Anybody else get an immediately negative visceral reaction from this? If I'm understanding this correctly, the aim is to manipulate our sense of shame/guilt to boost productivity.
After sitting with the feeling for a bit, here are some ideas that come to mind:
1. Maybe we should ask why we feel shame/guilt in the first place. Is it "normal" to feel this? If it isn't we should not rely on it for our happiness (or productivity).
2. What is the value of productivity? Why does it make us happy?
For me, guilt/shame is something to be overcome, not used as a tool. And the value of productivity is something that has been handed down to us by a culture which we've been thrown into. And (at least for me), it's our duty to question these ideas instead of merely giving into them to self-reinforce themselves.
It sounds like you're questioning the whole idea of accountability. The mechanism here is the same as if you have a friend check in on you to help you quit smoking or exercise more or eat better. It's true that you're adding pressure/shame/guilt into your life, but I don't think it's particularly sinister.
The way I see it, the mind is extremely complex, and the decisions you make in the moment may not be the decisions you'd like to make in life. In the moment, you might end up eating a tempting ice cream sandwich, or you might get distracted by Facebook when you meant to be working on a meaningful project. The sort of accountability from the article is an example of understanding your goals, emotions, and habits, and harnessing that understanding to better achieve what you really want. The pressure/shame/guilt here is a tool to be used with care, and if it negatively affects your life, then certainly you should stop or scale it back a bit.
I find happiness from productivity because I try my best to work on projects that I find meaningful (inside and outside of my job), and I find pride/meaning to be one of the most satisfying forms of happiness. People who don't find meaning in their work might still feel that productivity helps them achieve their goals by getting a raise or keeping a job, thus providing money to use for other goals (like happiness).
Thanks for the writeup. I think you're right: the idea of external validation / accountability is definitely involved here as well.
And I think it's easy to read what I wrote to mean that "shame is objectively bad," but that was not my intention. The intention was more to question (and possibly reevaluate) our own relationships to it.
> I find happiness from productivity because I try my best to work on projects that I find meaningful
In the end, it comes down to what makes you thrive, and only you can answer that. Productivity, in its most general sense, can be a way to achieve that. At the same time, for me, it is healthy to question these assumptions every once in a while.
Yes, my immediate gut reaction to the title was to think, maybe next we can have an app to promote the creation of super workers that produce outputs far in excess of their quota, we could call them Shock Workers. Then I read it and some of the language leaned eerily in that direction.
OTOH I've seen similar things used in a different way which worked well, in places that have lots of ops centers to link them and make them feel like one - you can look up and see the other ops center with your colleagues there and chat etc. But that was less about applying a work/focus pressure and more about enabling communication and keeping the teams connected.
>What is the value of productivity? Why does it make us happy? [...] And the value of productivity is something that has been handed down to us by a culture which we've been thrown into.
I think it's more that the business-speak label of "productivity" bothers you rather than its underlying idea of efficiency of input effort in relation to desirable output.
The concept of "productivity" doesn't have to be a Peter Drucker style management guru propaganda. Productivity makes us happy because it's an intrinsic human desire to improve our lives. For example, consider a prehistoric hunter in Africa that's running barefoot with a spear in hand and chasing after antelope to kill and eat it. He doesn't need modern McKinsey consultants to tell him he wants to do the least amount of running for the most amount of food. The better that ratio of expended effort to food quantity, the better the productivity. It's just that the hunter didn't label that concept as "productivity". If he has a sprained ankle, his chasing ability will decrease and his productivity will also decrease. He becomes unhappier. If the hunter uses his brain and notices the paths the antelopes use to the watering holes and takes advantage of those patterns to intelligently intercept it, his hunting productivity increases, and he becomes happier.
In the case of this thread's article, it looks like the author is a freelance journalist and so "productivity" to her is writing articles faster and/or writing more articles.
Good point. I agree the word "productivity" is bundled up with many meanings, and it could be a whole study in-itself to unpack it. Preliminarily, I'd say productivity is pragmatic towards-which one identifies oneself (a hunter hunts, a writer writes, etc).
I've been reading Being and Time recently, and Heidegger makes an interesting distinction between what is "ontic" (a writer writing, for example) and "ontological" (a writer investigating the state of being behind writing). In this context, productivity interestingly can be in both the following ideas:
Ontically, productivity writing a book.
Ontologically, productivity is understanding of the way of being a writer comports oneself to be a writer.
I think both ideas are equally important. I'm not sure why I'm writing this; maybe to address the difficulty with pinning down a consensus of what productivity means. but happy saturday!
