Slashdot Mirror
American Workers: Lazy or Creative?
Nofsck Ingcloo writes "CNET News.com
is carrying an
article
by Ed Frauenheim in which he interviews Bill Coleman of
salary.com.
Coleman and company have conducted a
web based survey
regarding how workers spend their "non-productive" time at work. Here are some snippets from the CNET article.
" Click to read more.
"The average worker admits to frittering away 2.09 hours per day, not counting lunch and scheduled break time."
"The extra unproductive time adds up to $759 billion annually in salaries for which companies get no apparent benefit."
"Work is invading our personal time and therefore it makes sense that personal activities are invading work time."
"Not all nonproductive time that an employee spends is a complete waste. Some of it is creative or constructive waste."
"[P]of the reason that this [survey] got such a good response was that it's an issue that people think about on some sort of regular basis."
"[O]ne of the reasons people gave for wasting time is they feel that they're not being paid appropriately for the work they're doing. And so it is sort of quid pro quo, in that an individual employee's ability to increase his or her pay is limited, but their ability to decrease the number of hours they actually work is not as limited."
Coleman is definitely on to something. I see this phenomenon, and this reasoning, all around me. How much of the reasoning is rational, and how much is rationalization?"
"The extra unproductive time adds up to $759 billion annually in salaries for which companies get no apparent benefit."
"Work is invading our personal time and therefore it makes sense that personal activities are invading work time."
"Not all nonproductive time that an employee spends is a complete waste. Some of it is creative or constructive waste."
"[P]of the reason that this [survey] got such a good response was that it's an issue that people think about on some sort of regular basis."
"[O]ne of the reasons people gave for wasting time is they feel that they're not being paid appropriately for the work they're doing. And so it is sort of quid pro quo, in that an individual employee's ability to increase his or her pay is limited, but their ability to decrease the number of hours they actually work is not as limited."
Coleman is definitely on to something. I see this phenomenon, and this reasoning, all around me. How much of the reasoning is rational, and how much is rationalization?"
I can only speak for myself,
Yes, I am lazy.
Look at Slashdot as an example. Daily duplicates, errors, misquotes. Lazy? I'd say YES.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Web based surveys are not scientific (not a random sample), therefore are completely worthless. Who is more likely to fill out a web based survey, those who use time at work looking at the web, or those who don't? There's the problem, and any conclusions drawn from this data about the general American population have no basis.
We're bored.
America lost its internet economy when we realized we'd made it too easy to operate and it could be shipped anywhere people could put text into editboxes.
Now we're giving massages and filling out divorce forms for a living.
This isn't the New World Order we paid for.
The higher up the corporate chain the lazier Americans get. And no, surfing the web isn't any less productive than golfing. Why doesn't some American journalists bring that up. Oh maybe they're afraid to get fired.
No, one of the reasons this survey got such a good response is because no one was busy working and had time to fill it out.
Lazy.
C17H21NO4
Indulged, entitled.
Deleted
My wife laughs and says that I work from 8 to 5 and 9 to 3 most days. I usually work all day, although I do enjoy long lunch meetings, come home for dinner, television, Scrabble, and other assorted "wife time", then go back to work when she scoots off for a bath and then bed.
Click here or here.
We are really a creative nation, we have a day called labor day on which no one acctualy labors! America is so great!
People working full time in America, despite these figures, still work relatively hard. There is little to no vacations available to a lot of workers here. How many times do you hear of someone going to Europe for a vacation, for a month? Rarely. Yet, this happens a lot in other nations. Many companies in Europe and Asia, for example, give 3-4+ weeks of vacation a year. Here in the U.S., it's called "sick days" and you get a very limited amount of them. Obviously not all companies, but most I have dealt with.
I know that in my job as a teacher I often feel that I'm not entrusted with enough responsibility and, because of that, am unenthused. Now, before I get too flamed for whining about my job, let me say that this is a result of having what I call six layers of idiocy (bureaucracy) above me.
Case in point: the budget for our school is divided into strict segments with fixed dollar amounts for each. Someone in the layers above me decides how much our school can spend in each area. My thought, rather than pay that person, entrust us, the staff at our school, to use the money to our best advantage. That person, whose salary is likely over $100,000 (over twice what I'm paid), could be put to more useful work or that position could be deleted. We would be able to spend the money more effectively and would be much more invested in the budgeting process.
As it is, the way it is, I only care about the money so long as it lasts in any given account. I'm lazy about the money, because I'm not allowed to be creative with it.
And thus ends my whining about my job.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Creatively lazy.
A part of the problem is the amount of time most Americans spend at work, and how little vacation time people get in this country. Two weeks of vacation a year isn't much, and people burn out as a result.
Give a lazy man a job and he finds the easiest way to do it.
I think I read that in Beetle Bailey 20 years ago....words to live by.
I use my wasted time at work constructively. I have found throughout my job history that if you want your ideas to be heard and implemented, you have to implement them for them to be heard. Going to the boss and saying, "Hey I have this cool idea..." usually gets a, "That's nice, now get back to work."
I've made a habit of using time at work I'm not supposed to be using to write the programs I think need to be written. I then casually show it to the boss and say, "Oh by the way, if you're interested, I mocked this up 'over the weekend', tell me what you think." That almost always gets a "Cool! Let's go for it!"
My company's present flagship product was spawned out of my little "time stealing" sessions.
Meaning that, rather than doing boring repetitive tasks manually, a good engineer usually finds shortcuts and ways to automate tasks without compromising the quality of results.
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
I generally find that time spent bonding with co-workers comes back in intangible ways. It opens lines of communication so that people feel comfortable when real issues arise. It makes people feel more comfortable reporting blockages in their workflow.
Likewise, studies have shown that workers produce the most when they spend a full 20% of their time off-task. That means roughly two hours of their day should be spent doing something else as recovery time to produce the most overall. People burn out if they focus too much, and 2 hours sounds about right based on the studies I've seen.
Employers should grab the above and run. Never give an employee one thing to do... always have several things they can rotate between when they're tired. Give them little projects with other people that can open lines of communication, rather than just one daily grind task.
