[o5ira]

He seems to have no sense of how IP law could stifle the benefit to humanity. He assumes that no matter who innovates something very useful, that it will spread to everyone's workflow. I think the host was correct to suggest that the government should fund this research, as you might be able to ensure it's available for public benefit and not "owned" (licensed?) by Atlassian or whoever it may be.

Not to mention he only describes the benefit in terms of dollars of profit to companies. Broaden your scope of the potential benefit to humanity!

[Jtsummers]

There are a large number of process management tools out there, not just Atlassian. If your office is more creative, they could adopt one of the BPMN-based or similarly generic tools and build out their own processes properly instead of trying to shoehorn everything into whatever Atlassian is pushing.

He talks about two benefits: One for the companies (profit and real improvements in productivity), one for the employees (better focus means less unpaid OT answering after hours emails and texts, or even paid OT that still leads to burnout). The reason to focus on that former one is that it's pretty much the best way to convince the people who care most about profits (that is, people at the top of the hierarchy) to care about something. Not that they don't care about employee wellbeing at all (though some may be truly uncaring), but it's too remote from their present position or too low a priority compared to keeping the company operating.

That's why he talks about how in this case he thinks incentives (in particular between management, shareholders, and employees) are actually aligned to potentially produce a win-win.

[o5ira]

I don't think framing the world as employers and employees is the right way to reconcile with a potential 10x increase in human productivity. We could consider making employers obsolete at that point. At this point in time, it isn't certain that employers (or capital, largely) will own the benefits of this 10x, is it? Can we make sure to wield it for the benefit of humanity? This is potentially beyond the scale of individual companies, if we don't let them eat all the profits.