Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Hazel Weakly (hazelweakly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 04-Apr-2024 09:33:23 JST Hazel Weakly

   If there's one thing I wish I burn entirely to the ground and wipe away all traces and remnants of, its the misplaced notion that the productivity of Knowledge Work can be managed, measured, analyzed, and optimized as if all one needed to do was drip feed heroin up the arse of their hapless workers.

   • clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Hazel Weakly (hazelweakly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 04-Apr-2024 09:33:21 JST Hazel Weakly

     in reply to

     Knowledge Work as imagined is when you take the best of humanity, you embrace it, and you turn the lovely unbridled enthusiasm and exploratory nature of humanity into a powerful self-feeding engine that paints the world with the colors of the human soul itself as it learns to understand the world around it.

     It's art, beauty, love, and life. It's this amazing fucking thing that happens when you take a bunch of humans and you stick them in a pile and say "go forth and learn to love the world"

   • Embed this notice
     Hazel Weakly (hazelweakly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 04-Apr-2024 09:33:22 JST Hazel Weakly

     in reply to

     What is Knowledge Work™, you ask? There's two concepts of Knowledge Work that I'm thinking about right now. The first is Knowledge Work as imagined, and Knowledge Work as done.

     (I'm temporarily ignoring the actual literature definitions of Knowledge Work for the sake of ranting out some frustration. Forgive me pls)

     Paul Cantrell repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Thomas Depierre (di4na@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 05-Apr-2024 05:56:05 JST Thomas Depierre

     in reply to

     @hazelweakly yep it is so sad in a way because like

     I am even trying to make them all better capitalists. They will make more money. I can show it

     But deep down... It is not money they want. It is the illusion of control and power.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Hazel Weakly (hazelweakly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 05-Apr-2024 05:56:06 JST Hazel Weakly

     in reply to

     One of the best things for me recently has been watching all of the research fly out about how humans work, how they cooperate, how they *really* learn, and guess what?

     It's not even a "you can have your cake and eat it too" thing. It's literally "you can stop eating coal and start eating cake". Seriously!

     Humans are *wired* to be productive *by* sharing, by loving, by growing.

     I spent my entire life thinking I had to put that aside when Doing Capitalism. That's not true!

     clacke likes this.
     clacke repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Hazel Weakly (hazelweakly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 05-Apr-2024 05:56:07 JST Hazel Weakly

     in reply to

     Humans want to be creative, humans want to love each other, humans want to make the world a better place, humans want to do art, humans want to *be* art, humans want to inspire, humans want to be inspired, humans want to learn, humans want to teach, humans want to heal the world, humans want to heal each other, humans want to collaborate, humans want to build, humans want to be beautiful, humans want to find beauty, humans want to create, humans want to be awed, humans love this fucking universe

   • Embed this notice
     Hazel Weakly (hazelweakly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 05-Apr-2024 05:56:08 JST Hazel Weakly

     in reply to

     > BEFORE: I'd like to [[measure productivity]] by [[tracking the lines of code per hour produced and withhold promotions for the bottom 10% performers]]

     > AFTER: I'd like to [[inflict animal abuse]] by [[tracking the lines of code per hour produced and using shock treatment on the bottom 10% performers]]

     Sounds horrific, doesn't it? Guess what: it doesn't work.

     Amazing. Who woulda thunk. Fear and abuse and spreadsheet hacking doesn't help people be creative and share ideas? Astounding really

   • Embed this notice
     Hazel Weakly (hazelweakly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 05-Apr-2024 05:56:09 JST Hazel Weakly

     in reply to

     And the answer to that question, about dollars per hour and knowledge work? Sure, here it is:

     One can no more abuse a dog into loving them than one can "productivity" a knowledge worker into generating a positive ROI.

     In fact, you can replace "measuing productivity" with "inflicting animal abuse" and get an accurate idea of what'll work and what won't. If it *sounds* like animal abuse, it won't actually measure productivity.

   • Embed this notice
     Hazel Weakly (hazelweakly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 05-Apr-2024 05:56:10 JST Hazel Weakly

     in reply to

     Sure, fair enough, let me rephrase that question a bit:

     "How does one measure creativity, the growth of institutional knowledge, and the value of that knowledge in terms of dollars per hour?"

     Which is really what you're asking when trying to define productivity for Knowledge Work.

     But it probably feels like a more ridiculous question now, doesn't it? (That's because it is)

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Hazel Weakly (hazelweakly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 05-Apr-2024 05:56:13 JST Hazel Weakly

     in reply to

     Now you might be reading this and going "Hazel, that's a lotta emotions, goodness; but, be real now, how do you actually expect a company to pay millions of dollars for knowledge workers and not want to optimize them?"

     [you, my dears, are probably not thinking this, but this is unfortunately a realistic question one might ask when attempting to be Doing a Capitalism™]

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Hazel Weakly (hazelweakly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 05-Apr-2024 05:56:14 JST Hazel Weakly

     in reply to

     In short, understanding Knowledge Work means understanding the human condition itself, and taking a dark look at how we managed to turn humans from a social equitable animal that has unlimited curiosity and a desire to help each other succeed into a raving, bloodthirsty mass of hyperindividualistic demons solely bent on hedonistic self exploitation at the expense of the other.

     Seriously, how the fuck did we do that? How? How did we so deeply and fundamentally break humanity like this?

   • Embed this notice
     Hazel Weakly (hazelweakly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 05-Apr-2024 05:56:15 JST Hazel Weakly

     in reply to

     It doesn't have to be this way, of course. We could be a lot better at this; we could be infinitely better at this, even.

     But, that requires understanding what makes Knowledge Work tick, what makes it... Work, and how one might nourish it and encourage it to grow rather than brutally ripping it out by the roots and screaming at it until it learns to behave.

   • Embed this notice
     Hazel Weakly (hazelweakly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 05-Apr-2024 05:56:16 JST Hazel Weakly

     in reply to

     Knowledge Work as done is where the love of the world goes to die, it's where one of the most unique and beautiful aspects of the human mind gets turned into its most terrible weapon, it's the snake that eats its tail, it's the adult world equivalent of taking the quiet artist, giving them a wedgie, and shoving them into a high-school locker while you laugh at them and take all their pictures and shove them into chat jippity do dah, zippity day, my oh my, we're gonna IPO today.

     It's a disgrace

   • Embed this notice
     Hazel Weakly (hazelweakly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 05-Apr-2024 05:56:17 JST Hazel Weakly

     in reply to

     Knowledge Work as done is what happens when you take art and artistry and creativity and imagination and the soulful awe inspiring wonder of a child and you figure out how to forcibly shove it into something that is roughly shaped like an assembly line.

   • Embed this notice
     Hazel Weakly (hazelweakly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 05-Apr-2024 05:56:46 JST Hazel Weakly

     in reply to

     I ended up publishing this on my blog because it was cathartic to write this out. There's no extra stuff in the blog post, which makes this the shortest blog post I've ever written... But it was cathartic to write, and that's the important part :)

     https://hazelweakly.me/blog/soulless-productivity/

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Hazel Weakly (hazelweakly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 05-Apr-2024 05:56:47 JST Hazel Weakly

     in reply to

     It just breaks my heart that we have *so* much stuff out there still that's stuck in this old way of thinking that the only way to have humans create efficiently is to torture them into submission and rip out their very souls and dump them into the Capitalism Monster

     It's beyond aggravating to have to explain that, no, one can't measure productivity, but they can measure belonging, and safety, and learning, and all of these wonderful wholesome ideas

     Not only is that "fine", it's even better

     clacke likes this.