FASTER YOU FUCKERS - The ILX Work & Productivity Thread

True, but the other four people who started on the same day as me got their first level of clearance without any apparent hiccups.

You're just temporarily snagged on the "moral turpitude" clause. They found out you masturbated when you were 14 and are thinking over the implications.

don't trust a man who didn't masturbate when he was 14 iirc

My Federal clearance has been delayed for unknown reasons,

I couldn't even start my job until the security clearance came through, then I couldn't do half of it until the enhanced clearance came through, and there's still the other half of the work I still can't do because that stuff requires yet another level of security clearance, and there's a blanket policy in place that employees at my position don't get that level of clearance because of the cost.

This job is for a fairly low-risk position (as indicated by the last government email I saw on the topic). Supposedly there may be some holdup connected to past security checks on my behalf.

Or they may think that I'm a security risk because I live next to the Russian Embassy compound, and every Federal employee assumes someone else told me that was the issue. :/

Who coudl love a man who puts
sugar on his cereal?

Who could love a man who
looks at sexual movies?

Interesting in itself, but also because it identifies a point where there's a deliberate definition of practice and workplace culture, the values of which much later can be so embedded as to be thought of only as 'obvious' or 'common sense':

Japan brings kaizen philosophy to Ethiopia.

For Ethiopia's challenge is comparable to the task that faced Japan in the 1950s as it began to build a modern industrial economy in a largely rural society.

Evolving mainly in the countryside but soon taken up by industrial groups such as the car-maker Toyota, kaizen - which means "livelihood improvement" - came to encompass a range of development ideas.

And inculcation at an earlier stage:

Michael Rosen on business practice being built into the structures of education:

Bit by bit, we figured out that this method and this model wasn't based on any educational principles but was a direct transfer across to education of a business model of training and production. The child was to be 'produced' by the same systems that were being used to produce the labour-power ('skills') of a 'trained' labour force or indeed the same systems used to produce a mass produced car or biscuit: in a sequence of tiny, separate processes enacted on to the trainee or raw material. The fact that human beings (ie the children and school students) are not 'raw material' and that learning doesn't proceed in this tiny step by tiny step way, was irrelevant. It was, supposedly, Daily-Mail proof.

the consequence of making education a national competition where the distribution of the results is fixed, means that education delivers up a neatly parcelled up segregated workforce, top, middle and a very large bottom ie those who 'fail', don't make the grade.

Reading the various entertaining and interesting Agile anecdotes in this thread, they seem to grind away at a line, one side of which is where Agile is becoming a methodology that is part of the fabric of how many offices run (it's moved away from just software development into project work and some of it even to BAU), the other side of which is where Agile is a veneer on older-style processes (which are what?) being done badly. Does that feel right?

Also, was watching the cricket yesterday, a match held in Chittagong, which reminded me of this documentary, Manufactured Landscapes about the photography of Edward Burtynsky. The scenes filmed in the Chinese factories are v much FYF! material:

http://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/xeizh2

There are various models for the provision of these 'products', but in the jockeying for power in this new frontier for capitalism, one model is for the provider of the 'platform' (ie the server) to win monopoly control in a given area and off the back of this, to end up as the sole provider of the curriculum as delivered on to school students' tablets and PCs. This seems to be what google is doing in the US, where local councils accept google as the provider of superfast broadband, give them sole rights to provide internet access and the corporation comes in on the back of this with curriculum 'content' for school students' tablets and school interactive white boards.

This is interesting. Not sure that the end result will be monopoly in British schools but the idea of content and tech being provided together is already there and will only grow.

Rosen is right to identify corporate culture as being transposed to schools - partly because monitoring and micro-assessment are thought to be effective in aiding learner growth and partly because they provide a platform for corporations to make "evidence-backed" claims that their services being good vfm.

It's not enough to look to GCSE achievement year on year, the figures are broadly stable and increased performance is written off as being down to easier exams by many. You have to break each term down into units, each unit into standardised sub-units, each sub-unit into tasks and track performance against each, just as you would if you were looking at efficiency in a car plant.

