work ethic

also should an innate characteristic be the subject of moral evaluation?

It's a difficult balance, inasmuch as I try to maintain a strong work ethic for the sake of the microcosm of people I work with and whose lives are made unnecessarily difficult when their coworkers fail to hold up their ends of things, but at the same time I've yet to work for a business whose continued well-being I gave any particular fucks about and who really inspired me to give my all. I think I've leveled off at 'just enough', but never again with that inevitably-exploited and demoralizing 'above and beyond' shit.

work is for fucking chumps

adam is perhaps nearer to my own perspective

weirdly tho, the hands-on bits of my job, the helping people bits, I kinda really get off on that side of it, it's a joy to help peeps

I'm 1000% more present and invested wrt volunteer stuff than I am wrt the stuff I get paid to do.

helping people is great. it's the idea that i make my labor available for exploitation in order to maintain a tenuous grasp on solvency for myself and my family, and that i'm supposed to feel good about it and want to maximize the return on that exploitation that makes me very irate.

Yeah, I have zero time for that shit. When they start telling us 'the numbers' in meetings, I start making jerk-off motions and rolling my eyes. How proud I am of the millions that we've made for you! Can't wait to see the pictures of the CEO's sixth yacht!

Work is for fucking chumps, but I still have a strong work ethic about quality and deadlines in the job I've agreed to do. Sure would love to strike it rich though and leave this all behind.

i wish i had a better work ethic and it's something i work on bc it's not my natural inclination

mine is real bad, have tried to improve so many times to no success

i feel good when i create or produce something in which i invested time and effort but it can be extraordinarily difficult to do that, i usually don't want to. i am a serial procrastinator and have a terrible work ethic. i'd much rather listen to music or play with my kids or hang out on our front porch or fuck around on the internet. if i didn't have to worry about money i would certainly not work, or at least not work in the sense of having a job, i think i would work in the sense of making art or cooking or keeping a nice house but i hate having to do things that i don't want to do

yeah that's me to a T

Mordy how do you work on developing your work ethic? this is a thing, like willpower, that often puzzles me - can one develop a trait that feels innate?

Getting Things Done (GTD) - Cult or Awesome?

sad truth: downloaded that book, have never been able to work up the effort to read it

The things i like to do aren't work.
The things i don't like to do i don't like to do.
Financial reward or other necessity sometimes compel me to do more of the second thing.
But i don't even do enough of the first things tbh because I'd rather do nothing than the things i like.

What was the question again

Mordy how do you work on developing your work ethic? this is a thing, like willpower, that often puzzles me - can one develop a trait that feels innate?

endeavor to fulfill your work obligations and make your work time productive and when i notice that i'm failing recommit myself to doing it. i mean how do you cultivate any positive trait you're looking to improve? keep it in your mind and try to change your habits to fit w/ what you are trying to develop.

I dunno, I don't know if I can cultivate positive traits, I'm pretty lazy

bummer

There are some ruthless contractor types I used to work for who are experts at exploiting people with the work-ethic, and the art of playing them against each other. We were such easy marks it would have been a massive waste not to exploit us tbh. I don't know what the work-ethic is really. But in my experience some of what drives people to work harder is more of an ongoing unbridled Darwenian death-match - rather than some kind of virtue, where the loser is the first to get laid off in the next recess between contracts. Also a bit of rampant egotism involved and primitive ant-colony type impulses.

sometimes having a good work ethic can have advantages for you personally. like if you work in a field where your salary is directly linked to the amount of work you put in (like if you do billable hours, or get paid on commission), or for chores that need to be done at home (which i think are related to this ethic) where doing them makes your house nicer and your life more pleasant.

Basis in Protestant theology
Further information: Grace (Christianity) and Good works

Protestants, beginning with Martin Luther, reconceptualized worldly work as a duty which benefits both the individual and society as a whole. Thus, the Catholic idea of good works was transformed into an obligation to consistently work diligently as a sign of grace. Whereas Catholicism teaches that good works are required of Catholics as a necessary manifestation of the faith they received, and that faith apart from works is dead (James 2:14–26) and barren, the Calvinist theologians taught that only those who were predestined (cf. the Calvinist concept of double predestination) to be saved would be saved.

Since it was impossible to know who was predestined, the notion developed that it might be possible to discern that a person was elect (predestined) by observing their way of life. Hard work and frugality were thought to be two important consequences of being one of the elect. Protestants were thus attracted to these qualities and supposed to strive for reaching them.

^^^^^ Never, ever understood this last bit.

