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The workplace is where people go to work. But much of the day is increasingly padded out with less productive activities, writes Peter Fleming. A few years ago a disturbing story appeared in the media that seemed to perfectly capture the contemporary experience of work and its ever increasing grip over our lives: "Man Dies at Office Desk - Nobody Notices for Five Days".
The case was unnerving for one reason mainly. People die all the time, but usually we notice. Are things so bad in the modern workplace that we can no longer tell the difference between the living and the dead? Of course, the story turned out to be a hoax. An urban myth.
As it happens, each country has its own variation that still fools people when they periodically appear. In the US the dead person is a publisher. In other countries, a management consultant.
Apart from getting the actual task done, which is typically completed in short bursts, there is also a good deal of messing about, chatting, paying the bills, surfing the net, daydreaming and waiting for the day to finish. Most importantly, much of our day is spent busy being busy rather than doing things that are socially useful.
A recent study of overworked management consultants in the US found that 35% employed in this occupation actually "faked" an 80-hour work week. For various reasons these individuals pretended to sacrifice themselves on the altar of work and still got everything done.
In this respect, entire occupations might be considered phoney - from life coaches to "atmosphere co-ordinators" (people hired to create a party vibe in bars) to "chief learning officers" in the corporate world. For those economists trying to figure out the present "productivity puzzle" in the UK, best start looking here.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32829232
[Source]: http://www.city.ac.uk/news/2015/may/why-do-people-waste-so-much-time-at-the-office
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Justin Case on Saturday May 30 2015, @07:26PM
Sorry for the self-reply, but I'm having flashbacks to a death march of all-day meetings, back to back.
They were convened by a flock of "assistant vice presidents" who flew out from New York to show us the light. We even had a "meeting facilitator" who demonstrated her value by covering every wall of the room by the end of every day with large sheets of paper containing her notes, just to show how much we had "accomplished". Of course, they were all taken down the next morning to make room for another crop.
The first and most important thing to understand was that "it" must be done by June 30, because we want to be the first to market, and we've got a big advertising buy "landing" on June 30.
The flock knew absolutely nothing about web design; it seemed unlikely that they'd ever even used a web site themselves. (1998) But they knew it absolutely must be cool, so they could brag to their rivals at dinner parties. Also it had to be "engaging".
And "compelling". Hey! We're almost treading on the edge of a requirement here. It should "compel" people to do what?
Why to build brand loyalty, of course.
I shut up and stopped asking questions.
After a great deal of agonizing debate, limited exclusively to the "assistant vice presidents", we finally "gained consensus" on the "creative". In other words, what color should the font be? No functionality, though.
When the marathon was finally over -- during which time we'd never been out of their sight during business hours long enough to do more than potty -- they turned to the developers and said "So, is it done yet?"
Done? We said. If you'll go away now maybe we can start.
Oh, I thought we were quite clear that it must be done by June 30. What have you been waiting for?
Ummm, you to shut up?
Arrggggggghhhh!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by boristhespider on Saturday May 30 2015, @08:41PM
If this was 98 you might have just been early enough to avoid the enormous joy that is "Agile". As far as I can see, an Agile "Sprint" is this:
Day 1: Convene at the start of the day to look through the list of tasks the project manager has set for the next two weeks. Spend two hours talking about the "effort" involved in each task, the number of hours involved in each "task", and then spend a few hours splitting them into sub-tasks and putting against them an idea of the "effort" and number of hours that would be consumed in this task, ensuring that it matches the previous estimate. Argue that the "effort" that has been forced upon you by the product manager are meaningless, since it's very likely that the code needing to be modified for these tasks will have unexpected tendrils in every other part of the code, in unpredictable ways. Having burned a good couple of hours, go away and task everything out a bit more carefully. Reconvene, and go through the entire fucking process again. Net result of day 1: totally fuck all; we've wasted the whole day arguing about whether task 5 is trivial or whether it involves a full redesign of one of our systems and would take three sprints. (Obviously, the latter.)
Days 2-13: Attempt to do some work in between the meetings set up for this Sprint, meetings set up for other Sprints you're not in but are expected to devote work torwards (apparently from your bottomless resource of free time given everything was evidently tasked out for a different Sprint on Day 1). Having started on a couple of the tasks assigned to you on Day 1, revise all the time estimates in light of the absurd existing software design, making a total mockery of the "effort" estimates that were forced upon you but which cannot be revised.
