Can't work with them. Can't work without them.

Writing is a solitary activity, even for wannabe writers like me, and more often than not it is done when working from home.  Well, yes, there are stories of how writers would check into hotels and furiously pound on the typewriter keys.  Right, Jack?

Working from home has never been the norm for most, but WFH has become the default for most white-collar occupations.  With a coronavirus vaccine months away, companies like Google are making it clear to their employees that it might be summer 2021 before they can regroup in office buildings, and play ping pong like in the good old days.

Does WFH help with productivity?

Measuring productivity in the service sector has always been problematic.  What exactly are the outputs that we can measure and compare when the output is not always tangible, unlike in manufacturing or agriculture?

Yet, "they" said that WFH since the Covid-19 lockdown had increased productivity.  But then the reality is slowly sinking in that WFH is creating more problems for productivity.  The US, which unlike the European countries, is strangled by its irresponsible leader in the White House and several gubernatorial offices, is doomed to experience a productivity drop with continued WFH.

And then there is the employee morale itself.  For people whose living spaces are not really work environments, work-life divide has become hopelessly blurred.

“I used to think of a desk as like a kind of prison cell, where I was chained for eight hours a day,” she tells me over the phone. “It was always like serving time. But, at this point, my desk would be my saviour.”

As long as there was a work to go to, people complained about it while counting down the days towards their next vacation.  It was also a place to go to in order to get away for a few hours from the nagging spouse and whiny children.

Now, there is nowhere to go even if one takes off from work--you are stuck at home, which is where you also work.  Meanwhile, the nagging spouse and the demanding kids are always around all the time.

Those without spouses and children are trapped in loneliness.

More than half a million people have tuned into The Sound of Colleagues, a web page and Spotify playlist of workplace sounds, including keyboards, printers, chatter and coffee machines. Red Pipe, a Swedish music and sound studio, created it in April as a joke, but its data suggests that people keep it on in the background.

The whole thing is becoming a Kafkaesque nightmare for many!

Here's to hoping that the nightmare will end soon.  Make that nightmares--after all, they are linked!

Meet and talk?

I maintain office hours during the academic terms.  Faculty announcing office hours was something new for me when I came to the US for graduate school--I don't recall faculty giving us their office hours when I was an undergraduate student.  Heck, for that matter, we didn't even have syllabi for the courses that we took.  We went to class, doodled, and it was exam time when the term ended.

We faculty are required to maintain office hours--essentially to tell students that we will be available in our offices, waiting for them to talk to us about whatever it is that they want to talk about.  Students do not show up though.  Rarely ever do students walk in during that appointed time.

Increasingly, if they want to contact me, they email.  Almost always, their emails are like text messages to their friends.  No salutation. No grammar. No signing off.

I have often pointed out to students that a great deal can be easily accomplished in a couple of minutes of real-time face-to-face conversation in the real world.  But, I can't seem to convince them about that.

It is the same way with colleagues too. Once, I walked over to a colleague's office two buildings away, and told her that I preferred this to email exchanges.  She was shocked, as if it was the most unnatural thing to to!

Emails have messed us up for good. Yes, there are immense advantages--but, we seem to misuse that tool more than putting it to productive use.

As e-mail was taking over the modern office, researchers in the theory of distributed systems—the subfield in which, as a computer scientist, I specialize—were also studying the trade-offs between synchrony and asynchrony. As it happens, the conclusion they reached was exactly the opposite of the prevailing consensus. They became convinced that synchrony was superior and that spreading communication out over time hindered work rather than enabling it.

The very people who birthed the concept of emails were beginning to see that real-time communication was superior and more productive!

It was in the nineteen-eighties that business thinkers and computer scientists began to diverge in their thinking. People in office settings fixated on the organizational overhead required to organize synchronous collaboration. They believed that eliminating this overhead through asynchronous systems would make collaboration more efficient. Computer scientists, meanwhile, came to the opposite conclusion. Investigating asynchronous communication using a mathematical approach known as algorithm theory, they discovered that spreading out communication with unpredictable delays introduced new complexities that were difficult to reduce. While the business world came to see synchrony as an obstacle to overcome, theorists began to realize that it was fundamental for effective collaboration.

