15 ms·

The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

323 points by memorable 5y ago

pm90 5y ago
I don’t find anything wrong with being addicted to getting things done if the productivity gains are shared amongst the labor force. Specifically, increase in productivity can be used to eg shorten the workweek even further and demand protections against work encroachment on personal life. I see that this is happening with some companies embracing 4 day workweeks, others adopting remote from anywhere etc. We need to accelerate this trend, possibly enshrine them in labor law. To be honest, the greediness of the managerial/investor class is kinda dumb. I keep thinking about how Amazon/Starbucks could have worked with their employees rather than exploiting and harassing them so relentlessly that now the labor movement is growing rapidly to their detriment. It was really stupid to think they could get away with being shitty forever. Incentive structures should be created that don’t bias so heavily towards the short term.
- jerojero 5y ago
  I don't think they ever thought they could "get away with it forever", it's more like: we have an opportunity to make a lot of money now before people get sick of it and legislation is pushed. That's how big businesses operate, they will always push the line because it is most profitable in the short term. The long term for them is made up of ups and downs on an upwards curve, they push the line (up) get pushed down (down) but hopefully they are still a little above where they started. And so on. Greediness is not a flaw of the system, it is a core value of it.
  - notshift 5y ago
    Nah, I can come up with countless examples of companies making decisions to maximize their market cap over the next 0-2 years, that are obviously going to have a huge negative impact over the next 5-10 years (a much greater negative impact than was gained in the short term). Serious long term thinking by those running companies (on the time-scale of 7-10+ years) is extraordinarily rare and represents a massive competitive advantage for those who actually do it (almost no one). Companies do not adequately select for or reward long term thinking behavior by CEOs and upper management. Mostly you only see this coming from company founders who actually have enough of a stake and political capital to make doing so viable.
    - literallyWTF 4y ago
      Pretty much agree with you. Countless stories of how Amazon tears their workers apart has literally made me unwilling to _ever_ work for them. Imagine if they were so goddamn ruthless!
    - refurb 4y ago
      I’d love to hear some examples since predicting the future isn’t easy. But regardless, it’s impossible for a business to focus entirely on the long-term. Why? There are short terms costs that have to be paid as well. So there has to be a trade off “if we do X we can keep the lights on and people employed while we work at Y which pays off in 10 years”. Private companies typically have it a bit easier since they don’t worry about stock price, but I’ve seen plenty of private companies make stupid decisions too. At least stupid in hindsight, but not stupid at the time they were made.
  - hn_version_0023 4y ago
    Greediness is a flaw. Acquiring more than you need or deserve is at the root of what’s wrong with this world, our societies, etc. Greed is a vice: it’s depraved and immoral. If you’re religious, it’s a venial sin! If greed becomes too commonplace in a persons life, it could even become a mortal sin. My point is this: greed is a flaw, and not a small one. To frame it otherwise speaks to exactly the type of corruption we’ve become numb to.
    - jseban 4y ago
      But isn't greed a reflection of the asymmetrical reproduction system that serves for natural selection as evolution of the species?
      - hn_version_0023 4y ago
        Does the reflection of a natural process excuse behavior that’s wrong? Do we simply throw up our hands and say “boy nature sure is a bitch, a shame we’re powerless to do anything about it?” No, I think not. Rising above our base nature is a task all humans should engage in. I’ll admit it seems that the ideals of Enlightenment are dying out, but surely we must fight against that with every ounce of our will, lest we descend back into another dark age?
        jseban 4y ago
        I agree with you here in general, and I think this is part of the definition of civilisation. But I still think the way it's phrased in the parent is wrong, that it's a "flaw" and "what's wrong with society", if it's actually a function of nature. I think it's still important to acknowledge what is part of our nature, and even if we can improve on that, it probably doesn't work to go too much against it, or deny it.
        hn_version_0023 4y ago
        I suppose it’s worth noting that my phrasing was a direct response to “greediness isn’t a flaw of the system, it’s a core value” I do think it’s a flaw. Its an overreach to say it’s the singular cause of all the worlds problems, but boy does it seem like it sometimes! Now I’m left wondering something I’m sure philosophers have grappled with better than I can: can a creature’s inherent nature be wrong? Are right and wrong even applicable to nature? Seems like it’s more that it just is and we can only apply our morality after the fact. I guess that means I take your point :)
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Great point. A few Starbucks in my area have unionized, and one particularly busy location just started the process. They’re doing the dickhead corporate thing, closing the store for a day or two at a time, etc. It’s nuts - the management is so emotional they are throwing money away. Habits change; if Starbucks isn’t reliably open, many substitutes exist.
- jseban 4y ago
  > Specifically, increase in productivity can be used to eg shorten the workweek even further and demand protections against work encroachment on personal life. I see that this is happening with some companies embracing 4 day workweeks, others adopting remote from anywhere etc. We need to accelerate this trend, possibly enshrine them in labor law. Yes can we please just get this done already, it would solve a whole heap of issues. I think it's almost comical how it's brewing under the surface but no political party wants to touch it, seems like it would be a pretty sure way of winning the next election, what's the hold up
esaym 5y ago
>Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when something’s about to break. There's an experience that lives rent free in my mind as well. As a teen, I worked at a bait shop that was on the Gulf coast. They sold mostly live shrimp but had other live stuff for bait as well. Salt water was pumped from the nearby innercoastal canal by two heavy duty swimming pool type pumps. From there, the water was split through several different pipes and manifolds and dumped into the live bait tanks. The overflow ran back out to the canal. There was this one customer I was getting bait for and he meandered around the bait room randomly (customers weren't supposed to be in there but I didn't feel like saying anything). He ended up way in the back of the room where the pumps were and I could see him touching them. Figuring I needed to get him out of there politely I walked back there pretending to check on stuff. Before I could say anything, he says "You will need a new pump soon". Um "What?" I say. "Put your hand on this one". So I did, I felt nothing. "Now put your hand on this one". And that one had a really high frequency vibration coming through it. "The bearings are shot, it will lock up soon". I was impressed. Granted for two more years I'd regularly "feel" the pump again, the vibrations were slowly getting worse. But then a hurricane came and flooded everything anyway so we got new stuff. But still, anytime I see a high RPM electric motor running, I got to "give it a feel".