Your argument that it exists _for_ anything is a bit hollow. What do superstitions exist _for_? What does religion exist _for_? What does the shame of being on the LGBTQ spectrum exist _for_? What does fat shaming exist _for_?
That something exists and that people are using it doesn't at all mean that the use is still valid, that it ever was valid, or that there are not much more fruitful alternatives.
Moreover your argument that you need guilt and shame to have a good society is the same sort of argument that Christians use against atheists and their lack of religion. The reason I don't go raise hell is simply because helping other people is what has been burned into my mind as a child. I don't hand a homeless person money because I'm worried about the shame of not doing it, nor do I feel any real happiness from when I do it; I do it because I believe it is my duty (which is the same reason I rarely miss deadlines).
Okay, so shame exists because it is good for a society that is built on shame? I don't mean to be derogatory in anyway, but the fact something is stabilizing doesn't mean it is good. I believe there are better ways to build relationships with others
> Okay, so shame exists because it is good for a society that is built on shame?
I think so, yes.
Evolutionarily, as humans, social inclusion was incredibly important. Being removed from a tribe was likely a death sentence. As such, we have some very strong social drivers like shame and embarrassment that people feel quite keenly.
But these social drivers caused people to do things that were good for society. You felt shame if you didn't contribute to hunting or gathering, cooking, planting and harvesting, building structures, raising children, or other crucial societal factors.
I think you're on pretty solid ground to say that shame and embarrassment go a long way toward the foundation of the society we have now.
I do think shame and embarrassment are useful tools that we shouldn't want to get rid of entirely. That being said, I think it's totally fair to question whether our current-society over-relies on these kinds of things, and asking if it would be healthier to scale them back rather than expand them.
>Okay, so shame exists because it is good for a society that is built on shame?
Yes. Shame exists because it gave some evolutionary benefits to the primates who had it, like being able to live in a society and cooperate and don't cheat/kill/fuck over each other as much (if you think we do bad stuff too much, wait till you see what we can do without shame).
>I believe there are better ways to build relationships with others
The problem is that made-up (e.g. of our own making, requiring us to think about them and follow them rationally), not instinctual, ways, are none effective at all compared to innate, evolutionary, feelings like shame...
Good points! I agree the feeling of shame is pre-reflective. At the same time, I think we have the possibility of comporting ourselves in a way-of-being that better copes with shame. For me, By reflectively using your pre-reflective feeling of shame as a tool for productivity feels wrong (and this is personal and I don't have the best words right now to expound that feeling)
>* For me, By reflectively using your pre-reflective feeling of shame as a tool for productivity feels wrong*
Well, with that I agree.
For one, it cheapens the quality and utility of shame.
Following this to the end, could end up with cheating on one's spouse or killing someone feeling only as bad as checking your Facebook page when you should be working...
No, I'm not referring to pair programming. That is a dialogue between two people working to get something done (no shame involved).
I'm focussing more on the aspect of having someone looking over your shoulder. Just a pair of eyes to watch you work (which I don't equate with pair programming)
Yes, I'm not questioning whether one would be more productive (I think actually someone would be more productive!). It's the value of this productiveness in the context of manipulating shame. Maybe for you shame is not a factor here, and that's great. I can only know me, and for me, the act of having someone watch over my shoulder (and only watch over my shoulder) as I work would have some level of shame/guilt involved.
It really isn’t like that when using it. Culture matters a lot and the community is just focused on actively working in a collaborative environment. It works wonders. I call it “flow state on demand.”
It reeks of "scientific management", a scrupuleless way of exploiting the slaves^H^H^H^H^H^H employees.
Ruthless con named Frederick Taylor looks for a way to make himself a ton of money by "consulting" on improving worker productivity.
"How did Taylor arrive at forty-seven and a half tons for Bethlehem Steel? He chose twelve “large, powerful Hungarians,” observed them for an hour, and calculated that, at the rate they were working, they were loading twenty-four tons of pig iron per man per day. Then he handpicked ten men and dared them to load sixteen and a half tons as fast as they could. They managed to do it in fourteen minutes; this yields a rate of seventy-one tons per man per ten-hour day. Taylor inexplicably rounded up the number to seventy-five. To get to forty-seven and a half, he reduced seventy-five by about forty per cent, claiming that this represented a work-to-rest ratio of the “law of heavy laboring.” Workers who protested the new standards were fired. Only one—the best approximation of an actual Schmidt was a man named Henry Noll—loaded anything close to forty-seven and a half tons in a single day, a rate that was, in any case, not sustainable. After providing two years of consulting services, Taylor billed the company a hundred thousand dollars (which works out to something like two and a half million dollars today), and then he was fired."
