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Yui Unifex · 02-04-2003, 09:13 PM

However they both have the same effect from the employer's point of view. Without using the restroom or getting a sip of water, you may become uncomfortable and your productivity may decrease. Without IMing a friend you may become uncomfortable and your productivity may decrease. The only difference here is that the former is easily quantifiable, and the latter requires great leaps of logic and data to state definitively that the activities have a net decrease of productivity. And even if you had this data on the average worker, the OP -- and others -- may not be the average worker.

No matter what your experiences may be, it is most certainly not like that everywhere. To assume it is so and denounce a particular activity is ill-informed, as evidenced by Valarauko's recent replies.

Nail and head: An employer pays workers to perform the tasks outlined in their job description. Why should an employer care if your productivity comes from playing games, animal sacrifice, school studies or what? If the employer does care, that shows that he is attempting to cater to a common denominator via an assumption about the average of his workers. Again, they likely have a great deal more data on this you did of the OP.

I highly doubt you are in a position to recommend the optimal break time for every person on the planet. Do you do any creative work at all? Let's say we have two programmers: Joe and Susie, both working on the same feature. Joe works from 8-5, churns out a thousand lines of code, and implements the feature. Susie goes to the park with some printouts to think about the problem, comes back at 12:00. She generalizes a function with a few extra lines of code to implement the feature, then leaves at 1:00. Who here was the most productive? It's obviously Susie: She was able to do something more concisely than Joe, and her work is thus more valuable.

I don't care *how* you prepare my taxes, so long as 1) the price is right, and 2) it gets done. If you estimate three hours (and I see this as the best price/value), but you get it done in one and decide to play a game for the other two, good for you! Anything else would be an assumption by me as to how you get the job done to achieve those goals, and is thus not accurate in all cases.

02-04-2003, 09:13 PM	#14
Yui Unifex Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Florida Posts: 323	However they both have the same effect from the employer's point of view. Without using the restroom or getting a sip of water, you may become uncomfortable and your productivity may decrease. Without IMing a friend you may become uncomfortable and your productivity may decrease. The only difference here is that the former is easily quantifiable, and the latter requires great leaps of logic and data to state definitively that the activities have a net decrease of productivity. And even if you had this data on the average worker, the OP -- and others -- may not be the average worker. No matter what your experiences may be, it is most certainly not like that everywhere. To assume it is so and denounce a particular activity is ill-informed, as evidenced by Valarauko's recent replies. Nail and head: An employer pays workers to perform the tasks outlined in their job description. Why should an employer care if your productivity comes from playing games, animal sacrifice, school studies or what? If the employer does care, that shows that he is attempting to cater to a common denominator via an assumption about the average of his workers. Again, they likely have a great deal more data on this you did of the OP. I highly doubt you are in a position to recommend the optimal break time for every person on the planet. Do you do any creative work at all? Let's say we have two programmers: Joe and Susie, both working on the same feature. Joe works from 8-5, churns out a thousand lines of code, and implements the feature. Susie goes to the park with some printouts to think about the problem, comes back at 12:00. She generalizes a function with a few extra lines of code to implement the feature, then leaves at 1:00. Who here was the most productive? It's obviously Susie: She was able to do something more concisely than Joe, and her work is thus more valuable. I don't care how you prepare my taxes, so long as 1) the price is right, and 2) it gets done. If you estimate three hours (and I see this as the best price/value), but you get it done in one and decide to play a game for the other two, good for you! Anything else would be an assumption by me as to how you get the job done to achieve those goals, and is thus not accurate in all cases.