The Cult of Work You Never Meant to Join
The "Overkill Cult" is an artifact of a working world built on subordination rather than progress. When the VP is working till 7:00, the Director better be there with him and then some (if the VP delegates out the door). In many companies, this ripples down the chain. It's a very old rule: don't sit when the king stands, and never appear more relaxed than your boss. To not participate in shared suffering is taken as rude, even if there's no good reason for that suffering to exist. Unfortunately, an attempt to remove that suffering from existence will upstage the VP and end one's career even faster.<p>The Big Lie is that most people aren't being paid for their intelligence or creativity or even their "potential", but for their availability. They're excess capacity. For a variety of social reasons, though, management needs to come up with 8 hours per day of work for them. Worse yet, there's a fucked-up incentive structure. Since a manager's job is often to make work, set meetings, and change what people are working on, you have a culture where overachievers end up overmanaging and that usually devolves into micromanagement or some other pathology. If a manager over-does his job, you don't get an efficient organization: you get monstrosities that look like Scrum. A good manager over-does his job upfront and very briefly (to remove standing problems) but then sits back and underworks at the management thing. His job is to make himself not needed.<p>Before about 1975, the culture of subordination made sense. It's an age-old pattern: subordinates do the work, and dominant people "lead" or "manage" or "order". It's failing us now because computers simply outperform us in all ways-- availability, cost, reliability, context-agnosticism-- when it comes to subordinate work. They work 24-hour days and don't give a shit about whether they're being trained up to something better (like their boss's job). We now live in an era where there's a strong social pressure to work in a way that makes one eventually replaceable by a machine or, at least, a person of lower skill (e.g. a "commodity Java programmer" instead of a hacker magician).<p>The old industrial regime didn't only require widespread subordination, but it required layers of educated, intermediate subordinates. They had to be given a sense of importance (19th century clerks, 20th century middle managers and "junior executives") but their working lives needed to be mediocre, because making people into a machine is hard and making a large group of people into a machine is <i>so</i> hard that it demands hierarchy and it demands an elevated-but-still-subordinate tier. This need for intermediate subordinates meant that our (errant?) tendency, in human organizations, to promote people based on their being good subordinates, rather than creative ability or leadership, didn't hurt us that much-- not back then. Now it does, because this skill of turning a mass of people into a machine is far less useful, because actual computing machines are better machines than we could ever be.<p>Unfortunately, I don't see this changing, because humans are short-sighted and too often focused on relative dominance rather than absolute prosperity. It's like the Chinese finger trap. Technological unemployment and underemployment are real and the severe mismanagement of the prosperity that technology generates means that average people (and even computer programmers) have to fight harder to get the dwindling number of jobs. You don't deliver genuine progress by "fighting"-- it takes time and reflection and collaboration-- but our instinct amid scarcity is to fight each other and the behavior of competing-to-subordiante (as in a chieftain's harem, or in capital's harem, also known as the corporation) is quite old as well. You get the macho-subordinate culture (i.e. a race to the bottom) of Scrum and open plan offices (violent transparency). It's a losing battle because we're fighting to do something that we, as humans, are no longer competitive at. Ultimately, anything that can be done by a ScrumDrone in 2015 will be done by a compiler or a tool in 2030.<p>Personally, I would rather accept this and focus on progress instead, but it's hard to make that statement without drawing the "you just don't want to be a subordinate" rebuttal (and that's true, I don't) and be painted as "not a team player". So little progress is made and, from what progress does occur, the prosperity it generates is badly invested. Thus, we have a world in which people work harder <i>and</i> more productively, but for a personal take that is stagnant at best and quite possibly (considering hyperinflation in the Satanic Trinity of housing, health expenses, and tuition costs) declining.<p>Long hours persist because, ultimately, the most measurable way to subordinate is to spend an ungodly amount of time in the office, which is a place where no one-- <i>especially</i> not the people who enjoy the work and want to be productive-- really wants to be.