As a product design director who runs teams where each individual is responsible for 100s of millions in revenue I can promise you. Every person on my team is working all the time.
Most of your analysis comes from low motivation grunt level coders here. Then beyond that you classify everything that isn’t deep breakthroughs not work.
Are a lot of engineers at big tech under utilized? Yes because they are often last on the line do what their told types. Could they do more? Sure. Are they not working? No.
This essays is at best naive, and at worst laughably stupid.
They didn’t really bring up the idea that these people are being hired and retained for reasons other than their day to day output (I mean they did, but with odd rationales like wealth distribution). Number of bodies is a key metric for describing the growth of a company or the power of a manager. When he bottom line stop mattering all kinds of useless practices can flourish.
> On average, Adam puts in 0-10 hours of deep work a week. The rest of his work hours are spent mindlessly coding, listening in on various meetings with his camera off, and on TikTok.
What is mindlessly coding and how does that work? Seems like the author is dismissive of meetings and some coding tasks.
I don't see any evidentiary basis for these claims (or narratives) in this article. What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
Is there any actual basis for any of what you wrote? Or are we supposed to think that your manufactured examples and numbers reflect reality for any reason?
Well, previously people have spent countless hours on routines.
Nowadays the biggest blocker for progress in the companies are (the lack of) well defined strategy and good planing. Companies pay money to retain the talent that they would need right after they figure out what's the priority right now.
Like others here, I am somewhat skeptical of the accuracy of these accounts, but ofc like anyone who's been working for some time I've seen the kinds of situations that inspire them. To me, framing this as being about the workers as opposed to the situation the workers find themselves in is entirely wrongheaded.
Working for 10 hours a week can either be embarrassingly bad or heroically productive depending on the situation you find yourself in. People can avoid work, of course, but generally avoiding work looks very different if you could be doing 30+ hours of real work each week. I recall (but cannot find) an article about the many months and meetings it took to add a single option to the windows shutdown menu. Depending on your organizational constraints, doing very little work each week may be optimal. Doing more work in the wrong direction would be a net-negative.
I just think it's very odd to say "no one is working" instead of "companies can't organize people to be able to work." If you are in an environment where you could actually do a lot of work and you do a little, you will not last long. The only way you last is if you're in the ballpark.
This is the flip side to the 10xer phenomenon. If you were to randomly sample an employee, odds are they aren't doing much. If you buy the 10xer thing, which many of us do, then this must also be true. If you don't, then you are watching a different movie.
The article goes off the rails when it tries to explain high salaries with a generational wealth transfer scheme that is at odds with corporate incentives.
A better explanation exists which is that companies slowly become bureaucracies, everyone is playing politics, trying to get more resources and people around them to accomplish less and less. People are trying to do that locally, for their own interests, and it manifests globally as productive output tending towards zero and cost of labor tending higher. No society-wide scheme necessary. This is at odds with the shareholders, but its difficult to fix because bureaucracies are parasitic organisms which defend themselves.
There are 168 hours in a week, which is the max available for 1000x robots. So by OP's definition, a typical 1x employee works only for 10,08 minutes, and TikToks the rest of the week.
> The clients love Brenda – she is young and in tune with Gen Z culture. She offers unique insights like “Instagram DMs are out” and “Being cringe is cool”. Her boomer clients run every piece of marketing material by her to avoid the never-ending cultural landmines and to be perceived as cool.
Maybe I'm getting old and out of touch myself, so maybe someone marketing-adjacent can tell me: is this sort of person actually real and employed in a typical corporation these days? This sounds like an obnoxious minor character in a poorly written Netflix Original.
Now we're introducing the notion of a 1000x employee? I call BS. The 10x employee is a bit of a unicorn, but I have known such people and the biggest thing I've noticed about them is their ability to identify BS work and not work on it and thus carve out time to focus on bigger issues whose solutions really propel the organization or project forward.
The reasons not everybody can be this 10x employee is two-fold:
1. People are content with busy work just to appear busy and don't really care if they get anything meaningful accomplished.
2. For those who are better at managing their time to focus on more impactful issues, they lack the ability to actually resolve those issues in a way that has meaningful impact.
That's why the 10x employee is so difficult to find. But a 1000x employee? Get out of here!
This phenomenon has nothing to do with the details of the anecdotes and everything to do with Coase's ceiling. This is the threshold above which an organization is paralyzed by internal friction and can no longer execute any mission; all it can do is just be an organization. The anecdotes follow from the realization that everything the organization does is meaningless, therefore "LOL nothing matters".
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 48.1 ms ] threadMost of your analysis comes from low motivation grunt level coders here. Then beyond that you classify everything that isn’t deep breakthroughs not work.
Are a lot of engineers at big tech under utilized? Yes because they are often last on the line do what their told types. Could they do more? Sure. Are they not working? No.
This essays is at best naive, and at worst laughably stupid.
Okay. So he’s working. What do you want exactly?
What is mindlessly coding and how does that work? Seems like the author is dismissive of meetings and some coding tasks.
Working for 10 hours a week can either be embarrassingly bad or heroically productive depending on the situation you find yourself in. People can avoid work, of course, but generally avoiding work looks very different if you could be doing 30+ hours of real work each week. I recall (but cannot find) an article about the many months and meetings it took to add a single option to the windows shutdown menu. Depending on your organizational constraints, doing very little work each week may be optimal. Doing more work in the wrong direction would be a net-negative.
I just think it's very odd to say "no one is working" instead of "companies can't organize people to be able to work." If you are in an environment where you could actually do a lot of work and you do a little, you will not last long. The only way you last is if you're in the ballpark.
There are many who choose not to participate and work for other motivations.
The article goes off the rails when it tries to explain high salaries with a generational wealth transfer scheme that is at odds with corporate incentives.
A better explanation exists which is that companies slowly become bureaucracies, everyone is playing politics, trying to get more resources and people around them to accomplish less and less. People are trying to do that locally, for their own interests, and it manifests globally as productive output tending towards zero and cost of labor tending higher. No society-wide scheme necessary. This is at odds with the shareholders, but its difficult to fix because bureaucracies are parasitic organisms which defend themselves.
There are 168 hours in a week, which is the max available for 1000x robots. So by OP's definition, a typical 1x employee works only for 10,08 minutes, and TikToks the rest of the week.
Maybe I'm getting old and out of touch myself, so maybe someone marketing-adjacent can tell me: is this sort of person actually real and employed in a typical corporation these days? This sounds like an obnoxious minor character in a poorly written Netflix Original.
The reasons not everybody can be this 10x employee is two-fold:
1. People are content with busy work just to appear busy and don't really care if they get anything meaningful accomplished.
2. For those who are better at managing their time to focus on more impactful issues, they lack the ability to actually resolve those issues in a way that has meaningful impact.
That's why the 10x employee is so difficult to find. But a 1000x employee? Get out of here!