- pm90 5y ago
  People who work closely with machines develop an instinct for how it operates. If you think about it, all mechanical machines are state machines (in the CS sense) and if you’ve had to work with and fix shit long enough your brain commits those experiences to long term memory.
  - fnbr 4y ago
    This is really obvious if you ride bicycles & do your own maintenance. You can quickly identify weird sounds/patterns with problems, because it’s such a simple machine.
  - ta988 5y ago
    Or more likely state machines are a highly simplified view of reality... Working with machines is a combination of probabilities, intuitions, experience, chance... Most work with machines is not 1 or 0.
patrck 5y ago
> Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when something’s about to break. lol. I run IT. Nobody at my workplace knows what I do. Contrary to TFA, my automation gains accrue to myself and my company. It seems difficult to see this as anything but win-win. I get respite and time to think, and my company gets improved responses and uptime.
- orangepurple 5y ago
  It's an incredibly impressive phenomenon considering the Internet has been popular for 20-30 years now and you would think people have a clue.
  - patrck 5y ago
    A couple reasons maybe: Specialization means everyone's chasing their own frontiers in their companies, which leads to less toe-stepping? "Everyone knows" IT is complex. So as long as things are working, there's no real impetus for other people in the company to sully their shirtsleeves.
endisneigh 5y ago
I used to slave away hanging dry wall (lol child labor laws), and then worked as a waiter. Now I work in big tech, and let me tell you the amount of people slacking off during work is incredible. Not that they necessarily should be working themselves to death, but with respect to the article, there's a lot of low hanging fruit. Wall St. is a sort of special type of pathology due to the sheer amount of high frequency, arbitrary deadlines that must be met. What's worse is that the work is incredibly repetitive and boring. A buddy at GS showed me what they did and it's incredibly dry. Literally Excel docs, pivot tables, slide decks. It's not even creative. Ironically they recruit top tier students (well, as much these days, but still) from Harvard, Stanford, etc. You can tell they're just putting in the work to eventually go work at a Hedge Fund or whatever. There's certainly diminishing returns, but I'd say the average engineer at Big Tech has not reached that point. That being said, it's hard to care when said companies are making 5-12X your salary in profit, and projects keep getting shuttered and requirements are changing and there's a bunch of delays due to bureaucracy, lol. In some ways I actually think it's better if everyone is lazy as it quickly reveals what's important. The problem with everyone acting busy is that it can be hard to tease out what's meaningful.
- ftlio 5y ago
  I worked in construction/manufacturing as labor, then in a CNC engineering capacity, then as middle management, then at a vendor for manufacturing as a software engineer. All were progressively less work, but my god consumer tech isn’t even close. The people working the hardest seem to be the most keen on useless bureaucracy and bridges to nowhere somehow. I’ll never go near it again. I also don’t think I’ll ever not be adjacent to manufacturing & construction again. “Tech” people are insane.
  - jolux 5y ago
    Everywhere is a bit different and companies whose primary product is itself software tend to be a bit more different as well.
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    I'm interested to know why somebody who's sworn off the tech world is reading HN. I don't blame you at all, by the way. Tech is insane! Just curious why you're haunting HN, though!
armchairhacker 5y ago
Work smarter not harder. And part of working smarter is understanding that you can't work too much or at every opportunity or you're efficiency will be shot. It's why people who work 60+ hour weeks seemingly get the same or less done than people who work 35-hour weeks. Your brain processes information and is "brainstorming" while you're sleeping, and I imagine it does this while you're on vacation or taking a walk as well. Trying to "maximize" productivity is perfectionism, and as the author points out, perfectionism has diminishing returns. You should definitely try to look for ways to be more productive. But don't stress about it, because, well, stress hurts productivity.
Guthur 5y ago
"made possible, at least for white men, by the middle-class security of the post-war period" Typical matriarchy, always men working as a secret cabal. How is it possible to take this stuff seriously with such unsubstantiated nonsense. For me I'll as soon a possible take myself my own and check out. Because we all have fears ,surprise surprise, and my greatest fear is this matriarchal narrative and what it means for my sons.
- weakfish 5y ago
  What?
churchill 5y ago
29athrowaway 5y ago
Stress reduces cognitive ability. Lack of sleep reduces cognitive ability. Thinking less, working more is a shitty way to live and make a living.
ulisesrmzroche 5y ago
My theory is that the subconscious works so well as a database so that's why every to-do list gets abandoned. You're better off just trusting your gut and playing things by ear since information, and even your own motivations, change constantly. I've liked personal wikis a lot more than GTD-like stuff.
natmaka 5y ago
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31285302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31285302
oxff 4y ago
You need to be slacking off in company hours. You need to do non-work tasks when you work. You need to be maximizing ROI for your employer. Hired for 6 hours per day? Do 1 hour of work. Read HackerNews rest of the five hours.
- dunefox 4y ago
  Be a man.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
Amusingly enough as I read this is second ranked on HN front page, the highest ranked is Why do you waste so much time on the internet? https://zan.bearblog.dev/why-i-waste-time/ https://zan.bearblog.dev/why-i-waste-time/
j7ake 4y ago
Diminishing returns on productivity is obvious (eg working 80 hours a week outputs productivity somewhere between 1 to 2 times the productivity of 40 hours a week). However, rewards for work is also highly nonlinear, and usually rank based. For example, Usain Bolt is not twice as fast as the second fastest runner but Bolt is rewarded many multiples more than the second fastest runner. What is rational is to think of the payoff or reward space, and think how even a tiny incremental increase in productivity (which compounds) can result in disproportionately large payoffs.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  Olympics is an extremely atypical competition. Cooperative culture amongst humans is why we are where we are technologically. Without the spirit of collaboration, we have no MRIs and modern medicine, no transistors and semiconductors, no airplanes and bridges. I wish HN wasn’t so damn depressing. Reading some of cynical stuff here is sometimes harmful for my own mental health.
  - j7ake 4y ago