The ______ Agenda
"Coleman and company have conducted a web based survey regarding how workers spend their 'non-productive' time at work"
That's easy, they all read Slashdot...
ather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
I used to have a job where I was severely underpaid. I was making under $40k to be the sysadmin and only programmer for a small e-commerce company. Rather than dicking around, I just took a later train in the morning so I ended up working 7.5 hours rather than 8, because I couldn't justify working for such a pittance at the time, but there was nothing else available. After a while I had a lot of built up a resentment because it became clear I wasn't ever going to get a raise. For many people, feeling undervalued is a great demotivator.
rooooar
A web-based survey on how people fritter time away at work? Hands up if you think the results are going to be just a hint biased toward a certain group.
If you do just enough to pass, you're the real sucker. Poor performance in school doesn't make you predestined to a life of burger flipping. It does make it much more likely though.
What a load of drivel.
The question is, "Do you care?" That will make or break you when you do get into the real world. And unless you plan on being 30 and living at home with mom, you WILL wind up in the real world.
Though I'm still in school, I spend quite a bit of my time surfing the web and doing things not productive in any way. But then I think, if I were to work every moment of my free time, I would get tired. The work would not be so productive. It is because I spend a lot of time doing nothing that I can do much more when I do work. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that it all evens out - the more time you spend working, with insufficient rewards, the less good your work will be. Perhaps it's ultimately more efficient to ditch 2.09 hours a day, so that the other 5.91 or however much will be better.
webpage
Another factor is that more and more people are working in jobs where it is difficult if not impossible to quantitatively assess their hourly productivity. For example, if you work on an assembly line screwing parts togethe, it's pretty obvious if you are slacking off during a given hour, and what's worse, you'll slow the whole line down. But if your task is to write a chunk of code, or draft a certain number of letters, it becomes almost impossible to figure out whether you are working fast and loafing, or working slowly but steady. From the employer's standpoint, they don't usually care as long as the total work gets done in about the same amount of time.
It also gets harder to second-guess the employee when certain tasks take longer, because some tasks are more difficult than others and will inevitably take more time. Unless the manager is willing to personally do the task and figure out exactly how hard it was, they can only rely on what the employee tells them.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I managed a small dev/production team for a publishing company. My highest priority after I was hired was to make myself redundant and not altogether needed in the office. I did this by "empowering" those that worked for me. By that I mean I analysed what the manager (me) needed to do and delegated the responsibilities evenly. Although I was always available to "ok" team decisions, in practise it meant I did very little during the day. I made myself obsolete! The key to all this was papering over all this by using my office time to work on my writing. I also managed to be "at home" far more than anyone else. By steadfastly refusing to actually "do" anything, I very quickly learned how to put together a damn good team that produced quantifiable (and quality) results every time. Am I lazy? Hmmmm ... not sure. The department brought lots of projects in on time and under budget. The affairs of the department flowed smoothly. But I really didn't need more than a few hours of time in the morning (and a few hours in the evening) to do the job.
Hmmm ...
Let's all count down until the obligatory "Office Space" quote!
These are two totally unrelated qualities. Yo can be very gifted and work 2 hours a week and produce a lot, make millions, etc. If you are not gifted you can work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and produce nothing.
If you manage to accomplish in an hour as much as other people in a year why not be lazy?
Yo can see that in all fields which require special talent like mathematics, theoretical physics, literature, art, etc.
For example, Adolf Hitler dreamed to become an artist, worked very hard, was not lazy but had no talent and only managed to become a dictator. (He did design the Nazi flag, however)
There are Nobel Laureates in literature which only wrote a few books. On the other hand there are hard working mediocre writers which wrote hundreds of books and nobody knows them.
Seems I'm not the only one using this technique.. I wonder how prevalent it really is.
Prepare for thousands of comments! This is not a drill!
The workday in the US should be reduced to 6 hours. That's 30 hours per week. Any more is unproductive.
The Europeans are kicking our asses on even the most basic technology, and they don't work nearly as much as we do.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Lazy or creative? This is a false dichotomy (or bifurcation), i.e. a logically fallucious reasoning, for being lazy and creative is not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, I would tend to think that only lazy people can be truly creative in the most metaphysical sense. In any case I consider this survey highly biased (biased sample). Needless to say, it would be unwise to draw any serious conclusions especially when the so called "non-productive" time (e.g. writing in an on-line forum) may be indeed much more productive than the work proper (e.g. working in a factory). And for those reasons et al. I would take the results of this survey with a grain of salt.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
One word, Jaded. I'm underpaid and get 1 week vacation. A combo that makes for a very unproductive worker. Tasks that should take me 2hrs take me 8hrs, i work for about 20mins and then make my rounds on the net...cnn, slashdot, espn, drudge, read a few wikipedia articles, check the weather...in a few dozen towns. It may sound strange but i'd rather be working at shoprite making 8.50hr because at least then I wouldn't be underpaid.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Do you waste your time?
Click on the answer that applies:
Yes, yes, sometimes, yes.
My work does not involve a great deal of routine "productivity." I fix things, I monitor things, I make decisions. There are plenty of things I could make myself busy doing but generally, I maintain my readiness and do very little.
That said, there have been times when I would work tirelessly for 12 days without a day off at more than 12 hours a day. This is when major projects are happening and it requries a lot of work. It' rare but it happens. When the time comes, I am there 100%. (Some might say 110% but that's just dramatic expression isn't it?)
So mostly, I get paid for being available as much or more than anything else. I guess this sort of study doesn't apply to my occupation.
"Well you see, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy... it's that I just don't care"
How about both?
Binary thinking is for machines...
They will never stop until somebody makes the
whoever modded the parent offtopic is an idiot.
But I find it very often you need to be lazy in order to be creative. Sometimes I think very hard on a problem and cannot think of a solution, but when I go to lunch or start doing something non-work related the solution appears to me out of thin air.
Fact is if you have to work all the time you cannot be creative. You need to pu tyour brain in different modes.
This holiday was introduced by communists over a century ago and is celebrated all over the world. Communism may be (almost) over but May 1 is still a holiday. Americans had to come up with something different, in order to show how much they hate communism.
All over the world March 8 is Womens Day, but not in the US. In the US there is a Mothers Day but not a Womens Day. In the US women have to be mothers in order to have their own holiday. March 8 is also a communist holiday which survived communism.
Thats the american way. We do slack a bit when we can, but when something needs doing, we do it.
WW2 would be a good example of that. It took us a while to get our asses in gear, but when we did, we got the job done. The japanese high command thought we were lazy, we proved them wrong...
Speaking for myself, I know that there have been times that I deliberately haven't worked on something. With 10 minutes until a meeting starts, and there's little sense starting a new task when it'll take more than 10 minutes to pick up where I left off.
