The Frustration with Productivity Culture • Hacker News Board

Re: The Frustration with Productivity Culture

#71

Post by iamstupidsimple » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 9:40 AM UTC

d3nj4l wrote: post #51

dasil003 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot more variety of startups than there are big companies. If you're thinking of late-stage VC-driven companies who work hard to maintain the label of "startup" to perpetrate the mythology of rocket-ship riches that their ivy league hiring funnel relies on, then yeah, it's gonna be stressful. On the other hand, if you're willing to take less money for the ability to work with tighter constraints, less res…

> especially if your talent level is validated by a big tech name brand on your resume This is unironically the best way to find a good WLB while working on interesting problems. I switched from a startup with great WLB to a big tech with worse WLB because I recognised that the brand name on my resume will open me up for more interesting work with better WLB later on. It sucks for me now, but I'm hoping it'll pay off…

There are plenty of big tech companies with good WLB. Not everywhere is Amazon.

Re: The Frustration with Productivity Culture

#72

Post by limaoscarjuliet » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 9:49 AM UTC

weq wrote: post #25

Barrin92 wrote: post #16

The problem with the entire productivity culture is just how industrialized, bureaucratic and formulaic it is. You read the piece by Newport and there is Henry Ford, the assembly line, 'knowledge work', growth, and so on. Words that don't show up once: freedom, exploration, curiosity, creativity (that does show up once in quotes technically). Everything that makes life interesting is discontinuous and surprising and…

The kings and queeens have turned into the captailists and relgious zealots who espouse ideals of productivity and growth in order to secure your obedience and trap you in debt and gives you no choice but to continue on or give up everything. By chasing the money you commit yourself playing within the confines of this system. I instead chase my passion and ive found an employeer who is happy to make those same tradeo…

> The kings and queeens have turned into the captailists and relgious zealots who espouse ideals of productivity and growth [...]

Advocatus Diaboli here. One has to be careful not to forget benefits of the hard work over millenia which we all enjoy: shelter, electricity, food in the fridge, medicine in the cabinet, transportation right outside of the house we live in. Countless people worked hard to get to this point. So the question is: is our society evolved enough to stop working hard and still enjoy these benefits?

Re: The Frustration with Productivity Culture

#73

Post by kqr » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 10:13 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #16

The problem with the entire productivity culture is just how industrialized, bureaucratic and formulaic it is. You read the piece by Newport and there is Henry Ford, the assembly line, 'knowledge work', growth, and so on. Words that don't show up once: freedom, exploration, curiosity, creativity (that does show up once in quotes technically). Everything that makes life interesting is discontinuous and surprising and…

This depends entirely on what you let pass for productivity culture. The Ford "scientific management" stuff falls under your description, but it also doesn't work. It doesn't promote productivity, it promotes waste.

Look into how the lean ideas promote productivity. Hint: it involves freedom, exploration, curiosity, and creativity -- quite explicitly. Those are the things from which true, lasting productivity stem.

Re: The Frustration with Productivity Culture

#74

Post by nickd2001 » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 10:18 AM UTC

tcoff91 wrote: post #18

uselesscynicism wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are plenty of less stressful work environments in technology that will pay someone a decent salary and will be much less demanding. There are?! Could you list some examples? I would take a pay cut for fewer responsibilities if I could stay in tech and if it didn't pay like thirty grand, which is what you will make in support. How do I transition from a high stress high pay software engineer to a medium pay lo…

Go work for some bigco that is coasting on a great market position of a SaaS project and you can definitely find software jobs where you can work about 30hrs a week, make around 130-180k a year, and chill hard. Only problem is that after a while you'll get really complacent and your skills may suffer. If there are layoffs and you have to find another job, you might be in trouble.

In certain parts of governments, non-profits and academia, can be found jobs which both (a) have lower stress / better work life balance, and (b) use innovative tech which keeps one's skills sharp and up to date. These jobs don't typically pay amazingly, but sometimes have a good pension plan, and the option is always there to go back to well-paid higher stress workplace later to fix finances if required....

Re: The Frustration with Productivity Culture

#75

Post by fogihujy » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 10:21 AM UTC

limaoscarjuliet wrote: post #72

weq wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kings and queeens have turned into the captailists and relgious zealots who espouse ideals of productivity and growth in order to secure your obedience and trap you in debt and gives you no choice but to continue on or give up everything. By chasing the money you commit yourself playing within the confines of this system. I instead chase my passion and ive found an employeer who is happy to make those same tradeo…

> The kings and queeens have turned into the captailists and relgious zealots who espouse ideals of productivity and growth [...] Advocatus Diaboli here. One has to be careful not to forget benefits of the hard work over millenia which we all enjoy: shelter, electricity, food in the fridge, medicine in the cabinet, transportation right outside of the house we live in. Countless people worked hard to get to this point…

Also, have our society evolved into one that we actually want? I would expect the answer to vary greatly, depending on whom you ask.

Re: The Frustration with Productivity Culture

#76

Post by nickd2001 » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 10:32 AM UTC

fergie wrote: post #60

Was alarmed to see an otherwise good article descend into a defense of Agile. "Agile project-management methodologies didn’t alleviate the need for programmers to strive to be better coders, but they did prevent the developers from having to excessively worry about what they should be coding and whether they had done enough" I think there are many coders here who would strongly disagree, and maybe even identify Agile…

I agree with this, though personally I'd distinguish between Scrum (continuously sprinting, people mindlessly trying to grab as many story points as possible to impress their boss, getting in trouble if a story overruns a sprint or takes longer than the estimate), and Kanban, which to me seems less stressful and more realistic and what the author was getting at.. IMHO at least..

