> One programmer I know made clear when she started a job at a startup that she worked 40-45 hours a week and that's it. Everyone else worked much longer hours, but that was her personal limit. Personally I have negotiated a 35-hour work week.
Wow, what a depressing time to be employed. The old standard (35 hours) is now considered a "short" workweek, and only the most desirable employees have the leverage to request it. Not to mention stagnant wages, rapidly rising costs of living, and off-hour availability expectations.
Easy. You hire more low skilled workers and run them in shifts because warm bodies are abundant and overtime is expensive.
High skilled workers have a high fixed cost per employee, low to zero marginal cost per hour. More hours from fewer employees is an obvious strategy to deliver the growth shareholders demand. By convention and legislation, high skill jobs pay invariant of hours worked and are overtime-exempt.
Low skilled jobs can be filled with whomever happens to be born nearby, so they can be distributed across small towns. High skilled jobs require the best people regardless of birthplace, and both employers and employees are incentivized to seek a large pool of potential counterparties to optimize wages and "fit." This naturally creates "destination" cities where inward migration of highly paid workers raises prices and therefore COL.
Stagnant wages - because labor intensive businesses aren't good enough investments anymore to have lots of employers bidding up the price of labor (except in some niches).
When management is treated as a generic function that can be performed by a particular class of people in any field rather than the most senior expert practitioners in their respective fields, this is what happens.
You get insecure authoritarians who latch on to (utterly wrong) metrics as a means of "understanding" what it is their subordinates do without actually understanding what it is they do.
With software developers it used to be SLOC (thankfully that died). With GPs it's "number of patients seen". With teachers it's standardized test scores.
There's a direct correlation between managerial technical ineptitude and insistence on working long hours.
Can't upvote hard enough. Even in the digital media space I'm in, with all our endless data, picking the right thing to measure and measuring it the right way is extremely hard.
Metrics have consequences as what gets measured gets managed, often to the detriment of everything else. Pick the wrong metric and you can shoot yourself in the foot inadvertently.
Here's how I manage to not just live in a cabin in the woods. If it's hard for me, I can only imagine how hard it is for the boss ( because scale ) . Even if the boss is an idiot, there's probably a lot more gain in cooperating and trying to fix it than in being belligerent.
But broken measurement systems invite corruption. It's now possible for ... dishonorable cliques to overtake the measurement regime and bend it to their own advantage.
Since they're going to be organized around the short term ( because that's how humans manage information overload - they go short term ), they're more likely to do things that will damage the organization for the long term.
Have you seen "All Cared For By Machines of Living Grace" by Adam Curtis? I wonder if Curtis used this as source material? It's the same basic idea, although it may appear that Curtis generalizes to a different view of the fallacy underlying all this.
The ghost of Otto von Bismarck laughs every night.
Thanks for the suggestion - the summary info I read makes it sound like a lot of intuitions I don't have fleshed out well enough to explain thoroughly. It's likely going to be either great or maddeningly off in subtle ways. Either way I'm interested in watching it.
Adam's films are .. just essays. They're flawed and informal, but the basic ... bones of his ideas are intriguing and stimulating.
I am glad I could reciprocate with something because I really like "Thinking Like a State" ( after my rapid-read treatment, with a slow read TBD). It encapsulates so many ideas I've never really seen bundled before, along with some that require further digging. I would not be surprised if "Thinking.." wasn't an influence on him.
And making sure that your decision to measure a thing isn't incentivizing the system to optimize for the measure. This is, in short, why Germany doesn't have good forests - in the 1800s, they started measuring the number, species, and age of trees.
Labor and capital are in constant conflict. Labor basically died as a cohesive international movement by the 80's. Labor-hating ideology has dominated economic thought for decades.
Small dev team at a non-tech company on the east coast, so all these nifty Silicon Valley management practices are unheard of here. At our company, you're lucky if you don't have to clock out and in for your lunch break...
And I'm not one of those "most desirable" employees I mentioned earlier, so I'd be very lucky if I could negotiate for better hours or more vacation.
Huh? That's exactly what I was refuting. He was saying working 35 hours a week (7 hour days with lunch being paid) is "the old standard". My whole life I don't think I've ever known someone who got a paid lunch. Almost everyone I know works 40 hours a week outside of their lunch hours (at a minimum).
Wow, what a depressing time to be employed. The old standard (35 hours) is now considered a "short" workweek, and only the most desirable employees have the leverage to request it. Not to mention stagnant wages, rapidly rising costs of living, and off-hour availability expectations.
How did we end up here?