No way of knowing who's to be saved, but still have to act like someone who is (and we don't even know for sure what that person would look like) even though it's a load of effort for either no reward or a reward you were going to get anyway

there are rewards! if you are one of the elect and you don't act like it, then you may as well not be, as far as your peers are concerned, which will go badly for you. and just on your own personal level, fall into sloth etc and you're just proving it to yourself that you're destined for hell. which would be depressing. but yes, none of that technically changes your underlying electness one whit.

lol

Since it was impossible to know who was predestined, the notion developed that it might be possible to discern I.E. KNOW

Not to get started on another free-will discussion (although maybe relevant to this thread?) but it always stumps me. If the Catholics believe in free will and the Protestants believe in predetermination, surely the result ought to be that it's the Catholics who end up with the work ethic (because your choices are 'real', significant, are not just illusory).

Whereas predetermination ought to imply a sort of strong Cynicism about whether you bother to do good or not (or the value of our calling something good or not, seeing as only God knows).

the effort part is really overrated. Get as much work done as possible with as little effort as possible. Stop being a try hard.

helping people is great. it's the idea that i make my labor available for exploitation in order to maintain a tenuous grasp on solvency for myself and my family, and that i'm supposed to feel good about it and want to maximize the return on that exploitation that makes me very irate.

― adam, Wednesday, April 5, 2017 2:09 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^ I work 100% harder in a service/education capacity than I ever did in 15 years in book publishing. Mostly though I agree that the concept of a work ethic is bullshit. As long as you handle your businesses there's no need to be performatively working harder than the strawperson next door.

I don't see what other ppl have to do with your work ethic. You could have a great one and no one knows but you.

cardamon, that's the issue pretty much everyone who has glanced at/read/studied calvinism has with it. it's also the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to criticizing his theology. there are a bunch of different denominations and even modern catholicism is changing in ways that are not always represented worldwide or in every parish. a person's belief system is a lot more organic than officials make it out to be, but they generalize when they speaking to the general public for the sake of simplicity and ease of communication

protestants don't believe in predetermination. some denominations of protestantism believe in predetermination, with calivinists being major proponents of it. contrast with the church of christ, for example, whose main characteristic is to be nondenominational, so literally each congregation differs to a varying degree -- they adhere to congregationalist polity

with regard to the thread's question, a work ethic is a positive trait, but it's also meant to be a guide

in my mind, ethics mostly relate to the law, those are mostly easy to follow and rationalize (e.g., should i smoke/vape cannabis, etc.). morals relate to the quality of your being. there is some overlap, but what's more important, at least to me, is living a virtuous life (kind of an updated/modern version of the greek's virtue ethics, but slightly different)

i don't believe work ethics is an innate characteristic, so it makes noodle vague's second question unnecessary in my view

yeah i think my treating it as innate is absolutely open to question, tho i'd broaden "innate" to include "instilled at a very early age" maybe

it's so much easier to work when i have a reason to believe in why i'm working, a simple belief in something. n.b. the workplace and the world right now in general isn't very friendly to that kind of belief.

I don't see what other ppl have to do with your work ethic. You could have a great one and no one knows but you.

― Mordy, Wednesday, April 5, 2017 4:36 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Because it's relative to whatever the viewer thinks is normal. The whole idea of a work ethic is performance.

As I think was explained really clearly and in more detail above with the whole Calvinism and predestination thing.

it's relative to what you personally set as a bar for yourself which may in turn be influenced by the performances of others / your cultural milieu, but isn't this true of all virtues? are you honest? kind? temperate? humble? you look to the world around you for examples and benchmarks for how [and how much] to be these things but ultimately you are the only judge of your soul. only you know what is true about your virtues.

The whole idea of a work ethic is performance.

― the world's little sunbeam (in orbit),

I only think of work ethic as an internal judgement i place on myself tbrrwu so this is a matter of perspective maybe?

tbf i made this thread because i heard some toerag use it as self-descriptory on the radio

idleness is underrated and under-conceptualised imo

business/busyness comes from OE bisignis, which meant anxiety, which seems too perfect

IO OTM IMO

https://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/3vodcg/if_someone_wanted_to_work_18_hours_a_day_and/

I work hard in that I like doing anything I do well because failure makes me hyperventilate. However, I refuse to be a workaholic and despite being salaried I rarely go over 40/week because a) I often don't need to and b) if I do, it's often because someone handed me an assignment I didn't have time to do and I generally refuse to work long hours simply because you dumped something on me. (of course, I have latitude to do that since I've been here more than a decade - doubt I'd be able to push back so much if I was a newb).

I find more value in efficiency, finding ways to do things that require less of our time so that we're doing our work under less duress, resulting in better quality, but find that often it has the reverse effect of people just shoving more busy work at us rather than rewarding us for getting things done early.

