The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.