More than once I've had to pull a late night -- due to deadlines or being on call -- without any additional compensation (formal or not). You can be assured I didn't make an effort to work the next 8 hours at 100% efficiency. I didn't try to slow down, but I didn't give 110% -- I did that yesterday.
Businesses need to look at the big picture, instead of adding up the minutia. Locking down the Internet connection or bathroom stall to monitor employee time to the second doesn't make a more productive workplace, it just gives ineffective management another target to miss.
I can only speak for myself and my coworkers. And thats a crock of shit, or maybe we're in the minority, who knows.
At this point we're working continuously from morning to lunch, then from lunch to late into the night.
I've never worked with a better group of people. When we do goof off or have a laugh, which is more like a max of 15 minutes day, its usually helping to get the team to gel more or to help relieve some of the tensions from the hectic schedule.
My situation can't be that rare.
In the past, on commenting upon the lazyiness of the American Worker, I have on many occasions been told that on average Americans spend more time at work than the people of most other nations. I have always thought this to be an misleading statistic. Americans spend a lot of time at work. That has absolutely no correlation to the amount of time they spend actually doing work, or perhaps more importantly, the quality of that work.
Give a lazy man a job and he finds the easiest way to do it.
That's not even as bad as it sounds. After all, every invention mankind has produced, all the way back to the thigh-bone club, was invented to make some job easier.
For many people, the easiest way to do something is, in fact, to eschew the tried-and-true brute-force method and develop an easier technique, even if it does take longer in the short term.
Of course, those people were doing something toward their intended goal. "Lazy" means not doing anything toward it, innovative or otherwise.
My father was an IT manager and eventually worked his was as a director of supply chain management.
How he got his first managerial job? Someone asked him in an interview what his favorite productivity tool was. His answer was the water cooler and coffee machine.
He summarized it as this. IF you chat with your employees before work or during breaks you can find out the most of what needs to be done and what is going on with the various projects. Needless to say he got the job.
Breaks including talking to those around the water cooler was alot more productive then serious talk in an unproductive meeting everyday.
I wonder how many hours each day are lost doing busy work or meetings, etc? Something to think about.
http://saveie6.com/
All I see in these comments, and in the story, is rationalization. "I don't get paid enough. I don't get enough vacation." Cry more, please. People can rationalize anything. That doesn't make it true.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I don't think it has anything to do with laziness. And I don't think people did change that much over time. Remember, our bodies are biological entities, they don't evolve as fast as our technology. What I think is happening is that the fact that we use computers more and more in our workplace makes it easier to observe in detail what employees do. And there is some degree of dehumanization in the workplace going on, especially in large corporations. So, performance of "human resources" is being reduced to numbers just with all other resources and the time spent at work gets arbitrarily and mechanically divided as "productive" or "unproductive".
...are my new role model.
People haven't changed much since primitive times. On a day after day basis it was not possible to work on hunting more than 4 to 6 hours a day. The same remains true today, the brain can only concentrate for so long.
As the article mentions much of what appears to be 'wasted' time is really subconscious creative time.
In my case I can't design a computer consciously; I bring in the requirements, I talk about them with other engineers, and then I relax, letting my subconscious work on the problem. When it is ready it hands me a completed design. I just transcribe it into the layout program. The whole process is more or less effortless.
I wonder how many people are at work reading this very article when they should be working
Bertrand Russell wrote an essay called "In Praise of Idleness" which argues that creative work arises out of constructive idleness. That's why we have academia. ;-)
Full text here:
http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
That's a pretty offensive thing to say, Michael Cherchoff of Golden, CO, IP address 64.181.31.87. Son of Mary Moore of Denver and Paul Cherchoff of Boulder. Employed by Coors Breweries, Inc. since August 1998. Address 478 Hutchins Street, Golden, CO, 80419. Phone 720-248-2614.
Nice going, Mike.
Maybe I wasn't clear... I *can* waste time. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a slacker. I work hard, I have a 3.9 GPA. Heck, I go to TJHSST, a Science and Technology magnet school. What I'm saying is that there isn't a short-term incentive to work hard, so a lot of people don't care. I know people whose only goal is to pass. I know I'm going to end up in the real world. But for now, I like having the theoretical option of not preparing myself for it - whether I choose to take that option or not.
Because of course every worker is supposed to be productive every minute of every work day. We're primates! We were not built to work eight or nine hours a day at the same pace and intensity. If you want that sort of efficiency use robots.
Seriously. There are plenty of jobs where robots would be better suited to the task. When you're talking about office jobs, there's simply no way for human beings to be productive all the time. Due to the fact that we are social creatures, many of the best insights and increases in overall productivity in the white collar environment (and in blue collar jobs too, from my limited experience) actually happen when people are standing around chatting, or even when their minds are allowed to wander off a bit while they goof off.
I understand that businesses always want their employees to be as productive as possible, but this notion of "lost productivity" is a canard, built on a baseline assumption of 60 minutes an hour of productivity per worker. In reality when you pay people an hourly wage, you know you're not paying for 100% efficiency. If you're a smart employer, you try to keep your employees happy, and you reward actual work results.
The mentality that workers should be monitored (all your emails and web browsing are belong to us!) stems from the same idiotic view of employer/employee relations. Hey, here's an idea: Why don't companies actually train their managers in *leadership* so they know what their employees are doing?
If Employee A is getting a lot of excellent work done, should we really care if he's being productive 100% of every hour on the job? In my experience the person who seems to be working the hardest is usually the one who is not getting the most work done. Eventually that person is also the one who poisons the work environment because their mindless buzzing about to and fro raises the stress level for everyone else. The only way to measure real productivity is by measuring worker output. Even then, you run into all kinds of problems quantifying output, because quality and quantity are often totally unrelated and difficult to evaluate as aspects of overall output.
I want to see someone quantify how many wasted hours CEOs create with about-face decisions, late decisions, and "make work" plans. I want to see a study of how many wasted hours are the product of incompetent people being placed into management positions. I want to see how many wasted hours are created through mid-level manager infighting.
Sorry, I'm having a pissy day. But this is just the most absurd quote, particularly on Labor Day.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
It's LABOR DAY you insensitive clod!
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
(I'm lazy and not creative, and so can't be bothered to add any more here).
