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The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

annehelen.substack.com

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Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#31

Post by ta988 »

pm90 wrote: post #5
esaym wrote: post #4

>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 ne…

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.

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.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#32

Post by justinlloyd »

esaym wrote: post #4

>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 ne…

There is a reason I won't listen to music or wear noise cancelling headphones in the workshop. I wear ear protection, that dulls the damaging frequencies, but I want to hear when the drill is biting or about to skip, I want to know if the table saw is struggling or if the cutter head on the router is biting a little too deep.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#33

Post by kayadera »

cameronh90 wrote: post #12
endisneigh wrote: post #8

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,…

People definitely slack off a lot in tech, but I think it's because it's a semi-creative process. Personally, I find if I've got a very clear road ahead of me with few complex decisions, I can just steam ahead, maybe for 12+ hours with few distractions. However, when it gets into the weeds, it's harder to keep going like that. Spend a little while thinking, have a break, read the latest tech news, walk around a bit,…

It's not time spent on programming that fatigues me, it's decisions made and how complex they are. I find estimating time so difficult because it's hard to tell how many complex decisions will come up.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#34

Post by JohnBooty »

civilized wrote: post #28
JohnBooty wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I work in big tech, and let me tell you the amount of people slacking off during work is incredible It's because the whole damn process of developing software in a company bigger than a garage is just a giant mess of productivity-busting bullshit all day, every day. Meetings, alerts, waiting for CI, waiting for builds to complete, whatever. There's no flow. I experience flow at my job maybe once or twice per mont…

Most of that is self-imposed and unnecessary.

Yeah and no. It's a reality at a majority of workplaces in my direct experience and in my friends/coworkers' experiences.

But, I could do a better job at seeking out workplaces where that's not the case. In that sense it's self-imposed.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#36

Post by galaxyLogic »

cameronh90 wrote: post #12
endisneigh wrote: post #8

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,…

People definitely slack off a lot in tech, but I think it's because it's a semi-creative process. Personally, I find if I've got a very clear road ahead of me with few complex decisions, I can just steam ahead, maybe for 12+ hours with few distractions. However, when it gets into the weeds, it's harder to keep going like that. Spend a little while thinking, have a break, read the latest tech news, walk around a bit,…

I have the same experience. I could go ahead and start implementing. But that means committing to a particular design. The first design that comes to your mind is typically not the best at all, why would it be. Therefore I feel hesitant to start coding it right away. Give the design-ideas some time to boil a bit in my head while perhaps focusing on something else. The better designs then typically pop up and that saves a lot of work in the future. And eliminates a lot of unnecessary technical debt.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#38

Post by ftlio »

JohnBooty wrote: post #17
ftlio wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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!

HN is still high quality content. Tech as a culture is defunct, but building stuff, and a network of builders, will never go away.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#39

Post by literallyWTF »

notshift wrote: post #6
jerojero wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 compet…

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!

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#40

Post by spoonjim »

esaym wrote: post #4

>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 ne…

There are startups today that automate this process with machine learning. They record the vibrations from your equipment and notify you when something changes or is likely to fail given historic patterns for similar equipment.
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