    Maybe I’ll give a tech related example instead. I sometimes browse local shops websites to buy products, but if the page loads too slowly or there are some hiccups, I tend to quickly search on Amazon to see if I can buy with a single click. The total amount of time spent shopping at local website may be only a tiny bit more than if I browsed Amazon, but the improved experience at Amazon is enough to tilt my spending away from local websites. Amazon probably spends multi millions to shave off fractions of seconds off their page loads, and the rewards pay off handsomely.
    - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
      Which works until Amazon becomes flooded with second rate product sources from Alibaba boosted by fake reviews, and a "job" means back-breaking work in a warehouse, or a precarious delivery gig with no security. This society only operates because a lot of people don't care to understand how it really works. You get your trinkets more quickly, but the negative externalities for others are huge and damaging. And there's a good chance that sooner or later those negatives will affect you too. Meanwhile the lift from increased efficiency is often temporary anyway.
noduerme 4y ago
Funny. I just had this conversation about ennui, probably not an original one, with a colleague who told me she wrote a thesis on ennui in college: Why did George Jetson go to work every day? Was it just to have a reason get away from his family? Wasn't the goal of that society that no one had to work, and everyone could be creative and leisureful all the time? Did George want to buy a newer robot? Was he cheating on Jane? What's going to happen to everyone when there's a universal basic income and nothing to do but doomscroll... are they really going to become artists?
- dymk 4y ago
  I like the Culture series take on post scarcity societies. Sure, the super AI ship could build and maintain and plan everything, but what’s the point in that if all the humans are bored to tears?
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    I like that they have the ability to achieve immortality using a variety of means, but barely anyone avails themselves of that. After hundreds of years of life they’re just done.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      After hundreds of years, every single thing you see or hear reminds you of something embarrassing or shameful you once did.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    Orson Scott Card had that whole "Ships of Earth" cycle where the ancients built an AI in the sky that could distract people every time they thought of developing certain technologies. So people went around trading camels and building empires but anytime they thought about nuclear power, for instance, they just suddenly lost their train of thought. I guess one way to guarantee a certain degree of personal value in human lives is to create insurmountable obstacles, but then once you know they're insurmountable that sorta takes away the fun.
manholio 4y ago
There is a fundamental misunderstanding in this piece about what the real problem is. Productivity and automation are great, fundamental things that fully transformed the human condition for the better. The office and factory automation mentioned are just the latest steps in a technological journey that took people out of the caves and into flying machines, allowing even the poorest in our societies luxuries that not even kings dreamt of. I simply don't care if your CNC machine-sitting job bores you and it's making you anxious about your skills as lathe worker: quit that job and do something you like, and let some unemployed off the streets operate the CNC. Regardless of who is doing the sitting, that machine will produce so much more parts, cheaper and better that one skilled worker could. And herein lies the problem. The real problem. The lathe worker turned CNC-sitter or the skilled typist inhaling copier ozone aren't oppressed by "productivity culture", whatever that may mean, they are oppressed by a highly polarized jobs market that no longer offers them alternatives at their professional level. So they are forced to accept dumbed down machine work that anyone could do, for less pay. It's as if a great chasm has opened: you are either a highly skilled professional in some un-automated market that can still wield power against capital due to your very rarefied skill-set, or some version of the manual labor monkey pushing buttons for a near minimum wage. Automation has transformed economy and greatly improved our standards of living, but has also robed workers of their human capital, the only leverage they traditionally had against financial capital. The resurgence of unions is just a simptom of workers grasping for some form of leverage in a labor market that turned against them. The dramatic rise in inequality is another. What machines we are pushing against are the limits of human society to create and use high creativity jobs, the biological limits of humans to adapt to the intelectual requirements of such jobs, and the strongly ossified structure of academia and class that fundamentally prevent most people from even entering social groups that beget such jobs.
noduerme 4y ago
>> We have to collectively reject the engine of endless growth, and the aspiration for infinite productivity, before it breaks us all. Or, y'know, not be so fragile. My generation, GenX, didn't get to where we are as semi-successful slackers by whining, we did it by actually just arranging our own gigs and either accepting or rejecting the abuse of the capitalist system on a case-by-case basis. Appealing to the collective "but we're all so fucked, we're the first generation to have lower economic prospects than our parents" was fun for movie plots, but not something that would make us quit a job. It took two things to reach this point of maximalist outrage at the unfairness of working: 1. Boomers raised their kids to be snowflakes, 2. Then Boomers got old and started using their kids as beasts of burden. That's really all there is to it. Obviously, if you're stuck in that situation you want to tear down the whole system, but what do you think would happen if "we" rejected limitless growth and endless productivity? Nothing in this piece suggests a replacement for the drive to work, or the virtues of working and earning. Nothing in it contemplates what a society without those virtues might look like or what meaningful thing would replace the continuity of work in peoples' lives. You want to hang out with GenX'ers? Okay, here's me at 22: DUDE I DON'T WANT TO WAKE UP AND GO TO WORK. AGAIN. Here's me at 40: Thank God I kept going to work. You'll feel the same way. Hopefully. If our economic and political system manages to digest the double demographic humps of an elderly, uptight conservative group of selfish fools and their entitled, progressive and whining children.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Advising someone not to be fragile is a lot like telling them not to be so sick, or poor, or black, or gay, or male, or whatever. It's blaming the victim. It denies the problem. And it only works to the point it doesn't. Someday, someone you care about may wake up and discover that what was once possible is no longer. And that person might very well be you.
- jseban 4y ago