There were not options for "whether a work ethic is good or not depends on the work in question" or "it's generally good to be _seen_ as having a strong work ethic, but actually _having_ one is probably optional"

I hold both of those opinions, to varying extents, depending on the day. Subsequent thoughts include the following:

1. I don't want a serial rapist to have a strong work ethic.

2. I don't want Steve Bannon to have a strong work ethic.

3. I don't want Wayne LaPierre to have a strong work ethic.

4. I DO want my son's babysitter to have a strong work ethic, rather than taking him to the playground and then forgetting that he's there.

5. I do want my daughter's teacher to have a strong work ethic, rather than saying "Eh? Who the fuck cares about fractions, anyway?"

6. If someone comes to fix my roof in exchange for money, I would prefer that they have a strong work ethic. (At least in terms of fixing the roof in such a way that the rain doesn't fall into my bedroom. I don't care if they're punctual or deferential or wear a nametag or whatever.)

7. Sometimes my work involves doing something that is (for me) relatively easy and pleasant, but which my colleagues believe to be difficult. If they praise my work ethic, I do not try to dissuade them.

8. On non-employment things that I care about (parenting, music, marriage, activism, volunteering)? Fuck yeah. I will work very hard. And I will take that as its own reward.

that's a very liberal use of the word 'ethic'

Fuck the Protestant work ethic and work is not inherently noble or anything like that, there's a load of grim exploitative Victorian shit wrapped in the valorisation of "hard work". On the other hand if you're being paid reasonably well to do something, and/or your NOT doing it properly is just piling additional work onto other people, then do your fucking job.

yes victorian protestants invented industriousness

If I am undergoing heart surgery, I would kind of prefer a surgeon whose work ethic is a strong one, rather than someone who might say "I'd rather be playing Mass Effect or poking around the internet right now, so let's just put some duct tape on that sucker and call it good. This is just a job. I mean, fuck capitalism, right?"

The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing,
while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied. (Proverbs 13:4)

Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest. (6:6-8)

A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man. (6:10-12)

Whoever is slack in his work is a brother to him who destroys. (18:9)

I know people who brag about the hours they put in ("I put in 70 this week"). my reply is usually "cool I was living my life"

I regard reading and writing as work and simultaneously as the best kind of play. Wasn't it Arendt who distinguished work from labor?

lex otm : grinding yourself into the ground for "work" isn't what I mean when I say that a work ethic is a positive character trait. I mean provided your job has good ends, it's good to do that work and to want to do that work well. that's "work ethic" for me.

a good end can be getting ahead in a career to get the results you want personally and that doesn't require you to gaf about the work itself or the ends of the off and I'd argue that it's nonetheless as valid or maybe more so a definition of work ethic as applied to the thread intent maybe?

Ends of the *org*

def

I have never worked in any organization where working hard was any help in progressing in the organization. PubLOLic or private sector.

Especially where I'm working now. Not that I'm bitter or anything. Or hard working.

yeah you don't have to care about the ends of your org to think that it's good to do your job well, though I think it's a lot easier if you do care about those ends.

I was defining work ethic in terms of what's good, that it's good to do good things well. you don't have to care if those things are good, but they'd better be good, otherwise I don't see why we're talking about work ethic instead of hustle.

don't want to quibble about what's good bc zzzzzzzzzzz

also relevant: self-described "grafters", "hard-working families"

after chatting about this last night I have some thoughts about what niggles me and what doesn't

some kind of personal efficacy, ability to follow through on your own goals, ability not to let other people down when they rely on you - yeah, of course, that's a virtue

when "work ethic" is used in the public sphere in western societies in the 21st century - some different connotations that irk me, mostly touched on above

still kinda think humanity could do with a collective kick back, pause for reflection and attempt as a whole to work smarter not harder. realise this is a ridic pipe dream.

I've noticed, in my current job, that the two absolute worst people I've worked with (possibly ever) are routinely, and accurately, described as being 'very hard working'. Like it's basically the only positive thing you can say about them, like you would say about an exceptionally homely individual, "But they have a nice personality".