Given the post's lack of detail relating to the experience of creating the game itself, I fear OP is treating his craft as a means to an end; instead of loving his craft for what it is. I fell into a similar trap when, after leaving my job to pursue my "passion," I became my own slavemaster, treating myself as resource for production, and eventually learned to hate my once cherished activities. I hope OP's game succeeds; regardless, I would not recommend, to anyone, to pursue a personal hobby, dwelling, or passion as a means to reaching some external reward.
> Given the post's lack of detail relating to the experience of creating the game itself, I fear OP is treating his craft as a means to an end; instead of loving his craft for what it is.
I'm sure this is true for some people, but it seems to completely disregard the problems this guy went through and his personal context.
It's true that programming and/or game development may be a craft to some people, but it doesn't sound like it was for this guy.
He went through something bad, was censored and censured for talking about it, and came out of the wringer feeling betrayed and lost. It sounded like something went wrong with his little brother, too.
Rather than the "I have a dream and I want to make this game real" story we usually see, this sounds more like a guy turning to his hobby as a therapeutic outlet, specifically:
> While my career was falling apart, I decided to start making a video game. Normally I might have played a video game as a way to retreat from the world. But instead I channeled all of my anger, sadness, disappointment, and frustration into a project that became the video game you see above. . . . I can take some fictional people, make everyone betray them for all their own petty and cowardly reasons, and our protagonists will just have to deal with it. . . . So now I've resigned from a job I had grown to despise, and I'm channeling my frustration into something productive as a way of dealing with everything that had happened.
This post is certainly an advertisement for his game, but it's also definitely a way to try to vent about things he's not allowed to talk about -- I can't imagine how frustrating that must be.
I think that saying that his feelings now are due to his misunderstanding of "his craft" is needlessly dismissive.
You're right; I don't know OP, and I've probably made some assumptions that are incorrect, but that's just the inevitable consequence of stating anything positively. I did, however, try not to attempt to state anything about OP's personal character or feelings. My initial inspiration for my comment was based on the quote you mentioned above: he channeled his anger/frustration into his craft. To me, that sounded like he found a dwelling in his craft for programming, and it reminded me of one of my own personal experiences
I coach people in these circumstances. In most cases they simply lack a model for what constitutes a hobby-type skill vs. what constitutes a full-time+-type skill. They don't know how to tell the difference without diving in and trying it. And I sympathize, having done that myself.
IMO a really basic helpful model is: 1) thing I could do in my sleep and still amaze people with OR make money with == means of making a living and 2) thing that excites me and yet always seems just out of reach == hobby.
However the devil is in the details and you cannot by easily diminish the excitement of #2 (above) because you risk becoming the enemy just by suggesting that it not be prized above all other work. So there are other models which must be skillfully employed to help tease out this comprehension. It's kind of a minefield, actually.
Regarding 1) thing I could do in my sleep and still amaze people.
It is a bit dangerous to be unconsciously good (ie in my sleep) at something and think that you can make money with it.
Let's take something like chess. Unless you are a TOP 10 player, you are not going to be making a good living from chess unless you go into secondary sources of income: teaching,writing, coaching. Source: as a master I know many poor grandmasters.
So there has to be a market demand for the skill that you have deliberately practiced to be unconsciously good at.
Yes, this is a good example of what I consider the fundamental work to be done in the area of #1. A lot of career books and tools aim at this kind of approach as well. I also use a Role/Group/Reward model that makes it clear that even if you have an offer on the table where you'd be playing chess for great money, you still have inquiries to make.
Maybe it would help if the term "hobby" managed to lose its stigma of "uptight, unproductive nonsense". A substantial part of today's (open source) software landscape has begun as work from hobbyists. There are hobbies (like cosplay or - yes game development) which take enormous dedication, manage to amaze a lot of people and, in rare cases, can make the hobbyist famous.
Nevertheless, those are usually not the things you spontaneously think of when you hear the term. So maybe untangling the different motivations and giving more value to things that are not immediately meant to make a living could help to make a change.
That's an interesting perspective for not following your passion. Could you elaborate on the experience as to how following your passion seemed appealing but actually wasn't?
the problem is that when you turn a passion into a job you get a lot of other things that you may not passionate about.
i had a passion for programming in highschool. but i absolutely hated working 9-5 in an office environment. the problem was when i had that experience as an intern i didn't know why i hated it. it took me years to figure out what the real problem was and to find the kind of work that aligned with my passions and avoided the things i didn't like about it while also along the way changing my feelings about some aspects (9-5 looks less bad when other factors are good (i still avoid it though)).