  > Nothing in this piece suggests a replacement for the drive to work, or the virtues of working and earning. Nothing in it contemplates what a society without those virtues might look like or what meaningful thing would replace the continuity of work in peoples' lives. Yeah and nothing acknowledges that this "dehumanising" exploitation also happens to be the source of all the nice things that we want and need, or admit that we will have to make sacrifices, and where and how these sacrifices should be made. Always throwing out the bathwater and just pretending that there is no baby. The hard thing about any political change is that change will always worsen things for some people, in some situations, there is no such thing as 100% positive change. And getting those people on board to actually make the sacrifices is the actual challenge, and in this case the author could at least bother to suggest how he/she would be willing to sacrifice to make up for these productivity losses, and/or how society will cut back on the rewards. I think we should keep the efficiency and use tech to its fullest potential, but just shorten the working hours, as a means to share the productivity gains.
zhdc1 4y ago
Research is starting to suggest that productivity gains are linear instead of exponential. So, whenever there is a shift, such as industrialization, that facilitates productivity growth, the bulk of the gains compared against economic growth will come early on and comparatively diminish over time. It’s not that productivity growth declines, but that we’re comparing something that grows linearly (productivity) with something that grows exponentially (GDP).
nathias 4y ago
productivity has a creativiy cost
vivegi 4y ago
Suppose we had a shop that produced widgets and it took tasks A, B and C to complete a widget. If the production standards were: it takes 5 minutes per widget for task A, 10 minutes per widget for task B and 5 minutes per widget for task C and we had three workers, worker-a assigned to task A, worker-b assigned to task B and worker-c assigned to task C and all of them met the production standards, we would still have waste and inefficiency in the overall system. Here's why. Task B is the bottleneck and one could never 'ship' on average on any given day, any more than what worker-B would be able to produce. Worker-a would be piling a lot of 'intermediate work product' (or work-in-process) for worker-B while worker-c may be starving for work and will likely be idle. Sure there would be a lot of busy work for workers a and b and a lot of work-in-process, but not much changes in terms of volume of widgets shipped to customers. If the goal was to achieve the lower cost of production for the same volume, one approach might be to remove worker-c and cross-train worker-a in task C in addition to task A. Now, worker-a can alternate between task A and task C (50% of time between the two tasks) and we would produce the same quantity of widgets as three people were producing earlier. If the goal was to achieve higher volume at the same (labor) cost of production, one approach might be to train worker's b and c in task B and train worker a in tasks A and C. So, the deployment is {a} -> {A, C} and {b,c} -> {B}. Now, all three workers are occupied the entire time and the rate of production for task B is now doubled i.e, the shop doubles its throughput thereby increasing revenues, profits etc., In either case, the pursuit of productivity in itself is not a bad thing. If the firm failed to choose the suitable rational option, in the long run, it would have higher costs of production (and hence eroding margins over time) or a higher price that customers abhor (and hence losing market share), considering other things constant. This is a management issue. When management prefers the status quo, you have dysfunctions such as worker-a potentially complaining about the effort vs. reward when (s)he is paid the same reward as worker-c ("they have an easier job while I slog my ass off!") or when management doesn't explain the change (i.e., cross-training and the benefits to the company, customers and workers) properly and faces resistance to the change ("what's in it for me?").
reader_x 4y ago
The book Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke imagined a world where technological advances allowed more free time — and for a few centuries humans became artists, poets, etc. The book fascinated me as a kid; as an adult I notice I tend to keep working when I objectively know I could log off and sculpt or paint instead. On a personal level, it’s hard to switch mental gears. Inertia happens in society too. I suspect we generally undervalue our finite actual and potential free time. Unlike in Childhood’s End, though, long term stability is not yet assured for us. It would probably take centuries (as Clarke implied) of stable abundance for societies to adjust and establish new norms based on it.
mark_l_watson 4y ago
Great article that captures a major pain point, especially on dehumanization. In mindfulness practice, we learn that sometimes “being, rather than doing” is important. As a Knowledge worker/AI practitioner, I consider myself so very, very lucky to be able to have a surfeit of time for quiet reflection because quiet times are important for the creative process. Income inequality is getting the attention it deserves, but there is also an inequality in having time to enjoy human centered activities. I have young people in my life who have great careers, financially, but at least to me don’t seem to have enough quality down time.
m0llusk 4y ago
> Capitalism does not care ... This is sloppy and wrong. A good counter example is child labor. That used to be common and fully integrated into corporate operations. Then it was made illegal and most people believe that economic systems work better without child labor. What appeared to be a simple optimization took away childhood happiness and opportunities for education. The problem we have is not some nebulous struggle with Capitalism as it is deciding on appropriate boundaries and regulations for work. Benefit corporations are keenly competitive Capitalist entities yet their primary goal is to enrich workers and customers alike. Employee ownership has well demonstrated benefits not only for workers but also managers and investors. What we need to do is figure out where our current systems go to far and need to favor human needs first.
mmarq 4y ago
> Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when something’s about to break. Quite the opposite, people used to be way more replaceable in the 80s than today. The real issue with the latest technology developments (say from the 80s) is that they require more and more cognitive skills to be adopted, which makes it harder to replace a worker while preventing a larger and larger part of the population from enjoying these productivity gains. This explains a large part of income inequality.
robertlagrant 4y ago
This article points out some interesting things, but doesn't seem to get the cause of them right. Employees don't deserve employment, just as companies don't deserve loyalty. If a machine comes along and makes your per-task work much easier, you will be expected to accomplish more tasks. If you don't, then your company's competitors will win. Companies don't exist for their owners, or their employees. They exist for their customers, and if you can finish more tasks for the same effort your customers will have better lives. And that's what propels us forwards: each company (or winning company in each segment) makes our lives better, or simpler, or easier.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  > Employees don't deserve employment, just as companies don't deserve loyalty. On a re-read, this sounds harsher than I meant. My central point is around how companies don't primarily exist to employ, but to provide something to customers, and not understanding that could lead people to make bad decisions about how much they should count on their employer.