I used to love what was known as "job and knock" in my industry. This was when we were on price-work rather than hourly, so with a decent team we could re-wire a flat by dinner time and effectively get a full day's pay for 4 hours work. Not that it didn't have it's problems though: habitual roughness and predictable resentment and lowering of price-work rates from the management. But it definitely required a stakhanovite level of graft from everybody for that 4 hours. Once you achieve "machine" status it is hard to get out of the habit of slogging unnaturally hard, even when it has no advantage to you is another downer.

http://squawkingalah.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/in_praise_of_idleness.jpg

he was a rich mf though

yeah calz job and knock is far too worker-friendly for today's highly trained managers to tolerate it

I have never worked in any organization where working hard was any help in progressing in the organization

Working hard = being given more work to do, rather than better work. The trap that a lot of people (myself included) fall into is becoming indispensable for X (through a strong and reliable 'work ethic') meaning if you start doing Y, X falls apart.

yeah calz job and knock is far too worker-friendly for today's highly trained managers to tolerate it

Having worked for the same company for 12 years, it has been interesting to see a shift towards flexible hours and working from home - on the basis that if the job gets done, that's what matters - and then back to an expectation of being in the workplace, accounting for every hour, etc. idk whether the other model was thought to have failed within this specific sinking ship or whether it's a broader corporate trend.

cult of managerialism feels stronger than ever right now. if I was a cynic I might suggest one reason is that economic hard times = they know they can get away with more shit

i'm lazy by nature - i would enjoy if every day was spent lying on a riverbank in the sun with a few beers. my couch has a sort of reclining section and i spend many hours there.

having said that work does motivate me, if it's interesting and i believe in it. i work quickly and pretty hard. it's a game of sorts, it doesn't matter, but i am happy to play the game of getting things done. i like my job and believe in it so if i see people dossing off or doing bad work or whatever it really bothers me, not least cos many of my coworkers are well-paid contractors, and all are paid by the state.

still kinda think humanity could do with a collective kick back, pause for reflection and attempt as a whole to work smarter not harder. realise this is a ridic pipe dream.

i'd say this could be on the way - in some sectors anyway. obv not deluded enough to think it'll happen for all.

i think i have a (possibly weird) intuitive respect for the difficult action that seems to accomplish nothing, maybe more so than the action that reaps obvious rewards

"We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard...." It has been pointed out that this could be applied to any number of completely pointless tasks, like disassembling the Empire State Building and reassembling it a block away.

people who brag about the hours they put in ("I put in 70 this week")

Yeah my line of work is full of that sort of person. Twenty years ago I kinda bought it. Or rather, I got a rush from the praise and rewards that "hard workers" got (at that job, at that time - not universally).

Nowadays when I hear my colleagues trading stories of weekend heroism and epic timesheets, I just think "Someone should have planned better, so it wasn't necessary." Now I pride myself on scaling my effort to the time allotted. It's very satisfying to send invoices with clean rows of eights.

Or like if there is a 9-hour day that can't be helped, the next day is 7. It keeps billing tidy, and it also makes the not-so-subtle point that if work leaks into my life, I will let my life leak back the other way in compensation.

(Oh and hours are pretty much the worst way to measure work, except that almost everybody does it that way. It's stupid, and when I can structure a project as a flat fee I will do so.)

In my experience, people who say "work smarter, not harder" end up doing neither.

that's cos they talkin when they should be workin iirc

OTM.

Someone I used to work with often used to talk about his "Slow preparation, Fast Job" philosophy. The prep was painfully slow and the follow up was doubly slow + incompetent!

there's a dude at work whose email signature has been "If you can't commit to perfection, go work somewhere else!" for years. He was the biggest dumbfuck alive and in one week managed to fuck the same thing up twice back in 2013.

Yeah I don't say "work smarter, not harder," but in my writing and teaching I do encourage people to:

1. Let technology do some of the grunt work whenever possible. This would theoretically allow them to do more of the work that requires, y'know, thinking. Examples are people who create their own "tables" with spaces and tabs. Another is people meticulously measuring out a page and trying to even up graphic elements by eye/by hand, rather than using handy little arrange/distribute buttons.

2. Scale effort to time. If you give me a project of size X with a deadline Y days away, I will bring to it what I think is a reasonable level of effort. If you later give me a project of the same size (X), only now the deadline is one-half of Y days, I will probably provide half the effort (rather than the same level of effort in half the time, presumably by omitting sleep).

But another way, if I'm working on two projects of roughly equivalent size and importance, I will probably spend about half my time on each. If you hand me four projects (again, of roughly the same size as the first two)? I'm not going to work twice as much. I'm probably going to work about half as much on each. If you're not satisfied with the result, well, either don't hire me again or accept that the effort will be scaled to fit the allotted time.

Sorry to go on and on - I have to think about this stuff a lot because my employer is in the primarily in the business of selling my time. Basically, she's a pimp. The clients who buy it (the johns, in this analogy) deserve transparency as to what they're getting, so part of my thought process has to be the defensibility of the invoice.

Someone I used to work with often used to talk about his "Slow preparation, Fast Job" philosophy. The prep was painfully slow and the follow up was doubly slow + incompetent!

