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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Infosys founder Narayama Murthy has tripled down on his previous statements that 70-hour work weeks are what's needed in India and revealed he also thinks weekends were a mistake.
Speaking on Indian TV channel CNBC-TV18 at the Global Leadership Summit in Mumbai last week Murthy once again declared he did not “believe in work-life balance.”
“I have not changed my view; I will take this with me to my grave,” he asserted .
The argument from Murthy, and like-minded colleagues he quotes, is that India is a poor country that has work to do improving itself. Work-life balance can wait.
The Infosys founder held prime minister Narendra Modi and his cabinet up as an example of proper workaholics, claiming the PM toils for 100 hours a week, and suggested that not following suit demonstrates a lack of appreciation.
“Frankly I was a little bit disappointed in 1986 when we moved from a six-day week to a five-day week,” he added.
[...] In response to his Murthy’s comments, some have suggested that long working hours are acceptable when you own your own company, but perhaps not ideal as an employee.
“This man has been given too much of an importance by asking his opinion about everything under the sun. His words remind me of those exploitative barons of medieval ages from whom the 8 hours work day rights had to be snatched,” quipped a commenter who claims to be a former Infosys employee.
[...] Despite its founder’s firm stance that India’s workforce be fully engaged, Infosys has recently received attention for promising 2,000 graduates a job and them making them wait up to two years to start work.
The engineers-in-waiting were allegedly kept busy with occasional training and promises after being selected for employment during Infosys’ 2022/23 recruitment drive.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 21, @02:54PM (4 children)
>How can we get even more out of those workers?
Automate your processes, train the workers to design, build, program and maintain robots that do the jobs for them.
Over-educate your populace, train so many robot techs that there's only 5 hours per week of work for each of them to do.
That's how you get George Jetson jobs at Spacely Sprockets. Bonus: since your employees have 6 days a week of free time instead of two, they can consume 3x as many consumer products - you just have to pay them like Ford did: enough to afford the products they are making. Extra bonus: parents have time to help their kids with their education to get those coveted 5 hours per week jobs...
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday November 21, @05:55PM (3 children)
Now that's where your plan goes dreadfully wrong. The plan each management team is ruthlessly intending to implement is that their workers get paid peanuts, while the market for the goods is made up by other company's workers. This is very smart if one management team does this. It is, however, not going to work if everybody does it at the same time.
And the politicians could fix this with higher minimum wages, lower full-time work weeks, and increasing overtime benefits, but they don't because their campaigns and parties are funded by the same people who are trying to implement the plan described above.
Which is exactly what has been happening for the last 45 years or so.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 21, @06:48PM (2 children)
2024-45 = 1979...
Things were going pretty well for my dual income family in 1979 - new 6 cylinder BMW in the 2 car garage of our newly constructed (1650sq ft) concrete block house in the 'burbs. Private school for the kids, and this on two teachers' salaries.
The cost of automobiles has outpaced inflation by some ludicrous multiple since then. Highway fatalities are down, but how much of that is attributable to safer highways and not the cars themselves? Nearly impossible to say, the people with the data to tease that out aren't sharing (like: fatalities per mile driven of antiques on the road today vs modern? Even then: how well maintained were the antiques? Even then: who drives antiques and do they drive them the same way as 60 month leased new commuters? Spoiler: not the same at all...)
Houses around here have gone disposable, built to fail within 40-60 years (needing major rework/repair as the roofs leak down into the wood frame walls putting mold behind the drywall, etc.), and more than doubled in size. We're also building more multi-family in the mix than we used to, as those single family homes spiral up out of reach for most workers.
Minimum wage shouldn't be the benchmark, but with our "smart" business owners each individually working to enrich themselves at the expense of society at large, it surely has become the benchmark, and unlike the hyper-inflating cost of cars and houses (and food, lately), minimum wage has been hypo-inflating for those 45 years.
Things weren't ideal in 1979, many things have improved since then, distribution of wealth isn't one of them.
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(Score: 2) by gnuman on Saturday November 23, @10:10PM (1 child)
Wasn't that always the case? I haven't noticed much quality changes in average house in last 50 years.
But it is. What multiple of minimum wage is your current salary? How was it in 1980? That's the measure of how well you are compared to rest of society. If minimum wage is catching up to the median salary, you should know what it means.
Voting has consequences. Taxes is how you redistribute wealth. If you keep lowering the taxes, what do you think happens to this income/wealth redistribution dream? Yeah, it's simply doesn't happen and the rich accumulate a lot more money much quicker.
I'm not against someone getting rich. But it's up to the government to keep the FREE in the Free Market. Natural state of any capitalistic society is monopoly and total wealth inequality. Government's job is to force the Free Market rules and redistribute the wealth. That's their basic economic job. That's how you keep the ephemeral hamster going in its economic wheel. But it looks like in America the rich have tricked the poor into voting against themselves and you get what you vote for.
Anyway, taxes were much higher in 1979, yet you are saying your standard of living you remember as better? Higher taxes == more money for teachers and other public servants. Yeah, that's how gov't "redistributes" money -- though services.
