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The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

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Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#71

Post by refurb »

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…

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.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#72

Post by mike_hock »

a_t48 wrote: post #57
noduerme wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eventuall…

> And unless you do something to the environment, it doesn't wear down over time. Disagree here (at least in spirit?) - code smell can also point to maintainability issues - if the codebase is continually changed some code is more likely to break than others.

I've never heard/read/thought of "code smell" as anything BUT referring to maintainability issues.

When you're debugging a concrete issue and have a hunch what might be the cause, that's not a "code smell."

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#73

Post by [deleted] »

Jare wrote: post #48
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.

[deleted]

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#74

Post by b112 »

Jare wrote: post #48
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.

I think this is like machine maintenance.

Take a delivery truck. Regular maintenance detects, and prevents breakdowns during deliveries. EG, oil changes, lubing, brake pad changes, etc.

Scheduled repairs are far cheaper, and take less time than unannounced repairs.

If the truck breaks down during deliveries, the repairs are still needed, may be more severe.

It also require loads of extra work, a replacement truck must show up and offload deliveries, a tow truck dispatched, someone had to organize this, customers upset and called, etc, etc.

As you say, humans are the same. Reduced sleep and leisure time (scheduled maintenance)?

Well, it's far more work to deal with in the long run. It takes more maintenance to recover from a lack of it.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#75

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

jseban wrote: post #61
t-3 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Blaming the technology is what's unfair. You can go back in history and see the luddite movement or Marx's theory of alienation to describe exactly the same issues in the industrial revolution, do you think we should have used that to stop technological progress in 1896? Of course you always want a job that's easy and physical and natural, but you also want all the niceties of modern society. There are also many choi…

I want all the niceties of modern society to include high quality widely available single-payer health care, sane non-captured media, politicians who are responsible to voters and not to corporations and extremely rich individuals, significant social investment in education and basic research, no forced personal debt, climate stability, and no indirect incentives which reward crime as a workable path out of extreme poverty.

As you say - how hard can it be?

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#76

Post by burntoutfire »

bombcar wrote: post #52
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…

One I remember is knowing if Windows 95 was going to lockup and crash just by hearing the hard disk start to thrash - with SSDs swapping to death is silent. And with many of these the difference between a journeyman and a master is the journeyman is saying “it’s never done that” whilst the master is already running.

Macbooks are the worst, they don't even HDD led, or even "switched on" led!. Quite often, I can't tell if it's on already and coming back from sleep, or do I need to press "Power" button again. What a frustrating design.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#77

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

j7ake wrote: post #64
systemvoltage wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#78

Post by jl6 »

noduerme wrote: post #49
pm90 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eventuall…

> 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.

I think if you’re talking about CS and code you’re right - it’s a very pure and deterministic system. But if you consider software engineering at scale, you do get scenarios where failure states emerge in a gradual fashion, like the OP example of a worn mechanism. An example would be monitoring error rates on a large fleet of servers. You expect a certain background level of failures, but when the rate starts to rise you might be observing the beginning of some kind of cascading failure mode. The errors might be manageable up to a point, but it isn’t always clear when the system will tip beyond that point. Post-mortems of cloud platform outages often mention these kinds of failures, because they typically arise from complex interactions between different layers which put the system into a state which nobody anticipated.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#79

Post by caffeine »

koonsolo wrote: post #70
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…

Most studies on the topic indicate that >50 hours has https://igda.org/resources-archive/why-crunch-mode-doesnt-wo...

What’s true on average might not be true for certain individuals, and power-law mechanics might make those individuals more significant than everyone else who makes up the average.

Like imagine Elon Musk works 80 hours a week and he doesn’t suffer any negative consequence, he just becomes the most productive human ever according to the market.

And then a bunch of other people work 80 hours and they do suffer burnout and become slightly less productive than if they had worked 40 hours.

If you say “What’s the expected value of working 80 hours rather than 40?” in that scenario, it’s extremely positive, because the tiny chance you become Elon and have half the wealth in America offsets the very high probability you become a burnout who does no better than average.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#80

Post by burntoutfire »

noduerme wrote: post #46

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…

> 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?

Why not just consume media all the time? That's what most of unemployed people are doing at the moment, they aren't creating art. Besides doomscrolling, there's infinite amount of tv series and video games to consume very cheaply. In a world of abundance, more expensive passive activities, like travel, visiting restaurants etc. will also be available. Hardly anyone has the tenacity to make art for art's sake.

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