If you want an example, here you go:

As the distributed-system theorists discovered, shifting away from synchronous interaction makes coördination more complex. The dream of replacing the quick phone call with an even quicker e-mail message didn’t come to fruition; instead, what once could have been resolved in a few minutes on the phone now takes a dozen back-and-forth messages to sort out. With larger groups of people, this increased complexity becomes even more notable. Is an unresponsive colleague just delayed, or is she completely checked out? When has consensus been reached in a group e-mail exchange? Are you, the e-mail recipient, required to respond, or can you stay silent without holding up the decision-making process? Was your point properly understood, or do you now need to clarify with a follow-up message? Office workers pondering these puzzles—the real-life analogues of the theory of distributed systems—now dedicate an increasing amount of time to managing a growing number of never-ending interactions.

The next time a very serious person talks about email overload, maybe you can send them the link to that essay?

At work, I have even joked with colleagues that I sometimes intentionally ignore bureaucratic emails--if it is truly important, either I will get another email or the person will walk over to my office.

We must, therefore, develop better systems—ones that will almost certainly involve less ad-hoc messaging and more real-time coördination.

I am all for it!  You know where to find me in the real world ;)

Whatever happened to the division of labor?

Gandhi preached self-reliance. We learnt about that school, and perhaps students learn that in India even now despite all the efforts of the modi toadies to rewrite Gandhi's and India's histories.

But, self-reliance has its limits.  We cannot do it all.  Where lies the line between doing-it-yourself versus having somebody else do it for you?

Over the past few years, it has been pissing me off that I am increasingly required to do everything. Like how at the big box stores, self-checkout is rapidly becoming the norm.  Even at hotels.  Remember this post from three years ago?

I walked up to check in.  There were more than a dozen flashing electronic screens instead of people.  Yep, those screens were for checking in.  First it was at the airports, and now at hotels too!

If I am going to be doing everything, wtf! 

You see how I have been pissed off about this for a while now?  I don't see how this level of self-service is progress.  It is a rapid annihilation of human contact, that's what it is!

Misery loves company.

Self-service supposedly represents the march of progress. A more prosperous society requires improving productivity: the best way is to substitute machine labour for the human sort. Are grumblers like me the modern-day equivalents of Luddites raging about the spinning jenny?

Exactly!

The self-service revolution is reversing the division of labour. You find yourself doing all sorts of jobs that you’re untrained for – acting as a travel agent booking a trip, an airport porter weighing and labelling bags or a shop-attendant checking out a basket of goods. Meanwhile a handful of companies suck up abnormal profits by turning their customers into unpaid labourers. The real sweatshop workers in the post-industrial economy are you and me.

We do all the work through self-service and some social misfits twenty-something programmers rake it in big time.  It is also highly likely that these programmers do not do a damn thing by themselves, and instead hire people through one of the many apps.  Self-service is for us suckers!

Leisure Suit Sriram

Even the retired folks these days don't seem to have leisure time.  How can that be?

The more I think about my own short life thus far, the clearer it seems that the dream was about a technological future that would launch us into an age of prosperity in which we would do very little work and enjoy a great deal of leisure time.  It would be a denial of gigantic proportions if we were to argue that we not incredibly prosperous now and, yet, leisure has become scarce?

To economists, this is no surprise.  Because, to them, leisure in prosperity means that there is much higher opportunity cost in terms of income that is not earned by doing nothing.  The more the income, the more the opportunity cost of sitting around.  So, people work themselves to death?

It is a strange world in which we live.  Ask yourself what exactly are we working for, and what exactly is it that we want to get out of the incomes that we earn?  Go ahead.  Do that first and then resume reading this post.

