"The modern workplace is a hive of inactivity and low productivity"

[Protagoras]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolo...cking-britain/

[DealorNoDeal]

I wonder how many working hours are lost to the internet? Forums are certainly a lot quieter on non-work days.

[ladymuck]

Yep. seems legit

[DoctorStrangelove]

I have regular nightmares about jobs where I have nothing to do.

Then I wake up & find I have nothing to do.

[ladymuck]

I wonder how many working hours are lost to the internet? Forums are certainly a lot quieter on non-work days.

Talking of which, NickFitz where are the Monday Links??

[Protagoras]

Readers' comments are entertaining, notwithstanding that some seem to be getting obsessed with detail regarding 'agile' development.

I'm so glad that I'm towards the end of my working phase - I couldn't cope with going back to an office!

[Whorty]

Why do people post links to stories behind pay walls? But no summary of the story?

[Paddy]

Why do people post links to stories behind pay walls? But no summary of the story?

Because they work in IT and know how to circumvent Pay Walls.

The below is copy and paste from Tor


How idleness at work became an epidemic that is wrecking Britain
The modern workplace is a hive of inactivity and low productivity
In 2004 a Finnish Government tax auditor was found dead at his desk where he had sat
undisturbed for two days.
Not one of the hundred or so colleagues on the same ?oor noticed, according to a BBC
report at the time. Nor had anyone noticed any disruption to the organisation’s work?ow,
or any loss in productivity.
The poor auditor’s death is an emblem of idleness at work – and a sign of just how good we
have become at hiding it.
Economists and policy wonks agonise about ?at productivity growth . In the UK it rose by
2.5pc on average every year in the three decades to 2008, but just 0.5pc annually since.
Theories abound as to why this is but most overlook the obvious culprit.
“The modern economy is replete with jobs that are half-made up,” says Professor André
Spicer, executive dean of the Bayes Business School and author of the book Business
Bulls---.
Popular culture is full of examples of the made up job. Entire sitcoms such as Nightingales
and The IT Crowd have been set in workplaces where there is nothing to do. But across
academia and in the policy world, we ?nd something resembling a conspiracy to ignore it.
“There’s a huge denial about it,” says author David Bolchover. “A lot of very well paid
people are doing very little, and nobody is talking about it.”
His book, The Living Dead, is an account of his own experience in the insurance industry.
Over six years, he estimates he did about six months of proper work. He even rose to an
executive position at a company where he was able to disappear completely for two years.
Last week, the think tank Onward fretted about increasing stress levels at work and how
little time this leaves for civic engagement. But for every frazzled City trader, exhausted
front-line nurse or Amazon warehouse packer, there are many others who discover that
there is so little work to do during o?ce hours they can successfully disengage.
UK' S PRODUCTIVITY I S LOWER THAN FOUR OTHER G7 NATIONS
Instead, they can devote much of the day to personal activities, such as online shopping or
social media. Some choose to nurture a hobby, or even start a sideline business. The
phenomenon is called “empty labour”, the title of another book by a maverick Swedish
business professor, Roland Paulsen.
Finally, that taboo is being broken.
After pandemic lockdowns, the practice of “quiet quitting” emerged , where employees
reportedly worked slowly in a subtle protest at their dissatisfaction with work. The fact
that people were able to do this en masse without being ?red was a sign of how little work
there was in the ?rst place.
This is nothing new. They were living out Parkinson’s Law, which maintains that “work
expands to ?ll the time available”.
Before this phrase was coined, the father of modern scienti?c management, F Winslow
Taylor, had identi?ed the practice and called it “soldiering”. Whatever the name, it’s easier
to accomplish now than ever without being discovered.
Forbes recently reported on the growth of “polyworking” – employees holding multiple
jobs at once. 47pc of US workers now hold down three jobs, it found.
While many will be working multiple low paying jobs to make ends meet, astonishingly
some employees are now doing full time jobs concurrently, while each employer is
blissfully unaware.
Meanwhile a survey for Salary.com indicates that 89pc of employees admitted to wasting
time, with almost two thirds wasting up to an hour a day.
When it comes to stretching out very little work to as many people as possible, the tech