The problem is that humans are not geared to do the same thing for 8+ hours strait. Most are more productive when the monotony is broken up into varied tasks. However, the HR cookie-cutter thinking is against this. Highly paid managers often spend hours gabbing about golf and baseball, I would note. (The trick is to call such an activity "team building".)
Table-ized A.I.
In the EU paid vacation is mandatory by law, which is not the case in the US. If I remember correctly US companies are not required by law to give paid vacation to their employees, they do it only if they want to. Likewise, in most EU countries is much harder to fire employees than in the US. In most of the EU unions rule, which is not the case in the US.
And dont complain that in the EU the taxes are higher than in the US, they are higher mostly for the rich people. The idea is take from the rich and give to the poor, for the good of the society.
Long Live Socialist Europe!
But if your both creative and lazy, wouldn't that just make you "crazy"?
The archetypical american worker feels that doing a complete crap task like taking cash is something to be proud of. i know two people who are this worker bee type. They feel that some how inovating technologies, and policies to renew is bad and makes them lazy. We are only one of 4 industerial nations with no-Manditory refresh brakes of at least 1 week (Scotland, russia, north africa and canida have this with briatain as of 2004 on the way). We aslo have the highest rate of work/task dissatisfaction of all officially industerial nations. Now I know many of you all are going to say this is an anonymous post-However having worked 3 years for the government, I am truly appauled how backwards most private policy is. When I went to work, I was told that as official policy once my tasks were done that I was free to leave. This was not to be humane or progressive. They took these work place violence studies and insurance risks seriously, happy people=not violent=productio=>less insurance theirfor better bottomlines
I think it's mostly due to laziness. (I'm typing this while waiting for a server build to finish.) I don't think the traditional work ethic exists for most people anymore...even getting people to do the absolute minimum work required is like pulling teeth.
I think the Europeans have it right...they work like crazy (especially Germans) but have a ton of vacation to make up for it. We're lucky if we get two weeks, and even luckier if we get to use it during the year. I routinely hear from people in Europe things like, "Oh, summer was great...we went to Italy for six weeks."
I once did a contract for a company in which we were building a reporting system that looked at about 10 different factors from different perspectives. It soon became appearent that it would be possible to "meta-tize" the design such that the factor combinations were dynamically selected and calculated rather than hard-code a huge tree of every combination.
However, I was rebuffed when I pointed this out. Appearently they tried that once and the single programmer couldn't handle that level of abstraction. So instead they paid about 10 people to hard-code a zillion combinations.
Sometimes it takes a bit of risk and experimentation to move to the next level of automation. But dumbass companies would rather grind it out the hard, expensive way simply because it is a bit more predictable. To be fair, they had a strict deadline, and the meta-approach did carry some a bit more risk.
Table-ized A.I.
American Workers && ( lazy | creative) == TRUE;
-- "Have you ever seen your own brain?"
Come on, people! I can't believe we've gone this long without anyone mentioning the fact that *laziness* is one of the virtues of a Perl programmer.
Frankly, I find my immense laziness drives my most creative problem-solving.
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
Throughout most history women were enslaved by men, you dont have to be a woman to see that. They had to make and raise children, clean and cook, that was about it. If I remember correctly in the US they did not have the right to vote until 1920s (Many European countries did better, they let women vote earlier). Denying the right to vote to half adult population, that is no democracy.
For these reasons I think that women like my wife deserve to have their own holiday, whether they are mothers or not.
I think that my productivity at work is cyclic in nature. Like almost everything in my life. I have long stretches of high motivation and great productivity, followed by a slow decline as my interests and motivation shift somewhere else. These periods can be as short as a few weeks or as long as several months. I think it is something I do to avoid complete burnout on any one area of interest. I am curious if others see their work habits this way.
There are a lot of reasons for down time that don't depend on someone being lazy. People being monitored, drug tested, denied raises and bonuses and squeezed for more and more productivity without getting anything back are just not going to be motivated. What's the point of working any harder for them? There's no reward beyond what they already had.
Yes, some people are just plain dog ass lazy and have no higher ambition than being appointed director of FEMA. But I find the majority of people want to work, they want to do something productive and be rewarded for doing it well.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Looks like you have something brown on your chin.
Hooray for lazy workers! Abolish work!
All seriousness aside, anything we hear about "laziness", "loss productivity" and time wastage is just hot air coming from management. In fact, in every workplace I've been part of, lower echelon workers often do more work than managers. Throw out the time that managers waste in meetings, what exactly do they contribute?
Workers waste two hours a day at work? Businesses look at this as lost money? Billions of dollars in lost profit? Look here, Mr. Boss Man, if you are going to whine about a few hours I spend taking a piss or making personal calls, how about if we talk about the uncompensated time that all of us "waste" getting to and from work? How about the personal time that workers "waste" on work-related activities like buying work clothes, ironing dress shirts, and kvetching about management's stupidity to the neighbors.
In the big picture, it looks like it all evens out to me.
First, in regards to the comments regarding the lack of randomization in the study, these are right on target. If people are volunteering to fill it out, chances are, the selected population are wasting more time than the real population mean.
Second, the number tagged on as "lost" money is complete baloney. This is similar to the figures put towards pirated software by the various software companies. XXX number of pirated copies means YYY numbers of "lost" money. This overlooks the point that MOST people who pirate software probably aren't willing to pay for it, regardless of whether or not they can get it for free. Therefore, if all the XXX number of pirated copies were simply unpiratable, they would NOT generate YYY amount of extra money for the software companies, because that money IS NOT THERE.
The same goes for the figure put towards measuring lost productivity into real money value. Chances are a majority of people who are wasting time are not busy enough, waiting for someone else, waiting for a meeting, or whatever the reason might be. So in other words, IMO, if these people were not wasting time by surfing the web or what have you, they would probably be staring at a wall. This is not lost money, as the productivity to generate the money isn't possible.
The study ITSELF is a real waste of money.
>> fallucious
:-)
Apparently you're not as smart as you think.
I work with the greatest minds of human history - some living, some channeled through spirtualists - other have been cryogentically frozen until now so they could work under me at my 'think-tank' organization.
My friends and I are like twice the scientist you are. Plus we don't even like statistics, but we dabble in it -and are like way better than you at it. And we all agree that TFA is lame, so lame. And that you are gay. How you got to be a scientist, or work with "2 PHDS" like you say is beyond me.
First, the first time my boss bitches about me surfing the web I will remind him of that the next time I catch him checking stocks and other items not work related.