Yep, we earn in order to consume.  Our highly productive lives--as in economic productivity--are not about working fewer hours and creating leisure time that we can enjoy, but are about consumption.

It is almost as if we set aside the golden years for leisure.  When we can no longer do anything "productive."  What a wasteful approach to life!

There is one other problem, a nasty one:

Most people haven’t been taught to find fulfillment in their free time. To the contrary, rather than learning how to cultivate lifelong interests, students—both in primary and secondary schooling—are increasingly being educated to meet specific labor-market demands, demands that may also disappear or be automated away. Meanwhile, “It just is assumed that everyone knows how to handle their free time,” Henderson laments. “Not true!”

Yesterday, during a conversation with a student, I yet again heard the familiar: "I pack a whole lot of classes and activities because I am at a loss if I don't have things to do."

 Oh, do not for a second think of people spending time on the likes of Facebook as those enjoying leisure.  Nope. As I have blogged in plenty, people are "raw materials" in those activities, with the businesses making money out of them.  And, these businesses work on making addicts out of their users.

Over the past decade, more people have been spending more time on Facebook, whose business model is not all that different than the tobacco industry—it addicts its users, denies its own harmful effects, and expands its user base by targeting children and developing countries.
Commercial leisure and entertainment industries are undergoing a technological transformation that will be just as profound as the changes in work. But if the prevailing market incentive is to manufacture addiction, then the future of leisure could be bleak indeed. It remains to be seen if those designing social-media platforms, video games, virtual- and augmented-reality applications, and other technologies will feel pressured to do so responsibility.

So, where do we go from here?

Nowhere. We are screwed.

Not me though. Ask my neighbors--they will tell you that I rarely work.  Ask my colleagues--they will tell you I am goofing around and my work is mere mashed potatoes. Mine is a life of leisure! ;)

          Leisure

William Henry Davies

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare

We can't rewind, we've gone too far

It has been a few days since the president theatrically announced that he is pulling the United States out of the Paris agreement on climate change.  I cannot even begin to understand his (ill)logic!

I am increasingly reminded of my younger days in the old country, when politicians would simply lie through their teeth and say whatever they needed to say in order to get the votes.  As a tween and as a teenager, I would read Thuklak and laugh at the idiot politicians, but fully aware that I--like most others--was being screwed.

It is one thing when a local DMK or an ADMK thalaivar entertains the crowd in the nearby maidan with his lies, but it is another when it is the president of the US--words have global implications in trump's case.

If trump wants to continue believing that coal will come back, whatever happened to the brains of the rest of the GOP leaders?  Are they all zombies now?

Here in the real world, the data and the trends have been so clear for so long:

The coal-mining jobs that President Trump thinks were destroyed by government regulation — adopted to combat air pollution and global warming — were actually lost to old-fashioned competition from other American firms and workers. Eastern coal mines lost market share to Western coal, which was cheaper. And natural gas grew at coal’s expense because it had low costs and lower greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s the conclusion of a new study by economist Charles Kolstad of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research ...
Government isn’t killing the coal industry. “Progress is the culprit,” concludes Kolstad’s study.

How much more clearer and simpler should this message be for the GOP idiots to understand?

Source

Technological progress happens.  And we are thankful for it.  Well, unless your livelihood depended on, say, renting video tapes of movies!  Without the technological progress, trump would not have Twitter, and he would, not have become president either back when coal was king!

So what if I am inefficient!

In graduate school, when I was just about learning to write essays--boy was that a struggle!--I wanted to write a paper questioning the primacy of efficiency and productivity.  But, back in those days, I had difficulty even piecing together a couple of sentences that made sense, leave along a 2,500-word essay.  I tell ya, no wonder I keep getting those nightmares every once in a while! ;)

I am far from a chop-chop guy; I am always wandering about.  The things that I like are never about efficiency either--from cooking to playing bridge to reading to grading essays to ... I mean, even on the "bike" path, I don't care to bike but prefer to walk.  Biking seems like wanting to rush through the experience.  It is not that I am wandering like a cow on a grassy meadow; I have a plan, of course.

