Hustle culture is a form of CYA for poor managers. If I, incompetent manager, hammer on my employees to hustle, I can claim I am doing my best to manage my team and any deficiency must be their fault because I've set the standard.
Nevermind that every job is different and the outcomes are measured very differently and sometimes "hustling" or "staying busy" is actually a substandard way of achieving most tasks consistently as the short term benefits of hustling give way to burnout.
Bad managers are asking employees to constantly sprint when business is a marathon. It's a weak form of leadership generally ascribed to the "professional" managers with (only) business school backgrounds who can't understand what their employees actually do nor understand the system of the company as a whole.
It's a classic short term quarterly profits mentality.
Employees have for centuries been doing this sort of thing. Looking busy by optimizing for busyness over actual productivity because they realize managers are only concerned with looking good and skating by, not the actual business outcomes.
Note for those starting a business: design your corporate structure so that middle managers incentives are visibly aligned with the actual success of the company and not with visible working culture. And then set the pace properly.
A motor cannot work at 100% duty cycle and maintain it's longest possible service life before being rebuilt.
I use CAD software for work. Starting in my current role I was given a laptop with Windows 11 preinstalled. I discovered my CAD software wasn't compatible with Win11 and had to downgrade to Win 10. Without fail, once a month, when I restart my computer, Windows prompts me to "upgrade" from Win 10->11 for free. There is no way to shut this feature off that I know of and frankly I just click NO three times and move on. Windows hasn't been this bad since Vista. I miss Win7.
Solutions: Food security. Taking processed foods out of the American diet as much as possible. Permaculture. Basic income, basic food, basic housing, basic medical.
"The future is here it's just not evenly distributed yet." -William Gibson
Really solid reasoning and we should listen to Burry.
WFH will reduce middle management and "prestige" employees as more efficient workflows evolve from the old "filing cabinets and typewriters" methods that some companies are still using to this day.
Automation is coming, and it is definitely coming for the white collar workers who act as human CRUD apps.
The ability to collate, search, and analyze data used to require labor power, it does not anymore.
I watch my partner's experience in accounting and the difference are stark.
There are many many bs steps in accounting with paper that disappear when digital tools are used.
Having physical pieces of paper as a fungible business tool is still something used by a lot of firms but they are simply behind the times, there are relatively simple software solutions for most paperwork needs and this reduces labor power required.
"We've always done it this way" is an excuse for firms that will fall behind other digitally empowered firms.
What does this mean for investors? Don't invest in companies that insist on using filing cabinets.
This just in, dinosaurs unable to see incoming asteroid...film at 11.
But seriously folks, it's so obvious that the older generations are intimidated by technology and the changes it begets in new work culture. Us younger gens (I am a "Millennial" FWIW) KNOW that work done digitally is faster and more efficient. The backlash against remote work is a backlash against the digital revolution.
What's the saying, if a technology is created when you're young you can get a career in it, if it happens when you're old you lash out against it? Something like that.
The people who complain about remote work are telling on themselves, and they are admitting they don't want to adapt to the new realities.