Don’t Want to Work

Spring is a ways off, and that limits the amount of available content I have for a post.  And my last 3 involved vacuum cleaners, lightbulbs, and fanciful theoretical mathematical models, soooo I think I need to change direction for a bit and diversify.

So I’ll do what everyone else does to fill empty blog space: complain about something, using an inflammatory title!

Here’s what I’ve chosen: “People just don’t want to work anymore.”

We’ve all heard it.  Online, by coworkers, by disgruntled consumers.

This phrase, generally uttered in exasperation by a Baby Boomer socioeconomic superior who’s currently unable to receive a service of some kind due to limited staffing, assumes an obnoxious smug self-importance that the world has the audacity to not cater to his every whim, or at least not in a timely fashion.  And, that this current state of affairs is the result of younger people being too lazy to work hard enough to achieve the high status of becoming the served, rather than the server–that is, how the above complainer feels he has achieved said status.

Rephrased: “I suffered some bad jobs and now I have a good job and now other people need to suffer those bad jobs for my benefit.”

This term gets too much use today, namely because of a certain recent “leader”, but it applies: this is narcissistic thinking.

This present situation is, of course, a result of COVID-19’s economic impact.  The jobs in question that people don’t want to work are the jobs that suffered greatly reduced demand from quarantines.  The businesses, as businesses do, simply reduced their staff as a result to balance the books.  Once quarantines lifted, demand increased, but the former workers didn’t want to go back to those underpaid customer-facing jobs.

The reasoning is slightly more complicated than people not serving you because they’re lazy.  I figured this logic chain to be fairly obvious, but it’s apparently not.  So to appease you self-righteous wealthy Republican Boomers judgmental privileged whiners, I’ll offer you just want you want: a service.  I will explain your logical error.

Three points:

  1. People don’t want to work crappy jobs.  Workers are still eager to fill higher-paying professional positions.  No one wants to be the employee that has to deal with the above Boomer irate customer storming around complaining about staffing shortages.  (And that employee, despite doing exactly what the raging Boomer Karen customer wants (working a crappy job), will still receive the brunt of these laziness accusations that don’t even apply to him.)
  2. Impacted workers, living temporarily on emergency government assistance, suddenly had a lot of time on their hands to shore up the skill gaps keeping them out of professional careers.  Now that they’ve done so, there isn’t much desire to return to jobs beneath their new qualification levels.
  3. Of course people don’t want to work.  Who does?  People want meaningful careers, vocations, callings…whatever.  But those things don’t pay the bills, so people work jobs.  CEOs don’t stay in their positions until retirement.  They make their millions and move on.  Is that because they don’t want to work, either?

Ultimately though, the main point, and philosophy by which you should start to live, is…

It’s not all about you!

–Simon

XP Padding

Did you know that Liz and I have a total of 23 years of finance experience?  That’s pretty amazing to think about.  A family unit has over half an entire career lifetime’s worth of knowledge in an industry?  Wow!

That means, collectively, we know as much about the credit/deposit industry as someone who’s worked in it since the 1990s.  And to think that in 1998, we were in middle school.

Yes, I’m being obnoxiously sarcastic here, because this crap needs to stop.

It’s encountered more among younger managers with lower payband teams.  Some smoothskin fresh out of business school wants to make a large group of grunts feel important, so they come up with ways to make menial work sound valued with big numbers.  Now, pulling from my own career experience, a 1000 people with 1-2 years tenure in a call center have, according to this asinine logic, 1-2 thousand years experience with the company!  Big numbers are exciting and I feel like I’m actually contributing significantly to the bottom line!

No, I don’t.  I felt patronized.

I will explain why this is stupid.

Given that entry level employees share the same basic knowledge pool from their training, this knowledge overlaps.  It doesn’t compound.

Given that knowledge is dependent on the individual’s memory to be of use.

Given that memories fade after their creation.

Then a large pool of shared knowledge only increases the chance that a selection of said knowledge is retained somewhere in the group, but still fails on the individual level at the same rate.

Therefore increasing the labor pool only increases the chance that someone retains an element of training, not that the collective unit as a whole can all access this information simply because one person has it.

Therefore experience is not cumulative across a group.  It can only complement the total group’s value.  It’s part of the equation, certainly, but a different formula is needed beyond Excel 101 sum(A:A).  Something more complicated is required.

