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The Economist - Why is everyone so busy?
The predictions sounded like promises: in the future, working hours would be short and vacations long. “Our grandchildren”, reckoned John Maynard Keynes in 1930, would work around “three hours a day”—and probably only by choice. Economic progress and technological advances had already shrunk working hours considerably by his day, and there was no reason to believe this trend would not continue. Whizzy cars and ever more time-saving tools and appliances guaranteed more speed and less drudgery in all parts of life. Social psychologists began to fret: whatever would people do with all their free time?
This has not turned out to be one of the world’s more pressing problems. Everybody, everywhere seems to be busy. In the corporate world, a “perennial time-scarcity problem” afflicts executives all over the globe, and the matter has only grown more acute in recent years, say analysts at McKinsey, a consultancy firm. These feelings are especially profound among working parents. As for all those time-saving gizmos, many people grumble that these bits of wizardry chew up far too much of their days, whether they are mouldering in traffic, navigating robotic voice-messaging systems or scything away at e-mail—sometimes all at once.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Friday December 26 2014, @01:17AM
While I modded you insightful, I think that you forget the tremendous amount of busy-work that exists in corporate AND government offices. Papers to fill out, memo-chains to weigh in on, road blocks to throw up, meetings to attend. There is a mountain of stuff that could be swept away and, (to quote the Mikado) They never would be missed.
Some of this is the government mandated busyness, other is the busyness affected simply to protect one's own ass, and appear somehow indispensable.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ticho on Friday December 26 2014, @01:20AM
Yeah, I guess that is true. Although, at least in my experience, the people doing the useless busywork are among the last to get axed, because middle management does love their Excel reports.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by buswolley on Friday December 26 2014, @02:20AM
Middle management will be replaced by AI.
Middle-man businesses will be replaced by decentralized networks
subicular junctures
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @04:57AM
Just an anecdote and an observation.
When we were a small company, it used to be a lot of fun working there because we felt we were doing something important. Something the customer wanted done. Something he was paying cold hard cash for.
We each knew our customer, what he wanted, and our customer would come by a lot to guide and help.
Then the big company - an investor group - bought us and whored us out.
We no longer seemed to work for the customer, rather we were now all in competition with each other trying to look important, and it became dog-eat-dog. Each day seemed like cat feeding time with six cats and five bowls. Now we were executively managed by very wealthy investors looking for whoever would pay the most for access to us, while seeing at the same time who among us they could get rid of. It seemed the order of the day was psychological warfare as the highly paid leadership type worked daily on our psyche to convince us we weren't worth much and how easily they could replace us.
The result is the people who could leave, did. The rest of us did not fare well running with the technical folks gone.
The investor group paid themselves well with the proceeds of destroying the company.
The following link is a good one demonstrating how valueless our system now considers skilled labor. Take a look at what they are asking for! Then look at how much they are willing to pay for this kind of skillset...
http://www.higheredjobs.com/details.cfm?Jobcode=176000105&aID=11160&print=yes [higheredjobs.com]
They will pay $30/hour, then deduct all sorts of taxes...
The neighbor kid down the street makes three times that growing pot.
I ran some copies of that ad off and posted it on the college's job board to show the students just how futile it was to study STEM in this country.
Best get into something useful like management and investment banking - something the government will fund and protect the business model of.
A highly paid man wearing a business suit is a helluva lot more useful to society than a skilled workman and his tools.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @06:09AM
The problem is USD30/hour is quite high compared to elsewhere in the world.
See: http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/01/16/verizon-finds-developer-outsourced-his-work-to-china-so-he-could-surf-reddit-and-watch-cat-videos/ [thenextweb.com]
and only paying the Chinese consulting firm “about fifty grand annually.
he apparently received excellent performance reviews for the last several years in a row, even being hailed the best developer in the building: his code was clean, well-written, and submitted in a timely fashion.
