this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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The lesson is to work really, really slow
There fact that I have been told seriously, more than 0 times, to work more slowly in my life is insane to me.
It's a rachet effect. If you do things quickly, often enough, it'll just be expected. You won't be rewarded for it.
And you better be able to keep up that pace constantly for the next ten years.
You can certainly deliver things early, just try to stay at a sustainable pace.
Finally. My low sensitivity for gaming is about to pay off.
"Did you see that email?"
"My cursor is on its way to check"
To quote Homer Simpson:
This is actually exactly the lesson. If the issue in this case was the mouse jiggler, then just working slow would be perfectly fine?! Are they all stupid?
I dont think wanting to use your free time effectively is stupid.
If you work in an office job you will find that it’s all a scam. You must work very slow. Otherwise, you get rewarded with MORE WORK.
The beauty of it all is that you can be the most productive person at the company and save the company wads of cash, but show up 15 min late for work a few times and you're fired.
I was written up due to having tasteful stripes on my otherwise business casual shoes. Two stripes. I’m a non client facing computer monkey. Everything in the office is a weird game of house that everyone has just forgotten that they’re playing.
It's a juggle between having too much work and being bored for 7 hours.
The problem is that companies have unrealistic expectation of how you spend your day. Everybody knows that most “white collar” jobs don’t actually have you working 8hrs every day with the only time you stop working being bathroom breaks and lunch. People take all kinds of informal breaks and get distracted throughout the day. So there is this weird thing where everybody knows that, but companies have to pretend like they don’t, which leads to asinine decisions like keyboard and mouse trackers to determine if people are actually working. Which then leads to people looking for solutions that earn them their little informal breaks back, which everybody takes and are perfectly fine. But again, we sort of pretend water cooler time doesn’t occur.
It’s some sort of perverse arms race built around a shared lie we all pretend we don’t know about.
This problem becomes even more asinine when you consider that the whole point of the Return to Office drive is the "Magic Hallway Conversation" that happens during those informal break time periods.
There's a lot of that when it comes to work in general. It's like it's taboo to point out that the only reason people show up to their jobs is because they get paid for it.
Right?
"Nobody wants to work anymore!"
Like no shit man.
News Flash: nobody has wanted to work ever. They work because the compensation lets them live the lives they want outside of work. If nobody wants to work for you, it's because you either aren't willing to compensate them enough to do that, or your job makes them so miserable that it's not worth it for them to trade away that much happiness for the compensation.
Or both. In lots of cases it's both.
I want to work, but the way I like to work.
If an employer only has a say in what I deliver, fuck yeah I want to work!
This
The only reason why any employer would be like "this is the way you work" would be in a team context, and even then, it should be a discussion, an adjustment, for practical reasons. never an arbitrary law
But you're working in that scenario because you're being paid.
If you had that job where your employer only had a say in what you deliver (ignoring the obvious pitfalls of that arrangement), and they suddenly stopped paying you, or started only paying you half...would you still be okay with it?
If not, then you're working because you like being paid, not because you want to work.
On the flip side: if you had some sort of situation where you got paid a comfortable living that allowed you to cover all your expenses, indulge some luxury, and save...and you got this money no matter what, just for waking up...would you still work every day? Or work until your employer was satisfied with your output each day/week/pay period?
Some might...most specifically (I would think) people whose jobs provide some sort of personal fulfillment like teachers, caregivers, etc. but I think the vast majority of people would take the money and live lives that offered personal enjoyment and fulfillment, doing what they wanted to do, not what an employer (who at that point isn't their source of pay) would like them to do.
Wait, did you take my comment as “pay doesn’t matter”???
Of course it matters. Just saying some do value their work intrinsically as opposed for only extrinsically.
There are jobs I want to work, they just don't pay a living wage.
But let's say you could also make that living wage just by existing. In a world where you wake up each day and a day's worth of your living wage was automatically deposited into your account whether you worked a job you liked or even if you went out for a walk in the park...would you still choose to work every day?
Define "work".
If by "work", you mean contributing to the capitalistic growth of The Economy™, then no I wouldn't want to work.
If by "work" you mean meaningfully contribute to my community and society as a whole, yes I'd still want to work. Not every day, but I was on unemployment benefits for almost a year, and it gets boring after a while not feeling like a useful member of your community.
Also unless you can hyperfocus and literally exhaust yourself in those 8h, you can't do any type of white collar job for 8h a day. It's impossible to be mentally productive for that amount of time day in day out. Forget doing anything creative.
Yeah, this is why it’s time we have an honest conversation to seriously consider a 24 hour work week.
Productivity has gone up consistently since the 70s while wages have stagnated. It’s going up at an even faster rate now with AI assistant tooling. Workers deserve to enjoy some of the rewards from that increased output, and I can’t think of a better way than letting them enjoy life more outside of work.
I would like to point out its not even we. Its upper management and 'the stockholders'. Everyone from the peon to lower management knows that people don't work continuously for their shift. I doubt anyone can work continuously for that long and not go crazy.
But the reward from mid and management and above for completing your work is more work. Which is great for them since you completing more work means they get bonuses.
You are being far too generous to many of your colleagues. I assure you there are plenty of “peons” and lower/middle management playing teachers pet who enable this crap. I’m not saying you are strictly exception, but you are definitely not representative of a significant portion of leadership.
I'm gonna reduce that. Shareholders don't give a shit about working hours. They just care about revenue and expenses.
This is purely a management issue. Upper management might insist on these metrics as a way to crack down on productivity. In my personal experience as a dev, middle management doesn't give about metrics unless someone (upper management) forces them to. Because at the end of the day, its just a pain in the ass hounding subordinates about trivial shit if theyre actually performing where it matters. So anecdotally, I will say this seems to exclusively come from upper management. But I'm sure people have different experiences.
The problem is that upper management is usually so divorced from the real day to day problems that the easy win they can take to their superiors is stupid shit like apm metrics.