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Fuck that, abolish work!
Semantics, but my interpretation is that work can be uplifting. Like yard work is work. Helping friends move is work. Working on your life drawing is work. Working out is maybe even work.
Jobs on the other hand are what I could do without.
But like I said, it’s just semantics. I agree with you.
Working for someone else’s profit, someone who you don’t even like, is not uplifting. That’s capitalism. You spend all day building some API, the owner starts making millions, and you a few thousand in salary.
I wanted to spend a good chunk of my life volunteering.
I can hardly take care of chores with how overwhelmed I am. I will try 3 Concerta pills either Monday or Thursday
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.
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.
Only thing that is human about humans is primitive urges, jealousy, mistakes, and irrationality.
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?
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.
“So we went back to five days, and now productivity is down to effectively three days, what when wrong?”
Executives, everywhere.
The study stops when the executives get what they want.
Which is objectively stupid as fuck, btw
“so I started
blastingfiring people”Anyone else remember the scene in Schindler’s list where the Nazis make a work camp Jew show how quickly he can make a part (a hinge I think), and then look at his completed parts bin and decide to kill him because he clearly hasn’t been working that speed the entire time?
Maybe Pizza Friday is the answer
One slice each only, obviously.
The management quietly dropped/forgot it lol
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You used to write 1000 lines per 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.
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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.
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.
as a manufacturing worker, this argument doesn’t work for us. every second of our day is already mapped out anyway, we’re struggling to keep the breaks we have
Crack that whip!
Give the past a slip
Step on a crack
Break your momma’s back.
When a problem comes along
You must whip it!
Whip it Good!
Whip it real good
When I was in the navy my command did this. We were out by 2pm, 4 day work weeks and had the best productivity of the whole navy.
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 can do three days of work in five days with the wrong 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.
If people are happy, something is wrong. Misery is a virtue/s
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’d laugh, but this just seems like it would actually happen.
On my first job the boss was telling a story about one of his previous jobs, where at one point they had to redo a whole week’s worth of work in one night. They tried hard and managed to do it. So I just added: “it’s in those times one see how slow they usually work”
Burnout is a thing too. There’s a reason marathon runners don’t sprint.
Marathons don’t move at the speed of business though. Progress moves business faster. Commerce IS business. Fast businesses use speed to move faster than their clients speed.
Business, business business. Speed. Solutions.
how am I being downvoted lol
Poe’s Law
Most in the c-suite truly think that way.
Very few business are sprints, they go for longevity like marathoners.
Even most know not to treat their employees that way too.
ya it’s cuz they aren’t side hustling enough
redo
Or rather we see just how much labor original work is compared to replication.
I’m less than 50% confident the OP is a joke.
It’s a joke based on a true story.
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I would have prepared my two weeks notice letter in advance and handed it to him right after he said those words.
They would never give you notice if they were firing you. They don’t deserve that courtesy from you.
When I accepted my current job, I did so on the conditions that I’d work 4x10 and fully from home (after training). When I started, they said there had been a misunderstanding about full WFH and that I was allowed to WFH one day a week. (That eventually changed during COVID but no one ever apologized to me for lying to me.)
Seven years later - last year - they told me that it was “unfair” that I’m the only person who had a special schedule (apparently I was the last person to have it, but I certainly was not the only) and took that away, too.
I live in a rural area and will not be able to find a comparable job nearby. I’ve been contemplating what to do.
Wanna share the plan? I’m still trying to come up with something for my boss.
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Beware the word moot has opposite meanings to people from the US and UK.
US takes it as something that can be ignored like it’s from practice in a moot court (or mock trial)
UK takes it from the meeting type (a moot) and the word means something that should be discussed
Australia mostly follows US usage in this
The problem is the workplaces don’t want that. if you’re happier and have more energy, it also makes you more uppity and harder to control. You might even find options for other work!
If it means keeping you tired and broken, that’s worth the cost of a little productivity.
But is that really so? i would think that a better work life balance makes the employees inclined to remain at their job instead of hopping elsewhere. Probably even at the expense of a higher salary at another place that would instead demand the grind again.
You’re not accounting for the emotional needs of management. Many of them are cruel. They put value in making their workers squirm.
We should have worker owned things instead of the petty tyranny of capitalism, but here we are.
People, generally speaking, have an absolutely infuriating tendency to adapt to good things. They eventually look for more. The best way to prevent this, from an employer’s perspective, is to break their spirit. Learned helplessness is one of the only ways to permanently keep a free person in a bad situation.
Take a look at are little friend remote work. Almost all employees love it. Retention is thru the roof at places that offer it. More than half of workers say they’d even take a pay cut to keep it. Productivity isn’t affected in most cases (ymmv obviously). Buuuuut guess who absolutely can’t stand it? Management. They’ll go to the ends of the earth to make sure you don’t get it. Ask yourself why.
Mostly it’s because they all own commercial real estate and are colluding with each other to keep it occupied.
It’s because management doesn’t only care about those numbers and stats you cited. They also have emotional needs. Like feeling important. Like being the boot.
They also often don’t really understand how work gets done. They do a lot of meetings and schmoozing and think that’s how a web server gets build. They’re self centered, unimaginative, idiots.
We are ruled by the worst among us.
Edit: I realized I already wrote the same kind of thing in this thread the other day. I’m an old broken record!
You might even find options for other work!
Not many other places offer a 4-day week for same salary.
This to give up would be a major strong point…And to be honest…I’d actually work an hour more a day (36h week) to have a monday - thursday week just for the same or higher wage.
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.
