Strongly agree. Peopleware 1987 [1]

> The first chapter of the book claims, "The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature". The book approaches sociological or 'political' problems such as group chemistry and team jelling, "flow time" and quiet in the work environment, and the high cost of turnover

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...

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no_wizard 7 months ago | parent [-]

I’ve been drumming this for so long now, even before I heard of (let alone read) this book.

I feel that the development of psychology and sociology has been lost on the workplace and it isn’t well applied. Executives want everyone to be widgets except themselves, even when study after study shows that for companies to perform optimally their workers must feel well compensated, well valued, balanced freedom in the workplace, chances for advancement etc.

In many respects you could apply psychology and sociology to how products should / could behave etc. as well, which I’m sure due to the monetary component some companies have taken seriously at least in some periods of their lifecycle, like Apple under Steve Jobs in his comeback

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pydry 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

>Executives want everyone to be widgets except themselves

Of course. This maximizes their relative power within the company.

Some executives are focused on the health of a company as a whole but not many. To most of them the pie can be assumed to be a fixed size and their job is to take as much of it as possible.

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zemvpferreira 7 months ago | parent [-]

For businesses or business areas where excellent isn’t necessary and good will do, this attitude can even be considered to be in the best interest of the company. The more fungible employees are made, the less bargaining power they have.

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nuclearnice3 7 months ago | parent [-]

Fair point. You could also imagine it's an easier management task to have fungible employees. Sam quits. No risk to the company. Our employees are fungible. Sarah can step right in.

	▲	zemvpferreira 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		I guess so. As a business owner/administrator it’s easy to see how your interests align in this way. As a worker your priority should be the opposite of course.

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BOOSTERHIDROGEN 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

What if the company has significant constraints on its financial health?

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lmm 7 months ago | parent [-]

Then it's all the more important to avoid unnecessary employee turnover.

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mst 7 months ago | parent [-]

People tend to vastly underestimate how much the time needed for a new hire to come up to speed costs the employer.

This is true even of (theoretically simple) things like retail jobs, because even if you're proficient in the basic skill set on day one, coming up to speed on the rhythm of a specific workplace still takes time.

I'm buggered if I can remember where I saw it, but there was a study once that showed that (in that specific instance, I have no clue as to whether or not it generalises) a minimum wage increase actually *saved* retail/service employers in the area money overall, just because the reduced churn meant that over the lifetime of an employee with the company the fact that said lifetime was longer meant they were getting enough more value per hour out of each employee to more than compensate for the higher cost per hour.

Of course the study could always have been wrong, but it didn't seem obviously so back when I looked at it and it at the very least seems plausible to me.

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