So, where was I?  ;)

Contemporary economic conditions prize efficiency and productivity.  The drive to more and better while being faster. All the speed for what?  Especially when it is even in our personal lives?

If I’m using Google Maps, it’ll quickly alert me when a faster route becomes available. I speed even when I’m not in a hurry, just to see the minutes disappear on my ETA—to see that I’ve saved precious time. The very idea that I’ve “saved time” can give a sensation of pleasure and satisfaction.
Meanwhile, commercials offer quick-and-easy alternatives to any and every cooking, housecleaning, or maintenance job. Dinners get hurriedly prepared in microwaves or crockpots, coffee in Keurigs or even instant packets. Because efficiency—time saved—beckons to us like sirens from every corner.

What the hell do people then use that "saved time" for?

There’s nothing wrong with such desires. But when efficiency becomes an obsession, our lives become a constant, headlong rush. Our obsession with saving time results in no time—at least no time for the sorts of slowness that lead to bursts of intellectual creativity, physical health, and spiritual contemplation.

The ones who "saved time" and are in a rush always seem to be in a rush.  And then there are people like me who seemingly move like sloths but get the job done anyway.  What is with the speed?

 Speed has become the measure of success—faster chips, faster computers, faster networks, faster connectivity, faster news, faster communications, faster transactions, faster deals, faster delivery, faster product cycles, faster brains, faster kids. Why are we so obsessed with speed, and why can’t we break its spell?

Maybe speed is nothing but a fear of being alone.  Wait, let me explain.  In the old days, men and women in the villages were in their group settings.  They talked, laughed, cried, together--essentially wasted time.  That was the life they led.  Now, after the efficiency revolution, we are increasingly by ourselves.

Over time, technological developments have enabled workers to move away from a reliance on colleagues for support and instead trust in a system for getting things done.

Alone at work and at home.  We then don't know what to do with ourselves.  We want to run far away from that loneliness.  But, as much as we run, well, we find that we are alone all over again.  And then we run at even faster speeds!

I often wonder, too, if our obsession with productivity—with “filled time,” in essence—is stemming from a fear of free time. If we’re ever stuck in a moment of silence, we usually turn on the radio or television, grab our phones, or log onto our computers. We have to fill the empty space.

Exactly!

You see how quickly got to this point? ;)

I am increasingly worried about the on-demand economy

Back in the elevator in the 37-story tower, the messengers do talk, one tells me. They end up asking each other which apps they work for: Postmates. Seamless. EAT24. GrubHub. Safeway.com.

Welcome to the on-demand, app, world.  If this is the future, then I don't want any part of it.  Because, as the writer notes:

And that’s when I realized: the on-demand world isn’t about sharing at all. It’s about being served. This is an economy of shut-ins.

Shut-ins.  

There is something strange happening.  Back when I started teaching in California, which seems like eons ago, the business school faculty were getting all excited to offer courses with "e-commerce" somewhere in the title.  It seemed all novel at that time, when Netscape was the dominant web browser!  We were all toying with phrases like "click and order" will wipe out "brick and mortar."  Alan Greenspan thought it was all irrational exuberance; remember that?

All that was before the iPhone revolution. Before Android. Before "apps" that work on smartphones.  Now, there seems to be a new app every day that people are gushing about.  I read the other day that messages via WhatsApp and other apps, plus the good old SMS, means that the phone, apparently, is not for calling people anymore!

In total, Americans spend about 26 minutes a day texting. That compares to spending about six minutes a day on voice calls.

 What the heck are we texting about?  It could be even for things like this:

A woman hauling two Whole Foods sacks reads the concierge an apartment number off her smartphone, along with the resident’s directions: “Please deliver to my door.”

That woman is a worker bee in this on-demand economy.  Yes, this is not the first time I blogged my concerns about this trend.  

