopaths whose contribution was ONLY performative work. There's one or two I used to put up with pre-pandemic, you know the types, management brown nosers, desk dropping all day long, and trying to command attention where it's simply not warranted. They've dropped off the radar altogether since they can't perform their schtick in person.

MattGaiser 5y ago
Do they not perform or do they just not perform to you? As at a prior job, they didn't disappear, but rather focused on managers and utterly ignored ICs like myself.
- Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago
  They're still there, but what they do day-to-day must have changed... I'm not 100% sure what they get up to now, but they could be focusing their A-game on zoom calls with management alright. However, pre-pandemic they would poll the IC's like myself for whatever information they needed via "casual" desk dropping, then present it to some manager as original thinking. The higher friction of setting up video calls, and being called out in group Slacks seems to have reduced this. One went as far as requesting a desk move in order to be closer to a manager, so that at least has all changed.

drewcoo 5y ago

This is entirely upside down. In the meaty past, humans gathered in offices in close proximity and tried to appear busy during "core office hours," which were often more than 40 a week. Many people wrote about how most of that time could not be spent doing valuable work, but everyone kept the act up. Now, in the days of plague and distance, we don't need to fake all of that and can focus on accomplishing valuable things. The problem is that many managers grew into their positions playing the politics of meat space. They "provided value" by being very visible to people. They are having a hard time now that we're all starting to question their previous value. This entire piece is garbage.

blitzar 5y ago
> we're all starting to question their previous value. And that is when management put the zoom wine and cheese evening into your calendar for 19:00 on a thursday evening.

black_13 5y ago

RandomLensman 5y ago

The simulation of change is just so much easier than actual change... Anecdotally, I'd say in middling companies executives seem absorbed with performative work which in turn filters down the ranks into more performative work. Only the top places seem to be able to escape this somewhat (there is always some performative stuff).

blitzar 5y ago
> middling companies executives seem absorbed with performative work which in turn filters down the ranks into more performative work Performative executives promote the finest performative workers into management I have been to the top, its only marginally better the main difference being the performance continues on later into the night so proportionally more gets done.

froaway4job 5y ago

I genuinely love the rise of performative work culture. I am someone who spent years frustrated by the performative BS at my workplaces. Actually being proactive was not as important as achieving some superficial engineering task that didn't actually solve anything. So, I flipped the script and leveraged this silliness into a 7 figure salary by working multiple remote jobs. I work 4 SWE jobs, spend about 10-15 hours per week per job, act like I'm "working" for the rest of that time, get paid. Works for me, works for them!

rambambram 5y ago
Flipping that script is bad ass! Sounds like stuff for a separate post.
- swader999 5y ago
  Or a sitcom.
ahtihn 5y ago
So, fraud then?
- habeebtc 5y ago
  I have been arguing with people on Blind about this. Not actually fraud! However, you are likely in violation of employment contract. Where I currently work, and my previous job, you could actually find a way through the official channels by just not being totally accurate about the other job(s). If challenged it comes down to the details. Moonlighting is a perfectly normal activity for driven people (I did tech blogging for a previous employer once while employed by someone else, so I have navigated this system at one company), and by structuring your disclosures very strategically you could likely avoid any legal impacts. All that said, working multiple jobs like that will definitely get you fired if you are found out. Even in a state with strong worker protections. And again, all that said: Don't do this.
  - 5y ago

viktorcode 5y ago

The show clip which is mentioned at the beginning of the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOQmxNPTJwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOQmxNPTJwc

xnavra50 5y ago

jerome-jh 5y ago

I am more or less in this rut now. I do SW planning which I now will be impossible to meet. Hopefully we never hit the deadline because priorities, requirements and resources constantly change. So planning is always revised. I am not the only one in this game. One rule I learnt is to never tell the plan cannot be realized. When this is all too obvious though, I let more experienced coworkers handle the situation with appropriate business speak I am far from mastering yet. Kind of a strange situation for an engineer.

throw0821374 5y ago

Wonder if US jobs are now split into 2 distinct roles - doing the work vs taking credit for the work. My limited experience in the Bay area seems to indicate that complaining about other people's work is more career beneficial than doing the work. Is this an effective method for credit/risk re-assignment after the fact? edit: typos

megamix 5y ago

This is just inflation of knowledge work. We all have that paper turning guy at the office pre pandemic. Now it’s just evident how many that don’t perform any value

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jvandonsel 5y ago

The first sentence of the article grabbed me the most. “…Seinfeld”, a vintage TV sitcom…”. I guess most of my life is now considered “vintage”.

blitzar 5y ago
I cant wait till you realise you too are considered vintage!

dopylitty 5y ago

Performative work reflects the reality that the output of most office jobs just doesn't matter that much. Jobs like trash collector, produce harvester, chicken plant worker, and snowplow driver actually matter and as we've seen during the pandemic when they aren't done it causes real problems. Office work is just something to keep people occupied in our economy because it's anathema to recognize that we can produce more than enough necessities to keep everyone comfortable without most people working more than a few hours a week.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> Performative work reflects the reality that the output of most office jobs just doesn't matter that much. I disagree. Performative work reflects the reality that most office jobs have concrete results that are hard to measure individually, separated in time and/or space from the work, and highly dependent on other office work that shares the first two features.
- astrange 5y ago
  Also, a lot of them are asynchronous and you’re only actually needed around all the time to keep the latency down when there is a task. Or if you’re in QA you’re running tests that almost always pass but they do fail sometimes.

ubermonkey 5y ago

It's a fair thing. Being really great at your job but never doing anything to market yourself puts you at a disadvantage. Being great at your job and having a healthy level of "look at what I did" happening is better. It unfortunately but necessarily follows that there will be people who decide to spend all their time promoting themselves and very little on meaningful work, but this is not a new development.

qwertyuiop_ 5y ago

Having recently left a workplace that turned into performance art I can assure you it’s a growing trend. Constant brownnosing, polluting slack threads as soon as there is a new topic, speaking overly enthusiastically about the CEO s actions.