sector may be the masters. In a widely circulated essay by a former software developer,
Emmanuel Maggiori, the author confessed: “I’ve been employed in tech for years, but I’ve
almost never worked.”
Over multiple jobs, Maggiori admitted to being handsomely rewarded for doing almost
nothing. When he made the mistake of completing a job rapidly, he found that his peers
were dismayed: he was letting the cat out of the bag.
“It’s hard to challenge the status quo when the productivity bar is so low all around,”
Maggiori told The Daily Telegraph.
Tech companies have laid o? nearly 170,000 sta? since January . Many of the businesses
now making people redundant had gone on recruitment binges after Covid struck, which
left many new hires with little to do.
Elon Musk’s Twitter stands in stark contrast to this attitude of over hiring and has become
a closely watched experiment. Musk has laid o? two thirds of Twitter’s full-time sta? and
contractors since taking over last October , but without any apparent ill e?ects, such as
slowing down innovation. All of this suggests Maggiori’s experience may not be that
unusual.
Geo? Shullenberger, the managing editor of the online magazine Compact, said Musk’s
job massacres marked “the collapse of a jobs program for surplus elites.”
“As soon as enforced lockdowns came in, a lot of people very quickly realised they could
run the business with a quarter or a third of the people they had,” notes Spicer.
How idleness at work became an epidemic that is wrecking Britain https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolo...-idleness-at-w...
“We think of public sector bureaucracies as uniquely ine?cient, but this is absolutely not
exclusive to them: some of the worst examples are in large organisations where people
can’t be seen.”
Bolchover agrees, saying: “Large corporations are the worst culprits.”
Often, the CEOs don’t know what’s going on, he suggests. Similarly, many managers are
only very reluctant bosses and struggle to prevent idleness among sta?.
Maggiori blames bad management in the technology sector for allowing the cult of ‘Agile’
management to proliferate.
In this cultish methodology, software developers self-identify how long a job will take –
invariably over-estimating the time needed. They then have lots of meetings, which
obscures their lack of real productive work.
Another smokescreen helps too. Forty years ago you could tell what someone did from
their job title. Now, it’s a mystery.
“How do you manage to appropriate half of your working hours for yourself without
getting caught?” Paulsen asks. “The answer can now be provided in all its simplicity: you
exploit others’ ignorance of what the job entails.”
Paulsen dismayed some of his own academic peers by focussing on empty labour. Leftleaning
academics, he explains, assume that workers are oppressed. That position is hard
to maintain when research suggests many sta? do so little.
For their part, pro-business commenters laud the private company as a model of
e?ciency, when it is anything but.
The epidemic of idleness is an uncomfortable challenge to the idea that economies with a
strong Protestant work ethic are assured of success.
How idleness at work became an epidemic that is wrecking Britain https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolo...-idleness-at-w...
“Why would anyone be self-employed today? There must be resentment building up,” he
wonders. “People who are self-employed and who work hard, in trades, and who are not
part of this gravy train, see the middle classes having this very nice and comfortable life.
"They see a new leisure class that says it works, but doesn’t. What should they think?”
We’ve barely begun to examine some other consequences.
One is hard to miss. The Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno once wrote: “The more
super?uous a job of work is, the worse it becomes, the more it degenerates into ideology.”
He died before the rise of the human resources department, and the advent of the “woke”
corporation.

[vetran]

So according to the chart we are 20% more productive than Japan, 5% more than Canada.

5% less than Germany.

The US however is 30% more efficient than Germany.

Seems odd that Japan the land of Kaizen and salarymen is so poor against us Brits and our cousins.

France is 15% more productive than us or the G7 despite years of strikes.

One sort of wonders if the measurement methodology is a bit off?

[Fraidycat]

In a widely circulated essay by a former software developer,
Emmanuel Maggiori, the author confessed: “I’ve been employed in tech for years, but I’ve
almost never worked.”

It is something i noticed decades ago at big firms, over resourcing of projects.

Development teams of say 12 when only 4 or 5 are needed.

Probably middle managers empire building and looking important. And it looks good on the CV the bigger the team you had..