Second, after that first time, he will find my cell keeps taking baths in the toilet or getting dropped til it doesn't work. The last 3 vacations I have had I was PAGED for, well, what amounts to a pile of crap. We don't have enough staff that knows all that I do to let me actually turn the frackin cellphone off. It's not that I mind being called (well I do, but I realize that money is tight...), but it's I mind when they don't thank me for interrupting my vacation or my day off. In any case, things are getting better as I have a jr sysadmin under me that I am teaching as much as I can, but sometimes it's hard to get schedules to mesh plus I can't always teach things without being able to actually being able to do it. How do you teach/document systems patches without having to go through it? How do you teach/document what to do when things go on and you go into patch debug mode?? I find you can't. In any case, I don't feel bad at all when I take off early or call the dr or a company looking for something for my house as it all really balances out. Since I do frequently check work e-mail and do work via remote, I don't think they have much room to complain. Plus, they DO have me patch at odd hours (middle of the frackin night) AND have me do emergency patches when they realize they meant to tell me to install X patch they day after I already patched the system (sigh...). I see ALOT of companies letting people like sysadmins stay and work from home as the cost of gas keeps going up and they are not willing to pay us more. Eventually, companies who can't pay enough will have to offer an intangible or extra benefit like a free bus pass or working from home otherwise they won't be able to keep people. Moral of story, you want us a large part of the day and sometimes you want us when we're not normally scheduled. If you value us and we get the work done yet spend a hour or so with personal web surfing, then you best leave us alone. Otherwise you may find us doing things during business hours that we probably should not do during business hours(yeah I wanted to get these patches in before I left at my scheduled time so I decided to take the live box down at 2 in the afternoon....saves me from overtime....).
Gorkman
Take this quote for example:
"One of the reasons people gave for wasting time is they feel that they're not being paid appropriately for the work they're doing. And so it is sort of quid pro quo, in that an individual employee's ability to increase his or her pay is limited, but their ability to decrease the number of hours they actually work is not as limited."
This is a perfect example of the American mind-set. You feel you're not paid enough, so you slack off. If I need to spell it out to anyone: How can you expect to get a raise, salary adjustment, promotion, etc to what you feel is fair, if your solution is to work poorly? Who in their right mind would reward a slacker with more money?? You're digging yourselves into your ruts, idiots!
It's a shame that the post above got moderated as "flame bait." People need to be asking these questions but America has been lulled into sleep by the republican party and its mouthpieces, Fox, CNN, MSNBC and all the other "teevee" news outlets, and other types of news outlets including the AP and Reuters.
Reporters are afraid to ask questions, hard questions, that Bush needs to have asked of him. Why hasn't he caught Bin Laden yet? Isn't Bin Laden the one who attacked us? It's not Saddam Hussein, that's for sure!
Of course, all these same reporters didn't have a problem grilling Clinton over a blow job, over which no soldiers or citizens lost their lives, no mothers had to cry over their sons at a graveside wondering why he had to die, because of a blow job.
BUSH KILLS!!
Every survey tells you something. You just have to be realistic about how far you extrapolate that something.
Since July 30 I only spend 2.09 hours (give or take an hour) each week looking for creative ways to make a mandated 3 job contacts per week to collect unemployment insurance.
I consider myself one of these "above and beyond" type persons and make 5.
I have also found some very creative ways to improve my productivity at this task. For example, I get several automated emails each week based on buzzwords in my resume (that are legitmatly there) for positions I simply cannot take because they are out of state. If I can't make my quota of serious job inquiries I fill-out the rest by sending these recruiters an email stating I'm not available to work in Hell, MI but offer my resume for file in case they see somthing in my area.
In all seriousness, however, I am looking but am in a position that I can afford living on unemployment for a while freeing me up to find the right opportunity rather than having to take the first thing that comes along.
Having said all of that when I was working I would spend a lot of "unproductive" time finding ways to improve my productivity during the productive times. Admittidly, sometimes I was flat-out unproductive but I also had the reputation of completing all of my projects in one half to one fifth the time my teammates would take so, the way I figured it, my productivity level was still making everyone look bad even when I'd spend half my time "unproductive".
P.S. Ditto what everyone has said about this sample being pure BS.
When you figure people are working 10 or 11 hour days and being "paid" for 8, I figure that means some of us can waste another whole hour and still break even!
Any time spent at work is wasted unless your work is something you love. I resent the assumption that one must spend hours each day doing work that she or he dosen't care about just to get by. Technology hasen't progressed enough for us to all work half as much at jobs we don't like? I think it's time for a societal restructuring. People need time to be with their loved ones and pursue activities that they find rewarding (open source maybe?) we might even get more done while not feeling stressed and having fun.
Garth Brooks, he very very razy!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Oh you're right - that part I understood all too well. If my team were the corporate proxy for 'me' then my fortunes rose and fell with the team. And I made certain things went well at all costs. But it IS a strange position to be in, eh? I thought myself successful as a manager when it all ran like some perpetual motion machine. To be honest, I'm rather sick of office life and would much rather be snapping photos or scribbling ... but it pays the (mounting) bills!
I suppose I'm actually rather attentive. What I resent is having to sit in a bloody office. THAT I manage to escape fairly regularly. Not too popular with the co-workers on that score - but I no longer have a staff ;-)
American workers are lazy. And creative. I think it takes one to drive the other. I for one will spend 2 hours creating a script to do something for me in an automated fashion that takes me 5 minutes to do manually, just so that I don't have to do it manually any more!
:-)
What's creative about it is that what I learn from writing the script can be used in other places, and I can spend some time later trying to find better ways to be even more lazy in the future
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
Dormann: "I see. That puts everything in a new light. I quit."
I strongly doubt that removing intermittent downtime will lead to better work output. Do the world's best sprinters sprint for 8 hours nonstop, aside from a break for lunch?
Too true! Since you appear to have the ability to think for yourself, I would like to share a book with you that really supports what you say about the media and can enlighten as to why our Government behaves the way it does and sleeps with the World Bank.
Click here to wake up!How do you control a Rebpublic? Control the information you feed the masses and thus influence the way they think. But how can the media be controlled? By the wealthy man who makes sure what is reported is best business for the media outlet and his other interests globally.
the name of the company you work for.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
The US work week is tied for first as the longest in the industrialized world at an average of 2040 hours. (France is around 1400 by comparison)
Screwing around at work for 2 hours is extremely reasonable considering that tens of millions of Americans go home after work and keep on working. Then there's overrepresentation of young people by virtue of the fact that it's a web survey. Young people have a strong representation in the retail sector, where screwing off causes little to no economic loss to companies.
