This, again, makes me question what meaning individual workers should find in work.
Ideally (level 3, the best), I could work with good people on something that I personally care about, like curing childhood cancer or something. This is the type of work I would do even if I wasn't paid, although I couldn't do as much without pay. The meaning is obvious.
This type of job is rare though, so I can't reliably expect to find this level of meaning in work.
But maybe (level 2), I can work with good people towards making a company profitable. Helping a company be profitable for the mutual benefit of all the good people I work with is meaning enough for me.
But companies often ask individual workers to do stupid things, or a company is not open to hearing ideas about how to be more successful and profitable from individual workers. So I can't reliably take personal meaning from making the company profitable, because the company isn't interested in hearing my ideas about the business, and/or is acting is self-destructive ways.
But maybe (level 1), I can find meaning in making my boss happy. This is hell, this is a pathetic meaning for work, but making the boss happy is at least something.
But often my bosses are not good people (about 50%). I've seen what makes them happy and I don't want to be that.
So, (level 0) I guess the only meaning I have left is to make money. If this is really the meaning behind my work, then I see no reason to not cheat and lie at every opportunity, while being careful to avoid consequences. If earning money really is the deepest meaning I should seek in work, then lying and cheating will help me with this--let's go full psychopath mode!
On HN people often say that level 2 is the right attitude, but companies do things that are self-destructive, so I cannot maintain level 2. Level 1 and level 0 are stages of hell.
taeric · 13m ago
The pretense here is that we actually know what leads to long term progress? As much as it pains people to admit it, short term results are often far more predictive of long term results than any other single data point.
Is it perfect? No. Of course not. But having a team that is just willing to show up and work towards a goal is such a leg up over any other thing that we know that it is painful to see it argued against.
Will there be some people that make progress in leaps? Absolutely. Most of that progress will be taken up and incorporated rather quickly in the places that also employ the teams that just show up.
kenjackson · 1h ago
They do care about those things. But it turns out that stock price and profits often turn on “bigger” things than productivity. Google didn’t win search because they were productive. Nor did Tesla win EVs due to it (and they won’t lose EVs due to the lack of it).
There are some spaces where productivity does matter. My uncle runs a painting company. It’s all about productivity, costs, and customer acquisition. HeAl’s not waiting on new markets or innovation to fundamentally change how he makes money (although tech has improved productivity). He’s made it for the same way for the past 30 years.
lapcat · 48m ago
> They do care about those things.
The article author argues that companies enforce policies that are manifestly unproductive. Do you have a counterargument, or evidence that they do care?
zdragnar · 42m ago
The article incorrectly conflates "cares about productivity" with "cares exclusively about productivity".
SWE salaries are a massive cost. Improving productivity is one way of offsetting that cost. The examples provided for "don't care about productivity" are things like open office plans- where a certain amount of productivity is sacrificed while offsetting a different cost (building space).
Yes, it is fair to say that managers and executives do not care about productivity to the exclusion of all else. It's something of a pointless statement, though, as I don't think anyone actually thinks that.
whatshisface · 58m ago
If there's an action that would lower the price per share by 10% but raise an individual's stock based compensation by 12%, every executive in the world would take it.
SoftTalker · 52m ago
Google and Tesla both won by being vastly better than the competition. After they won, perhaps their motiviations changed.
snapcaster · 39m ago
But they didn't win by being marginally more productive than competitors
FirmwareBurner · 16m ago
Tesla was iterating and innovating way faster on the SW and HW front with less R&D resources, than the stablished German or Japanese players. By that metric, they were significantly more productive.
Stock market is a gambling game that has little to do with actual productivity, it's about convincing a fool to pay more than you did so that you can make a profit and leave him holding the bag.
moc_was_wronged · 39m ago
Large language models have their place, but they’re quite limited and no real substitute for human intelligence or judgement at its best.
That said, abusive corporate environments (and they’re pretty much all abusive) turn people into automatons. Execs can thus wave LLMs around and say, “Look, you’re so useless a machine can do your job.”