I don't think he intended to use this post to talk about game development, he's doing it on a forum thread + reddit and imgur posts. He might have taken the Opportunity that his CV has been cleared.
A passion is something that is personal and internal. It's your direct experience with a craft that is becomes a natural extension of you. When you change your relationship to that craft such that you require some external means, it no longer becomes purely internal. In today's culture, which (I believe) overvalues monetization and productivity, it is easy to be swept into external desires for accomplishment. And, even if you do achieve your goals, it is very difficult to go back to re-experience the original internal, personal relationship you enjoyed with that craft
Well, basically do what you love because you love it. Treat your occupation as a business, even if you are just an employee. That (at least to me) is a good way to think things through in their proper context.
If a person loves their occupation then that's great! But he/she still needs to treat it as a business rather than a mission for a higher cause (even if it was a mission for a higher cause) because without financial insight it gets hard to prioritize things.
And don't see why in a) you couldn't manage to have time for your passions, i.e. leave at 5. For me it meant lowering my ambitions and not trying to be fulfilled only by me work, but instead make time for unproductive activities (hobbies/friends/family). Even if I have less money in the end I feel way better.
although I don't think it necessarily applies in this case from all I've read in all cases where you look to your hobby activities as a source of needed financing those hobbies become more like work. Hopefully it is work that succeeds for him, and that he will enjoy.
I kind of get what systemizer is saying. People may think of evolution of technologies as cycles but it is never that. A new technology 'Y' is always developed because the incumbent 'X' has some shortcomings. And even after a period of disillusionment when we revert back to 'X', it is not always the same. We synthesize the good points of 'Y' back to 'X'.
Coming to this topic, I see Microservices as a solution to the problem of Continuous Delivery which is necessary in some business models. I can't see those use cases reverting back to Monolith architecture. For such scenarios, the problems associated with Microservices are engineering challenges and not avoidable architecture choices.
I was on this flight. The flight wasn't late; but we almost had to be diverted because no one came forward with the device. It took about 30 minutes and 4-5 reminders from the flight attendant and pilot to resolve the issue, making me think the person either forgot he renamed it to that or he himself was pranked and didn't realize his phone was renamed until he took a second look. I was hoping someone didn't buy a galaxy note 7 as a gift and had it in a bag somewhere. But yeah, definitely one of the more interesting flights i've been on :/
They said they would have searched every bag, but they wouldn't have find it since it could have been any kind of Android with a changed SSID.
It's the ultimate troll!
edit: > no further action was taken on the passenger with the device (from the BBC article)
The person came forward with the device and it was determined that the phone wasn't actually a Galaxy Note 7, but was just named that way. We were very close to being diverted though.
If you're interested in learning the basics of reductive synthesis, I recommend Syntorial (http://www.syntorial.com/). It teaches in an interactive way by first playing a tone and then asking you to configure the synthesizer to make that same sound. It covers everything from oscillators, adsr, lfos, reverb/delays, and more.
How does everyone else modularize their javascript? I'm kind of a noob when it comes to this (jQuery spaghetti, cough cough), so I'm really interested in this subject.
This article was awesome; definitely going to take a look at the example code when I get home!
I don't understand how a service can be both secure and centralized. You'd have to give 100% of your trust to a single entity. I'm not pointing fingers, but DDG is a good example of this situation.
My current trust model is primarily made up of my friends and family; not a third party organization online, regardless of how they market it. If I put my trust in them, my security would only be compromised if ((N-1)/3) worked together. (see http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824-2012/papers/castro-practical...) Wouldn't my activity be more secure if it was built upon that?
I'm not proposing any implementations; just food for thought.
Cool. I'm curious: what was your motivation for doing this rather than using Chef's encrypted data bags?
Is it because it's tightly integrated with IAM? If that's the case, does that mean you guys use a cookbook that tightly couples system users with IAM roles?
This isn't a job, but if you follow #hack4good on twitter or geeklist's hack4good feed (https://geekli.st/#hack4good ), there are some cool projects going on around social good. Most recently there was a hackathon around the typhoon that hit the Philippines.
After sitting with the feeling for a bit, here are some ideas that come to mind:
1. Maybe we should ask why we feel shame/guilt in the first place. Is it "normal" to feel this? If it isn't we should not rely on it for our happiness (or productivity).
2. What is the value of productivity? Why does it make us happy?
For me, guilt/shame is something to be overcome, not used as a tool. And the value of productivity is something that has been handed down to us by a culture which we've been thrown into. And (at least for me), it's our duty to question these ideas instead of merely giving into them to self-reinforce themselves.