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Parkinson's law says: "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

Completing tickets, issues or burning story points means next to nothing if the work you do is detached from reality. And that reality consists of an irrational humans with complex, contradicting demands and needs and an unpredictable future.

Moreover, if you work as an employee, you will spend 40-50 hours a week at the office regardless of how fast or slow you're grinding through the workload. Why? Because that's how salaried work is legally organized.

Then there's limited agency. The article assumes that programmers are free to arrange their schedule. But that's only true if you're an independent contractor who's not deeply embedded in a team. Most programmers - and workers in general - are subjugated to the authority of managers and specific workplace culture.

Trying to rally workers around the battle cry "let's improve productivity" without questioning to what end, well, that's just a bad take on Taylorism.



^ This


> The article assumes that programmers are free to arrange their schedule. But that's only true if you're an independent contractor who's not deeply embedded in a team.

Then you take what you can do and leave the rest.




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