And even then it does a shitty job. It misses special cases and causes messes. But it’s cheap in the short term, which is all that matters to the boss’s career. Things will go to shit in a few years, but if you’re good at executive social climbing, you are three promotions away from your bad decisions by the time anyone figures out that’s what they were.
jackero · 51m ago
Maximizing productivity comes from maximizing efficiency. Efficiency is about sitting down and analyzing your tasks holistically and doing min-maxing to ensure every process achieves its greatest result.
Now ask yourself this: how often do people do this at all? Pretty much never. Most of us only do it when you have to, because you aren’t making enough money, because your application is slow, because you can barely meet budget, or because you are trying to land on the moon and failing costs too much.
boothby · 43m ago
> Efficiency is about sitting down and analyzing your tasks holistically and doing min-maxing...
Accurate analysis depends on accurate data. Which is why some people I know are required to account for their work activities in 7-minute increments, have frequent and detailed meetings to account for progress, project planning, etc.
Actually, doing that analysis has a cost that must be discounted from any perceived gains of efficiency, to be truly efficient. One learns to tolerate some waste to avoid the ultimate time-suck.
To say nothing of maintence and sustainability -- if you're always sprinting, you're doomed to fall.
No comments yet
MaKey · 5m ago
> Now ask yourself this: how often do people do this at all? Pretty much never. Most of us only do it when you have to, because you aren’t making enough money, because your application is slow, because you can barely meet budget, or because you are trying to land on the moon and failing costs too much.
I do it most of the time at work because I find joy in finding the best possible solution.
jgeada · 23m ago
The other hard lesson learned during the Covid shutdowns (actually, it is learned and promptly forgotten at every major crisis):
maximizing efficiency also maximizes the number of single points of failure in your system. Anything that goes wrong breaks an optimized for efficiency system.
You need to have resilience and redundancy to deal with variability, but those cost money.
Much better from the management perspective to ignore those risks, cash in on the cheap profits and blame "unexpected events" and get a bailout when things go wrong. They cash in on the easy money and have no downside consequences.
tptacek · 38m ago
The author has twisted themselves into a weird pretzel trying to tie a broad societal critique about short-termism to day-to-day line management. Your manager almost certainly does care about your productivity; in fact, the more biting critique is probably that they care too much about it, working to juice output in the short term while paying short shrift to downstream consequences.
throwaway1004 · 12m ago
I would frame this slightly differently: managers care about delivery above all else, not necessarily productivity or efficiency.
Their goal is to attach their name to as many features/initatives as possible, owning the successes and orphaning failures, to impress their bosses. Another related goal is to have as many reports as possible. Delivery is relative to the average velocity: often, it's preferable to have a slow, inefficient operation so you can sandbag your bosses AND increase your headcount.
When it comes to improving processes and tools, managers prefer low-risk, iterative improvements which they can (somewhat) grasp. They also enjoy one-off prototypes and half-baked hacker projects which use new and shiny technology. Both categories make great fodder for PowerPoint presentations in front of shirts.
When it comes to larger, fundamental shifts which they cannot grok nor plausibly attach their name to, many managers will actively impede such efforts, as this risks upsetting the status quo which is (probably) working for them. The exceptions are usually the smart middle-managers looking to create a rising tide.
I've worked at a company that had dozens upon dozens of teams working on precisely the same problems (standard build->deploy->test->release fare), using many of the same tools, each with their own half-baked and poorly maintained configuration, plugins, dependencies, and custom libraries (sometimes, they even wrote a few tests!).
You can probably guess the majority of the proposal I put together, it's foundational stuff. It was presented and discussed among our senior+ engineers, and with managers.
>"You know... maybe there's value in letting teams be innovative..."
add-sub-mul-div · 28m ago
Sounds like the same argument. They don't care about true productivity, they want the appearance of it, the illusory short term gains of AI.
burnte · 54m ago
Good ones really do and they work hard to enhance the productivity of their workers. I always say to my people that my job is to make their jobs easier, and to a large degree that's true.
There are other types who prefer the power trip, or that if you're a bad manager then your job is pretty easy, etc. But GOOD execs actually do care quite a lot. I tend to tangle with HR over salaries because I'd rather hire a handful of really good people for 15% above market and get double the productivity than a lot of people at or below market.