323 points by memorable 5y ago

pm90 5y ago

I don’t find anything wrong with being addicted to getting things done if the productivity gains are shared amongst the labor force. Specifically, increase in productivity can be used to eg shorten the workweek even further and demand protections against work encroachment on personal life. I see that this is happening with some companies embracing 4 day workweeks, others adopting remote from anywhere etc. We need to accelerate this trend, possibly enshrine them in labor law. To be honest, the greediness of the managerial/investor class is kinda dumb. I keep thinking about how Amazon/Starbucks could have worked with their employees rather than exploiting and harassing them so relentlessly that now the labor movement is growing rapidly to their detriment. It was really stupid to think they could get away with being shitty forever. Incentive structures should be created that don’t bias so heavily towards the short term.

jerojero 5y ago
I don't think they ever thought they could "get away with it forever", it's more like: we have an opportunity to make a lot of money now before people get sick of it and legislation is pushed. That's how big businesses operate, they will always push the line because it is most profitable in the short term. The long term for them is made up of ups and downs on an upwards curve, they push the line (up) get pushed down (down) but hopefully they are still a little above where they started. And so on. Greediness is not a flaw of the system, it is a core value of it.
- notshift 5y ago
  Nah, I can come up with countless examples of companies making decisions to maximize their market cap over the next 0-2 years, that are obviously going to have a huge negative impact over the next 5-10 years (a much greater negative impact than was gained in the short term). Serious long term thinking by those running companies (on the time-scale of 7-10+ years) is extraordinarily rare and represents a massive competitive advantage for those who actually do it (almost no one). Companies do not adequately select for or reward long term thinking behavior by CEOs and upper management. Mostly you only see this coming from company founders who actually have enough of a stake and political capital to make doing so viable.
  - literallyWTF 4y ago
    Pretty much agree with you. Countless stories of how Amazon tears their workers apart has literally made me unwilling to _ever_ work for them. Imagine if they were so goddamn ruthless!
  - refurb 4y ago
    I’d love to hear some examples since predicting the future isn’t easy. But regardless, it’s impossible for a business to focus entirely on the long-term. Why? There are short terms costs that have to be paid as well. So there has to be a trade off “if we do X we can keep the lights on and people employed while we work at Y which pays off in 10 years”. Private companies typically have it a bit easier since they don’t worry about stock price, but I’ve seen plenty of private companies make stupid decisions too. At least stupid in hindsight, but not stupid at the time they were made.
- hn_version_0023 4y ago
  Greediness is a flaw. Acquiring more than you need or deserve is at the root of what’s wrong with this world, our societies, etc. Greed is a vice: it’s depraved and immoral. If you’re religious, it’s a venial sin! If greed becomes too commonplace in a persons life, it could even become a mortal sin. My point is this: greed is a flaw, and not a small one. To frame it otherwise speaks to exactly the type of corruption we’ve become numb to.
  - jseban 4y ago
    But isn't greed a reflection of the asymmetrical reproduction system that serves for natural selection as evolution of the species?
    - hn_version_0023 4y ago
      Does the reflection of a natural process excuse behavior that’s wrong? Do we simply throw up our hands and say “boy nature sure is a bitch, a shame we’re powerless to do anything about it?” No, I think not. Rising above our base nature is a task all humans should engage in. I’ll admit it seems that the ideals of Enlightenment are dying out, but surely we must fight against that with every ounce of our will, lest we descend back into another dark age?
      - jseban 4y ago
        I agree with you here in general, and I think this is part of the definition of civilisation. But I still think the way it's phrased in the parent is wrong, that it's a "flaw" and "what's wrong with society", if it's actually a function of nature. I think it's still important to acknowledge what is part of our nature, and even if we can improve on that, it probably doesn't work to go too much against it, or deny it.
        hn_version_0023 4y ago
        I suppose it’s worth noting that my phrasing was a direct response to “greediness isn’t a flaw of the system, it’s a core value” I do think it’s a flaw. Its an overreach to say it’s the singular cause of all the worlds problems, but boy does it seem like it sometimes! Now I’m left wondering something I’m sure philosophers have grappled with better than I can: can a creature’s inherent nature be wrong? Are right and wrong even applicable to nature? Seems like it’s more that it just is and we can only apply our morality after the fact. I guess that means I take your point :)
Spooky23 5y ago
Great point. A few Starbucks in my area have unionized, and one particularly busy location just started the process. They’re doing the dickhead corporate thing, closing the store for a day or two at a time, etc. It’s nuts - the management is so emotional they are throwing money away. Habits change; if Starbucks isn’t reliably open, many substitutes exist.
jseban 4y ago
> Specifically, increase in productivity can be used to eg shorten the workweek even further and demand protections against work encroachment on personal life. I see that this is happening with some companies embracing 4 day workweeks, others adopting remote from anywhere etc. We need to accelerate this trend, possibly enshrine them in labor law. Yes can we please just get this done already, it would solve a whole heap of issues. I think it's almost comical how it's brewing under the surface but no political party wants to touch it, seems like it would be a pretty sure way of winning the next election, what's the hold up

esaym 5y ago

>Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when something’s about to break. There's an experience that lives rent free in my mind as well. As a teen, I worked at a bait shop that was on the Gulf coast. They sold mostly live shrimp but had other live stuff for bait as well. Salt water was pumped from the nearby innercoastal canal by two heavy duty swimming pool type pumps. From there, the water was split through several different pipes and manifolds and dumped into the live bait tanks. The overflow ran back out to the canal. There was this one customer I was getting bait for and he meandered around the bait room randomly (customers weren't supposed to be in there but I didn't feel like saying anything). He ended up way in the back of the room where the pumps were and I could see him touching them. Figuring I needed to get him out of there politely I walked back there pretending to check on stuff. Before I could say anything, he says "You will need a new pump soon". Um "What?" I say. "Put your hand on this one". So I did, I felt nothing. "Now put your hand on this one". And that one had a really high frequency vibration coming through it. "The bearings are shot, it will lock up soon". I was impressed. Granted for two more years I'd regularly "feel" the pump again, the vibrations were slowly getting worse. But then a hurricane came and flooded everything anyway so we got new stuff. But still, anytime I see a high RPM electric motor running, I got to "give it a feel".