*In general*, if you work hard, you can get ahead. That's the American Dream, and people here are pretty good at it. Just check out the GNP.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
1) Lies
2) Damned Lies
3) Statistics
Then a bunch of lazy, shiftless fucks will want to work at his company. Some with very good resumés.
Actually, I didn't make all that much more than some of the temps. Still, I had some job security and they got sacked after I left the company. I'm not entirely sure that the team would have worked nearly as hard ... and certainly the structure wouldn't have been in place. I worked my arse off at the start ...
I prefer to think of my time there as working my way UP and out rather than DOWN and out.
Yes, I was promoted.
Guess what? High school is the real world, kid. If you don't work hard, and just barely pass, you're not going to get into a very good college. And you're going to be used to not working much or very hard, and will be in over your head at even the crappiest of schools. You'll drink a lot and party and have fun and then, after a semester or two, you'll drop out and move back home, and forever look back at how great it was in high school when you were carefree and worthless ... never noticing that you're exactly the same as you were back then. Worthless and carefree. And people still treat you like a kid, because that's all you are.
Grow up. Do enough to get a B+. And more importantly, work harder on your own stuff than on your schoolwork. High school is a great place to spend several hours a day not at home. You see your friends, and make new ones. But when you go home, do something. Read books. Write computer programs. Learn things that you like learning, and that you like doing. If you've done a lot on your own time, school gets easier. You'll be able to spend even less time doing schoolwork, and you'll get better grades. And, more importantly, you won't have people like me telling you to stop being a complete moron, because you wouldn't be one any more.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
The amount of dollars lost each year by pirated software, MP3 downloads, and now unproductive time seems excessive and unrealistic. I do not know how these numbers are created, and haven't kept a running total. Has anyone made a grand total of money that's lost each year? Is it more than the total amount of money in the world yet? When it is more, will these bogus numbers be questioned?
Don't remember where I first saw this, but I've remembered it ever since:
The 3 qualities of a good programmer
1. Hubris
2. Impatience
3. Laziness
She's not inconspicuous, but Carly Fiorina certainly got a great deal when she was fired. Here's an analysis of her severance package. Note at the bottom of the page the comparison between Fiorina and a US Army general. The Army general makes about 10 times more than a private does. Apply that to H-P, and the lowest hire at H-P would be making $370k per year.
Ten-to-one seems like a pretty broad divide between the highest-paid and the lowest paid. But in corporate America that's an absurdly low ratio. I'm sure there are plenty of people working at H-P who make $35k per year. Fiorina made $3.5M in 2004. So she made 100x the salary of an entry-level person at the company she ran (I know $35k is a high-side estimate).
Here's the question we need to ask ourselves. Are the Brahmins who run American business really *so* good that they deserve salaries 100x greater than those of their employees? You might be able to make the case that they are, for example in the case of a Gates or a Jobs or a Welch. But the problem is that top-level execs are getting enormous salares *whether they actually produce or not*.
I have no problem with people making scads of money. But America is going to get buried if we don't start tying executive compensation to actual performance. Judge me by my performance, by all means. Don't watch what I email or worry about whether I'm surfing the Web too much. If I'm fucking up and not producing, fire me. But use the same approach at the executive level, too.
Of course, this sort of equitable approach won't come to pass until American boards of directors are reformed. They continue to be filled with, you guessed it, O-level people from other companies. They want to keep executive compensation obscenely high, so none of them votes against huge pay packages.
This sort of thing isn't something the government should get involved in, imho. The market will likely do it for us. American companies will either adopt, by cutting fat at the top, or they'll get blown out of the water by competitors who are organizationally flatter and better at trimming executive waste.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
How do you seperate out cultural differences?
Then 'Laziness' is the father.
What made this country great is not the wars we've fought or anything like that, but the creative thinking we as Americans apply to a problem to get things solved. You can take as many 'outside America' engineers you want to throw at a problem, be it a new widget or a new whatsit, and 9 times out of 10 the outside America engineers will constrain their thinking to the confines of the box describing the problem. Americans think outside that description box and often times bring serious innovation to the design, instead of just re-fabbing what's come before to fit the current needs.
If you make me sit and solve problems for the entirety of my work-day and I'll find somewhere else to work that allows for the free flow of ideas and sources.
I often find myself 'browsing the net' while stuck on a particularly nasty problem I'm trying to fix at work. Probably 90% of the time I think of THE solution when I'm not directly working on it... I think it's called 'dis-associative problem solving' or something like that... Of course, I also get the same effect from a nice long shower. Most of my best ideas have come while soaping under the hot spray.
(Just my two cents... No insult meant to the Foreign Engies... Call it pride of citizenship on my part)
God, someone please mod the parent's arrogant ass down. Didn't even the simple question.
Time spent in the office is easy to measure, but is not necessarily a good measure of productivity. Kind of like "lines of code".
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Quote from legendary German Field Marshal Rommel:
Men are basically smart or dumb and lazy or ambitious. The dumb and ambitious ones are dangerous and I get rid of them. The dumb and lazy ones I give mundane duties. The smart ambitious ones I put on my staff. The smart and lazy ones I make my commanders
It goes against human nature to work 40 hours in a cubicle. Here is a quote from William Temple from the 18th century on how to condition the human to an unnatural work week:
That is just the nature of society that demands production. We are artificially, and intentionally conditioned to accept unnatural working conditions. Tell a European that you only get 2 weeks vacation per year! Many hunter-gatherer cultures only work 15 hours per week on subsistence tasks.
Sorry, I glossed right over your point. Yes, 5, 6 hour shifts don't fit perfectly into a 168 hour week. At best you'd have 18 hours a week of overtime you'd have to fill. But if you're used to 42 hour weeks with four people, then you should be paying 8 hours of overtime already per week. And working an extra shift every other week isn't so bad when you're working less anyways.
But, you're right, there are jobs that would be negatively impacted by such a move. Basically, any job where you're expected to do manual labor for 8-10 hours per day. But aren't these the types of jobs we'd like to get rid of anyways? Don't we want to encourage 6-hour-a-day "thinking" jobs and 12-hour-a-day "babysitting" jobs instead? At some point we will want to create disincentives to using humans as automatons. Perhaps not now, but at some point.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Get ready for the space race. Yee-haw!
