The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#41

Post by fnbr » Sat, May 07, 2022, 5:37 AM UTC

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.

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.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#42

Post by bryanrasmussen » Sat, May 07, 2022, 5:40 AM UTC

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/

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#43

Post by jseban » Sat, May 07, 2022, 5:45 AM UTC

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…

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Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#44

Post by j7ake » Sat, May 07, 2022, 5:46 AM UTC

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.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#45

Post by systemvoltage » Sat, May 07, 2022, 5:49 AM UTC

j7ake wrote: post #44

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…

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.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#46

Post by noduerme » Sat, May 07, 2022, 5:51 AM UTC

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?

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#47

Post by manholio » Sat, May 07, 2022, 5:59 AM UTC

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.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#48

Post by Jare » Sat, May 07, 2022, 6:17 AM UTC

j7ake wrote: post #44

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…

> working 80 hours a week outputs productivity somewhere between 1 to 2 times the productivity of 40 hours a week

Effort and energy spent will be somewhere between 1 to 2... but as soon as stress and exhaustion set in (which may happen fairly soon) you may find actual productivity tanking well below 1 and even into the negatives, due to all the mistakes and bad decisions you start making.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#49

Post by noduerme » Sat, May 07, 2022, 6:22 AM UTC

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.

I like this. It holds true for looking at code to some extent - what people call "code smell". But the main difference would be that failure modes in CS tend to be binary - a piece of code produces the expected result or it doesn't. And unless you do something to the environment, it doesn't wear down over time. Whereas your car's brakes don't go out all at once (hopefully), and yet it's guaranteed to happen eventually without maintenance, so a mechanic's eye is trained more toward what's currently going wrong with a known system than what might go wrong with a novel system.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#50

Post by t-3 » Sat, May 07, 2022, 6:23 AM UTC

jseban wrote: post #43

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…

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Blaming communist sympathies is unfair when wage labor offers the exact same incentives to slack, and nothing could be more capitalistic.