Last year the venture capital firm SherpaVentures — whose offices are just down the street from that apartment building full of Ubers and Squares and Twitters— released a sunny study on the future of our on-demand world. They have a stake in making it go big , of course: they’re seed investors in Shyp and Munchery and have $154 million to invest in on-demand businesses. As the desire for more instant, app-based services expands up the economic chain, the report argued, entrepreneurial freelancers — everyone from grocery deliverers to cleaners to accountants to lawyers — will have flexibility to monetize their time when they want to and pursue their passions. Brick-and-mortar stores die out, and so do their low-wage retail jobs, which it suggested would personalize the world, away from the sterile anonymity of big-box stores to a “21st-century village economy,” in which we’re “united” by cellphones.
So who are we uniting with in this scenario? 

Meanwhile, in the crowded less developed economies:

grocery delivery has taken off massively in hyper-dense developing countries, where huge income disparities allow upper-middle-class citizens to turn the rest of the workforce into their personal delivery network.

The WSJ has a story about India on that point:

One morning, Ashok Kumar hoisted a huge, 110-pound pack jammed with books, cellphones, bluejeans and other items onto his back and cinched the shoulder straps.
Then he donned a helmet, climbed onto a motorcycle and, balancing precariously, headed out into the traffic-clogged streets of the Indian capital for his daily rounds.
Mr. Kumar and thousands of men like him fan out across the crowded cities of the world’s second-most-populous nation every day—foot soldiers on the front lines of India’s e-commerce revolution.
This low-tech army of urban sherpas hauls bags of online purchases down narrow alleys and up flights of stairs, lugging everything from laser printers and kitchen appliances to cans of Coca-Cola for their country’s burgeoning consumer class.

So, what exactly is my worry here?

In the new world of on-demand everything, you’re either pampered, isolated royalty — or you’re a 21st century servant.

We aren't thinking this through.  It certainly has the feel of "share-the-scraps economy."

Can a man not working long hours get paid a lot? Yes, I can!

Consider this excerpt:

For upper-middle class men, notes sociologist Michèle Lamont, ambition and a strong work ethic are "doubly sacred. . . as signals of both moral and socioeconomic purity. Elite men's jobs revolve around the work devotion schema, which communicates that high-level professionals should "demonstrate commitment by making work the central focus of their lives" and "manifest singular 'devotion to work,' unencumbered with family responsibilities," to quote sociologist Mary Blair-Loy. ... How do the elite signal to each other how important they are? "I am slammed" is a socially acceptable way of saying "I am important." Fifty years ago, Americans signaled class by displaying their leisure: think banker's hours (9 to 3). Today, the elite — journalist Chrystia Freeland calls them "the working rich" — display their extreme schedules. 

Think about the professionals you know who are in that elite stratosphere.  (I know you, reader, are not one. Because, if you were, you would not have the time to read this post.  Elementary, my dear Watson!)  They are uber-busy, right?  Awfully packed schedules. Always on the go.  You will be lucky if you can get five minutes of their undivided attention.

We have turned the very idea of being rich upside down: we used to think that being rich meant that you had all the time in the world because you didn't have to work at all.  Now, it turns out that being rich means to boast that you have no time at all.

And, there is an unending rush, a long line, to join that elite club.

What's the deal?

It's not productivity. It's not innovation. It's identity. If you've lived a life where holidays are a nuisance, where you've missed your favorite uncle's funeral and your children's childhoods, in a culture that conflates manly heroism with long hours, it's going to take more than a few regressions to convince you it wasn't really necessary, after all, for your work to devour you.

It's identity.  I work, therefore I am.  I work incredibly long hours, therefore I am.  I am tempted to believe that it is not merely the money that motivates this extreme work schedule, but it is very much the identity.  Like the character that George Clooney played in Up in the Air.

I doubt that Max Weber would have ever imagined such an extreme version of the Protestant Ethic.  These rich are, ironically, not in the leisure class anymore!