This article is confusing the corporate raider mindset rampant in big public companies with the genuine growth mindset most companies actually have. Everyone focuses on productivity and costs, enshittification only happens when you're near enough of a monopoly you can afford to squeeze your customers. Most companies can't do that and most companies try to just keep improving. Don't look at MS or Exxon and think that's who most companies actually work. That's just the beginning of the end stage of a megacorporation's life.
fatbird · 1h ago
As I keep mentioning, I worked as a contractor inside Honeywell for 5+ years. My experience of my immediate team was mixed: some very good people, some total morons. My experience of the organization was uniformly terrible. Absurd company-wide requirements for security checks, code quality verification, financial controls. Insane restrictions on product development to use X technology or integrate with Y unit's product. Billions wasted on their IIoT play that got rebooted after several years (and the billions I saw wasted wasn't its development, it was moving everyone in the company onto and off it again ["offboarding"]).
In that time, the stock price went up, and Honeywell went back on the Fortune 100. Just zero relationship between productivity or effectiveness within the company and the stock price.
whatshisface · 1h ago
>Just zero relationship between productivity or effectiveness within the company and the stock price.
Losing billions of dollars doesn't keep you off the Fortune 100, only losing billions of dollars more than the other companies people could invest in.
paulcole · 42m ago
> There’s obviously a financial bubble in full force.
If it’s so obvious, figure out how to bet against it, get rich, and never have to worry about productivity again.
> The environmental impact is real.
If every LLM disappeared tomorrow, the environment is still equally fucked as it is today. “Think of the environment” is the second most mindless appeal to emotion argument against anything other than “Think of the children.”
jgeada · 20m ago
"The market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent" -- John Maynard Keynes
Ideally (level 3, the best), I could work with good people on something that I personally care about, like curing childhood cancer or something. This is the type of work I would do even if I wasn't paid, although I couldn't do as much without pay. The meaning is obvious.
This type of job is rare though, so I can't reliably expect to find this level of meaning in work.
But maybe (level 2), I can work with good people towards making a company profitable. Helping a company be profitable for the mutual benefit of all the good people I work with is meaning enough for me.
But companies often ask individual workers to do stupid things, or a company is not open to hearing ideas about how to be more successful and profitable from individual workers. So I can't reliably take personal meaning from making the company profitable, because the company isn't interested in hearing my ideas about the business, and/or is acting is self-destructive ways.
But maybe (level 1), I can find meaning in making my boss happy. This is hell, this is a pathetic meaning for work, but making the boss happy is at least something.
But often my bosses are not good people (about 50%). I've seen what makes them happy and I don't want to be that.
So, (level 0) I guess the only meaning I have left is to make money. If this is really the meaning behind my work, then I see no reason to not cheat and lie at every opportunity, while being careful to avoid consequences. If earning money really is the deepest meaning I should seek in work, then lying and cheating will help me with this--let's go full psychopath mode!
On HN people often say that level 2 is the right attitude, but companies do things that are self-destructive, so I cannot maintain level 2. Level 1 and level 0 are stages of hell.
Is it perfect? No. Of course not. But having a team that is just willing to show up and work towards a goal is such a leg up over any other thing that we know that it is painful to see it argued against.
Will there be some people that make progress in leaps? Absolutely. Most of that progress will be taken up and incorporated rather quickly in the places that also employ the teams that just show up.
There are some spaces where productivity does matter. My uncle runs a painting company. It’s all about productivity, costs, and customer acquisition. HeAl’s not waiting on new markets or innovation to fundamentally change how he makes money (although tech has improved productivity). He’s made it for the same way for the past 30 years.
The article author argues that companies enforce policies that are manifestly unproductive. Do you have a counterargument, or evidence that they do care?
SWE salaries are a massive cost. Improving productivity is one way of offsetting that cost. The examples provided for "don't care about productivity" are things like open office plans- where a certain amount of productivity is sacrificed while offsetting a different cost (building space).
Yes, it is fair to say that managers and executives do not care about productivity to the exclusion of all else. It's something of a pointless statement, though, as I don't think anyone actually thinks that.
