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> 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 w

> 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
    I hope my surgeon doesn't have your attitude. You need to both do good work and take responsibility to communicate this to your manager. If you just do good work, but don't communicate it, your manager might not know and won't reward you properly. If you don't do good work but only "perform", you lack integrity, you're not developing yourself, you're cheating your customers, and you are a drain on your employer and society.
    - allenu 5y ago
      Oh I don’t disagree with your comment about integrity. I just don’t think good work is enough in the corporate rat race. I know when I’ve done good work and I’m proud of it, and I do my best to put good effort into whatever I do, but I’m not naive enough to think that somehow that’s enough to get rewarded at work. Working for someone else is a combination of doing good work and managing expectations. Sometimes good work isn’t enough, or even needed.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      Presumably medical work is different from this type of office work.
      - OJFord 5y ago
        Perhaps most importantly/obviously in ease of measuring effectiveness, patient outcomes have a lot of other factors of course, but it seems like a better metric than 'number of closed tickets' or 'lines of code' or whatever.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      Unsurprisingly, even in medicine doctors who do better at patient communication get better reviews. And there's an entire industry of alternative medicine which is bad at proving efficacy but good at selling it to the patient ...
      - astrange 5y ago
- s5300 5y ago
  In a country with healthcare tied to employment & ever rising cost of the most basic of living, it gets hard to blame people who do whatever they have to do to get by / live
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Forget even needs. I don't blame employees for playing the game for whatever reason, as that is the game management has, though its actions/neglect, decided that it wants played.
    - chii 5y ago
      And this is why financial independence is so sought after by a lot of people - they want to stop playing this game, but without having to make sacrifices to their lifestyle.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Ironically, that financial independence comes about from investing in companies that engage in this game.
  - wyclif 5y ago
    I thought the point of Obamacare was to separate healthcare from employment, but it turns out it never succeeded in truly accomplishing that.
  - wyclif 5y ago
    You say that healthcare is tied to employment in the US. Obamacare tried to change that but failed.
    - yourapostasy 5y ago
      Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. At this point, the military axiom of taking any action at all is better than inaction seems to hold. If you want to change the status quo of American healthcare, Obamacare is better than doing nothing while waiting for healthcare Godot, even if Obamacare is the opposite direction of where you want to go. I see this a lot in our industry (and other industries) as well. People will endlessly bikeshed for a perfect solution until well past the point that "any action at all" was a better choice than continual bikeshedding. This dynamic is often used by stakeholders with a significant investment in the status quo to politically kill any change while appearing to be onboard with change.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Managers often take advantage of that attitude and when their employees start to realise that it drives away most of the satisfaction from the work. It's hard to keep that adversarial attitude at bay when that is the lifeblood of management.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >It's also possible to get satisfaction from delivering a big project, and then getting fired because obviously don't need you anymore! I have a hard time faulting people for attitudes or behaviors that are adversarial considering that the system seems to be designed to be adversarial, although I must admit I find myself unable to play those games as they seem too tiring than just trying to work hard and deliver and hope that works out.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    on the other hand now I think of some projects I was on that didn't go too well, could it be that the guys who I thought were clueless idiots that were seriously making everything we did take twice as long were actually performing work for more important people than me - the product owner who could never make a decision themselves but had to rope others into it (thus creating a paper trail of work performed) or the technical tester who had been given that job because he was tired of writing excel spreadsheets and needed more challenges and wrote many unreasonable bug reports. So while I don't fault them (as being immoral or unethical) I sure can be annoyed by them.
- watwut 5y ago
  I think winning here is more money, more interesting projects, bosses treating you better and so on. It is very material. Satisfaction from good work turns into resentment quickly when you find yourself respected less then peers.
- ttctciyf 5y ago
  Isn't the point that "win" here means "progress in one's career"? I think the comment is pointing out that promotions and salary increases depend on the perceptions of those in a position to grant them. (See also: Goodhart's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law )
- pianoben 5y ago
  I think the point is a little more general than that. You "win" by convincing people to pay you - whether it's for nothing, for regular work, or for superior work, is immaterial. This isn't a zero-sum game, at the IC level at least. Winning doesn't mean others lose. It just means you get paid. There are many roads to victory, including empty performance.
chrisdave 5y ago
Off topic but is it petty to pet peeve about the phrase "by extension"? As far as I can tell it's just a better-sounding way to say "so I'm going to assume".
rapind 5y ago
Thing is, a lot of white collar jobs have always been performative. They just don’t need 6-8 man hours a day. They require very little actual production. It’s collective psychosis.
- zohch 5y ago
  Some concrete examples may be warranted.
  - blitzar 5y ago
    90% of jobs in the high density business district in the city nearest you. Unless you count browsing the internet, gossiping about karen in marketting, sitting in meetings that have no relevence to you and checking email as a daily task that requires 6 hours of work; at most there is a half days work done each day.
    - enraged_camel 5y ago
      Actually producing output is not the only way employees add value, though. The much-derided “water cooler” talk for example can be a way for cross-team pollination and build cohesion across thehahhahaha just kidding!
      - blitzar 5y ago
        I have witnessed quite a bit of cross team pollination in my time.
        Der_Einzige 5y ago
        Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
    - ctvo 5y ago
      > 90% of jobs in the high density business district in the city nearest you. Have you examined the possibility you may be ignorant to what 90% of those jobs entail? Not being able to understand their output and complexity doesn't make them performative.
ericalexander0 5y ago
Bingo. Red beads. https://youtu.be/ckBfbvOXDvU https://youtu.be/ckBfbvOXDvU
yobbo 5y ago
> beyond my boss believing it Even worse, the boss might not care what is true/false. The boss might win if she has many reports that seem to be working hard on hard problems, not achieving something measurable.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Yep. You might be 5 levels below anyone who has a genuine stake in outcomes.
sershe 5y ago
Those things are not mutually exclusive. In a non-dysfunctional team, it is much easier to impress peers and managers if you have done useful work than if you haven't. The performative/visibility side has 2 aspects - first it should guide your choice of work towards the stuff that actually matters for people paying you to do work, or the nearest proxy (your manager, skip level, etc.), i.e. it should either map to some higher level objective directly or it should help other people/teams achieve theirs. Second is the cringy part, it does help have to make it visible unless it already is; or make it more visible. Let's say another team shipped some feature, but it was only viable because I've greatly improved the perf of their dependency as part of the project. It's not directly related to their feature, and kind of obscure to almost everyone involved, but I want to make sure I'm mentioned on the org-level ship email ;) Is it performative? Sure. But it's fair and follows useful work.

