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It's All Bullshit

thebaffler.com

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Re: It's All Bullshit

#11

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

Actually, it is abundance and seemingly waste that produces a lot of innovation.

Bell Labs was funded by AT&Ts telephone monopoly and was able to pay a bunch of really smart people to do projects that they found interesting.

This resulted in innovations like the transistor, C, C++, and Unix among others.

In some ways the push for productivity can actually kill innovation, since innovation requires times to think and the risk that all the effort may end up being wasted if it doesn't work out.

Re: It's All Bullshit

#12

Post by lll-o-lll »

livinginfear wrote: post #7
heckraiser wrote: post #2

Ah, that’s the spirit! Yet I say unto thee: “Despise not in others what one covets for themselves, for that is hypocrisy.” I have trouble comprehending what this piece provides beyond bullshit slinging at big tech. Wishing you were the one making six fixture for 2 - 6 hour days? Business is in part strategy. Individual tech workers are in part corrupt (and incompetent), blaming leadership rather than taking initiativ…

> Wishing you were the one making six fixture for 2 - 6 hour days? I am one of these people. While I do earn a stupid amount of money in the financial sector, the reality for me isn't really that enviable. I do about 3 hours of honest work per day, but the other hours of the day aren't spent with my feet up on the beach. They're spent waiting . They're spent negotiating with pointy-haired managers to unblock me, or a…

You know, it’s pretty trivial to automate that mouse jiggle…

Re: It's All Bullshit

#13

Post by moffkalast »

nicbou wrote: post #8
wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #5

"In an anonymous online poll on how many “focused hours of work” software engineers put in each day, 71 percent of the over four thousand respondents claimed to work six hours a day or less". Written as if 6 hours is little. To get a full focused 6 hours is a pretty high number.

Back when I had billable hours, I'd measure how long I actually work (building small websites), and 6 hours was unusually long. Now I write and edit text for a living, alone, at home and without interruptions. I usually work from 10 to 16 with plenty of breaks. 8 real hours all day, every day is a pipe dream in creative professions.

Yeah I think I found roughly 4 hours as the average over the course of a month, ranging from zero to about 10.

Re: It's All Bullshit

#14

Post by livinginfear »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #12
livinginfear wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wishing you were the one making six fixture for 2 - 6 hour days? I am one of these people. While I do earn a stupid amount of money in the financial sector, the reality for me isn't really that enviable. I do about 3 hours of honest work per day, but the other hours of the day aren't spent with my feet up on the beach. They're spent waiting . They're spent negotiating with pointy-haired managers to unblock me, or a…

You know, it’s pretty trivial to automate that mouse jiggle…

I know. Some people have bought "Mouse Jigglers", and so on to do this. I cringe when I see people buy weird USB devices on eBay for this purpose. Who knows what lurks in the firmware of those things. Some people even buy little hardware turntables that physically jiggle the mouse every so often. On an SOE laptop with all kinds of corporate spyware, you'd have to be pretty game to install a driver to automate the task.

Re: It's All Bullshit

#15

Post by b112 »

wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #5

"In an anonymous online poll on how many “focused hours of work” software engineers put in each day, 71 percent of the over four thousand respondents claimed to work six hours a day or less". Written as if 6 hours is little. To get a full focused 6 hours is a pretty high number.

An hour for lunch, a few 15 minute breaks, a bathroom stop, a conversation in a hallway, makes 6 hrs an 8 hour workday.

Everyone's workday has always been this way.

Re: It's All Bullshit

#16

Post by tempodox »

> …that the problem, at its core, lies in the business model of the platform economy, one that depends not on productive labor but on rents.

all the while we are being told by the high priests of capitalism that “the market” will sort it out, that “the market” will force efficiency. Pshaw!

> That tech work is becoming bullshit is not the problem. The problem is that the companies themselves are bullshit.

It's refreshing to see it said so directly for a change.

Re: It's All Bullshit

#17

Post by rightbyte »

wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #5

"In an anonymous online poll on how many “focused hours of work” software engineers put in each day, 71 percent of the over four thousand respondents claimed to work six hours a day or less". Written as if 6 hours is little. To get a full focused 6 hours is a pretty high number.

Ye 6h of work per day is really high. A honest answer for a programmer is probably 1h tops plus meetings.

Once I worked at a place for like half a year to a year I have qued up so much work for others that I can't progress myself. And efficiency gets down to like 1-5% or something of what I would produce in a one man project.

Re: It's All Bullshit

#18

Post by manymatter »

dave4420 wrote: post #3

I thought Google had abandoned 20% time?

I think it's been described as "as good as dead" so technically not, but rare anyone gets their other time reduced to anywhere around 80% unless their side project is no longer really a side project.

If it's difficult to keep people programming 2 hours a day, losing 8 a week to a side project was naturally making fuller projects than the meeting encased projects.

Re: It's All Bullshit

#19

Post by jillesvangurp »

wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #5

"In an anonymous online poll on how many “focused hours of work” software engineers put in each day, 71 percent of the over four thousand respondents claimed to work six hours a day or less". Written as if 6 hours is little. To get a full focused 6 hours is a pretty high number.

It comes in bursts. But it averages out to a lowish number. The flip side is that the rest of the time is also work and it includes some important work even. In order to be effective as a programmer, you have to understand what you are building and why. I do a lot of thinking and decision making before I start coding. When I work in a long burst, it's usually after days or weeks of pondering how I'm going to do it. Programmers that do this too much sometimes get stuck not doing anything. This is often called analysis paralysis. A good way to break through that is to start doing stuff. Any stuff. Even if it might be the wrong stuff. Sometimes I solve stuff in my sleep even. I go to bed not knowing a solution to a problem after having worked hours on it. And wake up with a working solution that I can knock out in minutes. So, do I code for six hours a day? No, but work occupies most of my day.

I do both management and coding; so I can see both sides of the equation. Keeping your team motivated and stimulated with interesting work is hard. A lot of work just is drudgery. I know it is because I dread doing these things myself. And then end up doing them anyway. Drudgery is demotivating. Demotivated people drag their feet, especially when drudgery just leads to more drudgery. Often management is simply a matter of getting people to see results coming from their hard work. Break it down, celebrate the progress, do some more. Short feedback loops are a key tool. Even the drudgery gets dealt with when you do that.

Re: It's All Bullshit

#20

Post by staunton »

louwrentius wrote: post #6

Loved this article. > Making explicit these differences, however, would reveal that these platforms are not all that different from the banks of Wall Street: they are not making value, they’re taking it. And as long as this remains the underlying form of profit, tech firms’ imaginary of a technological future will be limited to the fast and cheap profits of monopoly rents. This is at the center of tech’s innovation c…

Seems like there's a lot of discontent people who really enjoy it when someone starts calling everything around them bullshit.

Graeber's ideas/books with respect to "bullshit" are themselves cynical bullshit written as a kind of joke for maximum controversy. I'm sure he had a lot of fun though, being invited to speak and tell people all their work is bullshit...

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