Weekends were a mistake, says Infosys co-founder Narayama Murthy

Shockingly, your brain and productivity improve when you get regular downtime.
(Yeah I know most people want something shorter than a book. It's a solid read though.)
- I'll read this next weekend 🙃
  
  I'll eat you next weekend! Mmmmmm, smoked gouda cheese. Lettice. Pickles. Bacon. Squirt of ketchup.
  Just need some potatoes.
- His american colleagues sometimes poke fun at my cousins branch for only working 35 hours a week, taking long vacations and having lots of state mandated holidays throughout the year. When they hire someone new they sometimes comment on how lazy the german colleagues are...
  Then they point them towards the numbers and the fact that the german branch is constantly setting the productivity records. They've been outperforming the americans by more than 10% for years.

Narayama Murthy sounds like an enormous piece of shit.
- Narayama Murthy was a mistake.
  
  I keep trying to tell people the pull out method is not 100% effective.
- You sully the good name of shit.
  
  Yeah, stuff grows in shit

The problem with statements like this is that they only ever seem to be made by narcissists who thinks work is only those efforts that directly benefit them. The end of my "work day" is when I start my other job of working for myself. I manage my home, I take care of my garden, I put effort into maintaining or improving my physical and mental well being, I foster and build the relationships in my life that I care about, etc. All of that is work, it's just work that I do for myself and don't get a paycheck for.
- Absolutely nailed it.
- Some people would want others' lives to be embedded into one hierarchy, and that only.
  So that everything of importance were decided by people on top of those hierarchies.
  Ex-USSR countries show full well why this shouldn't be allowed. It, of course, was done there accompanied by a different ideology, but.
- Start billing your job for providing support services to their employees

Science: knowledge workers stop being consistently productive past 40 hours per week, and probably less than that
Rentier-capitalists hot boxing their own farts recreationally: ackshually the problem is we let you dirty fucking peasants go home to sleep at all
- So eloquently put & efficiently communicated, I only wish I could be that articulated with words.
  
  It could be worse. You could be one of the knights who say: Ni.

I propose we swap and only work 2 days a week.
- this should be the way
  
  It seems that modern society has made "standard" things more standard than they originally were.
  At least people having special arrangements and working, say, one job 2 days a week and another 3 days a week, and the third sometimes on-demand, seemingly was more normal 100 years ago.
  Of course not the majority, the majority would work their asses off by the clock even more than now.
  But there are upsides to a non-synchronous, irregular life schedule. Say, more even load for utilities and transport. Weekends not being special days when half the things don't work.
  And, of course, the ability to pick something you like most. Say, if the pay for 3 days a week somewhere is good enough to keep you floating, even if barely, then why the hell not, it's worth it.
- You've got my vote

He's absolutely right. That's why he should come work for me on his weekends. I'll pay him $15/hr!
What? He won't work for that? Lazy CEO.

Infosys is a mistake. It's a poor choice for anyone.
- This. Everything Infosys touches is garbage.

I agree weekends were a mistake.
It should have always been 2 on 1 off, 2 on 2 off.
- Sounds sexy
  
  The sexiest.

MBAs were a mistake, says me, some guy on Lemmy.
- I know right? Who cares about basketball?

Bruh! Your golf business meetings, lunches, drinks, clubs, gamblin, parties, vacations, and anything other than sitting in front of a computer going meeting after meeting with 5 minute lunch and then coming home to make dinner or do chores and deal with shopping or family issues after sitting in traffic for at least an hour each way and no one driving you all while doing this without extra help is a mistake.
When you can do what we do for the pay we get for at least a whole year, let’s talk. Until then, kindly suck on deez nutz.

These people, like Musk, think laying on a couch with a pen in your hand pondering about random shit to be hard work. That's where they come up with this kind of BS. That and being from a higher cast and never having worked a single honest day in his life and making a fortune out of corruption and networking.
- And sitting on the couch with their dicks in their hands is "hard work" for them, but it's just jerking off for the rest of us. These assholes consider themselves working when they sleep, because them being rested is "good for the business".
  
