As I keep mentioning, I worked as a contractor inside Honeywell for 5+ years. My experience of my immediate team was mixed: some very good people, some total morons. My experience of the organization was uniformly terrible. Absurd company-wide requirements for security checks, code quality verification, financial controls. Insane restrictions on product development to use X technology or integrate with Y unit's product. Billions wasted on their IIoT play that got rebooted after several years (and the billions I saw wasted wasn't its development, it was moving everyone in the company onto and off it again ["offboarding"]).

In that time, the stock price went up, and Honeywell went back on the Fortune 100. Just zero relationship between productivity or effectiveness within the company and the stock price.

They do care about those things. But it turns out that stock price and profits often turn on “bigger” things than productivity. Google didn’t win search because they were productive. Nor did Tesla win EVs due to it (and they won’t lose EVs due to the lack of it).

There are some spaces where productivity does matter. My uncle runs a painting company. It’s all about productivity, costs, and customer acquisition. HeAl’s not waiting on new markets or innovation to fundamentally change how he makes money (although tech has improved productivity). He’s made it for the same way for the past 30 years.

Good ones really do and they work hard to enhance the productivity of their workers. I always say to my people that my job is to make their jobs easier, and to a large degree that's true.

There are other types who prefer the power trip, or that if you're a bad manager then your job is pretty easy, etc. But GOOD execs actually do care quite a lot. I tend to tangle with HR over salaries because I'd rather hire a handful of really good people for 15% above market and get double the productivity than a lot of people at or below market.

This article is confusing the corporate raider mindset rampant in big public companies with the genuine growth mindset most companies actually have. Everyone focuses on productivity and costs, enshittification only happens when you're near enough of a monopoly you can afford to squeeze your customers. Most companies can't do that and most companies try to just keep improving. Don't look at MS or Exxon and think that's who most companies actually work. That's just the beginning of the end stage of a megacorporation's life.

Maximizing productivity comes from maximizing efficiency. Efficiency is about sitting down and analyzing your tasks holistically and doing min-maxing to ensure every process achieves its greatest result.

Now ask yourself this: how often do people do this at all? Pretty much never. Most of us only do it when you have to, because you aren’t making enough money, because your application is slow, because you can barely meet budget, or because you are trying to land on the moon and failing costs too much.

> There’s obviously a financial bubble in full force.

If it’s so obvious, figure out how to bet against it, get rich, and never have to worry about productivity again.

> The environmental impact is real.

If every LLM disappeared tomorrow, the environment is still equally fucked as it is today. “Think of the environment” is the second most mindless appeal to emotion argument against anything other than “Think of the children.”

Large language models have their place, but they’re quite limited and no real substitute for human intelligence or judgement at its best.

That said, abusive corporate environments (and they’re pretty much all abusive) turn people into automatons. Execs can thus wave LLMs around and say, “Look, you’re so useless a machine can do your job.”

And even then it does a shitty job. It misses special cases and causes messes. But it’s cheap in the short term, which is all that matters to the boss’s career. Things will go to shit in a few years, but if you’re good at executive social climbing, you are three promotions away from your bad decisions by the time anyone figures out that’s what they were.

The author has twisted themselves into a weird pretzel trying to tie a broad societal critique about short-termism to day-to-day line management. Your manager almost certainly does care about your productivity; in fact, the more biting critique is probably that they care too much about it, working to juice output in the short term while paying short shrift to downstream consequences.

The pretense here is that we actually know what leads to long term progress? As much as it pains people to admit it, short term results are often far more predictive of long term results than any other single data point.

Is it perfect? No. Of course not. But having a team that is just willing to show up and work towards a goal is such a leg up over any other thing that we know that it is painful to see it argued against.

Will there be some people that make progress in leaps? Absolutely. Most of that progress will be taken up and incorporated rather quickly in the places that also employ the teams that just show up.