Re: The Frustration with Productivity Culture

#77

Post by shantnutiwari » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 10:32 AM UTC

Reading a great book-- 4000 weeks by Oliver Burkeman.

He makes the great point that no matter how productive we get, we will never feel satisfied, as there will always be more to do.

Instead, we need to start focusing on things that actually matter.

The title 4000 weeks is the average lifespan of a human-- and Oliver make the point we get stuck in the race to be more productive, and forget to enjoy life, which is usually the reason we start the productivity race in the first place.

Re: The Frustration with Productivity Culture

#78

Post by Viliam1234 » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 10:34 AM UTC

levinb wrote: post #17

Barrin92 wrote: post #16

The problem with the entire productivity culture is just how industrialized, bureaucratic and formulaic it is. You read the piece by Newport and there is Henry Ford, the assembly line, 'knowledge work', growth, and so on. Words that don't show up once: freedom, exploration, curiosity, creativity (that does show up once in quotes technically). Everything that makes life interesting is discontinuous and surprising and…

>tracking how much time they spent on their breakfast with a stopwatch Masterfully stated. One of the primary problems with this culture, and the general culture of quantified self/everything, is that the data doesn’t inform or change actual actions. Most quantification is proffered as a solution by the Anxiety Alleviation Industrial Complex. I’d argue a significant portion of consumer SaaS is just that.

> One of the primary problems with this culture, and the general culture of quantified self/everything, is that the data doesn’t inform or change actual actions.

It depends on how you use the collected data. I think it is psychologically similar to investing in stock market or cryptocurrencies: Some people keep refreshing the screen every minute and get crazy about microscopic increases or decreases of the stuff they own, read all the clickbait with related keywords, and after a few weeks they burn out. Other people invest some money, then forget about the whole thing for a few months, then spend one afternoon looking at the numbers and making small adjustments, then again forget about the whole thing for a few months.

Just because you collect a lot of data about yourself (as the quantified-self people like to do), doesn't mean you need to review it every day. You could simply spend the minimum effort to collect the data, and then summarize it and draw conclusions once a year. I know people who collect various body statistics every day, and they just upload the logs to their computer, and later write a script that generates graphs over longer periods of time. And their conclusions are like: "hey, I made this lifestyle change a few months ago, and here my health data have improved significantly, so it was the right move"; where the health data is something like a weekly average of blood pressure.

Collecting million trivial details does not necessarily prevent you from seeing the big picture. Though I guess for some personality types, the temptation to obsess over the details is irresistible. It is not enough that the big picture is okay, they need to maximize the pressure at every single detail... until the thing somehow explodes. Congratulate yourself on successfully shortening the bathroom breaks, and then get surprised when in a few months half of your workforce quits.

Re: The Frustration with Productivity Culture

#79

Post by Viliam1234 » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 11:05 AM UTC

Jensson wrote: post #58

The frustration is mostly that people want to keep and eat their cookie. They want to get selected by productive teams and work with productive teammates, but they don't want to face the pressure associated with being a productive teammate themselves. Ultimately the pressure comes from yourself, you don't have to be better than the team you are willing to work with. If you want to work on a world class team then you…

> If you want to work on a world class team then you now put world class expectations on yourself, if you are fine working on menial tasks then you don't have any issues at all not being productive.

In open source it works naturally. I can contribute a trivial improvement to a project where geniuses do magic. Hey, I am not a genius, but I can still improve the documentation, or add a translation, and my humble contribution is still an improvement to the overall project; the geniuses don't mind me doing this.

It just somehow doesn't work at a job. Speaking for myself, I absolutely wouldn't mind if the geniuses get 10x the salary I get; that would be completely fair. Sadly, the geniuses usually don't get paid significantly more... if you are 10x more productive, your salary is maybe 2x higher. And then the company resents having to pay 50% of the genius salary to a person who is clearly not in the same league. Also, managers love treating people as replaceable, so they e.g. estimate the effort in man-days, ignoring the fact that one person's man-day could be another person's man-week or more. From this perspective, working with geniuses is exhausting.

Re: The Frustration with Productivity Culture

#80

Post by slightwinder » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 11:12 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #16

The problem with the entire productivity culture is just how industrialized, bureaucratic and formulaic it is. You read the piece by Newport and there is Henry Ford, the assembly line, 'knowledge work', growth, and so on. Words that don't show up once: freedom, exploration, curiosity, creativity (that does show up once in quotes technically). Everything that makes life interesting is discontinuous and surprising and…

> Words that don't show up once: freedom, exploration, curiosity, creativity (that does show up once in quotes technically).

Obviously, those are the opposite of productivity, the things you want to get rid of to get more things done. Productivity is about optimizing your workflow to the point where no action is wasted, and every second is used in the most beneficial way.

> Newton was a genius

Was he? Or was he just lucky to be rich enough to be sent to university, while living in an age of low-hanging fruits to discover?

> yet the man spent most of his life doing alchemy, trying to forecast the future with the help of the bible, and chasing dragons in the Swiss Alps,

Now think about what else he could have discovered if had work seriously and not wasted time on pointless stuff.

> Yet he also made contributions larger than anyone will ever do by filling up note-taking apps and tracking how much time they spent on their breakfast with a stopwatch.

Maybe, maybe not. The thing is, nobody knows that. Creativity is random and unpredictable. Sometimes is bringing forth something good, but more often it's more harm than benefit. There is a huge mountain of survivorship bias with those cases.

It's true that we need the creative nut heads who think outside the box and contribute in mysterious ways to society. But not everyone should be a nut head and not everywhere we can afford them. We've seen in the last 18 months the other side that this creative minds will bring to society, in the form of conspiracy idiots and anti-vaxxers.