[begurken]

This message is very well known and understood.

The interesting question is 'why do foolish managers continue to treat their employers in poor ways that are known to decrease productivity?' In terms of productivity, it's a total lose-lose situation.

I'm 37, and I'm pretty sure that I have worked out the answer. Most corporations are run by people (the managerial class) who are more interested in power than results. They hire sycophants who kiss upwards and amplify pressure downwards. Competence is irrelevant; after all, any competent manager would resist managing their employees in ways that management science have proven to be unproductive.

I have been in a couple of these companies, and they absolutely rot from the head down.

At least in tech. we have the option of getting out, because such companies are generally not entrenched and are on track to fail. Unfortunately, in other parts of the economy, such companies are unassailably entrenched, so their workers have no choice but to work for stupid, evil, toxic organisations, or to change career.

The result of these organisations is that much of the US now has a toxic culture of 'if you're not stressed, you're not working'.

A friend also suggested to me that it's possible for groups of people to become 'addicted' to stress; it would be interesting to see more on this.

[nostrademons]

There's a less cynical answer: it's that managers are subject to the same principle, of insufficient R&R resulting in tunnel vision, and so they're exhausted and hence tend to think short-term (beat this unrealistic deadline now!) instead of long-term (we'll cut the least important features or slip the deadline so we can get it done). The only way to break the cycle is to realize that a good portion of what you do doesn't need to be done, and ruthlessly cull out nonessential tasks so that nobody does them.

[wpietri]

> Most corporations are run by people (the managerial class) who are more interested in power than results.

This made me a lot angrier before I realized that this is just the primate dominance dynamic expressed in business organizational structure. It's the default human response to the circumstance, just like street gangs are the default response to different circumstances.

That has changed my attitude to "I hope these assholes get hit by a truck" to one of compassion to people whose wiring has gotten them trapped in a local maximum. There are no villains, only people who the system has trained to serve the system.

[jey]

It's partly a problem of optimizing metrics that are easy to measure, like ass-in-chair time.

[crazygringo]

I couldn't agree more. There is absolutely NO way to effectively measure programmer productivity.

If there actually were an objetive way, then it would be a different story. But in the absence of it, a team has to "look" productive at least, and that means people in the office looking like they're working. Even if it means less real work getting done (because again, how do you measure that objetively? can't be done).

[viscanti]

> There is absolutely NO way to effectively measure programmer productivity.

One of the big reasons programmer productivity is so difficult to measure, is that you need to also see future productivity of everyone else who works on the code. If a programmer takes an extra week to build something more maintainable and that improved design saves months of future work, it's likely a productive use of time, but that's not always obvious until those months are saved (or not saved). That's not easily measured until the full lifecycle of the software is complete.

[johnjlocke]

Measuring programmer productivity, as in long-term impact, is much harder than measuring how many hours Programmer X sits at their desk or how many lines of code they can spit out in a day. Those are metrics that other programmers notice after maintaining code that previous programmers leave behind. It's always going to be a delayed reaction.

[anuy]

i agree that working with breaks and socializing with colleagues for a coffee/a walk/ a fresh breath of air is good for productivity. however i do not agree with some posters who say that there are no metrics to measure productivity. there are ways to measure programmer productivity. not talking about lines added or features added. in general we can get a sense of how involved is a feature addition by looking at the list of data structures needed, algorithms to process the data, algorithms to list/display the output. more formal methods--http://secse08.cs.ua.edu/Papers/Danis.pdf

[prodigal_erik]

That approach can set a sort of lower bound on how much work a feature requires, but judging productivity also involves measuring how often the program fails to meet its specification and how much work to modify it could have been avoided up front.

[johnjlocke]

Addiction to stress is kind of a real thing. It takes a complete stripping away of the mentality that most people have to see it for what it is. The managerial class is also put through the paces in Corporate America. I've seen this first hand. Unless you are a C-level executive, there is always someone using the veiled threat of job loss to keep you in line.

The tech world has some problems, but compared to the work environments that the rest of the country is experiencing, it's Shangri-La.

I wish that all of the country (world, really) would be able to exercise control over their destinies as easily as we can. The mindset and the skills together are a great gift. Never cease to be grateful.

[datr]

> A friend also suggested to me that it's possible for groups of people to become 'addicted' to stress; it would be interesting to see more on this.

This NY Times article was posted here a few months back and touches on the same idea: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-tra...