Why do office workers generally have internet connectivity at work? Is it for the actual work (which is enhanced sufficiently to compensate for Facebook wastage [1]), or to compete with other employers on perks? I would think it’s the former, but that’s just my internal human modeler—are there any studies?
[1] “What the hell did people do at work all day before the Internet?”
Is there any actual evidence that using facebook (or other ‘distractions’) decreases productivity significantly?
Perhaps we’re getting the direction of causation wrong and employees who are least able to generate work in a given time spend their idle time on facebook. (Subjectively I’ve found that when I block facebook etc but aren’t productive I end up staring into space or finding other methods of distraction, but when I’m feeling especially inspired all the wonders of the internet cannot distract me.)
What evidence would distinguish these two possibilities?
What evidence would distinguish these two possibilities?
Select arbitrary productivity metric. Select people in a controlled environment (like cubicles). Randomly assign their IP addresses to a correctly configured DNS server or a DNS server with a faulty entry for ‘facebook.com’. See if there is a difference.
[1] “What the hell did people do at work all day before the Internet?”
Just in case you wanted a serious answer to your question… in the engineering profession we spent a whole lot of time looking for information. Including:
Finding books/manuals with the right formulas, then looking up the formulas in the book
Finding data, eg. “latent heat of evaporation of methanol”
Finding installation/operation/maintenance manuals. We had a massive library full of manuals.
In many cases, the right resource was not on hand, and you’d have to find the person who had it or knew where to find it. Many times this had to be done via correspondence (fax by then, thank god, not postal mail)
Worst of all, many times you just had to generate the data yourself, by experimentation. This included things like actually measuring the latent heat of evaporation, for example, or trial-and-error wrt eg. disassembly or maintenance procedures. Often “stuff” was designed far more conservatively, to compensate for lack of data.
The internet has been a stupendous boon to engineering productivity, and largely generated the free time that some people spend now on Facebook etc.
If you don’t get your work done, you lose your job, so whether you have internet access or not doesn’t much matter. You will regulate your own distraction or you will perish.
That being said, there can sometimes be lots of downtime in office work. I imagine that the internet is there because it LOOKS a lot like doing actual work. It’s much easier for the employee to pretend he’s working, and it’s much easier for the boss to pretend she hasn’t noticed her employees are being unproductive. A boss that sees her employee spends four hours a day chatting at the water cooler has to “address the problem” to save face. If her employees stay in their cubes she can lie more convincingly to her superiors that everyone in her department is quite busy. It is simply covert idleness.
Just channeling my inner Hanson. (for what it’s worth, I do all my LessWrong reading/posting from work)
I can’t imagine a class of office workers that I wouldn’t want to have Internet access. Having access to Wikipedia straightforwardly increases your knowledge about everything.
I had no idea it was fairly easy to copy. Though checking Wikipedia, it looks like there’s no easy way to get the images.
That said, there are lots of other things that I’d generally consider sufficient justification, but some of them (like e-mail and chat) can just be installed on the LAN, and others (like Stack Overflow and Github) are a bit computing-specific (and why computing professionals need Internet access is more of a no-brainer).
More importantly, if you don’t have Internet access, you won’t discover that something like Wikipedia might be helpful for your job.
Maybe I just don’t have experience working in non-creative office jobs, and there really are people who never have questions that can be best answered by the Internet.
Why do office workers generally have internet connectivity at work? Is it for the actual work (which is enhanced sufficiently to compensate for Facebook wastage [1]), or to compete with other employers on perks? I would think it’s the former, but that’s just my internal human modeler—are there any studies?
[1] “What the hell did people do at work all day before the Internet?”
Is there any actual evidence that using facebook (or other ‘distractions’) decreases productivity significantly?
Perhaps we’re getting the direction of causation wrong and employees who are least able to generate work in a given time spend their idle time on facebook. (Subjectively I’ve found that when I block facebook etc but aren’t productive I end up staring into space or finding other methods of distraction, but when I’m feeling especially inspired all the wonders of the internet cannot distract me.)
What evidence would distinguish these two possibilities?
Select arbitrary productivity metric. Select people in a controlled environment (like cubicles). Randomly assign their IP addresses to a correctly configured DNS server or a DNS server with a faulty entry for ‘facebook.com’. See if there is a difference.
I was orders of magnitude more productive at work in the days before web access on my desktop than I am now, but there are other contributing factors.
Just in case you wanted a serious answer to your question… in the engineering profession we spent a whole lot of time looking for information. Including:
Finding books/manuals with the right formulas, then looking up the formulas in the book
Finding data, eg. “latent heat of evaporation of methanol”
Finding installation/operation/maintenance manuals. We had a massive library full of manuals.
In many cases, the right resource was not on hand, and you’d have to find the person who had it or knew where to find it. Many times this had to be done via correspondence (fax by then, thank god, not postal mail)
Worst of all, many times you just had to generate the data yourself, by experimentation. This included things like actually measuring the latent heat of evaporation, for example, or trial-and-error wrt eg. disassembly or maintenance procedures. Often “stuff” was designed far more conservatively, to compensate for lack of data.
The internet has been a stupendous boon to engineering productivity, and largely generated the free time that some people spend now on Facebook etc.
If you don’t get your work done, you lose your job, so whether you have internet access or not doesn’t much matter. You will regulate your own distraction or you will perish.
That being said, there can sometimes be lots of downtime in office work. I imagine that the internet is there because it LOOKS a lot like doing actual work. It’s much easier for the employee to pretend he’s working, and it’s much easier for the boss to pretend she hasn’t noticed her employees are being unproductive. A boss that sees her employee spends four hours a day chatting at the water cooler has to “address the problem” to save face. If her employees stay in their cubes she can lie more convincingly to her superiors that everyone in her department is quite busy. It is simply covert idleness.
Just channeling my inner Hanson. (for what it’s worth, I do all my LessWrong reading/posting from work)
It’s possible (indeed, standard) to have internet connectivity at offices but with time-wasting sites blocked.
They tried that at my work—blocked all blogs. We have a pile of developers. Guess how developers share ideas and tips?
I can’t imagine a class of office workers that I wouldn’t want to have Internet access. Having access to Wikipedia straightforwardly increases your knowledge about everything.
Wikipedia is not a sufficient justification for internet access because it is fairly easy to put a copy on the company LAN or even on each desktop.
I had no idea it was fairly easy to copy. Though checking Wikipedia, it looks like there’s no easy way to get the images.
That said, there are lots of other things that I’d generally consider sufficient justification, but some of them (like e-mail and chat) can just be installed on the LAN, and others (like Stack Overflow and Github) are a bit computing-specific (and why computing professionals need Internet access is more of a no-brainer).
More importantly, if you don’t have Internet access, you won’t discover that something like Wikipedia might be helpful for your job.
Maybe I just don’t have experience working in non-creative office jobs, and there really are people who never have questions that can be best answered by the Internet.