pm90 5y ago
People who work closely with machines develop an instinct for how it operates. If you think about it, all mechanical machines are state machines (in the CS sense) and if you’ve had to work with and fix shit long enough your brain commits those experiences to long term memory.
- fnbr 4y ago
  This is really obvious if you ride bicycles & do your own maintenance. You can quickly identify weird sounds/patterns with problems, because it’s such a simple machine.
- ta988 5y ago
  Or more likely state machines are a highly simplified view of reality... Working with machines is a combination of probabilities, intuitions, experience, chance... Most work with machines is not 1 or 0.

patrck 5y ago

> Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when something’s about to break. lol. I run IT. Nobody at my workplace knows what I do. Contrary to TFA, my automation gains accrue to myself and my company. It seems difficult to see this as anything but win-win. I get respite and time to think, and my company gets improved responses and uptime.

orangepurple 5y ago
It's an incredibly impressive phenomenon considering the Internet has been popular for 20-30 years now and you would think people have a clue.
- patrck 5y ago
  A couple reasons maybe: Specialization means everyone's chasing their own frontiers in their companies, which leads to less toe-stepping? "Everyone knows" IT is complex. So as long as things are working, there's no real impetus for other people in the company to sully their shirtsleeves.

endisneigh 5y ago

I used to slave away hanging dry wall (lol child labor laws), and then worked as a waiter. Now I work in big tech, and let me tell you the amount of people slacking off during work is incredible. Not that they necessarily should be working themselves to death, but with respect to the article, there's a lot of low hanging fruit. Wall St. is a sort of special type of pathology due to the sheer amount of high frequency, arbitrary deadlines that must be met. What's worse is that the work is incredibly repetitive and boring. A buddy at GS showed me what they did and it's incredibly dry. Literally Excel docs, pivot tables, slide decks. It's not even creative. Ironically they recruit top tier students (well, as much these days, but still) from Harvard, Stanford, etc. You can tell they're just putting in the work to eventually go work at a Hedge Fund or whatever. There's certainly diminishing returns, but I'd say the average engineer at Big Tech has not reached that point. That being said, it's hard to care when said companies are making 5-12X your salary in profit, and projects keep getting shuttered and requirements are changing and there's a bunch of delays due to bureaucracy, lol. In some ways I actually think it's better if everyone is lazy as it quickly reveals what's important. The problem with everyone acting busy is that it can be hard to tease out what's meaningful.

ftlio 5y ago
I worked in construction/manufacturing as labor, then in a CNC engineering capacity, then as middle management, then at a vendor for manufacturing as a software engineer. All were progressively less work, but my god consumer tech isn’t even close. The people working the hardest seem to be the most keen on useless bureaucracy and bridges to nowhere somehow. I’ll never go near it again. I also don’t think I’ll ever not be adjacent to manufacturing & construction again. “Tech” people are insane.
- jolux 5y ago
  Everywhere is a bit different and companies whose primary product is itself software tend to be a bit more different as well.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  I'm interested to know why somebody who's sworn off the tech world is reading HN. I don't blame you at all, by the way. Tech is insane! Just curious why you're haunting HN, though!

armchairhacker 5y ago

Work smarter not harder. And part of working smarter is understanding that you can't work too much or at every opportunity or you're efficiency will be shot. It's why people who work 60+ hour weeks seemingly get the same or less done than people who work 35-hour weeks. Your brain processes information and is "brainstorming" while you're sleeping, and I imagine it does this while you're on vacation or taking a walk as well. Trying to "maximize" productivity is perfectionism, and as the author points out, perfectionism has diminishing returns. You should definitely try to look for ways to be more productive. But don't stress about it, because, well, stress hurts productivity.

Guthur 5y ago

"made possible, at least for white men, by the middle-class security of the post-war period" Typical matriarchy, always men working as a secret cabal. How is it possible to take this stuff seriously with such unsubstantiated nonsense. For me I'll as soon a possible take myself my own and check out. Because we all have fears ,surprise surprise, and my greatest fear is this matriarchal narrative and what it means for my sons.

weakfish 5y ago
What?

churchill 5y ago

29athrowaway 5y ago

Stress reduces cognitive ability. Lack of sleep reduces cognitive ability. Thinking less, working more is a shitty way to live and make a living.

ulisesrmzroche 5y ago

My theory is that the subconscious works so well as a database so that's why every to-do list gets abandoned. You're better off just trusting your gut and playing things by ear since information, and even your own motivations, change constantly. I've liked personal wikis a lot more than GTD-like stuff.

natmaka 5y ago

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31285302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31285302

oxff 4y ago

You need to be slacking off in company hours. You need to do non-work tasks when you work. You need to be maximizing ROI for your employer. Hired for 6 hours per day? Do 1 hour of work. Read HackerNews rest of the five hours.

dunefox 4y ago
Be a man.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

Amusingly enough as I read this is second ranked on HN front page, the highest ranked is Why do you waste so much time on the internet? https://zan.bearblog.dev/why-i-waste-time/ https://zan.bearblog.dev/why-i-waste-time/

j7ake 4y ago

Diminishing returns on productivity is obvious (eg working 80 hours a week outputs productivity somewhere between 1 to 2 times the productivity of 40 hours a week). However, rewards for work is also highly nonlinear, and usually rank based. For example, Usain Bolt is not twice as fast as the second fastest runner but Bolt is rewarded many multiples more than the second fastest runner. What is rational is to think of the payoff or reward space, and think how even a tiny incremental increase in productivity (which compounds) can result in disproportionately large payoffs.

