Conversation

Oddly enough I tweeted this before I read the NYT piece
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There’s suddenly an influx of spiritual-monastic gigworkers/indies entering the game. wtf. It’s like the 4th wave coffeefication of indie consulting and freelancing. I’m more like single-origin Folgers.
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Kinda like history repeating itself. After the Darwinian capitalism of the 1920s-30s, post-war economy saw the rise of comfy Organization Man with his social ethos and rotary clubs and feminine mystique kaffeeklatsch wife. Lasted 30 years. We’re coming off another Darwinist era.
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Unlike the poor, the middle class don’t actually want a bigger share of wealth. They want the foot off the accelerator and a protected, slower-changing environment where leisure > effort. When they don’t get it, they make do with ritual design consultants and stuff.
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I’d be inclined to dismiss this as “3 data points make a trend” NYT article, except it isn’t. This is unfortunately definitely a trend that’s been building for years. Huge appetite for this kind of meaning-pampering in entitled-techie land.
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Hehe some people are offended that this desecrates religion and tradition, I’m offended it desecrates the bleak, stark, soullessness of business
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Registering a bet with Toby for future reference
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Replying to @tobyshorin and @djbaskin
It’s a bet. We’ll revisit in 10 years. I’d say a tiny minority of the workforce will be in environments like this, and majority will have highly functional relationships to work with few such superfluities. WFH, free agency, and API jobs will turn work into bare metal behaviors.
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Distinction between active vs passive environmental design
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Replying to @mikewawszczak and @MikeWawz
That comparison is off. Evironmental aesthetics don’t actively try to make you do things. A better comparison is to workplace wellness programs that give you health insurance premium breaks for wearing pedometers and walking 10,000 steps. Or cultish sales events.
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In general, business trends strike me as faddish when they have specious or non-existent relationships to the basic existential function of businesses: to make and sell goods and services at a profit, creating wealth for owners and time-for-money trades for workers.
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If you can’t trace a robust connection to the balance sheet, it’s either a perk/in-kind comp (like buffet lunches and on-site laundry), some sort of distraction theater, or a manifestation of fundamental causal confusion about what drives what. There’s a lot in that last category
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Perks and theaters are often misread as causes of success. Eg: buffets A: Perk hypothesis: Just a convenience for high-value employees B: Theater hypothesis: Sucker them into working longer hours cheaply C: Causal hypothesis: improves morale/culture, boosting productivity
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IMO it’s mostly A. The business is profitable enough to pay for such perks. B is a cute suspicion. Other forces drive workaholism way better than buffet theater. C is basically wrong. Strong culture and business success form a virtuous cycle that does not pass through “buffet”
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