alt Hacker NewsAbsolutely everything is tracked as a work item with estimates. Anything you think should be done needs to be justified and tracked the same way.
My grandpa once said something that seemed ridiculous but makes a lot of sense: that every workplace should have a “heavy” who steals a new worker’s lunch on the first day, just to see if he asserts himself. Why? Not to haze or bully but to filter out the non-fighters so that when management wants to impose quotas or tracking, they remember that they’d be enforcing this on a whole team of fighters… and suddenly they realize that squeezing the workers isn’t worth it.
The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing.
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Many of the workers in the 1950s were combat veterans who had lived through some shit and weren't as easy to push around. Contrast that to today when a lot of people tend to panic over minor hazards like a respiratory virus with a >99% survival rate. That cowardice puzzled me until I realized that a lot of younger people have led such sheltered lives that they have never experienced any real hardship or serious physical danger so they lack the mental resilience to cope with it. They just want to be coddled and aren't willing to fight for anything.
That generation had it more together as citizens, and they held on to power for a long time. Postwar all of the institutions in the US grew quickly, and the WW2 generation moved up quickly as a result. The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone.
What if the workers decide the work is imposing on them? Maybe that's a good thing but it could go too far.
> The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing.
That era also had militant labor organization and real socialist and communist parties in the US. Anticommunism killed all that and brought us to the current state of affairs where employers that respect their employees even a little bit are unicorns.
> steals a new worker’s lunch on the first day, just to see if he asserts himself
> to filter out the non-fighters
This is bullying and hazing.