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
The often quoted "2 weeks of vacation per year" doesn't even come into play for some of us. I spent 6 years working for a company that offered us this typical 2 weeks' vacation policy, but my boss would never let us really use it. He kept telling us we had some project or other we were in the middle of that was "too important" for us to be taking off.... He preferred to have H.R. just pay us for the unused days, once it got to the point of "use it or lose it".
Then, I worked for 3 different companies in a row where I didn't get any vacation time until I worked there for at least 1 year first. And guess what? I didn't stay at 2 of the 3 for any longer than almost exactly 1 year each! In the last case, I was there for about 1 1/2 years, but the company closed its doors and let all of the employees go, before I had the chance to use my vacation.
Right now, I'm *finally* getting my first "vacation" in nearly 10 years.... collecting unemployment and sitting at home, job hunting.
"[P]of the reason..."
See how creative the Slashdot editors are today?
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
I learned a long time ago that company loyalty in America basically does not exist. Oh, I know there are plenty of people who are loyal to their companies. But that's not my point. I'm saying there's hardly a company in America that has so much a shred of loyalty to its employees. Hell, in the world of public corporations, it's practically illegal to value your employees above the almighty bottom line.
When a bunch of folks get laid off because of management's poor decisions, the usual story is: "It's a shame, I know. But that's business reality. Deal with it." People are treated like inanimate objects ... it's even become trendy to call employees "human capital" these days. So when my company burns me out, doesn't appreciate me, takes my work and gives me nothing in return, and then I find a better job with somebody else with a nicer job description and more money, and my boss feels all disappointed and betrayed, I say -- "What did you expect? That's business reality. Deal with it."
Give your boss the opportunity to make you happy, but at the end of the day, if your present company can't do that, it's time to start looking around. Self-interest is not a sin, especially if you have a family to feed.
Breakfast served all day!
Larry Wall
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
Ill stop being lazy for the right price.
minimum wage==minimum work effort.
Unlike them, u.s. employees learn new tricks by looking outside their current employer and hopping jobs. Any single employer just assigns them to one single thing from the time they join until the time they're done. There's a constant need to look outside the company to know what the next big thing is.
I once watched a movie on workers at an egg processing plant. For 8-12 hour shifts the workers would crack eggs on conveyor belts for hours on end. I used to enjoy horror movies but after that one I quit. According to the movie 90 + % of the plant workers were crazy/mad.
To debate how people waste employer anything is pointless unless you are an employer. Employees get wasted by employers not the other way round.
In conclusion: Go ahead and slack, unless your job description is design of cubicles, office cameras and keystroke software..................
That sounds bad, but what I mean is this: My goal is to do my job, and do it well, with the least amount of effort on my part. My goal is get things done fast and get it right the first time. I've created all kinds of little macros, programs and shortcuts that increase my speed and accuracy. I've made every tool available to my coworkers, but no one else uses them. The result is that I'm at least twice as productive as the people I work with (it's measurable). But I don't get paid twice as much. At most, I make 5-10k more. After working like a dog for the first 6 months of this year when we were short staffed and dealing with a couple of big projects, I got a 3% raise (the company is doing fine). After 10 years of "exceeds expectations" or "outstanding" reviews, I no longer feel like working hard. So I've been using my tools for the benefit of MYSELF, rather than my employer. I make sure everything that needs to get done gets done, and any extra time I take for myself. I take 90 minute lunches (I live close by so I go home and see my kids), I surf the web and I socialize. But I always make sure I'm a top producer - just not by so much. So maybe my raise won't be as big next year, but there's not much difference between 2.5% and 3% anyway and there is a huge difference between the way I was feeling about my job a few months ago and the way I feel about it now.
I guess you could say that I'm both lazy and creative.
"Can I finish? Can I finish?
In my experience, a vast number of programmers are working on internal software projects for systems that are used in-house and are continually being altered over time, not working on products which have formal release dates or which directly account for corporate revenue.
In those cases, there are no "billable hours".
Also, in those instances, the 60-80-hour/week crunch time scenarios rarely occur.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
what does that mean? By any measure, American workers are paid very well, compared to their counterparts in most of the rest of the world. So we need to justify that increased cost with increased value.. Higher productivity. Seriously. Nobody owes us a free lunch. Businesses are not in business to 'provide jobs' they are here to make money.. Its surprising how few people get that.. OTOH, the US *desperately* needs a HUGE increase in the priority we give to education of the jobs of the 21st century will pass us by.. Programming in the near future will be done by software.. Only people with truly creative jobs will be employed. Most people won't be able to hack it and they will be out of work. Nomatter how little they are willing to work for.. Its supply and demand.. Lots of supply and little demand equals low salaries.. Lots of people may starve.. This is no joke.. Under capitalism, business doesnt exist for people, its the other way around.. We exist for them.. Or don't, its your choice.. Yes, maybe we need to change that situation.. But I don't see it happening - people are completely clueless that we need to look ahead and plan for technology's successes in improving productivity's implications..
?Today is LABOR DAY. A day to reflect on the HARD WORK that goes into the greatness of this nation. A day which is dedicated to the WORKER.
And yet, the WORKER is the person least likely to get the day off. For people in upper management, having __________ holiday off is pretty much a given, but the rank and file many times have to ask on a holiday by holiday basis if they have to work and what hours.
Engineer, fresh out of college. I get 3 weeks vacation, 7 personal days, plus the standard federal holidays and three "floating" holidays.
Basically, it all depends on skill level. More skilled jobs, in general, give better vacation. However, the other variable to consider is some employers offer better pay or other benefits in lieu of vacation. For example, I could have taken another job in town and made 10% more money, but I would have had less vacation and a crappier insurance policy. The safety of the insurance policy and time off to visit relatives who are all several states away was worth it to me.
-everphilski-
and wear sunscreen :)
Wow...I thought people spent more time on IRC than a measly average of two hours a day...=/
Grow up. Do enough to get a B+. I'm sorry, but since I was brought up from an Asian family, I don't know what you mean by "B+". Were you trying to say "A+++++"?
You'd have no time but you would find it rewarding. And frustrating. And fun. And costly. And fulfilling.