We have software that breaks homework down question by question and allows teachers to track not just who is getting the answers right but how much time each student spent doing so. It can be used to compare performance across a class group, across a school, across a city and across a nation.

they seem to grind away at a line, one side of which is where Agile is becoming a methodology that is part of the fabric of how many offices run (it's moved away from just software development into project work and some of it even to BAU)

BAU, really? Are people being told to become 'agile' or some such? Because that isn't agile. That sounds like 'do it faster'.

I think that is when people adopt "well, we're agile EXCEPT" approaches

^exactly (at least that's what I had in mind). using agile methods or bits (scrum meetings) because they carry a magic power to get things done. but really, I suspect saying "agile will transform how many cultures perceive the mechanics of the world" is probably a bit much. saying that methodologies derived from engineering and specifically computer programming are increasingly characterising the world of work (and indeed the world around us and our personal worlds), seems more defensible.

the extent to which this is the case is certainly debatable (percentage & type of people actually in this type of work - tho see Rosen for the wider effect). but sometimes I feel the widespread consequences of it are as extensive as a the effects of Romanticism, say. the extreme level of current political centrism and the enforced dereliction of the working class in the uk can make it feel like the world of work provides the defining set of values for a large number of people.

I don't think people could ever be marshalled to do agile or even 'agile, except..' at work. I think bits of it could be a good thing -- who wouldn't want short meetings where the team get to review work packages in 15 mins and then get on with the rest of the day mucking about on ilx.

lunchtime masturbation will increase productivity

currently on a project where the pm insists on having TWO daily scrums (at 11:30 and 4:30, no less)

scrum = masturbation??

cockend next to me on the train is trading Legacy - 15 Lessons in Leadership. What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life.

wd love to read sthn good on the models that business devours. sportsthink is surely becoming yesterday's mode - feel that model was in itself inherited by sport from the army. boot camps and paintball. all that fuckin shit.

― Fizzles, Thursday, November 27, 2014 4:58 PM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

reading not trading tho

― Fizzles, Thursday, November 27, 2014 4:58 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what's replacing jonny_wilkinson_kick_world_cup.jpg in the nu-management ppt deck? Breaking Bad?

maybe time for a 'faster you fuckers' revive.

― woof, Thursday, November 27, 2014 5:05 PM (40 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There must be some top notch fascism in that.

[...book talk...]

― xyzzzz__, Thursday, November 27, 2014 5:16 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol breaking bad am half expecting to see this now.

half-baked theory: there's a sector divide here.

corporate management and finance: sports and army theory. agro-bro bollocks.

corporate tech: agile, scrum etc (feeding into tech and dev heavy areas). all-areas incompetence. feel this is main mode for non-director types. (guy next to me shouting out some recruitment firm saying u got me a deliverer when I needed a business winner trouble is he costs 15K more and tbh I have a prob with that).

start-up tech: still some open-plan, out of box, free your mind hippy philosophy?

need to hit up the fuf thread again yes. wut are u readin no place for this.

― Fizzles, Thursday, November 27, 2014 5:41 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

t/s: 9 Project Management Lessons From Game of Thrones vs Five customer experience management lessons learned from 'Breaking Bad'

"This... is not meth." KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!

hooray saturday sitting in a library making up dog licence user needs

woof

do you have user journeys.

daily walkthrough guides

360 feedback sessions feel like tailchasing exercises tho

it's just content for imaginary ulsterfolk confused about dog licence costs

no journeys

ulsterfolk

Mis-read that as clusterfuck but then if you knew where I worked you'd be automatically making that substitution with all kinds of words all the time.

Born: October 27, 1963 (age 51), Belfast
Height: 1.60 m
Spouse: Gina Crossan
Licensed Sobriquet: Mad Dog

No need to bother w/this work suff anymore yes!

