[HN Gopher] Lessons from the Deep History of Work
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Lessons from the Deep History of Work
Author : mitchbob
Score : 51 points
Date : 2022-11-03 12:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| mitchbob wrote:
| Archived: https://archive.ph/dh0HR
| klelatti wrote:
| I'm more interested in 'Lessons from the career of Cal Newport':
| it seems that quite a lot of his productivity is likely to come
| from having chosen a topic and then writing a whole series of
| books / articles / podcasts on very closely related subjects.
|
| Not meant as a criticism just a lesson in how focus and
| persistency can pay off (although I do tend to admire authors who
| have a wider range more).
| bittercynic wrote:
| I think his success has more to do with very skillfully
| promoting his work than with the quality of the work itself.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This reminds me of Packard Jennings' humorous "Ikea Manual":
| https://packardjennings.com/2020/02/01/somepic2/
| itronitron wrote:
| "Goodnight Zoom"
| jeffhwang wrote:
| Interesting! The author of the New Yorker article is a CS
| professor who has been studying work, productivity, tools etc for
| awhile.
|
| I'd recommend the hyperactive hive mind concept from his previous
| book "A world without email". Refers to both synchronous and
| asynch digital comma like email, Slack, MS Teams, etc.
|
| https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/575655/a-world-with...
|
| Imho, very good diagnosis of problems with the tools and culture
| around them and good examples of how some small companies have
| battled against those problems. But unfortunately I don't think
| his solutions are super generalizable beyond pretty niche
| organizations.
| borroka wrote:
| I am perplexed by the success Cal Newport has had with ideas that
| are either trivial or whose application is so context-dependent,
| such as the theme developed in this verbose article, that making
| parallels evokes the classic "Oh, interesting" response--without
| follow-up--from the reader.
|
| I read his first books (3 or 4?). "Deep work" - no kidding. Who
| in their life has ever heard the advice "just get distracted, it
| will work for you"? No one. The how depends very much on the
| context.
|
| "Be so good that they won't be able to ignore you" - sounds good,
| especially for a nerdy audience that has a hard time getting
| exposure, but it is often much better to get good enough and
| spend the remaining time working hard to get noticed, or "playing
| the game," since there is always a game going on.
|
| In this particular article, the hunter-gatherer remote
| work/lifestyle parallel is so forced as to be simply puzzling.
| First, hunter-gatherer groups were small and required very little
| coordination, whereas modern companies, when they are larger than
| a few hundred individuals (I am generous, I might say larger than
| a few dozen) require coordination overhead--being "on the same"
| page is quite important--which completely changes group dynamics.
|
| Of course, one might say, but how inefficient or ineffective are
| all these meetings, e-mails, notifications on Slack, etc., I just
| want to code or get my brilliant ideas accepted without further
| discussion. And we all agree there are better or worse ways to
| get things done at the organizational level (that's an important
| point), and some companies work better than others and some
| stages of company life are more conducive to good work and good
| results. But the reality of group dynamics is that 30 people in a
| startup or hunter-gatherer groups to get a result at the
| organizational level (no one dies in the hg group or a product is
| shipped to the startup) need to work in ways that are very
| different from those that need to happen in a large organization.
|
| Then leaving aside the caloric issue that inevitably makes the
| living conditions of a 30-hg group very different from those of
| thousands of people who depend on agricultural products.
| jaccarmac wrote:
| I can't speak to most of your comment, as I'm almost totally
| unfamiliar with Newport's work. And I might be reading too much
| into the New Yorker piece, though a glance at his Wikipedia
| page confirms that Newport works on distributed systems...
|
| > In this particular article, the hunter-gatherer remote
| work/lifestyle parallel is so forced as to be simply puzzling.
| First, hunter-gatherer groups were small and required very
| little coordination, whereas modern companies, when they are
| larger than a few hundred individuals (I am generous, I might
| say larger than a few dozen) require coordination overhead--
| being "on the same" page is quite important--which completely
| changes group dynamics.
|
| I think that's part of the point. We've moved to a society
| where large-scale coordination is the norm, but, just like
| distributed computing, that coordination is a hard problem to
| solve. Who's to say that the management techniques we tend to
| implement are the best ones? There are certainly many workers
| who feel as if work is getting worse, and metrics which point
| to certain things getting worse or plateauing while capital-P
| Production rises.
|
| I'm suspicious of easy answers about when humanity had it
| figured out or simple prescriptions, but if we are interested
| in evaluating the relatively young modern regime, there are
| worse places to start than anthropology.
| borroka wrote:
| I believe that we are on the same page, as I wrote in my
| comment.
|
| "Of course, one might say, but how inefficient or ineffective
| are all these meetings, e-mails, notifications on Slack,
| etc., I just want to code or get my brilliant ideas accepted
| without further discussion. And we all agree there are better
| or worse ways to get things done at the organizational level
| (that's an important point), and some companies work better
| than others and some stages of company life are more
| conducive to good work and good results"
|
| There are better and worse ways of doing things in a company,
| but what hunter-gatherers bands were doing is no consequence.
|
| Where we do not agree if when you say that, in this context,
| starting with anthropology makes sense. And I think it makes
| zero sense, since the goals, structure and size of hunter-
| gatherers bands and large work organizations are not even
| remotely comparable.
|
| Articles of this type are meaningless, they try to be
| thought-provoking, but they are just trying to impress the
| gullible. "I never thought about that", yes, because it does
| not make any sense, not because you are a fool.
|
| A sports team, e.g., soccer team, is comparable in size and
| goals (win/not lose, die/not die, reproduce/not reproduce, it
| is clear what is good and what is bad) to a hunter-gatherer
| band, but what kind of lessons should a coach draw from an
| anthropological study of hunter-gatherer bands? Nothing,
| zero, other than some feel-good stories about being a team
| and not just a collection of individuals, supporting the weak
| and the elderly.
|
| I have no clue how the editor thought it was an article worth
| publishing.
| jaccarmac wrote:
| I don't think we agree that much.
|
| > And I think [starting with anthropology] makes zero
| sense, since the goals, structure and size of hunter-
| gatherers bands and large work organizations are not even
| remotely comparable.
|
| The relative size of these groups are obviously different.
|
| The relative structure is exactly what is under discussion.
|
| Relative goals: Now we're getting somewhere. There may be
| some people who "just want to code or get my brilliant
| ideas accepted without further discussion", but that
| doesn't seem particularly interesting to me. I - and I
| believe many other people - are interested in a society
| which achieves goals other than individual aggrandizement
| or increased production. Anthropology provides a
| perspective on what groups of people valued and to which
| degree they flourished. I suppose I might just be a
| simpleton, but supporting the weak and elderly read to me
| as rather worthy pursuits, not to mention hard problems.
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