systemvoltage 4y ago
Olympics is an extremely atypical competition. Cooperative culture amongst humans is why we are where we are technologically. Without the spirit of collaboration, we have no MRIs and modern medicine, no transistors and semiconductors, no airplanes and bridges. I wish HN wasn’t so damn depressing. Reading some of cynical stuff here is sometimes harmful for my own mental health.
- j7ake 4y ago
  Maybe I’ll give a tech related example instead. I sometimes browse local shops websites to buy products, but if the page loads too slowly or there are some hiccups, I tend to quickly search on Amazon to see if I can buy with a single click. The total amount of time spent shopping at local website may be only a tiny bit more than if I browsed Amazon, but the improved experience at Amazon is enough to tilt my spending away from local websites. Amazon probably spends multi millions to shave off fractions of seconds off their page loads, and the rewards pay off handsomely.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    Which works until Amazon becomes flooded with second rate product sources from Alibaba boosted by fake reviews, and a "job" means back-breaking work in a warehouse, or a precarious delivery gig with no security. This society only operates because a lot of people don't care to understand how it really works. You get your trinkets more quickly, but the negative externalities for others are huge and damaging. And there's a good chance that sooner or later those negatives will affect you too. Meanwhile the lift from increased efficiency is often temporary anyway.

noduerme 4y ago

Funny. I just had this conversation about ennui, probably not an original one, with a colleague who told me she wrote a thesis on ennui in college: Why did George Jetson go to work every day? Was it just to have a reason get away from his family? Wasn't the goal of that society that no one had to work, and everyone could be creative and leisureful all the time? Did George want to buy a newer robot? Was he cheating on Jane? What's going to happen to everyone when there's a universal basic income and nothing to do but doomscroll... are they really going to become artists?

dymk 4y ago
I like the Culture series take on post scarcity societies. Sure, the super AI ship could build and maintain and plan everything, but what’s the point in that if all the humans are bored to tears?
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I like that they have the ability to achieve immortality using a variety of means, but barely anyone avails themselves of that. After hundreds of years of life they’re just done.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    After hundreds of years, every single thing you see or hear reminds you of something embarrassing or shameful you once did.
- noduerme 4y ago
  Orson Scott Card had that whole "Ships of Earth" cycle where the ancients built an AI in the sky that could distract people every time they thought of developing certain technologies. So people went around trading camels and building empires but anytime they thought about nuclear power, for instance, they just suddenly lost their train of thought. I guess one way to guarantee a certain degree of personal value in human lives is to create insurmountable obstacles, but then once you know they're insurmountable that sorta takes away the fun.

manholio 4y ago

There is a fundamental misunderstanding in this piece about what the real problem is. Productivity and automation are great, fundamental things that fully transformed the human condition for the better. The office and factory automation mentioned are just the latest steps in a technological journey that took people out of the caves and into flying machines, allowing even the poorest in our societies luxuries that not even kings dreamt of. I simply don't care if your CNC machine-sitting job bores you and it's making you anxious about your skills as lathe worker: quit that job and do something you like, and let some unemployed off the streets operate the CNC. Regardless of who is doing the sitting, that machine will produce so much more parts, cheaper and better that one skilled worker could. And herein lies the problem. The real problem. The lathe worker turned CNC-sitter or the skilled typist inhaling copier ozone aren't oppressed by "productivity culture", whatever that may mean, they are oppressed by a highly polarized jobs market that no longer offers them alternatives at their professional level. So they are forced to accept dumbed down machine work that anyone could do, for less pay. It's as if a great chasm has opened: you are either a highly skilled professional in some un-automated market that can still wield power against capital due to your very rarefied skill-set, or some version of the manual labor monkey pushing buttons for a near minimum wage. Automation has transformed economy and greatly improved our standards of living, but has also robed workers of their human capital, the only leverage they traditionally had against financial capital. The resurgence of unions is just a simptom of workers grasping for some form of leverage in a labor market that turned against them. The dramatic rise in inequality is another. What machines we are pushing against are the limits of human society to create and use high creativity jobs, the biological limits of humans to adapt to the intelectual requirements of such jobs, and the strongly ossified structure of academia and class that fundamentally prevent most people from even entering social groups that beget such jobs.

noduerme 4y ago

>> We have to collectively reject the engine of endless growth, and the aspiration for infinite productivity, before it breaks us all. Or, y'know, not be so fragile. My generation, GenX, didn't get to where we are as semi-successful slackers by whining, we did it by actually just arranging our own gigs and either accepting or rejecting the abuse of the capitalist system on a case-by-case basis. Appealing to the collective "but we're all so fucked, we're the first generation to have lower economic prospects than our parents" was fun for movie plots, but not something that would make us quit a job. It took two things to reach this point of maximalist outrage at the unfairness of working: 1. Boomers raised their kids to be snowflakes, 2. Then Boomers got old and started using their kids as beasts of burden. That's really all there is to it. Obviously, if you're stuck in that situation you want to tear down the whole system, but what do you think would happen if "we" rejected limitless growth and endless productivity? Nothing in this piece suggests a replacement for the drive to work, or the virtues of working and earning. Nothing in it contemplates what a society without those virtues might look like or what meaningful thing would replace the continuity of work in peoples' lives. You want to hang out with GenX'ers? Okay, here's me at 22: DUDE I DON'T WANT TO WAKE UP AND GO TO WORK. AGAIN. Here's me at 40: Thank God I kept going to work. You'll feel the same way. Hopefully. If our economic and political system manages to digest the double demographic humps of an elderly, uptight conservative group of selfish fools and their entitled, progressive and whining children.