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/apr/02/how-robots-algorithms-are-taking-over/

How much it (work) matters may not be quantifiable, but in an essay in The New York Times, Dean Baker, the codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, noted that there was

a 50 to 100 percent increase in death rates for older male workers in the years immediately following a job loss, if they previously had been consistently employed.

One reason was suggested in a study by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990), who found, Carr reports, that “people were happier, felt more fulfilled by what they were doing, while they were at work than during their leisure hours.”

We should test this reasoning here!

Been talking to a colleague - pretty much the only person who I've met in my line of work who loves scrum.

Got introduced to it in the military (lol I guess) but has used it in successful IT projects - gotta say the way he talks about it does make a lot of sense as a way to run specific areas of work.

our team of 5 or 6 is responsible for the customer facing bits. we scrum together despite working on 6 different projects. it doesn't make a lot of sense, really - we are effectively giving progress reports to the team lead (who oversees all 5 projects) whilst the other 80% look on bored.

You do scrum on one single project. So that sounds like its not being done the right way. #scrumPartyLine

i guess the alternative is 6 scrums of 2 people each.

to be fair, occasionally one of us will chip in with a solution to other people's problems. but that mostly happens in a skype window.

http://www.france24.com/en/20151014-france-32-hour-working-week-campaign-cgt-union

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/14/work-chinese-americans-jeremy-corbyn-highlands-holiday

nuh-uh in print compounded by the fact it's in a british paper is making me ia

“Jeremy has led the party off into the wilderness and then taken a hike in the Highlands,” lamented the reliably oppositional MP Simon Danczuk on hearing the news.

Cunt.

My workplace bought into this management consultant team who has brought in this whole spiel based on... Transactional Analysis.

I find the whole "bring in elements of therapeutic technique to the workplace" tedious at best and utter spurious wank on the whole.

I don't really know how to engage with this kind of discourse. In therapy settings, it's fine to say "I don't find this helpful, can we try another paradigm" but when it's enforced on you as part of your job... Ugh.

(In another part of my life, someone keeps trying to talk to me about "enneagrams" and seriously, I don't even know how to begin with that, except maybe to counter "well, you're a Sagittarius so you fall for every wank-word bingo going, but I'm an Aries so I tend to be slightly more sceptical about personality tests based on numerology and mysticism." Which would be extremely unhelpful.)

for most places this is a terrible idea, but my office genuinely does need therapy.

if somebody started talking to me about "enneagrams" i would make them listen to egg.

It's annoying because really, there are totally such a thing as dysfunctional workplaces. (Ironically, this is one of the least dysfunctional places I've ever worked.)

The problem is, that approaches that are suited for helping dysfunctional people do not always work for dysfunctional systems. Even though systems are made of people, totally well functioning people can create really dysfunctional systems, and dysfunctional people can create and use perfectly functioning systems.

excellent series of tweets here:

https://twitter.com/SolHughesWriter/status/740472383262298112

(1)Some 19th century work abuses that are back:

(2)"travelling time": then-19thC miners only got paid when they got to the coalface, not when they crawled to it through tunnels

(3)"travelling time": now SportsDirect staff didn't get paid while they waited in the warehouse queue for security checks

(6) in 19th Century many workers had to buy from over-priced "Company Store" (like in the song '16 Tons'). Was outlawed by the 'Truck Acts'

(7)SportsDirect staff had to use overpriced cash card and terminals from firm to get their wages - for a fee - a modern 'Company Store'

(9) "The Pen" "The Call On System".In 19th, early 20th Century jobless would gather in a 'Pen' for possible hiring (eg docks).

(10) Zero Hours contracts, with hire-by-day-by-text wait-by-the-phone are a modern "pen" for day- hiring at the gate.

(12)Specific older laws like the Truck Acts were repealed because nobody thought employers would be so bad again (!)

(13) "The Sweating System" or "Piecework" 19th Century home workers were paid by eg each shirt they stitched. Caused grim exploitation

(14) Modern 'piecework' like pay-per-parcel delivery jobs are often nominally 'self employed ', but "sweated" below minimum wage rates

(15)finally, a 'Middle Class' 19th century labour practice. 1880s teachers were "paid by results", with wages set by class exam results

(15) teacher 'payment by results ' creeps back, even tho' 19th century system abolished as it caused cheating, ignoring weaker pupils etc.

