I do actually plan on getting old, and as much as I would love to retire before I'm no longer adaptable, I'm not so sure my finances or my brain will comply.
>At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes.
I don't think this fits my analogy, because you personally can go watch TV or read a book or exercise given the time that is saved by the dishwasher. At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it.
When you find an employer that is happy to pay people to not work, let me know because I also want to work there.
Labor, just like any market relies on information asymmetry. Your company is in business because it manages to sell something at a higher price than the cost it incurs producing it. Your company will absolutely not give away its "secret sauce" to their customers so they can go off and do it themselves and stop paying.
You should act the same; if you have "secret sauce" that allows you to deliver the expected output quicker, enjoy the free time or put it to use elsewhere.
This was most employers during COVID :-)
I worked fewer hours, and still got more done than most of my team. Since I didn't come to office, no one knew. As long as I responded to emails/messages in a timely fashion, no one cared.
As someone on a salary, when the work is finished... I am too. What's overtime? I believe some paperwork had the word 'exempt' on it. My unvested shares are an incentive to save the place from immolation over the next N years. Where's this 'must be at work doing something else' in the contract, again?
"Where's the loyalty?" I hear someone ask. It passed with a family member and employers that had no compassion.
All this to say, I fully support your testing of the water. It's a strategy I've picked up/adapted, too. The poster above should enjoy the time saved by automation/hike. I shitpost.
I’m still salty about it because the people who played this game poisoned the WFH situation for the rest of us who didn’t use COVID as an excuse to work less and try to pretend we were working more.
Speak for yourself, salary means I'm done when the work is. I encourage you to enjoy the hike, book, whatever. That said, I truly hate the induced demand LLMs offer.
I think it's broadly reasonable that you would only be paid for doing something someone else needs doing.
Maybe you wouldn't, but you definitely should. Knowledge workers aren't paid for their labor (in the form of me trading my time and effort for wages), knowledge workers are paid for impact. I'm trading my ability to reason, decide, and create value for the company.
I'm valuable not because I sit at a desk and type for 8 hours. I'm valuable because the outputs of my thinking help move the company forward. My employer isn't buying 8 hours of my time , they're buying the outputs that come from expertise and judgement.
So if I automate something, the company still receives the same value the pay me for whether I perform the task manually or build something that automates it. I work in ops, so if I use ansible and a script to automate patching 100 servers instead of doing it by hand, my employers gets the same result: patched systems. The automation didn't diminish my contribution, it proved it. I get paid the same either way.
In essence, my salary is a retainer. It's payment to keep my expertise availalbe, and working for my employers instead of someone else. It's not payment for activity or time.
>In essence, my salary is a retainer. It's payment to keep my expertise availalbe, and working for my employers instead of someone else.
>It's not payment for activity or time.
If the latter statement is true, then you must not have any mandatory hours to be present.
If you do have mandatory hours to be present, then the latter statement is not true.
I'm pretty sure your typical managers don't think so.
Also, almost everyone is a shareholder, directly or indirectly by being a taxpayer and shouldering the cost of pensions, which are invested in businesses.
They will be less excited about the second order - a steady loss of revenue as whole professions are automated and people can't find a well paying job.
The third order will be even worse when no one has a job or money to buy anything.
People always point to the industrial revolution. But that created millions of jobs before it obsoleted millions of jobs - you needed workers to create tractors. This wave seems to be shaping up much more like what happened to the rust belt in the late 20th century, regions which still haven't recovered. However this time it'll hit pretty much everyone, everywhere.
Good luck with that capitalism.
Right, like drinking coffee at the kitchen in the office.