Day 14: Have a wrap-up, in which you present about a third of the work that was forced upon you on Day 1. In the retrospective afterwards, point out that the "effort" is a pointless piece of bureaucratic pish that simply wastes time and applies unnecessary pressure, and that "original time estimates" are not just degenerate with "effort" -- to the repeated denials of the Scrum Master and the Product Manager who appear, themselves, to be in denial -- but are equally useless and pressure forming. Point out that had we not burned Day 1 in "planning" and in making pointless estimates of "effort" and hours involved, and been allowed to jettison obviously unrealistic tasks in favour of the realistic, and Day 14 in wrapping up and painful navel-gazing that will be entirely ignored come the following working day, we might have got a bit more done and certainly have had far fewer missed objectives.
Day 15: Declare that both "Agile" and "Scrum" are a pile of fucking shit, and merely new words for the same old crap - and that it would be easier all around to simply give me a set of tasks to do on Day 1, discuss how realistic they are for the next release, and then review again on Day 14 - and get reprimanded by a management who inexplicably love it, despite having been in the development teams less than a year before.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Justin Case on Saturday May 30 2015, @09:27PM
Yes well it is obvious, I'm sure, to anyone with a brain that "agile" and "sprint" are just managerdroid-speak for "we're going to pretend if we change a few words around suddenly it magically won't consume time to do things."
And you're right about "effort". Our project management system is supposed to have a bunch of tasks for every project. But of course that would mean work for the PMs to detail out all those tasks. So instead we get a single task named "Project Work Effort Reporting". Clearly you're not supposed to do anything, other than report your "effort". And of course once you've reported an amount equal to the absurdly-randomly-predicted "effort", the project will be done, right?
Since all they really want to hear is "yes, it's done" I've learned to just say "yes, it's done." A day or two later they will come back and say "but it doesn't do X" to which I respond "thank you for finally providing a requirement; I'll get straight to work on X."
(Score: 2) by boristhespider on Saturday May 30 2015, @09:38PM
Thankfully we don't have the "Project Work Effort Reporting" - and for full disclosure, my own product manager appears to have a reasonable contempt for this, so that these days my kick-offs are about 30 minutes to an hour long, and generally "effort" involves him asking "how long will this take?", listening to the reply, believing it, and dicking around with priorities and otherwise leaving us alone. This is a blessed relief after the year before it, and most likely after he's either moved on or succumbed to the bullshit, especially as the (junior) member of staff who has been appointed "SCRUM master" is predictably, tediously and nauseatingly gung-ho for this crap.
I think I might start trying the "thank you for finally providing a requirement; I'll get straight to work on X." I might drop "finally" - that would lend a wonderful ambiguity as to whether (as they believe) they had provided a requirement at the start, or whether they've only just provided one now, without getting me accused of criticising management....
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday May 31 2015, @02:49AM
Yes well it is obvious, I'm sure, to anyone with a brain that "agile" and "sprint" are just managerdroid-speak for "we're going to pretend if we change a few words around suddenly it magically won't consume time to do things."
Duh, of course it won't consume as much time. "Agile" and "sprint" are fast words! Naming your meetings with fast words mean they get done faster, anybody knows that. It's just like a joke I made recently about people using Apple's Swift language because the name obviously means everything's faster -- development, testing, and performance, all faster! -- because sometimes people really do believe that sort of nonsense.
See also the tendency to rename companies and products to get rid of bad reputation. Fix the problems? Nah, just rename it and hope nobody notices.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:00PM
Since all they really want to hear is "yes, it's done" I've learned to just say "yes, it's done." A day or two later they will come back and say "but it doesn't do X" to which I respond "thank you for finally providing a requirement; I'll get straight to work on X."
This. I always ended up having to slap something together that included all the vague ideas that came from management, then adjusting it finally to do what they actually wanted and get rid of the rest. Some wasted work, but much less frustrating than trying to pin down management ahead of time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @01:42AM
If you want to find out where all this numb-nuts crap came from, find yourself a torrent of The Trap, and English documentary that looks at the origins of quantifiable performance objectives as part of the modern world.