This is genuinely how MBAs think
This is why cruelty is the point, because they prioritize it even above profit.
If you’re not miserable, you’re not working hard enough/s
I used to work at a university whose education department sank hundreds of thousands of dollars into a study to find ideal lecture length to maximize retention.
Memory’s a little fuzzy… it was short. Like a half hour?
Anyway the punchline I definitely do remember is that they got the results of the study then changed absolutely nothing
“We funded this study hoping it would conform to our existing world view, Alas it didnt, there for we’re not changing a fucking thing”
If people are happy, something is wrong. Misery is a virtue/s
Lol yeah it’s the exact same [facetious] logic as expecting increasing the working day from 10 ~> 20 hours to lead to increased productivity.
It’s almost like ample and adequate rest need to be baked into scheduling?
Like thinking 2 women can birth 1 child in 4.5 months…
Holy crap are you telling me that if I impregnate 17 women at once I can have a kid in an hour? What’s all this hubub about population decline hop to it people!
It’s Taco Bell logic. You love our chicken nuggets and caramel empanadas? We sold out in 3 days? Well they’re discontinued so fuck you. Ok guys, sales are down and we can’t figure out why, we need ideas.
they got rid of the quesarito just so they can bring it back for a week. and there is NOTHING in the quesarito that isnt already on the menu, so you can still get it if you customize a beefy 5 layer
What’s the “logic” here?
I have worked in the mining industry for over 20 years. Before Covid happened my monthly schedule was set up so that we were given seven days off every month. At the end of 2021 management decided to change it so that we worked 5 days and 4 off with them saying that this was a “safer”and more beneficial to employees, since the schedule change there have been more people quitting and more people getting hurt on the job I myself along with others have voiced our opinion to go back to the original schedule and management looks down upon us as if we said a dirty word.
Yeah, I’d go with the option that has the least incidences. Mining is already environment prone so we don’t need to add any more human error than we need.
while we know this post is fake, this is the logic capitalists use. it is the logic they hide, the lede they bury, when they report on how efficient ai will make us.
I can’t tell you whether the post is fake, but I can tell you this exact situation was researched in my country and found to be correct and then was never heard from again
I guess at this point, with the million plus recently laid off, humanity is just lucky we ate able to leave freely and not progressed into biofuel to fun
data centersslop factories.Capitalism in a nutshell. Treat your employees like expendable assets and squeeze every last drop out of them
The only silver lining to ending slavery for the owner class was that at least now the cogs were responsible for their own room and board and etc
*acknowledging that slavery hasn’t truly, universally ended
Just like before AI employees used to code 1000 lines/day. With AI 1000 lines can be written in a few mins. Imagine what an overworked employee can code using AI in a day. #Efficiency
With AI 1000 lines can be written in a few mins.
Every programmer knows that more lines of code = better software. Encapsulation and abstraction are for suckers. CTRL+C, CTRL+V and you too can code like an AI.
You used to write 1000 lines per day?
Are comments considered lines?
Maybe in a week with a lot of copied boilerplate code and after auto-formatting, but even then probably less.
It’s just an example 🫠
It’s also that so much work is pointless and doesn’t serve a proper purpose for humanity. Things like ads, a lot of office jobs where people sit in endless meetings, and so on.
I think humanity has realized it’s wasting our lives but we can’t think of another system that will work.
Maybe universal income but the downside of that is that it comes with AI and transhumanism, which will remove what is human about humans.
I hate how a big chunk of my work has become to write reports nobody should read. Our team produces a report every January, that gets passed to our director, that gets compiled into a yearly lab wide report, that gets combined into a 5-year report, that get sent to the government to ensure continuous funding… so much time wasted by everyone
I’m 51 now and I learned from 25 years of working that wasting time is not a problem for large corporations år governments. Even in smaller companies, they value people being forced into office much higher than employees producing work.
So the conclusion for me is that its just a system to keep everyone busy and conform to rules set by the corporation.
Sure we can think of better. It’s just that the only people with the power to change or implement any of it are financially incentivized not to. So they don’t.
Why would universal income come with AI and transhumanism?
If the corporate fantasy of replacing all jobs with AI were to actually come to pass, what are all the now jobless people supposed to do? Quietly wait in a back alley to starve to death?
So either universal income happens, or the one percent learn that there’s no level of technology that will overcome a two orders of magnitude disadvantage in numbers.
So, nothing but fearmongering.
Because the alternatives are pointless toil or perishing (spoilers: neither of these are off the table)
You’re going to have to elaborate on that. Why are those the alternatives?
Only thing that is human about humans is primitive urges, jealousy, mistakes, and irrationality.
I’d laugh, but this just seems like it would actually happen.
This happened to me.
I requested four days and laid out a plan on what “success” looked like. We tried it. After six months my boss and I agreed all my metrics had improved, so he put me back in five days because “imagine how productive you’ll be now”, so I quit a couple of months after.
When I accepted my current job, I did so on the conditions that I’d work 4x10 and fully from home (after training). When I started, they said there had been a misunderstanding about full WFH and that I was allowed to WFH one day a week. (That eventually changed during COVID but no one ever apologized to me for lying to me.)
