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Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says the company used to be so idealistic that people were 'not working very hard'
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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Working harder isn't very scalable. Working more productively can be, but almost always requires investment.
A lot of people don't understand what productivity means and often use it interchangeably with working harder. However from the owner's perspective, getting salaried workers to work more hours, assuming the extra hours produce marginally more output is net new profit. As they're seeking ever increasing profit, that's one lever they have to push to get some growth. The next one on the labour side is decreasing salaries.
Working harder (if overtime is uncompensated) does increase productivity. But it's an abusive and ineffective or even counterproductive practice. I used to lead a service line within a medium-sized consulting firm, and I made it clear to managers reporting to me that forcing their staff into extended overtime in order to meet milestones would get those managers sacked for bad planning. It only took a couple firings before the other managers started taking it seriously. The biggest problem was managers bidding jobs with the clients that assumed the whole squad would be working 60-70 hours weekly. That's burning out our people to take on work which, if correctly estimated, wouldn't be profitable for the firm. And that leaves zero contingency for when something goes wrong, which it often does.
But the moronic frat boys who run many IT firms and consultancies still try that One Simple Trick, on the assumption that if they burn out their staff, there are always more suckers who can be found to replace them.