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.
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
“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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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 :)
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.
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?
Maybe in a week with a lot of copied boilerplate code and after auto-formatting, but even then probably less.
Are comments considered lines?
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.
It’s just an example 🫠
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.
7 days off a month, as in, accruing 7 days each month that you can take off later (in a bigger chunk, for example)? Or like, 3 weeks on, ~1.3 weeks off, repeat…?
The 7 days off was built into the normal schedule monthly. The schedule was, 4 days on the 3 off, then 3 days on and 2 off, then 3 on 3 off then 4 on then a week off. The schedule was also divided into half a month day shift and half night shift.
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.
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
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
If productivity increased then you had some slackers before
4 day work weeks often means working four 10hr shifts. Same hours but less start and stop adds to productivity, and that extra day off during the work week means you can schedule things that day that otherwise would require time off during work hours. That extra day off really helps both employer and employee.
4 tens is so much better than 5 eights.
I’ve tried that before. I get less done on a 10 hour shift than I do in 8. Have to wake up too early and go home too late. It’s torturous.
Now a 32 hour week for the same pay is peak. Doesn’t even need to be three continuous days off. A weekend and a Wednesday is good enough.
4 tens is so much better than 5 eights.
Going to need a citation for that, because that is not what the research I’ve seen suggests.
From this paper:
This paper studies the link between working hours and productivity using daily information on working hours and performance of a sample of call centre agents. We exploit variation in the number of hours worked by the same employee across days and weeks due to central scheduling, enabling us to estimate the effect of working hours on productivity. We find that as the number of hours worked increases, the average handling time for a call increases, meaning that agents become less productive. This result suggests that fatigue can play an important role, even in jobs with mostly part-time workers.
The full article is behind a paywall, but the discussion paper is available in full here.
Another paper suggests that, while same-day performance can sometimes increase with number of hours, next-day performance suffers. And, more importantly, routinely working shifts that are longer than 8 hours reduces productivity over time:
To start, we elucidate the tension between a widely held assumption grounded in the ideal worker norm that working long hours boosts performance and recovery research suggesting the opposite. Our findings reveal that, although working a long day is associated with a same-day performance boost, working long hours hinders overnight recovery by reducing sleep, hindering next-day performance. Our results also cautiously suggest that regularly working longer than 8-h days results in fatigue and a lack of resilience, making it difficult for employees to sustain high levels of performance over time.
I have consistently seen the four-day workweek defined as 32 hours per week (4x8hr), not 4x10hrs.
That’s why we need to end the push for the 4-day week.
And start the push for the 32-hour week.That’s not what they mean by the 4 day work week. I’ve had the 4 10 hour days and friending in the work you’re but very productive with a day that long. It’s hard to be in the zone thinking hard for 10 hours.
Yeah because people are more well rested with 3 days off. So they can focus better during the workday.
Times are different I guess. I was always bagged after weekends heading back to work on Monday.
Productivity also increases when people are allowed to work from home. Turns out hostile work environments are not conducive to productivity.
I’d laugh, but this just seems like it would actually happen.
This happened to me.
I requested four days and laid out a plan on what “success” looked like. We tried it. After six months my boss and I agreed all my metrics had improved, so he put me back in five days because “imagine how productive you’ll be now”, so I quit a couple of months after.
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.
Yes! I had an engineering management role in a smallish company, which means that I still had a lot of hands on responsibilities, so not sure how things apply to your role. But a lot looked like this:
- we set out what we expected would be achieved in six months (major projects or milestones) <- we ran a roadmap that got fuzzy with time so this was more a vibe check than commitments
- we defined what would be signs that it wasn’t working. Eg. Projects stalling, teams confused about direction, feedback from the team, lowering of certain metrics.
- we set up checks every two months that included feedback from direct reports and one over.
- I picked Wednesday. we set out how the calendar was going to change, how handover was going to work for those days and what mechanisms existed to avoid blocking.
It went great! Especially as a manager knowing you’re not always there helps drive decision making delegation, self directedness, etc.
In this team I wasn’t the only one that tried it, and we didn’t synchronize days. It had no issue
Also depending on where you are, it might be moot. Eg. In Germany they can’t say no unless they have business reason.
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
I didn’t know this! I was using the US style. Thanks for the clarification
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.
Honestly this caught me off guard because they interim check-ins were good. I wasn’t expecting this conclusion. Otherwise i would!
Three months notice over here lol
I’m less than 50% confident the OP is a joke.
It’s a joke based on a true story.
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.
ya it’s cuz they aren’t side hustling enough
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.
Edit: how am I being downvoted lol - obviously what I wrote is nonsense straight from every Amazon, UPS, IBM commercial every made. Maybe I’m just moving at the speed of business. Keep up!
Very few business are sprints, they go for longevity like marathoners.
Even most know not to treat their employees that way too.
how am I being downvoted lol
Poe’s Law
Most in the c-suite truly think that way.
redo
Or rather we see just how much labor original work is compared to replication.
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