Good stuff.

Yeah very neat

Case closure rate up 50% this month tho guys

this all seems pretty nightmarish (though some ppl on twitter were questioning whether the badges could really do all the things claimed in the article and suggested that some of this might just be the Humanyze guy talking up his product?)

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/bosses-track-you-night-and-day-with-wearable-gadgets-kdn8068ql

Employees of at least four British companies, including a major high street bank, are already carrying “sociometric badges”. The credit card-sized badges are worn around the neck and include a microphone for real-time voice analysis, a device that tracks the wearer around the workplace, a Bluetooth sensor to scan for proximity to others and an accelerometer to check physical activity.

Brauer said the next development would be “biometric CVs”, with job applicants required to present evidence from monitoring to show they are biometrically qualified.

“The basic premise we’re working from is the augmented human being,” he said. “That will be the optimal productivity unit in the workforce.”

🤖 optimal productivity unit 🤖
That's good fodder for https://www.reddit.com/r/latestagecapitalism

Sometimes completely separate passages in books you're reading obliquely illuminate each other. Over the last few weeks I've had Michael Powell's autobiography - wildly titled A Life in Movies - and Diane Coyle's history of GDP - equally capriciously titled GDP - on the go.

In GDP Diane Coyle writes that before the second world war GDP was a gauge of the national economic output, a set of statistics collated in part to analyse the great depression. what wasn't included in this was government spending on welfare and armaments, which did not appear as part of the productivity figures but as depletions.

The Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply, established in 1941, found that its recommendation to increase government expenditure in the subsequent year was rejected on this basis.

...

The first American GNP (gross national product) statistics were published in 1942, distinguishing between the types of expenditure, including by government, and permitted economists to see the economy's potential for war production.

The economist Kuznets - who had argued that GNP should represent national economic welfare rather than just output - said that this method 'tautologically ensured that fiscal spending would increase measured economic growth regardless of whether it actually benefited individuals' economic welfare'.

Nevertheless as it was in governments' interests in the US and across Europe Kuznets lost. A complete statistic understanding of productivity was an outcome of the second world war - maybe it's best embodied by Keynes' How to Pay for the War.

He fulminated in this about the inadequacy of the statistics available to him for calculating what the UK economy could produce with the available resources, what would be required for mobilisation and conflict, what would be left over for people to consume - and how much their living standards might need to fall.

There's nothing wrong with this sort of analysis, but as Diane Coyle makes plain, the perception of GDP as the main useful method of measuring a nation's worth, dangerously loads policy against things that are not accounted for in it, and can ignore the fact that GDP is not welfare.

I thought all this very interesting. I've got a very tenuous narrative that's intended to lead up to the current FASTER YOU FUCKERS business methodologies, which includes the use of statistics in 19th century French medicine, and Benjamin's observation about the death of experience in the first world war, and how statistics was able to replace experience, with good and bad consequences. But one thing I've never been able to bridge is why we didn't really see the application of the statistical world to business - scientific management - until after the second. The great depression, the revolution in measuring productivity, and the second world war are a set of dots which help join the gap.

Michael Powell describes the film I Know Where I'm Going, made during the same few years as the changes to GDP, as in some way a farewell to a pre-war world. One which was less materialistic than the post-war one - he may not say materialistic, I can't find the quote, but the sentiment's similar. The representative of this world is Catriona, played by Pamela Brown.

There's a scene towards the end where the main character - Joan Webster - asks her 'If you're saddled with responsibilities that you can't get rid of, why don't you sell Erraig (her house) and Torquil could sell Kiloran? Then you could do what you like.'

Powell was renowned for not wasting film, so the fact Pamela Brown's answer 'Yes, but money isn't everything' took an unprecedented 22 takes for Michael Powell to be satisfied drew a huge crowd into the studio.