  sitting on the couch with their dicks in their hands is "hard work" for them
  Uh, I think you mean "meditation" and "mindfulness"
- Hierarchies are bad for honest people. Honest people take work and meritocracy seriously and try to follow them.
  But hierarchies are never about meritocracy. Hierarchies are always built by people who have connived their way up. Those who have worked honestly don't build hierarchies, at worst they are pressed to do that by outside pressure.
  In any case, the market economy I'm in favor of doesn't include big businesses. As in "at all". Big cooperatives at the maximum.
  For the obvious reason that the bigger a business is, the less it's about market and the more it's about power and hierarchy. Big businesses are the way human nature with jungle law and such fights markets and rules. By making the space untouched by market mechanisms and rules into something continuous inside one subject - the company.
  It's the same as siloed services in the Internet. A thousand and one web forums are free, despite open despotism of webmasters in each and every one of those. A three or two big social platforms are not, despite their owners trying their best for their policies to appear impartial and professional and depersonalized.
  And I guess that's where I can agree that the "market economy status quo" has been broken by such evolution showing itself both IRL and in the Web. You can't make something like 1999 Web and expect it to not turn into 2024 Web. And you also can't make a functional market economy old-style and expect it to not degrade into what we have.
  I like solutions touching upon the root of the problem, so - in my opinion personal responsibility (one can even say sovereignty, pun intended) is key. You don't lose responsibility for your decision just because you've paid someone else or have been paid by someone else. You are both responsible, since it's a common endeavor. The responsibility is not divided, it's copied. Also personal responsibility excludes companies as subjects of the law. Only a person can have responsibility, property, make decisions.
  That and fully protected free speech and right to self-defense and transparency of the state. I'm not talking about forcing others to give you platform, I'm talking about shadow bans, about state secrets not being something you'd care about if you hadn't signed anything, about state official's decisions being only contestable in court, something like that. Anything forcing you to keep your head down.
  OK, done dreaming.

I'm only able to take a couple a year, but 3 day weekends are amazing. It takes me two days to catch up on life from working like a dog, and it means I get one day to actually enjoy the life I allegedly work so hard for.
You could argue my greedy ass would say the same thing about 4day weekends if 3days was the norm. Perhaps, but I don't think so - I think there's something balanced about the 3:4 ratio. My mood and productivity are so much better on the rare occasions I get to experience this.
- Instead of taking traditional vacation throughout the year, I started taking as many Wednesdays as I can for this exact reason. I picked Wednesday specifically because no one else is off to need my attention and I can actually focus on my own chores or my mental health.
  Two days is not enough for me to get caught up.
  
  That sounds good, but we are strongly discouraged from one or two day vacations. Supposed to take one week blocks. It's just short enough to not be relaxing and long enough to chew through a decent chunk of time off.

Typical CEO ragebaiting to make themselves seem relevant.
- If Musk has taught me anything in the last several months, it's that the job of CEO is the easiest jib in the world. He's CEO of like 5 different companies, and now he has a made-up but high level, government job. Must be fuckin nice-
- That’s too much credit. I’d say just an old man given more attention than he deserves.

Just because he is an idiot who never worked a day in his life and so doesn't know that your productivity goes down significantly without relaxation that doesn't mean that anyone should listen to that drivel.
- It's not about productivity. If that were the real goal then the entire system would be structured radically differently, given what we know now through actual research. The real goal is ensuring that workers do not have ample time or energy to collectively organize. Make sure they don't have the time to even think about anything else, and you ensure they damn sure don't have the time to rebel. The other goal is ensuring there are a significant number of unemployed people in terrible enough conditions to make them desperate, but not so terrible that they are incapable of working. That way if s few stray workers get a bug up their ass about organizing and striking, there's a reserve army of labor in the homeless and unemployed communities that can step in and scab.

Murthy claimed he himself worked six and a half days a week until retirement, typically 14 hours and 10 minutes a day, clocking on at 6:20 AM before downing tools at 8:30 PM.
Yeah, sure you did, pal.
“This man has been given too much of an importance by asking his opinion about everything under the sun. His words remind me of those exploitative barons of medieval ages from whom the 8 hours work day rights had to be snatched,” quipped a commenter who claims to be a former Infosys employee.
True words, my friend.
- Fun fact: Where I live (Devon, England), every common person once had to spent two days a month working for their local Lord for free, maintaining the roads. That's as well as paying rent to them, of course. Plus, they had to provide tithes to the Church as well as grow or raise enough food for their family. And if they had any strong sons that might be particularly useful in working their meagre strip of land, they'd be conscripted for the Crown's armies.
  They worked 7 days a week. Incredibly hard and long days by our standards. The only half day they got off was to go to church, which wasn't really optional. (You weren't forced, but the whole community turned against you if you didn't)
  
  It's pretty clear this is Narayama's dream, the "good old times"