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

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#141

Post by jseban » Sat, May 07, 2022, 2:02 PM UTC

oriolid wrote: post #132

jseban wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Stop serving cake and having useless meetings, Karen, get a life and leave people alone.

I've worked on the assembly line, it was like being in the army, they screamed at us like drill sergeants to make us work faster. I'll leave it up to you to decide how humanising that environment is.

Where do you think all the nice things come from, getting shit done and not from grooming each other all day.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#142

Post by mark_l_watson » Sat, May 07, 2022, 2:07 PM UTC

Great article that captures a major pain point, especially on dehumanization.

In mindfulness practice, we learn that sometimes “being, rather than doing” is important. As a Knowledge worker/AI practitioner, I consider myself so very, very lucky to be able to have a surfeit of time for quiet reflection because quiet times are important for the creative process.

Income inequality is getting the attention it deserves, but there is also an inequality in having time to enjoy human centered activities. I have young people in my life who have great careers, financially, but at least to me don’t seem to have enough quality down time.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#143

Post by snom380 » Sat, May 07, 2022, 2:13 PM UTC

burntoutfire wrote: post #124

samatman wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand this complaint in detail? If a Macbook is asleep, it will just wake up, you'll see the keyboard light, there is no need to press the power button. If there is a need to press the power button it is because the machine is off. Don't worry, it will make a distinctive and iconic sound once it is not off and display, you guessed it, a white apple logo on the screen. What circumstances lead to yo…

The machine can wake up for many seconds (I'm running Windows 10 on my Macboo Pro). During that time, there's no communication on the state of the machine at at all (the keyboard doesn't light up for me). Is it still asleep? During wake up? Or maybe powered off completely for some reason? If it's powered off, then I should press the "Power" button... But what if it isn't? - will pressing it kill the wake up process?…

I think this is one of the cases where Apple doing hardware and software shines through. They’ve made macOS resume quickly from sleep, to the point where I’ve never really thought about/noticed the problem you’re describing. So the LED really isn’t needed for 99% of the users, the same way that you don’t have a power LED on iPhones or iPads. On recent models the login screen is there before you’ve fully opened the lid.

(It’s interesting in itself to track the history of power/sleep lights on MacBooks, since as far as I can remember they only turned on in the case where the internal display is off, or when the laptop was sleeping (pulsing light). Jony Ive even talked about it in the Objectified documentary: https://vimeo.com/7827217 )

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#144

Post by snom380 » Sat, May 07, 2022, 2:18 PM UTC

nonrandomstring wrote: post #107

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…

My grandfather was a car mechanic after he come out the navy and always had a stethoscope in his tool-box. He'd listen around the engine before diagnosing crankshaft or valve maladies like some kind of auto-doctor. Come to think of it, machine listening techniques could be deployed in a modern mech-engineering to predict physical failures in advance given how easy it is to embed a piezo crystal and and TPU core.

They don’t use TPU cores, but most of not all modern commercial helicopters and aircraft have vibration monitoring and reporting. I would assume the same is the case in many other industrial systems as well.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#145

Post by civilized » Sat, May 07, 2022, 2:23 PM UTC

oriolid wrote: post #134

civilized wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

Meetings, CI, etc. are all good things in moderation, but people could be more productive by applying more judgment to the question of when to do them.

If you're like a typical colleague of mine, you aren't needed at 80% of the meetings you attend, and you don't get any value out of those meetings either. Your attendance at these meetings is essentially a mindless way to run out the clock on the day.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#146

Post by kochikame » Sat, May 07, 2022, 2:25 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #137

mrow84 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Example: what value to assign to the productivity benefits that Amazon and AWS have created for individuals, companies etc and society in general? I think we can all agree that it is an enormous amount in dollar terms.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#147

Post by kochikame » Sat, May 07, 2022, 2:27 PM UTC

goodpoint wrote: post #115

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…

On the contrary, wealth is mutually exclusive by definition. Regardless if it's cash, stocks, land or a pile of cans of food - if I have a piece of it you don't have the same piece. So yes "by virtue of his massive wealth now, is depriving an ungodly amount of people of financial resources and opportunities" is exactly how wealth works.

No, most of Bezos’ or Musk’s wealth is tied to the value of their companies. To this extent, they don’t “own” a thing that someone else is deprived of.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#148

Post by kochikame » Sat, May 07, 2022, 2:27 PM UTC

b112 wrote: post #74

Jare wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mus…

Great analogy

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#149

Post by m0llusk » Sat, May 07, 2022, 2:30 PM UTC

> Capitalism does not care ...

This is sloppy and wrong. A good counter example is child labor. That used to be common and fully integrated into corporate operations. Then it was made illegal and most people believe that economic systems work better without child labor. What appeared to be a simple optimization took away childhood happiness and opportunities for education. The problem we have is not some nebulous struggle with Capitalism as it is deciding on appropriate boundaries and regulations for work. Benefit corporations are keenly competitive Capitalist entities yet their primary goal is to enrich workers and customers alike. Employee ownership has well demonstrated benefits not only for workers but also managers and investors. What we need to do is figure out where our current systems go to far and need to favor human needs first.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#150

Post by mmarq » Sat, May 07, 2022, 2:42 PM UTC

> 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.

Quite the opposite, people used to be way more replaceable in the 80s than today. The real issue with the latest technology developments (say from the 80s) is that they require more and more cognitive skills to be adopted, which makes it harder to replace a worker while preventing a larger and larger part of the population from enjoying these productivity gains. This explains a large part of income inequality.