***

I will begin with Hermann Ebbinghaus’s oft-referenced simplified formula on memory loss.  Where t is time and S is the relative strength of a memory, then R equals the probability of that memory being recalled:

R = exp(-t/S)

For the sake of this exercise, I will assign t to the number of days since the memory was created, and S to a static value of 25–which I’m arbitrarily defining as a 25% value to the individual, because work training material is really riveting.

In this example, a person trying to recall a fact after 7 days would have a 76% chance of doing so.

Now if we scale this to a group, cumulative probability would calculate the chance at which all people with a group, P, would recall that memory (Rc):

Rc = (exp(-t/S))^P

Let’s say 3 people are in this group.  Scaling the above example would yield a 43% chance of every person remembering the fact.  The more people we add to the group, the less the chance that all members would remember the same fact.

I’m going to get crazy here and use this as a basis for my own theorem: Simon’s Theorem on Group Memory Loss Dynamic Experience Offset over Time.

And theorem’s are great, because they’re hypothetical formula extrapolated as mathematical representations of empirical observations.  As long as the math itself is correct, no one can deny what I’ve witnessed personally.  Ergo, while I can never prove my theorem to be right, no one can prove it’s wrong.  Suck it!

Ahem.  Anyway…

I’ll assign a value to the group now (Ev).  As in usefulness, not numerical.  A 1:1 would be the ideal ratio, but that’s not going to happen because of the initial premise.

Ev = P((exp(-t/S))^P)

So after 7 days, the data retention of those 3 people on a 25%-level of interest piece of information turns these people’s usefulness, as units of the whole, into the equivalent of 1.3 people.  Note how increasing the personnel further reduces the usefulness.  That’s because, again, information isn’t pooled across the group.

But also remember that increasing the group size increases the probability that any one individual will remember the information (Rg).  So we take the individual retention rate and raise it to the inverse of the group size.  Retention will never be perfect.  A data point may be lost to time no matter how many people are hired.  But it does continually raise the probability:

Rg = exp(-t/S)^(1/P)

Of those 3 people, individually there’s only a 76% chance that a specific individual will remember a piece of information, and of the group there’s only a 43% chance that they will all retain that information, but across the group there’s a 91% chance that any of them will remember that information.

This is where the group size makes an impact–on the chance that across the group as a whole, one of them will prove their use having retained the necessary information.  By increasing the group size, we increase that possibility.

But let’s go even further.  Because if you’re still reading, I feel we’re now on a journey together and I don’t want to disappoint.  I’ve grown fond of you, dear internet reader.

And because, if you’re very attentive, you’ll note that time will still gnaw away at the group recollection chance.  More people will increase the chance, but that’s not scalable.  What we need is a third way to increase value, since we can’t ever reduce time, and staff size always has a limit.  We need another variable.

That’s right!  We increase the number of informational items, which we have to do over time, else memory loss will still degrade the total usefulness at the same rate.  So we increase the total number of informational points learned per day.

I offer one final formula: the ultimate value of the group (Uv), which incorporates the logic of the prior formulas, quantifies the equivalent value of the group based on the equivalent value of people as units, but taking into account the chance of any one person remembering a select piece of information, and increases the value based on the number of information points presented per day (I) for the duration of t:

Uv = exp(-t/S)P((exp(-t/S))^P)tI

As mentioned, this value degrades with time, but can be increased with additional information points.  Also known as experience.  Ah, we’ve come full circle finally.

Conclusion:

The value of a group is more complicated than its collective time.  If we base the value on total information, we can’t assume that all members of a group retain that information, and a linear function doesn’t apply.  We can increase the value of the group by increasing its number, which in turn will increase the chance that information will be retained by an individual, but to ultimately avoid group value loss, additional information–or novel experience–must find its way into each individual of a group on a continual basis.

And this is why we can’t just add up everyone’s tenure.  Experience isn’t cumulative.  It’s one variable in a probability function that someone in a sample size will increase group value through novel experience recollection.

Maybe lower management should cut back on the 3 martini lunch team building.

–Simon


  • t = # days
  • S = strength of memory (25%)
  • P = total # of people trying to remember
  • I = items of value learned per t
  • R = probability of memory retention
  • Rc = Chance of all people remembering
  • Ev = Equivalent value of total people as units
  • Rg = Chance of any one person remembering from total # of people
  • Uv = Ultimate value of group

Football Conversations

As a non-football watcher, I’ve spent many a conversation pretending to have watched something I didn’t, or to care about something I don’t, and to use grammatically unsound complex sentences of negation.