Seven years later - last year - they told me that it was “unfair” that I’m the only person who had a special schedule (apparently I was the last person to have it, but I certainly was not the only) and took that away, too.
I live in a rural area and will not be able to find a comparable job nearby. I’ve been contemplating what to do.

I would have prepared my two weeks notice letter in advance and handed it to him right after he said those words.
Honestly this caught me off guard because they interim check-ins were good. I wasn’t expecting this conclusion. Otherwise i would!
Three months notice over here lol
They would never give you notice if they were firing you. They don’t deserve that courtesy from you.
Wanna share the plan? I’m still trying to come up with something for my boss.
Yes! I had an engineering management role in a smallish company, which means that I still had a lot of hands on responsibilities, so not sure how things apply to your role. But a lot looked like this:
- we set out what we expected would be achieved in six months (major projects or milestones) <- we ran a roadmap that got fuzzy with time so this was more a vibe check than commitments
- we defined what would be signs that it wasn’t working. Eg. Projects stalling, teams confused about direction, feedback from the team, lowering of certain metrics.
- we set up checks every two months that included feedback from direct reports and one over.
- I picked Wednesday. we set out how the calendar was going to change, how handover was going to work for those days and what mechanisms existed to avoid blocking.
It went great! Especially as a manager knowing you’re not always there helps drive decision making delegation, self directedness, etc.
In this team I wasn’t the only one that tried it, and we didn’t synchronize days. It had no issue
Also depending on where you are, it might be moot. Eg. In Germany they can’t say no unless they have business reason.
I’m less than 50% confident the OP is a joke.
It’s a joke based on a true story.
On my first job the boss was telling a story about one of his previous jobs, where at one point they had to redo a whole week’s worth of work in one night. They tried hard and managed to do it. So I just added: “it’s in those times one see how slow they usually work”
Burnout is a thing too. There’s a reason marathon runners don’t sprint.
Marathons don’t move at the speed of business though. Progress moves business faster. Commerce IS business. Fast businesses use speed to move faster than their clients speed.
Business, business business. Speed. Solutions.
Edit: how am I being downvoted lol - obviously what I wrote is nonsense straight from every Amazon, UPS, IBM commercial every made. Maybe I’m just moving at the speed of business. Keep up!
Very few business are sprints, they go for longevity like marathoners.
Even most know not to treat their employees that way too.
how am I being downvoted lol
Poe’s Law
Most in the c-suite truly think that way.
ya it’s cuz they aren’t side hustling enough
redo
Or rather we see just how much labor original work is compared to replication.
deleted by creator
“So we went back to five days, and now productivity is down to effectively three days, what went wrong?”
Executives, everywhere.
“so I started
blastingfiring people”Anyone else remember the scene in Schindler’s list where the Nazis make a work camp Jew show how quickly he can make a part (a hinge I think), and then look at his completed parts bin and decide to kill him because he clearly hasn’t been working that speed the entire time?
Maybe Pizza Friday is the answer
One slice each only, obviously.
The management quietly dropped/forgot it lol
The study stops when the executives get what they want.
Which is objectively stupid as fuck, btw
The problem is the workplaces don’t want that. if you’re happier and have more energy, it also makes you more uppity and harder to control. You might even find options for other work!
If it means keeping you tired and broken, that’s worth the cost of a little productivity.
You might even find options for other work!
Not many other places offer a 4-day week for same salary.
This to give up would be a major strong point…And to be honest…I’d actually work an hour more a day (36h week) to have a monday - thursday week just for the same or higher wage.
But is that really so? i would think that a better work life balance makes the employees inclined to remain at their job instead of hopping elsewhere. Probably even at the expense of a higher salary at another place that would instead demand the grind again.
Take a look at our little friend remote work. Almost all employees love it. Retention is thru the roof at places that offer it. More than half of workers say they’d even take a pay cut to keep it. Productivity isn’t affected in most cases (ymmv obviously). Buuuuut guess who absolutely can’t stand it? Management. They’ll go to the ends of the earth to make sure you don’t get it. Ask yourself why.
It’s because management doesn’t only care about those numbers and stats you cited. They also have emotional needs. Like feeling important. Like being the boot.
They also often don’t really understand how work gets done. They do a lot of meetings and schmoozing and think that’s how a web server gets build. They’re self centered, unimaginative, idiots.
We are ruled by the worst among us.
Edit: I realized I already wrote the same kind of thing in this thread the other day. I’m an old broken record!
Mostly it’s because they all own commercial real estate and are colluding with each other to keep it occupied.
You’re not accounting for the emotional needs of management. Many of them are cruel. They put value in making their workers squirm.
We should have worker owned things instead of the petty tyranny of capitalism, but here we are.
People, generally speaking, have an absolutely infuriating tendency to adapt to good things. They eventually look for more. The best way to prevent this, from an employer’s perspective, is to break their spirit. Learned helplessness is one of the only ways to permanently keep a free person in a bad situation.