30/hour works out to more than 55000/year even assuming 1 month of not working (holiday). And keep in mind the Chinese firm was being paid about 50k, their actual employees probably not so much (unless it's a very small firm).
FWIW I work in a 3rd world country making much less than USD30/hour and I probably spell and think better than most US workers earning my salary range. So assuming technology improves (automation, communications, AI), many more US workers are in for a lot more hurt.
p.s. I don't know why you reward your obviously mediocre CEOs so much too. Why'd you need to pay them huge sums to sack people and damage the company? If they can find ways to retain employees and turn a profit, then yes they're worth millions since that's much harder to do.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @12:13PM
p.s. I don't know why you reward your obviously mediocre CEOs so much too. Why'd you need to pay them huge sums to sack people and damage the company? If they can find ways to retain employees and turn a profit, then yes they're worth millions since that's much harder to do.
We do not. The shareholders of the companies do. If the shareholders believe paying tens of millions to someone who promotes a short-term profit-at-all-costs mentality is paramount to the company's success, then that's what will happen.
Most (if not all) upper-tier 'C' level executives aren't employees. They work under a personal services contract and are in it just for one reason: maximizing their personal profits (the exact same reason most shareholders invest in a company).
The idea of growing a business as a place where everyone prospers (principals, shareholders, execs, labor, local community, etc) is a nostalgic relic of days gone by. Quick profits are the name of the game. You can even see this when a large multi-billion dollar international conglomerate posts a great quarter but is slightly conservative with their next quarter projections. The stock can go down even though they just posted great profits.
Greed has become the foundation of large economies (just look at the companies that have government contracts or the ones buying politicians). So much so that now employees need to be greedy just to try to earn a living wage (which certainly hasn't kept up with inflation over the last few decades).
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday December 26 2014, @05:58PM
This is one thing I've been saying. We in the US could do fine on much less, if we really tried.
But, it's not so easy for an individual. We have suburban sprawl and "McMansions". You really must have a car in the US, and that of course is a huge expense. To add to the fun, various organizations try to take advantage of this need to squeeze even more money out of car owners, with things like red light cameras, annual license fees, and "safety" inspections that are really more about revenue and drumming up repair and replacement business than actual safety. For instance, Virginia uses safety as the excuse why your windshield basically cannot have any cracks at all. Our cities, especially the newer ones in the south, were designed for transportation by car, and, intentionally or not, are quite hostile to other forms of transportation. There are some places where you can do without a car, but they are few. Then, for housing, there are lots of wastefully large and inefficient McMansions, and not so much in the way of low cost housing. There's a great deal of prejudice against affordable housing. "Trailer park trash" and "the projects". There was a New Urbanism movement some years ago, an effort to build neighborhoods that were actually pedestrian friendly and had low cost housing. In typical American fashion, developers twisted this into the latest fad, worth paying millions for, and the low cost part was quickly dropped. Seaside Florida is a perfect example of this.
As for the CEOs, yes, we and they know they are massively overpaid. "Thief Executive Officer" is one name I've heard them called. They've rigged the system so that it's impossible to work within it to address this issue. Small stockholders have no say in the matter, not enough votes to do anything. Employees can do nothing either, in part because they're kept too busy trying to hang on to their own jobs, made to just feel grateful that they have a job. Customers also have enough to worry about without adding CEO pay to the list of reasons not to buy from a particular company. Regulators have been bought off or suppressed.
America isn't about what you need, it's about having more than your neighbors. Keeping up with the Joneses.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheRaven on Friday December 26 2014, @09:37AM
The following link is a good one demonstrating how valueless our system now considers skilled labor. Take a look at what they are asking for! Then look at how much they are willing to pay for this kind of skillset...
University lab techs are among the worst paid skilled jobs. They're paid less than postdocs, who are paid less than faculty (in most places), who are paid significantly less than they could get in industry. They generally fall into three categories:
If you look for similar jobs in industrial research labs, they usually pay a lot more.
sudo mod me up