Productivity isn’t a straight line, which is where most businesses fail in their thinking. Yeah I can do five days of work in four days, with the right incentives. I can also do it in five with no incentives.
I kinda see it lol, at work I see people dragging themselves to Friday. And on Friday, they’d do so much work and wrap up things that would otherwise take time. The excitement of “there’s no office tomorrow” and the motivation to clock out on time on a Friday evening is like the adrenalin rush!
Just think about WFH, exactly the same logic.
Three days in office was a perfect balance for me and my team. Everyone came in Wednesday so anytime we needed in person stuff, it was scheduled for that day. Folks were happy, saving on the commute, desk space and parking was plentiful. Then higher said folks like me were to be in five days a week while everyone else was four. Cue nosedive in productivity.
This is genuinely how MBAs think
MBAs have systematically been drilled to view the world as numbers, rather than social or psychological dynamics. Empathy is an obstacle when your focus is on generating higher numbers.
If you estimate a project in hours of work, a shorter work-week looks like projects will take longer. Imagine you’ve planned 60h and are billing for 60h, but instead of devoting 20h per week and delivering in three weeks, your developer now only spends 16h and you’ll be delivering in four weeks instead! That’s wasting a week they could’ve spent on other projects, slow down turnaround times and essentially cut your revenue per week by 33%.
Worse, you’re also supposed to pay them 20% more per hour, so you have less revenue for more pay. You can see how that’ll cut into profits.
Never mind that the increased productivity messes with your estimate, so the same work might now get done in, say, 48h instead, keeping the same turnaround time, at the same price you were paying before. Even if you consider that, you’d also have to charge the customer more per hour of work, which seems like a tougher sell than just keeping things as they were, which everyone is already used to.
It’s an idiotic and soulless way to think about labour instead of people, and it’s neither sustainable nor really reasonable, but if the only tool you have is a calculator, everything becomes numbers.
This is why cruelty is the point, because they prioritize it even above profit.
If you’re not miserable, you’re not working hard enough/s
I used to work at a university whose education department sank hundreds of thousands of dollars into a study to find ideal lecture length to maximize retention.
Memory’s a little fuzzy… it was short. Like a half hour?
Anyway the punchline I definitely do remember is that they got the results of the study then changed absolutely nothing
I can believe it, last two places I’ve worked the primary voice in teaching decisions seems to have been timetabling. Got to maximise your room usage.
“We funded this study hoping it would conform to our existing world view, Alas it didnt, there for we’re not changing a fucking thing”
Thats pretty much the status quo of science under wealth inequality. I invent AI studies to confirm my biases too. The current study is “can an AI legislate better than mitch mcconnell”
Let’s start with Lindsey Graham and go from there.
All of them, and we should use the AI to spy on them and use the PATRIOT ACT data to see everything they’ve done in said in the last 100 years and summerize it for us. I’m totally ready to adopt this technology and use it against the people who would use it to control me.
If people are happy, something is wrong. Misery is a virtue/s
Lol yeah it’s the exact same [facetious] logic as expecting increasing the working day from 10 ~> 20 hours to lead to increased productivity.
It’s almost like ample and adequate rest need to be baked into scheduling?
Like thinking 2 women can birth 1 child in 4.5 months…
Holy crap are you telling me that if I impregnate 17 women at once I can have a kid in an hour? What’s all this hubub about population decline hop to it people!
Pregnancy is approximately 40 weeks, so to get it done in an hour, you’d have to impregnate more like 6,720 women. It’s hard to impregnate that many in an hour, so it’s no wonder guys are too intimidated to try it.
It’s Taco Bell logic. You love our chicken nuggets and caramel empanadas? We sold out in 3 days? Well they’re discontinued so fuck you. Ok guys, sales are down and we can’t figure out why, we need ideas.
they got rid of the quesarito just so they can bring it back for a week. and there is NOTHING in the quesarito that isnt already on the menu, so you can still get it if you customize a beefy 5 layer
What’s the “logic” here?
