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It’s time to embrace slow productivity (2022)

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Re: It’s time to embrace slow productivity (2022)

#51

Post by hitsurume »

srackey wrote: post #39
great_psy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe work became the central piece in people’s lives because they don’t have time to devote to other things. It’s a 40 hour work week, but add in commuting and chores and decent sleep and you’re left with a few hours left for other things. Hard to build an identity around a few hours of something else.

But we used to work more and this wasn’t as much of an issue?

What do you mean by that? Like in the industrial / manufacturing age where people manually did the same thing over and over? Where people were physically exhausted but not mentally?

Re: It’s time to embrace slow productivity (2022)

#52

Post by sanderjd »

srackey wrote: post #39
great_psy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe work became the central piece in people’s lives because they don’t have time to devote to other things. It’s a 40 hour work week, but add in commuting and chores and decent sleep and you’re left with a few hours left for other things. Hard to build an identity around a few hours of something else.

But we used to work more and this wasn’t as much of an issue?

It probably was, except that there weren't blog posts about it.

Re: It’s time to embrace slow productivity (2022)

#54

Post by goofy_goober »

golergka wrote: post #33
charlie0 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is going to happen. Increases in productivity eventually lead to race to the bottom in terms of prices. Which means whoever owns the means of production are not incentivized at all to just let their workers work less. The demands of workers will stay the same, if not increase because of lowering barriers to entry on the supply side of job seekers. I wish we as a society would just accept less work…

> whoever owns the means of production This 19th rhetoric century doesn't work in modern world, especially when you're talking about creating software. To "produce" most of what HN readers do, you don't need anything more than a laptop and some cloud services — which you would need to scale up proportionally to load, and, therefore, revenue. If you need capital to hire others, it's also never have been more easily av…

An interesting development as cloud services become increasingly more important (if they aren't critical already for businesses looking to get big) would be cloud services providers structured as mutual companies, like we see in some insurance and financial services companies (Vanguard, State Farm, etc).

This would create a fiduciary duty to not soak the customer for everything they've got (no more sky-high public internet egress charges!), but also a structure where the customers of the company are the company's legal owners, so both workers and external customers could technically own a piece of the means of production if they use the services for their hobby projects or business.

I would not be surprised if this comes to exist in the future as people want downward pressure on public cloud prices, and it would be an interesting development seeing legal ownership of "the means of production" (public cloud infrastructure) and earnings from it titled to anyone who uses it.

Re: It’s time to embrace slow productivity (2022)

#55

Post by Izkata »

great_psy wrote: post #9
gffrd wrote: post #3

This glosses over the fact that jobs are a central piece—if not _the_ central piece—of many people's identities in the States. We've lost religion and communities as things that define and provide structure and purpose, leaving us clinging to jobs. Is this good? No! It's terrible! We should fix this! However, I'm not convinced that workplace stress is a matter of hours … it may be a symptom of lack of life beyond wor…

Maybe work became the central piece in people’s lives because they don’t have time to devote to other things. It’s a 40 hour work week, but add in commuting and chores and decent sleep and you’re left with a few hours left for other things. Hard to build an identity around a few hours of something else.

Don't forget work social events that extend beyond those 40 hours. Seems like there's more of them each year.

Re: It’s time to embrace slow productivity (2022)

#57

Post by m3kw9 »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #46

I like the saying “slow is smooth and smooth is fast” as applied to software development. For all the talk of Agile processes and breaking creative work down into bite-sized chunks and prioritising collaboration and team productivity over individual contributions, ultimately our work is about thinking and fundamentally it requires that each individual doing the work understands what needs to be done. Not investing en…

Sometimes software engineers forget coding should be the final step, and not the main step. Defining as much as you can,80/20 before starting will save you time. Certainly there are cases where you have an idea and you dive right in and it will work out but usually that won’t work out well from my experience

Re: It’s time to embrace slow productivity (2022)

#58

Post by BogdanPetre »

I would encourage a focus on "right productivity," (doing the right things at the right time with the right pace, rather than merely doing more or less.). The key to "right productivity" is finding the right balance between quality and quantity, speed and deliberation, work and rest

Re: It’s time to embrace slow productivity (2022)

#59

Post by datatrashfire »

gffrd wrote: post #3

This glosses over the fact that jobs are a central piece—if not _the_ central piece—of many people's identities in the States. We've lost religion and communities as things that define and provide structure and purpose, leaving us clinging to jobs. Is this good? No! It's terrible! We should fix this! However, I'm not convinced that workplace stress is a matter of hours … it may be a symptom of lack of life beyond wor…

I actually relate to this quite a bit. For years I was a workaholic. I was constantly stressed out over work, was generally pretty miserable person.

A few years back got very intensely into a new hobby that blossomed and it totally changed my quality of life.

At the same time, I wouldn't say I've drastically changed my hours. I work 40-50 hr weeks typically, I just stopped putting in the 60 hour ones that I felt I needed to. No one ever noticed or cared. It was always my own impulse to do that. Even though in my head, I felt like there was pressure to do it.

I really think it was just my brain knowing I didn't have anything else lined up for life, so it just kept lining up more work for me.

If all of a sudden that person was told four day work week had arrived, it wouldn't have made a difference. I'd just be there feeling I needed to work cause I didn't have anything else to do.

Recently, my health has prevented me from participating in the hobby. And unsurprisingly I find myself obsessing over work again...

Re: It’s time to embrace slow productivity (2022)

#60

Post by Mizoguchi »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #46

I like the saying “slow is smooth and smooth is fast” as applied to software development. For all the talk of Agile processes and breaking creative work down into bite-sized chunks and prioritising collaboration and team productivity over individual contributions, ultimately our work is about thinking and fundamentally it requires that each individual doing the work understands what needs to be done. Not investing en…

Isn't changing requirements one of the key principles of the Agile manifesto?

If so, why do we want to dive so much into requirements that are likely to change anyways?

Not saying we should jump into design without understanding the requirements, but sometimes requirements are incomplete or not clearly defined and we cannot sit and wait until a new revision is out or someone becomes available to answer our questions.

I guess this really depends on the area we operate.

In my business domain we call requirements "wish lists" as the solutions we build are for complex hardware that generally doesn't exist yet and there's a good chance the requirements spec you got today will be rewritten in six months, yet we need to start working as soon as the project is launched.

So we have learned to design things that are reasonably easy to adapt, replace and test, we even developed an entire framework for this very purpose that has become some sort of spinoff business as some customers wanted to use it for their in house development.

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