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
  I hope my surgeon doesn't have your attitude. You need to both do good work and take responsibility to communicate this to your manager. If you just do good work, but don't communicate it, your manager might not know and won't reward you properly. If you don't do good work but only "perform", you lack integrity, you're not developing yourself, you're cheating your customers, and you are a drain on your employer and society.
  - allenu 5y ago
    Oh I don’t disagree with your comment about integrity. I just don’t think good work is enough in the corporate rat race. I know when I’ve done good work and I’m proud of it, and I do my best to put good effort into whatever I do, but I’m not naive enough to think that somehow that’s enough to get rewarded at work. Working for someone else is a combination of doing good work and managing expectations. Sometimes good work isn’t enough, or even needed.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Presumably medical work is different from this type of office work.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      Perhaps most importantly/obviously in ease of measuring effectiveness, patient outcomes have a lot of other factors of course, but it seems like a better metric than 'number of closed tickets' or 'lines of code' or whatever.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    Unsurprisingly, even in medicine doctors who do better at patient communication get better reviews. And there's an entire industry of alternative medicine which is bad at proving efficacy but good at selling it to the patient ...
    - astrange 5y ago
s5300 5y ago
In a country with healthcare tied to employment & ever rising cost of the most basic of living, it gets hard to blame people who do whatever they have to do to get by / live
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Forget even needs. I don't blame employees for playing the game for whatever reason, as that is the game management has, though its actions/neglect, decided that it wants played.
  - chii 5y ago
    And this is why financial independence is so sought after by a lot of people - they want to stop playing this game, but without having to make sacrifices to their lifestyle.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Ironically, that financial independence comes about from investing in companies that engage in this game.
- wyclif 5y ago
  I thought the point of Obamacare was to separate healthcare from employment, but it turns out it never succeeded in truly accomplishing that.
- wyclif 5y ago
  You say that healthcare is tied to employment in the US. Obamacare tried to change that but failed.
  - yourapostasy 5y ago
    Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. At this point, the military axiom of taking any action at all is better than inaction seems to hold. If you want to change the status quo of American healthcare, Obamacare is better than doing nothing while waiting for healthcare Godot, even if Obamacare is the opposite direction of where you want to go. I see this a lot in our industry (and other industries) as well. People will endlessly bikeshed for a perfect solution until well past the point that "any action at all" was a better choice than continual bikeshedding. This dynamic is often used by stakeholders with a significant investment in the status quo to politically kill any change while appearing to be onboard with change.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
Managers often take advantage of that attitude and when their employees start to realise that it drives away most of the satisfaction from the work. It's hard to keep that adversarial attitude at bay when that is the lifeblood of management.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>It's also possible to get satisfaction from delivering a big project, and then getting fired because obviously don't need you anymore! I have a hard time faulting people for attitudes or behaviors that are adversarial considering that the system seems to be designed to be adversarial, although I must admit I find myself unable to play those games as they seem too tiring than just trying to work hard and deliver and hope that works out.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  on the other hand now I think of some projects I was on that didn't go too well, could it be that the guys who I thought were clueless idiots that were seriously making everything we did take twice as long were actually performing work for more important people than me - the product owner who could never make a decision themselves but had to rope others into it (thus creating a paper trail of work performed) or the technical tester who had been given that job because he was tired of writing excel spreadsheets and needed more challenges and wrote many unreasonable bug reports. So while I don't fault them (as being immoral or unethical) I sure can be annoyed by them.
watwut 5y ago
I think winning here is more money, more interesting projects, bosses treating you better and so on. It is very material. Satisfaction from good work turns into resentment quickly when you find yourself respected less then peers.
ttctciyf 5y ago
Isn't the point that "win" here means "progress in one's career"? I think the comment is pointing out that promotions and salary increases depend on the perceptions of those in a position to grant them. (See also: Goodhart's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law )
pianoben 5y ago
I think the point is a little more general than that. You "win" by convincing people to pay you - whether it's for nothing, for regular work, or for superior work, is immaterial. This isn't a zero-sum game, at the IC level at least. Winning doesn't mean others lose. It just means you get paid. There are many roads to victory, including empty performance.