Of course, what was wrong was not the way the line was being read by Pamela: it was the line itself. When Wendy said: "You could sell Erraig and Torquil could sell Kiloran," Pamela should have answered: "Yes, but then we'd only have money." See?

When, many years later, I told Pamela this, she hit me.

Michael Powell was in love with Pamela Brown, and Emeric Pressburger felt it skewed the picture. Powell was forced to agree, both feeling that her performance was 'too romantic', so a load of footage of her ended up on the cutting room floor. This is completely f'ing heartbreaking, because i would watch I Know Where I'm Going over and over again just for Pamela Brown.

I had made it visually clear that Catriona had been in love with Torquil ever since their childhood together. This subplot had to go. No doubt people who loved the film, and who have seen it many times, will howl with anguish when they learn what they have missed (yes). But Emeric was firm and I have to admit that he was right. One glance from those great eyes of Pamela's early in the film told the whole story rather better than I could, with all my shots of her among the heather and the lochs. And yet, I wonder...? One still photograph survives from this whole sequence, and it was taken by me. It shows Pamela in the Castle of Moy, as she watches Torquil read the Curse upon the stone. It has an eerie power.

This counterfactual, this still that was never part of the film, like the counterfactual unspoken line 'yes, but then we'd only have money', seems to express a different, a similarly counterfactual world, or one that still exists, available but unavailable, outside of the grip of the productivity and statistical evaluations of worth.

(i'm aware this sort of romanticisation can be immensely bogus, but Pamela Brown ffs!)

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/b4/09/79/b4097992436e1170cfa5914da5cdd8d3--film--beams.jpg

incidentally she suffered painfully from arthritis all her life, which led to a slightly odd gait, which Michael Powell first noticed at the theatre.

Specialists persuaded her to take the famous, or infamous, gold treatment for arthritis which consists of injecting gold into the veins. The treatment gives you a fighting chance if you are prepared to suffer tortures.

A grotesque version of the analogies above. More Pamela:

https://reelclub.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/ikwig1.jpg

amazing staff meeting today at work as the head of our business gave a talk about some of the changes happening to a group of people, some of whom had recently seen colleagues lose their jobs in a round of off-shoring. tin-eared management speak to a large group of young, immediate post-university staff. started talking about how why automation and industrial change happened at them. one great woman stood up and asked him not to explain capitalism to them. he responded by saying it was nothing to do with capitalism, and that it was the way of the world, she said that it was capitalism, but that didn't matter and that she, among others, was just asking him to listen to people who were saying they were worried about their jobs. he went on to explain that 'history and industrial revolutions or evolutions' lol were based upon standardising and automating that which could be standardised and automated. another person responded by saying that their jobs hadn't been automated, they'd been off-shored, and off-shored badly (true and often seems to be true) and he responded by saying eventually all their jobs would be automated and this was inevitable.

he genuinely couldn't see outside his tiny technocratic, managerial head, i mean it was totally blank to him that capitalism could be seen as a thing. i think he felt he was being 'courageous' by being 'honest' and not showing any sympathy. it was all fascinating. and all very very bad obviously. woman got a round of applause tho. scenes.

lol when is his job being automated? I am pretty sure it could be successfully done (unlike many other jobs).

And all in this in the anniversary of the October revolution too.

the demand for thoughtful, capable managers greatly outstrips the supply.

day 1 of 2 done for prince2 practitioner and its such wordbollocksy sham

he went on to explain that 'history and industrial revolutions or evolutions' lol were based upon standardising and automating that which could be standardised and automated.

I can just see this man reading some MBA textbook or popular management book that offers this pearl of wisdom and him thinking, 'why, this explains quite a lot!' and then, because he has only room in his head for one explanation, it quickly morphed into 'this explains everything!'

this is excellent news: please report back from the front darragh (keeps autocorrecting to “farrago”).

i keep meaning to revive this thread, sort out the OP formatting, and pull together the various faster u fuckers stuff lying around in my bookmarks.