Here's what I've observed, as a software programmer. We were supposed to get leisure with increasing economic growth. Instead we get waste and mismanagement. T

Here's what I've observed, as a software programmer. We were supposed to get leisure with increasing economic growth. Instead we get waste and mismanagement. There's a saying that 90% of work exists to correct other work. In software, that's certainly true. 90% of the work is maintenance, communication overhead, political positioning, and just plain cleaning up messes. 90% of the work is maintenance because almost none of the work is done right the first time. We fill 8-10 hours, while little gets achieved, because we let The Business dictate terms (you have to use this language in which I could hire 50 mediocre developers tomorrow) and cause this arrangement in which most of the job is cleaning up crap. So how have we compensated for the increase in productivity? Not by working less. Not by us workers being paid more more (which would, in the long term, given them leverage). Instead, the ones in charge spend this surplus on letting workplaces get monstrously inefficient. Perversely, this isn't great for shareholders but it gives a lot of power to the executives (principal-agent problem). By making work unnecessarily unpleasant, they get status and power over people, which they can use to advance their own causes, and take the lion's share of the profits from the past 35 years of technical growth.