― calzino, Thursday, April 6, 2017 8:38 AM (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

me and writing

plain and simp the systems a pimp but i refuse to be a ho

efficacy/efficiency is a big deal in a lot of industries, like in a car assembly line

but each industry has its share of bad managers that believe if you're being efficient, you're reducing time spent doing your job, which means they can increase your workload

that's not how it works and they don't account for burnout. these are the same type of managers that treat people like "resources"/robots/slaves

That is literally what efficient means tbf

When you reach a certain optimal point of work load you need to start factoring in metal fatigue and must initiate a more active schedule of maintenance to keep the vehicle worker operational. However, in jobs where replacements are cheap, like Amazon warehouse jobs, burning out workers and then disposing of them can be very cost-effective.

xp

it was more a reply to:

In my experience, people who say "work smarter, not harder" end up doing neither.

― Matt DC, Thursday, April 6, 2017 8:06 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i took it to a more supply chain mgmt (scm) way because scm has its own jargon, so there's more to it

efficiency is how well you are putting each resource (not necessarily "human") to work internally in relation to the entire system, not just individually

so if you're having to micromanage a resource a lot because your checking its/his/her weakness, that's not efficient because someone has to monitor that resource "manually," and that's slowing down the process, because scm theory says you're going as fast as your slowest part

this is different from effectiveness, which deals with the processes outside of your "assembly line" so to speak -- how you interact with other teams/people in/outside your org

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

closing on Tuesday eh? well I guess we know what kind of work ethic "System" has

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Haven't read the whole thread, but I always joke with friends that the job where I made the most money (by a large margin) was the easiest job I ever had. I was salaried and worked maybe 5 hours a week (about an hour a day, on average). I still had to be sitting at my desk for about 40 hours, but spent most of my time reading Harper's articles from their archives. Funny thing is my boss would convince all the higher ups how busy our group was; no-one ever checked if she was full of shit. I eventually quit that job after about four years as I had to move to another state.

I now work ~60 hours a week and make 40% less annual salary.

I was promoted 4 years ago to basically a project manager position and I liked it despite the extra hours and restless nights for a bit. but there was one project where the person reporting to me on it continually shirked her responsibilities (and I had no managerial authority over her other than going to her manager), then went on leave a month before, leaving me to do both of our jobs, 65+ hour weeks, and people basically telling me indirectly "your personal time means shit, this project is your life".

after that nastiness I went back to my old position. they kept my salary the same despite it being a lower pay grade. it's still aggravating but it's an aggravating I can handle.

where's that freakonomics piece, or wherever it was from, that explains that the reason associates work completely insane hours while their boss puts in maybe 5-6 hours a week in between golf and yacht rides is because the boss lifestyle is the incentive system? there are 60 associates and 1 VP, the VP is like this, so you all work like this. Drug dealerships supposedly evolved similar systems independently of law firms and management consultancies.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/dec/28/tory-mp-condemns-universal-basic-income-on-moral-grounds

“Mankind is hard-wired to work. We gain satisfaction from it. It gives us a sense of identity, purpose and belonging

Cunt.

work is bogus

"resources"/robots/slaves

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/e3/2f/c6/e32fc6e688d4b289c19723c89886bbd5--work-shirts-father-and-son.jpg

god damn commies

I'd probably have a better work "ethic" if I just exercised more and ate healthier

The former. https://t.co/EedAsLS5eZ

— 𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖊 𝕰𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖞 𝕯𝖆𝖞 (@NickPinkerton) February 14, 2019

Do I have a work ethic? Guess it was drilled into me by mommie dearest (my boss for plus 20 yrs). I love my job. Am I good colleague? Not atm. :-(

The bosses anounced we would get a bonus if we exceeded sales by 30 procent. We would received ab 10 euro per month. Laughable. Sorry but that is bad management. (We are a team of four. So sorry, you shldnt have made the bonus like it's so amazing.) That said I don't have to work harder: I am a very good salesperson. I try to learn to be a better one but I still feel I'm very good (and they agree, I'm the best salesperson there).

Btw our manager is paid fulltime but she goes home much earlier. I'm tempted to tell the bosses bec it creates a v bad atmosphere. But I don't I will. :-(

ive always had a strong disposition towards a flaneur lifestyle; procrastinating, smoking weed, going for long aimless walks, surfing the web, just hanging out and wasting the day, with some sort of vague philosophical justification in the back of my mind. but since moving to a new city and starting a phd my social life is so dull that im developing a work ethic, purely because there’s nothing better to do. hoping once my course work is over i can get back to it

some sort of vague philosophical justification in the back of my mind

U&K