The antiques are death traps. Few fatalities because few drive them. And they are only driven in perfect conditions anyway. But like a motorcycle rider will tell you, it's not always up to you if you will get hit by another.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday November 24, @12:29AM
>>Houses around here have gone disposable, built to fail within 40-60 years
>Wasn't that always the case? I haven't noticed much quality changes in average house in last 50 years.
In Florida there has been a big move (encouraged by the building codes, which in turn are mostly written for the construction industry - giving them continued employment) away from concrete in construction. With our wind loads concrete can be very viable economically, but the codes are heavily slanted against it and the few contractors that have continued to try to build in concrete are facing major economy of scale issues.
Florida concrete homes built in the 50s through the early 70s are in very much better condition today than similar homes built from wood frame in the late 70s onward. They're unfashionably small, but structurally quite sound.
>>Minimum wage shouldn't be the benchmark
>But it is. What multiple of minimum wage is your current salary? How was it in 1980?
I wasn't working in 1980, but my father was working in 1973 for $10K per year, against a minimum wage of $1.60 per hour - or $3200 per year, so he was at 3.125x
When I started with a "real job" in 1991, I was making $30K per year against a minimum wage of $4.25 per hour - $8500 per year, 3.53x
>That's the measure of how well you are compared to rest of society.
I don't think that's a valid measure at all. As an example: Manhattan real estate in the late 1980s, a 300 square foot studio apartment would run $1000 per month, but for $2800 per month you could have a nice 1500 square foot three bedroom apartment... the thing was: lots of people could get $1000 per month together, but very few could manage $2800 per month. For less than 3x the money, you get three actual bedrooms, two bathrooms, a real kitchen and living room area, all because you've got what most of the other people don't...
Just because the lowest paid working people in the country are making more per hour doesn't mean your money is worth less... and vice versa. The price of Florida waterfront real-estate is mostly disconnected from "real" houses inland because the people who trade in those properties are simply different pools of buyers. The waterfront property rises and falls in price with the stock market, and spirals up at higher rates of inflation as the people who trade in it accelerate their income growth faster than the "little people" inland. The price of the "regular" homes is much more tied to mortgage interest rates...
>If minimum wage is catching up to the median salary, you should know what it means.
It means that nearly 50% of salary workers are being paid at minimum wage. That's neither good, nor bad, it's a statistic describing a flat bottomed income pool. If families supported by those minimum wage earners can afford basic healthcare, food, shelter, education, transportation and a bit of recreation / entertainment, that's not necessarily a bad thing at all. If families supported by minimum wage earners are spending all kinds of time and effort qualifying for and receiving government assistance for food, shelter, healthcare, etc... I'd say that's the "free market" freeloading on the taxpayers, and I'd call that a bad situation.
>Anyway, taxes were much higher in 1979, yet you are saying your standard of living you remember as better?
I didn't say the standard of living was better. To repeat what I said in more detail: our family of four, supported by two schoolteachers, seemed to be living a bit more comfortably and securely in 1975 than similar families are living today.
>Higher taxes == more money for teachers and other public servants.
Yet, today's starting teacher salaries in Florida are at $40K, roughly - and by the CPI: $40,000 in 2024 is worth $6,247.15 in 1974, so... a 37% decrease vs where my parents were at back then. Florida sales tax in 1974 was 4%, today it's 6% and locally boosted to 7% in most jurisdictions, up more than 50%... property taxes (where school funding comes from) are trickier to track, but inflating home values have resulted in greatly increased property tax collection in the last 50 years, while teacher salaries decreased by 37% in real terms...
>The antiques are death traps. Few fatalities because few drive them. And they are only driven in perfect conditions anyway.
I agree, in some ways. Prior to 1970 most of what was on US highways was horridly unsafe. Drum brakes, rigid steering columns, no seat belts, no headrests... However, my 1977 GMC Sierra collected two solid impacts within about 16 hours back in 1995, SUV ran a red light into it at 40+mph on my way home from work, totalled himself on the left rear quarter panel - which sustained minor wrinkles to the sheet metal and sprung the diamondplate bumper out a bit - then on the way to work the next morning a neighbor rear-ended me, totalling her SUV and mostly pushing the bumper back to its original shape. A little spray paint to cover up the exposed sheet metal and the 1977 truck was basically as good as ever except for some cosmetic "character marks." By 1972, most of what was being sold new by the US automakers had progressed tremendously in safety terms, since then I am much less impressed with the plasticization of everything, the rarely necessary but always easy to destroy "crumple zones", vast arrays of airbags, etc. etc. Side impact protection bars: good ROI in my book. Explosives 12" from my face ready to trigger in any given millisecond? I'm not sure I trust the muddied statistics on how much those may or may not be helping overall.
>But like a motorcycle rider will tell you, it's not always up to you if you will get hit by another.
Not always, but frequently it very much is. I absolutely refuse to drive around without headrests - I likely would have been paralyzed by that rear-ending if my head had been allowed to flop back like the cars of the 60s and prior would have allowed... being rear ended is one of the most unavoidable situations out there, even when you see it coming it's often hard or impossible to do anything about it. As for things that air-bags can help with... I'd say the majority (at least 51%) of accidents where air bags have made a positive difference for the occupants, the driver could made bigger positive differences with proper handling of the situation leading up to the deployment.
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