Jordan Hayes wrote:
> > >Like I said, maybe it's just my experience (so I'm my own muppet!),
> > >but I see whole groups of people who graduated from the same big
> > >colleges in the same decades who worked for the same 50 large
> > >companies and they couldn't be more different in their productivity.
Doug Henwood wrote:
> > Large pool of workers. Averages. Central tendencies.
> >
> > And what's "more different"? 2 to 1? 10 to 1?
Peter van Heusden:
> Vast difference in 'productivity' are stock-in-trade in discussions
> amongst programmers - the story goes that some workers are vastly
> more productive (as in producing more working code) than others. The
> same might be the case in other 'knowledge-based' fields.
>
> Now, I have seen a couple of amazing examples of this - where someone
> codes something into existence in what seems like an impossibly short
> amount of time (see the Dilbert strips with Zimbu the monkey programming
> using his tail for a good illustration of how this is perceived) - but in
> general I think the emphasis on differences in personal productivity a)
> ignore experience (which counts a hell of a lot in programming) b) ignores
> social factors, like the ability to code till 3am because of no other
> commitments.
>
> Also, the worship of productivity is in my mind at least a factor in
> presenting the ideal programmer as a truly 'One Dimensional Man' - in
> the context of the Internet, and 'free software', programmers encounter
> each other purely as a set of text and an email address - this erasure
> of the social functions to maintain an ideal which is individualised
> (and as kelly could abundantly point out, gendered, racialised,
> 'classed' (if that's the right word), etc.) In turn, this feeds into a
> kind of identification with the job which is exploited by managers,
> what I've called in the past '2nd order Taylorism'.
>
> No doubt this could all do with some more research.
Having been in the computer programming field most of my working life, and having participated in the endless, usually very self-serving discussions of the supposed enormous difference in productivity between some people and others, and having compared those theories with the actualities of daily working life, is what caused me to write that productivity is a mystery. I could recite my observations, but they would all be anecdotal.
Let me instead put the shoe on the other foot and ask: Where is a theory of work and productivity grounded in phenomena, where the work has not been completely commodified and dumbed-down to the level of mechanical operation? If there is no such theory which people agree upon, how can rewards be apportioned according to productivity, rather than according to an appearance of productivity brought about by the prejudice and power I mentioned? I think the answer is obvious, and I think it's because production _is_ a mystery, an outcome of complex social interactions which are not well understood, in which the roles of many of the participants are effaced or downgraded for political reasons.