I have a different version of identity: the good ol' I think, therefore I am.

In this identify, work is a 24x7 commitment.  Thinking is a lot of work.  Sometimes I wish I didn't think.  I worry that I overthink. I even wonder whether I am thinking in my sleep.

But, despite that intense 24x7 schedule, my calendar is always wide open.  Ask my neighbor who jokes all the time that he has never seen me at work.  You want to meet with me?  Say when, and pay for my plane ticket and I can be there.  It is not any BFD, to use Joe Biden's language!

I don't get paid for the 24x7 thinking work that I do.

Well, not in dollars.

I get paid a lot in so many other ways.  For one, I get to interact with you, dear reader.  Did you already know that you are a reward for my thinking?  Yes, without you, I will be infinitely poorer and I don't want to slide into that poverty.

There are plenty of payments that I receive, every single day.  Earlier today, on my way to the physical therapy appointment (now, that is an expense item, not a reward!) I flashed the hazard lights to warn the cars behind and came to a stop.

To collect a payment; this one:

Yes, it is an annual payment I receive for the long hours I work thinking.

And you thought I don't work long hours and that I earn pittance.  Now you know.

10.2%? OMD!!! Where will it end?

Outsourced to Derek Thompson:

1) The last time unemployment crossed the 10 percent barrier was September 1982. It stayed above 10 percent for nine months. Nine months from now is the August of a mid-term election year. Bad news for Dems.

2) The broader measure of unemployment, which includes part-timers and people who have stopped looking for work, hit 17.5 percent. This broader measure of unemployment will start to converge with official unemployment before the official rate goes down.

3) It's hard to have inflation when almost one-fifth of a consumer-driven economy is out of work, under-worked or discouraged from looking for work at all.

4) Increased productivity sounds like a good thing, but for at least 17.5 percent of the population, it's not. Employees are squeezing more out of their workers, even with part-time work at an all-time high. That means they'll be morel likely to add hours than add workers as the economy picks up.

5) After dithering on jobless benefits for weeks, Congress just happened to extend unemployment benefits the day before unemployment crossed 10 percent. Sounds like somebody on Capitol Hill was tippped off about today's shocking figure, which was 0.3 percentage points higher than analysts expected. What did Congress know and when did they know it?

The future of manufacturing, and American workers

Robert Reich has a fantastic piece on why we ought not to be insanely worried about the loss of manufacturing. Read the entire argument here. An excerpt:

Want to blame something? Blame new knowledge. Knowledge created the electronic gadgets and software that can now do almost any routine task. This goes well beyond the factory floor. America also used to have lots of elevator operators, telephone operators, bank tellers and service-station attendants. Remember? Most have been replaced by technology. Supermarket check-out clerks are being replaced by automatic scanners. The Internet has taken over the routine tasks of travel agents, real estate brokers, stock brokers and even accountants. With digitization and high-speed data networks a lot of back office work can now be done more cheaply abroad.

Any job that's even slightly routine is disappearing from the U.S. But this doesn't mean we are left with fewer jobs. It means only that we have fewer routine jobs, including traditional manufacturing. When the U.S. economy gets back on track, many routine jobs won't be returning--but new jobs will take their place. A quarter of all Americans now work in jobs that weren't listed in the Census Bureau's occupation codes in 1967. Technophobes, neo-Luddites and anti-globalists be warned: You're on the wrong side of history. You see only the loss of old jobs. You're overlooking all the new ones.

The reason they're so easy to overlook is that so much of the new value added is invisible. A growing percent of every consumer dollar goes to people who analyze, manipulate, innovate and create. These people are responsible for research and development, design and engineering. Or for high-level sales, marketing and advertising. They're composers, writers and producers. They're lawyers, journalists, doctors and management consultants. I call this "symbolic analytic" work because most of it has to do with analyzing, manipulating and communicating through numbers, shapes, words, ideas.

Obama to monitor Facebook for slackers!