I have worked in the mining industry for over 20 years. Before Covid happened my monthly schedule was set up so that we were given seven days off every month. At the end of 2021 management decided to change it so that we worked 5 days and 4 off with them saying that this was a “safer”and more beneficial to employees, since the schedule change there have been more people quitting and more people getting hurt on the job I myself along with others have voiced our opinion to go back to the original schedule and management looks down upon us as if we said a dirty word.
Yeah, I’d go with the option that has the least incidences. Mining is already environment prone so we don’t need to add any more human error than we need.
while we know this post is fake, this is the logic capitalists use. it is the logic they hide, the lede they bury, when they report on how efficient ai will make us.
I can’t tell you whether the post is fake, but I can tell you this exact situation was researched in my country and found to be correct and then was never heard from again
Just like before AI employees used to code 1000 lines/day. With AI 1000 lines can be written in a few mins. Imagine what an overworked employee can code using AI in a day. #Efficiency
With AI 1000 lines can be written in a few mins.
Every programmer knows that more lines of code = better software. Encapsulation and abstraction are for suckers. CTRL+C, CTRL+V and you too can code like an AI.
You used to write 1000 lines per day?
I’ve done a thousand “real” lines in a day, but it was like a 10 hour “day,” and it was just coding for the entire period. No emails, no meetings, no peer reviews, no debugging. No design or architecture work–that was all done on a previous day.
And obviously all of that code did get tested and debugged and reviewed, but on a different day. So I can’t really say that those lines were “completed” in one day.
Are comments considered lines?
Maybe in a week with a lot of copied boilerplate code and after auto-formatting, but even then probably less.
It’s just an example 🫠
Capitalism in a nutshell. Treat your employees like expendable assets and squeeze every last drop out of them
The only silver lining to ending slavery for the owner class was that at least now the cogs were responsible for their own room and board and etc
*acknowledging that slavery hasn’t truly, universally ended
I guess at this point, with the million plus recently laid off, humanity is just lucky we ate able to leave freely and not progressed into biofuel to fun
data centersslop factories.It’s also that so much work is pointless and doesn’t serve a proper purpose for humanity. Things like ads, a lot of office jobs where people sit in endless meetings, and so on.
I think humanity has realized it’s wasting our lives but we can’t think of another system that will work.
Maybe universal income but the downside of that is that it comes with AI and transhumanism, which will remove what is human about humans.
I hate how a big chunk of my work has become to write reports nobody should read. Our team produces a report every January, that gets passed to our director, that gets compiled into a yearly lab wide report, that gets combined into a 5-year report, that get sent to the government to ensure continuous funding… so much time wasted by everyone
I’m 51 now and I learned from 25 years of working that wasting time is not a problem for large corporations år governments. Even in smaller companies, they value people being forced into office much higher than employees producing work.
So the conclusion for me is that its just a system to keep everyone busy and conform to rules set by the corporation.
Sure we can think of better. It’s just that the only people with the power to change or implement any of it are financially incentivized not to. So they don’t.
Why would universal income come with AI and transhumanism?
If the corporate fantasy of replacing all jobs with AI were to actually come to pass, what are all the now jobless people supposed to do? Quietly wait in a back alley to starve to death?
So either universal income happens, or the one percent learn that there’s no level of technology that will overcome a two orders of magnitude disadvantage in numbers.
So, nothing but fearmongering.
Because the alternatives are pointless toil or perishing (spoilers: neither of these are off the table)
You’re going to have to elaborate on that. Why are those the alternatives?
It’s assuming a lot, but running with the premise of bots totally replacing human workers (dubious), either workers keep working even though they don’t need to (pointles toil), or they cease to exist as they last lever on power is removed (the ability to bargain by withholding their labour).
It’s silly
Only thing that is human about humans is primitive urges, jealousy, mistakes, and irrationality.
