Your supervisors were punishing the complainers. It’s that simple–They, and the complainer themselves, do not look at “work” as either a privilege or a pleasure; it’s a punishment, to be levied out on those who annoy them. They probably preferred you as a congenial coffee-break partner, and wanted Mr. Complainy as far from the shop offices as possible.

The fact you don’t “get” this instinctively is what makes you a superior worker and human being to both your “superior” and the “complainers” alike. The further fact that your workplace put the guy who’d do that in charge of things, and didn’t fire the complainers…? Telling. I would wonder if that firm was still even in business, because they obviously selected for different workplace behavior than that which would make the firm successful.

https://bombthrower.com/articles/the-age-of-over-abundant-elites/#

I do believe he’s on to something…

It isn’t the fault of the computer so much as it is the idjit class which fetishes the damn things, which they’ve been doing since the WWII era.

There’s nothing that a computer does that can’t be done by a human being with a box of pencils and a few tons of paper–It’s just that the computer makes it all happen a lot faster. And, cheaper–Back when you’d have to pay an office full of file clerks and typists to produce those TPS reports, you had actual discipline going, in that it would cost you a small fortune for something that today eats up one man’s time and costs whatever it does to move a bunch of electrons about the place. So, nobody tells the dipshit administrator that is asking for the TPS report to curb his desire for control…

Biggest thing we need to develop is an actual appreciation for what all these things cost, and some control over that “drive to control” which motivates all this inane BS. When the process becomes more important than the end result, you’ve lost the bubble–And, that’s pretty much true across our entire social structure today. Process, procedure, and everything ephemeral take precedence over actual result, which winds up ignored. If the math works, why, then… That must reflect reality. The issue is that we’re doing it without real feedback getting back into the loop, so that we’re more and more reliant on the delusions of the twice-removed to tell us how things are working out, out here in the real world.

There’s a lesson here, if only we would bother to pay attention and learn it.

Would that maximize shareholder value?

(No.)

It seems obvious that a combination of more sleep, more free leisure, and less time to accomplish deadlines would act as great motivators for workers. But the simple fact is that even if people hate working, they want the money. With upper administration being notoriously old-fashioned in many organizations, it’s difficult to say whether a shift towards higher wages with fewer hours will be a reality of the near future.