/ waited a long time to have kids, enjoy them immensely
/ wife and I enjoyed our time of "just us" also
/ both are good, YMMV
"The US work week is tied for first as the longest in the industrialized world at an average of 2040 hours. (France is around 1400 by comparison)"
And yet, France with far fewer resources, 7 weeks of paid holidays, a 35 hour workweek and an attitude from here to Indistan, yet they still are the 5th largest economy in the world.
"*In general*, if you work hard, you can get ahead. That's the American Dream, and people here are pretty good at it. Just check out the GNP."
There are scores of americans who can't get by even while doing two full-time jobs.
I'm not out to bash the U.S., just making some points on trying to measure success by looking at GNP and working hours.
IMO a country that has less working hours with in comparison better GNP has to do better. But that is my opinion, mingled with a somewhat typical Euro-bias (not shared by all Europeans, just very common).
IMO also one could argue that GNP in the U.S. should be considered gross GNP and should be corrected to include cost of health, parent/child care and stuff like that.
That's of course considered a private matter in the U.S. but we all have to pay the price somehow or suffer the consequences.
Bottom line argument: comparing figures with the rest of the world doesn't really work unless you are prepared to compare what the average worker gets or doesn't get for his money and citizenship.
The cultural dimension is a funny one: Americans tend to downplay the actual amount of state intervention because it implies failure of the system, while in Europe state intervention is a source of pride (and endless grumbling about taxes of course).
This means that if the U.S. and Europe spend an equal amount on a social issue, it will be criticized in the U.S. (because private initiative HAS to be better) and praised in Europe (because the state MUST care).
If in that same scenario something goes wrong, the U.S. will argue the state does too much, and Europe will argue the state does too little.
It's a funny old world...
I think, therefore I am...I think.
My advice to "bosses" who are concerned that their employees aren't slaving like diamond-miners every single second on the clock: compared to what you contribute, be glad they just SHOW UP!
Well, why, counting lines of code would be a great way to measure my performance! You see, theoretical programming tells us there are infinitely many ways a program can be written, each longer than the previous one. So, all I would have to do would be to further perfect my nonsense code generator algorithms. You know, stuff like --i; ++i;, adding input checks inside every code branching, copying and pasting implementations of entire methods... Additional bonus: every design pattern this breaks is a plus, as it assures almost infinite job security!
The reasons are simple:
1. We no longer have job security, and thus no sense of loyalty or responsibility to the company.
2. The majority of employers in North America don\'t pay a living wage. (Slashdotters, most of you aren\'t good examples. Do some research. What\'s the median income in the U.S. or Canada? For singles, couples? Compare with cost of living and your own salaries.)
3. Employers treat employees like shit. We put up with endless BS from \"managers\" of various stripes, we\'re expected to be available 7/24, and the holiday time we\'re allotted is laughable everywhere else in the world.
Our parents\' generation walked into high-paying lifelong jobs straight out of high school, and have devoted their careers to creating a system of credentialism that is far out of control, and in which basically everyone that comes into the workforce after them is screwed. What kind of fucked-up ethics is that?
Are we lazy? No. We\'re just protesting against the amazing state of shit that the working world has become.
American workers should follow the example of the POTUS. The work ethics of Bush should get productivity up...
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
However if your job involves any amount of "thinking" or "judgement", as mine does, I find that if I take a few minutes to just walk around, very very often my mind finds solutions to things that have been stumping me during the previous hour or two of "focused" work. Happens almost every day.
You might recall:
At least that's what I tell my boss as I'm heading out for a sit-down under a tree/walk around the hottie-desk areas/joyride on the tram/trip to Hooters.
No really, I do get some of my best ideas in the shower too.
France is around 1560, please don't make us look more lazy than we are. Moreover, we have a higher hourly productivity, and a similar annual productivity. Working less usually means working better.
Some facts about France's so-called 35h week:
OK, let's say I 'waste' 2 hours a day on the web.
Does this survey take into consideration that I spent 4 hours last Sunday doing a budget while sitting in my living room? How about the 1+ hours I spend checking emails/messages when I'm not at work?
Yeah, I spend time on the web 'during work hours'. I spend time working 'during non-work hours'...I still think my company is getting the better end of the deal.
-Styopa
After waking up from spending a day, hard at work, 'taste testing' cheap beer, I can assure you that I dont feel lazy seein hows I discovered exactly which beers are and are NOT, really, 6pt.
Definitly true.
I'm currently a long term investor. I don't really care how the company is doing today or even this year. I'm looking at it's 20 year prospects.
Most stores opened aren't profitable for the first 1-5 years. Under the 'quick buck' logic, no new stores would be opened.
Sure, there's companies that are looking for the 'quick buck'. They also tend to be the ones are are gone within a few years.
Yes, there's day traders looking to MMF, but like most MMF schemes, they're more likely to loose their money in the long run than the 'slow and steady' approach.
For companies that aren't as interested in the 'quick buck', look at GE, General Mills, POST cereals, grocery stores, insurance companies, power, etc. They're planning for the next ten to twenty years, and not so much the next quarter.
I don't read AC A human right
Indulged, entitled.
"Uncompetitive, indulged, and entitled" does indeed accurately describe our leadership, particularly our president, but that does not describe the average American at all.
We are on the whole overworked, more often than not underpaid, and almost never get enough vacation or time off to recover. One of the reasons people can't muster up enough energy to be outraged at their plight (and the list of legitimate reasons to be outraged to the point of taking to the streets in just the last 5 years is quite prolific), is because we are simply too exhausted after working a 40, 50, 60, 70, or 80 hour plus week to be bothered to care.
Which of course, is the intent.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
...but in very creative ways
You know, I've worked on teams where I wished some of the coders just didn't work at all and spent all day on the net. Every time they hit the keyboard they added bugs to the system that I would eventually end up fixing along with the rest of the stuff I had to do. Coding just isn't like building Chevvys.
It's not surprising that workers in America waste away so many hours, given the barbaric state of paid holiday leave in North America. I left Canada four years ago, where I was luckily in the only Province to get three weeks paid holiday. I've moved to Australia, where the minimum paid holidays per year is four weeks, and goes up to six depending on profession. I'll never settle for less than four weeks leave per year again. It's no wonder you're all shooting each other over traffic incidents - I know I'd go mental with only two weeks holiday a year.
I just read your blog.
You are a typical retard utopian living liberal who doesn't live in the real world.
Arrogant cunt.
office workers ain't construction workers