chrisdave 5y ago

Off topic but is it petty to pet peeve about the phrase "by extension"? As far as I can tell it's just a better-sounding way to say "so I'm going to assume".

rapind 5y ago

Thing is, a lot of white collar jobs have always been performative. They just don’t need 6-8 man hours a day. They require very little actual production. It’s collective psychosis.

zohch 5y ago
Some concrete examples may be warranted.
- blitzar 5y ago
  90% of jobs in the high density business district in the city nearest you. Unless you count browsing the internet, gossiping about karen in marketting, sitting in meetings that have no relevence to you and checking email as a daily task that requires 6 hours of work; at most there is a half days work done each day.
  - enraged_camel 5y ago
    Actually producing output is not the only way employees add value, though. The much-derided “water cooler” talk for example can be a way for cross-team pollination and build cohesion across thehahhahaha just kidding!
    - blitzar 5y ago
      I have witnessed quite a bit of cross team pollination in my time.
      - Der_Einzige 5y ago
        Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
  - ctvo 5y ago
    > 90% of jobs in the high density business district in the city nearest you. Have you examined the possibility you may be ignorant to what 90% of those jobs entail? Not being able to understand their output and complexity doesn't make them performative.

ericalexander0 5y ago

Bingo. Red beads. https://youtu.be/ckBfbvOXDvU https://youtu.be/ckBfbvOXDvU

yobbo 5y ago

> beyond my boss believing it Even worse, the boss might not care what is true/false. The boss might win if she has many reports that seem to be working hard on hard problems, not achieving something measurable.

MattGaiser 5y ago
Yep. You might be 5 levels below anyone who has a genuine stake in outcomes.

sershe 5y ago

Those things are not mutually exclusive. In a non-dysfunctional team, it is much easier to impress peers and managers if you have done useful work than if you haven't. The performative/visibility side has 2 aspects - first it should guide your choice of work towards the stuff that actually matters for people paying you to do work, or the nearest proxy (your manager, skip level, etc.), i.e. it should either map to some higher level objective directly or it should help other people/teams achieve theirs. Second is the cringy part, it does help have to make it visible unless it already is; or make it more visible. Let's say another team shipped some feature, but it was only viable because I've greatly improved the perf of their dependency as part of the project. It's not directly related to their feature, and kind of obscure to almost everyone involved, but I want to make sure I'm mentioned on the org-level ship email ;) Is it performative? Sure. But it's fair and follows useful work.