At first, I would maintain the charade as football fans, when discussing football, are complete conversational narcissists, and would never notice that I wasn’t adding anything meaningful to the conversation.  These one-sided discussions would invariably crescendo to an emotionally-charged climax, upon which I would just agree with whatever was said last and laugh, which in turn led to some mutual conclusion that escaped me because I don’t watch football.

Now, I just don’t care enough about garnering favor with random people at the coffee station, so I don’t humor the smalltalk anymore, or so was my intent.  Unfortunately, a surprising majority of people take the dismissive comment to be a joke (for what kind of American doesn’t watch football?), and interpret it as encouragement–thus putting me into the conversation anyway.

So I decided that, as it’s been said: If you can’t beat ’em–kill everyone.  Or rather, inwardly sigh sadly and pretend to follow along.  But I need assistance.  I need information…obtained through any other means than reading, watching TV, or conversing with my fell Man.

I needed an aggregator and summarizer.  I needed the absolute bare minimum content required to form a cohesive thought.  I needed the equivalent of a Twitter feed of sports commentary, but without the racism/sexism/homophobia (the entire social aspect, basically).  I needed a means by which to trawl football articles and identify the most-used words, negating general sentence structure such as definite articles and conjunctions.

Fortunately I found this site: wordcounter.net.  Probably not its intended use–I began pasting the top football news articles into its form and analyzing their content.  I checked 5 such posts, and compiled their keywords:

The first two articles didn’t have enough meaningful content for a full 10 words

Okay, I could work with this.  This Bryant fellow seems to be a highlight.  I’m sure I could muddle through the rest.

I decided to test my theory on Liz, and texted her the following message:

“I heard that in Bryant’s week one, he scored enough points that it’ll be his big season.  He’ll make a good five-star Fantasy Football pick.  Despite the initial loss, Arkansas will recover with enough victories to stay in the running.”

Liz responded:

“What are you reading?”

She was intrigued!  Had I pulled it off?!  I replied, ambiguously:

“Just the highlights.”

She validated my success by sending me an unrelated photo of a dog that was up for adoption.

…Okay, maybe my method needs a little refinement.  Maybe I can pull a larger sampling of articles and write a formula to analyze the character strings.

Or maybe, just maybe…when I tell you I don’t watch football you could stop talking to me about football and I wouldn’t have to design a logic-based analysis of textual media to formulate responses to your banal and pointless rambling.  Now quit hogging the coffee machine.

–Simon

Halloween Costumes

“Hey, who’s Doc Holliday?”  He gestured in my direction as he spoke with my boss.  A colleague, he was in town to meet the rest of the team that worked at this location.  And as what so often happens when meeting people who are normally only a voice, I failed to place the face with a name.  Apparently, he suffered from the same problem, and chose to associate an actor’s particular character with my own.

I’ll note that no one ever sees me and says: “Hey!  He looks like George Clooney!  So devilishly handsome!”.  No, instead I was being compared to Val Kilmer’s character–the emaciated borderline psychopath on the cusp of death from Consumption.  That was me.  And it wasn’t the last time that I would hear that observation.

In truth, I had never seen the entirety of Tombstone.  As far as Wyatt Earp movies went, I found it to be a forced rendition with unnecessary drama.  The story itself is one of violence and drama, so I felt it odd that they pushed it so.  Plus, it didn’t really address Holliday’s backstory.  Instead, he just kind of shows up as a stylish badass with an uncanny ability to attract the ladies, despite his debilitating and infectious disease.  I guess if I was going to be compared to someone, it was a lot better than Elijah Wood’s Frodo.  I could live with it: a dying wealthy gunslinger with sexy ladies.  Fine.

So when the office held a costume contest for Halloween, I decided to see just how convincing the emulation could be.  I bought a cheap black cowboy hat and red vest.  The rest of the outfit I conveniently already possessed, down to the silver pocketwatch.  I even shaved (though I required mascara to darken the mustache that was increasingly turning white).

After much consideration, I left the shotgun at home

It’s not every day that I can make the security guard burst out laughing.

In the end, I lost the contest to Mary Poppins (bitch).  But more importantly were the costume assessments I received.  Notably, from multiple people, that my costume wasn’t all that different from the way I normally dress, and were it not for the hat, they might not have even noticed it was a costume at all.

I guess, in the end, the comparison had been accurate all along.  For better or worse, I’m now permanently associated with the persona.

I’m your Huckleberry.

–Simon