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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)

#131

Post by dopidopHN »

dymk wrote: post #51
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…

I like the Culture series take on post scarcity societies. Sure, the super AI ship could build and maintain and plan everything, but what’s the point in that if all the humans are bored to tears?

In that series we see the fringe of that society. I think only “man of games” show the every day life of the culture ?

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#132

Post by oriolid »

jseban wrote: post #56
civilized wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of that is self-imposed and unnecessary.

Yeah and by people like the person who wrote the article, which I find ironic, that the article complains about being "forced" to work efficiently robbing the work of it's social and human aspects, yet people in the comments here, and elsewhere, are complaining about literally the opposite thing: being forced to work inefficiently and suffer from these forced "human" aspects of socialisation with people they can't ch…

> Gives me the feeling that the author really tries to misuse the workplace for lifestyle, meaning, socialising etc which they really are responsible for themselves in their free time.

This gives me the feeling that you really believe that pretending to not be human during work hours makes one more productive. As far as I know it doesn't work like that even for assembly line jobs.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#133

Post by reader_x »

The book Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke imagined a world where technological advances allowed more free time — and for a few centuries humans became artists, poets, etc.

The book fascinated me as a kid; as an adult I notice I tend to keep working when I objectively know I could log off and sculpt or paint instead. On a personal level, it’s hard to switch mental gears. Inertia happens in society too.

I suspect we generally undervalue our finite actual and potential free time. Unlike in Childhood’s End, though, long term stability is not yet assured for us. It would probably take centuries (as Clarke implied) of stable abundance for societies to adjust and establish new norms based on it.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#134

Post by oriolid »

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.

Ask someone who has worked on a long-running project before CI and code reviews became common. If the choice is between slow and randomly failing CI and no CI or code review at all and mistakes getting noticed when the software is finally tested weeks or months later, I would always choose the CI. It would be nice if everyone in the team was omniscient genius who never makes mistakes, but sadly I am not one and I haven't met anyone who is yet.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#135

Post by marttt »

justinlloyd wrote: post #32
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.

Several forestry workers I know used the same argument: while working with a brush cutter, they prefer not to use a FM headset because it would distract them away from also hearing what the machine's engine is doing.

I personally have also felt less concentrated and more mentally tired while trying to simultaneously cut brush and listen to music (let alone an intellectually challenging podcast). As a tinnitus sufferer, I use both ear plugs + best possible earmuffs to reduce the dangerous frequencies as much as I can. Works fine, and I can still hear the machine, too.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#136

Post by sokoloff »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #112
goodpoint wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> machine listening techniques could be deployed in a modern mech-engineering to predict physical failures in advance It has been done for decades.

Yes, I remember reading something about its use on bridges and giant steel structues to listen for bad welds when the wind blows. I guess for auto stuff there's so many embedded sensors in a modern engine there's little need these days.

There’s still plenty of bearings and pumps that wear or make noise without setting a code or having the computer tell you what to do.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#137

Post by sokoloff »

mrow84 wrote: post #127
caffeine wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As Elon, by virtue of his massive wealth now, is depriving an ungodly amount of people of financial resources and opportunities. That doesn’t make any sense at all. His wealth isn’t made up of financial resources and opportunities that other people could have used - his wealth is the price that other people would be willing to pay him to own shares in the companies he created. I think it’s a common misconception ou…

Even if you believe that: 1. the wealth of such people corresponds solely to an increase in the pool of available wealth (as opposed to just redistribution from other people), and 2. that increase is solely attributable to them, it remains true that the distribution of the wealth pool is an arbitrary social choice. Billionaires being billionaires deprives other people of resources, by definition.

If a billionaire increased the size of society’s pie by more than their total amount of pie, they’ve made both themself and the rest of society overall better. You can argue that none of them have done this, but I don’t agree that it’s obvious or definitionally true that none of them have.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#138

Post by sokoloff »

kqr wrote: post #100
caffeine wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As Elon, by virtue of his massive wealth now, is depriving an ungodly amount of people of financial resources and opportunities. That doesn’t make any sense at all. His wealth isn’t made up of financial resources and opportunities that other people could have used - his wealth is the price that other people would be willing to pay him to own shares in the companies he created. I think it’s a common misconception ou…

> His wealth isn’t made up of financial resources and opportunities that other people could have used This is literally how profit works. You make sure your costs (salaries you pay your workers) are less than the value they produce. In other words, you keep some of the financial resources and opportunities that others could have had.

That’s a hyper-localized view. The teams of people who tamed farming, semiconductors and medicine have added many multiples more value than they kept to society.

Imagine that a novel creation is worth 100 units of value to society. It’s entirely possible for society to take 50 units, the workers to share 25 units, and the CEO to keep 25 units and for literally everyone to be better off than if that creation was never made.

The view above compares against an alternative split of 60/35/5 while ignoring the case where the split is 0/0/0.

Even in a 90/9/1 split, why are the workers depriving society of such a large share by hoarding 9% for themselves?

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#139

Post by jseban »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #122
jseban wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, moving to Europe sounds like a pretty reasonable approach if you want to have more socialism, as opposed to revolting against computers. Europe is not less efficient and they are not against computers, it's just a different type of redistribution politics, technology is entirely neutral in these matters. The problem is that the size of both your home and your paycheck will be cut in half, it's always a tradeoff…

It's not so much about more socialism, it's more that the US is wrestling with problems we've completely forgotten about (e.g. decent food). There are plenty of big homes, and big paychecks in Europe - but, as they say, 'so poor that all they have is money!'

Americans like to believe that social democratic countries just conjure up more stuff for everyone by means of politics, so they can have more benefits, or that they actually take it from the rich.

In reality it's a really tough compromise where it's the working middle class that pays the price for the equality, and then people are not so interested anymore for some reason..

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#140

Post by koonsolo »

caffeine wrote: post #96
koonsolo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty smart and a hard worker. I have a Masters degree in computer science. I can do about 4 to 6 hours of concentrated work per day. I never seen anyone do more or better. I know plenty of people who claim to work a crazy amout of hours. But in the end it always turns out they are deceiving themselves. I don't know Elon, so maybe he is different. But in the end, I'll believe it when I see it.

You are doing solo, technical, concentrated work. I have seen a lot of people do more and better. But different work, not coding. Like leading and managing people is very possible for some elite people to do for say 70 hours a week and mostly involves talking, persuading, answering emails and phone calls, and most importantly making good decisions. The value of good leadership and good decisions is directly proportio…

I also don't agree with this point of view, and it seems Jeff Bezos shares this point of view: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl...

Quality of work beats quantity any day of the week. And at 80 hours, there just cannot be any quality left. At that point, your mistakes will cost you more. Maybe the people below you might offset your stupidity at that point.

I had managers doing 60+ hours. They were not the greatest, in fact, they were terrible.

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