dredmorbius 4y ago
Advising someone not to be fragile is a lot like telling them not to be so sick, or poor, or black, or gay, or male, or whatever. It's blaming the victim. It denies the problem. And it only works to the point it doesn't. Someday, someone you care about may wake up and discover that what was once possible is no longer. And that person might very well be you.
jseban 4y ago
> Nothing in this piece suggests a replacement for the drive to work, or the virtues of working and earning. Nothing in it contemplates what a society without those virtues might look like or what meaningful thing would replace the continuity of work in peoples' lives. Yeah and nothing acknowledges that this "dehumanising" exploitation also happens to be the source of all the nice things that we want and need, or admit that we will have to make sacrifices, and where and how these sacrifices should be made. Always throwing out the bathwater and just pretending that there is no baby. The hard thing about any political change is that change will always worsen things for some people, in some situations, there is no such thing as 100% positive change. And getting those people on board to actually make the sacrifices is the actual challenge, and in this case the author could at least bother to suggest how he/she would be willing to sacrifice to make up for these productivity losses, and/or how society will cut back on the rewards. I think we should keep the efficiency and use tech to its fullest potential, but just shorten the working hours, as a means to share the productivity gains.

zhdc1 4y ago

Research is starting to suggest that productivity gains are linear instead of exponential. So, whenever there is a shift, such as industrialization, that facilitates productivity growth, the bulk of the gains compared against economic growth will come early on and comparatively diminish over time. It’s not that productivity growth declines, but that we’re comparing something that grows linearly (productivity) with something that grows exponentially (GDP).

nathias 4y ago

productivity has a creativiy cost

vivegi 4y ago

Suppose we had a shop that produced widgets and it took tasks A, B and C to complete a widget. If the production standards were: it takes 5 minutes per widget for task A, 10 minutes per widget for task B and 5 minutes per widget for task C and we had three workers, worker-a assigned to task A, worker-b assigned to task B and worker-c assigned to task C and all of them met the production standards, we would still have waste and inefficiency in the overall system. Here's why. Task B is the bottleneck and one could never 'ship' on average on any given day, any more than what worker-B would be able to produce. Worker-a would be piling a lot of 'intermediate work product' (or work-in-process) for worker-B while worker-c may be starving for work and will likely be idle. Sure there would be a lot of busy work for workers a and b and a lot of work-in-process, but not much changes in terms of volume of widgets shipped to customers. If the goal was to achieve the lower cost of production for the same volume, one approach might be to remove worker-c and cross-train worker-a in task C in addition to task A. Now, worker-a can alternate between task A and task C (50% of time between the two tasks) and we would produce the same quantity of widgets as three people were producing earlier. If the goal was to achieve higher volume at the same (labor) cost of production, one approach might be to train worker's b and c in task B and train worker a in tasks A and C. So, the deployment is {a} -> {A, C} and {b,c} -> {B}. Now, all three workers are occupied the entire time and the rate of production for task B is now doubled i.e, the shop doubles its throughput thereby increasing revenues, profits etc., In either case, the pursuit of productivity in itself is not a bad thing. If the firm failed to choose the suitable rational option, in the long run, it would have higher costs of production (and hence eroding margins over time) or a higher price that customers abhor (and hence losing market share), considering other things constant. This is a management issue. When management prefers the status quo, you have dysfunctions such as worker-a potentially complaining about the effort vs. reward when (s)he is paid the same reward as worker-c ("they have an easier job while I slog my ass off!") or when management doesn't explain the change (i.e., cross-training and the benefits to the company, customers and workers) properly and faces resistance to the change ("what's in it for me?").

reader_x 4y ago

The book Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke imagined a world where technological advances allowed more free time — and for a few centuries humans became artists, poets, etc. The book fascinated me as a kid; as an adult I notice I tend to keep working when I objectively know I could log off and sculpt or paint instead. On a personal level, it’s hard to switch mental gears. Inertia happens in society too. I suspect we generally undervalue our finite actual and potential free time. Unlike in Childhood’s End, though, long term stability is not yet assured for us. It would probably take centuries (as Clarke implied) of stable abundance for societies to adjust and establish new norms based on it.

mark_l_watson 4y ago

Great article that captures a major pain point, especially on dehumanization. In mindfulness practice, we learn that sometimes “being, rather than doing” is important. As a Knowledge worker/AI practitioner, I consider myself so very, very lucky to be able to have a surfeit of time for quiet reflection because quiet times are important for the creative process. Income inequality is getting the attention it deserves, but there is also an inequality in having time to enjoy human centered activities. I have young people in my life who have great careers, financially, but at least to me don’t seem to have enough quality down time.

m0llusk 4y ago

> Capitalism does not care ... This is sloppy and wrong. A good counter example is child labor. That used to be common and fully integrated into corporate operations. Then it was made illegal and most people believe that economic systems work better without child labor. What appeared to be a simple optimization took away childhood happiness and opportunities for education. The problem we have is not some nebulous struggle with Capitalism as it is deciding on appropriate boundaries and regulations for work. Benefit corporations are keenly competitive Capitalist entities yet their primary goal is to enrich workers and customers alike. Employee ownership has well demonstrated benefits not only for workers but also managers and investors. What we need to do is figure out where our current systems go to far and need to favor human needs first.

mmarq 4y ago

> Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when something’s about to break. Quite the opposite, people used to be way more replaceable in the 80s than today. The real issue with the latest technology developments (say from the 80s) is that they require more and more cognitive skills to be adopted, which makes it harder to replace a worker while preventing a larger and larger part of the population from enjoying these productivity gains. This explains a large part of income inequality.

robertlagrant 4y ago

This article points out some interesting things, but doesn't seem to get the cause of them right. Employees don't deserve employment, just as companies don't deserve loyalty. If a machine comes along and makes your per-task work much easier, you will be expected to accomplish more tasks. If you don't, then your company's competitors will win. Companies don't exist for their owners, or their employees. They exist for their customers, and if you can finish more tasks for the same effort your customers will have better lives. And that's what propels us forwards: each company (or winning company in each segment) makes our lives better, or simpler, or easier.

robertlagrant 4y ago
> Employees don't deserve employment, just as companies don't deserve loyalty. On a re-read, this sounds harsher than I meant. My central point is around how companies don't primarily exist to employ, but to provide something to customers, and not understanding that could lead people to make bad decisions about how much they should count on their employer.