Stock market is a gambling game that has little to do with actual productivity, it's about convincing a fool to pay more than you did so that you can make a profit and leave him holding the bag.
That said, abusive corporate environments (and they’re pretty much all abusive) turn people into automatons. Execs can thus wave LLMs around and say, “Look, you’re so useless a machine can do your job.”
And even then it does a shitty job. It misses special cases and causes messes. But it’s cheap in the short term, which is all that matters to the boss’s career. Things will go to shit in a few years, but if you’re good at executive social climbing, you are three promotions away from your bad decisions by the time anyone figures out that’s what they were.
Now ask yourself this: how often do people do this at all? Pretty much never. Most of us only do it when you have to, because you aren’t making enough money, because your application is slow, because you can barely meet budget, or because you are trying to land on the moon and failing costs too much.
Accurate analysis depends on accurate data. Which is why some people I know are required to account for their work activities in 7-minute increments, have frequent and detailed meetings to account for progress, project planning, etc.
Actually, doing that analysis has a cost that must be discounted from any perceived gains of efficiency, to be truly efficient. One learns to tolerate some waste to avoid the ultimate time-suck.
To say nothing of maintence and sustainability -- if you're always sprinting, you're doomed to fall.
No comments yet
I do it most of the time at work because I find joy in finding the best possible solution.
maximizing efficiency also maximizes the number of single points of failure in your system. Anything that goes wrong breaks an optimized for efficiency system.
You need to have resilience and redundancy to deal with variability, but those cost money.
Much better from the management perspective to ignore those risks, cash in on the cheap profits and blame "unexpected events" and get a bailout when things go wrong. They cash in on the easy money and have no downside consequences.
Their goal is to attach their name to as many features/initatives as possible, owning the successes and orphaning failures, to impress their bosses. Another related goal is to have as many reports as possible. Delivery is relative to the average velocity: often, it's preferable to have a slow, inefficient operation so you can sandbag your bosses AND increase your headcount.
When it comes to improving processes and tools, managers prefer low-risk, iterative improvements which they can (somewhat) grasp. They also enjoy one-off prototypes and half-baked hacker projects which use new and shiny technology. Both categories make great fodder for PowerPoint presentations in front of shirts.
When it comes to larger, fundamental shifts which they cannot grok nor plausibly attach their name to, many managers will actively impede such efforts, as this risks upsetting the status quo which is (probably) working for them. The exceptions are usually the smart middle-managers looking to create a rising tide.
I've worked at a company that had dozens upon dozens of teams working on precisely the same problems (standard build->deploy->test->release fare), using many of the same tools, each with their own half-baked and poorly maintained configuration, plugins, dependencies, and custom libraries (sometimes, they even wrote a few tests!).
You can probably guess the majority of the proposal I put together, it's foundational stuff. It was presented and discussed among our senior+ engineers, and with managers.
>"You know... maybe there's value in letting teams be innovative..."
There are other types who prefer the power trip, or that if you're a bad manager then your job is pretty easy, etc. But GOOD execs actually do care quite a lot. I tend to tangle with HR over salaries because I'd rather hire a handful of really good people for 15% above market and get double the productivity than a lot of people at or below market.
This article is confusing the corporate raider mindset rampant in big public companies with the genuine growth mindset most companies actually have. Everyone focuses on productivity and costs, enshittification only happens when you're near enough of a monopoly you can afford to squeeze your customers. Most companies can't do that and most companies try to just keep improving. Don't look at MS or Exxon and think that's who most companies actually work. That's just the beginning of the end stage of a megacorporation's life.
In that time, the stock price went up, and Honeywell went back on the Fortune 100. Just zero relationship between productivity or effectiveness within the company and the stock price.
Losing billions of dollars doesn't keep you off the Fortune 100, only losing billions of dollars more than the other companies people could invest in.
If it’s so obvious, figure out how to bet against it, get rich, and never have to worry about productivity again.
> The environmental impact is real.
If every LLM disappeared tomorrow, the environment is still equally fucked as it is today. “Think of the environment” is the second most mindless appeal to emotion argument against anything other than “Think of the children.”