Comment by afavour
4 hours ago
I’m not so sure about that. The pre-internet age had a lot of forced “mental health breaks”. Phone lines went down. Mail was delayed. Trains stalled. Businesses and livelihoods continued to thrive.
The idea that we absolutely need 24/7 productivity is a new one and I’m not that convinced by it. Obviously there are some scenarios that need constant connectivity but those are more about safety (we don’t want the traffic lights to stop working everywhere) than profit.
Just want to correct the record here, as someone who worked at a local CLEC where we took availability quite seriously before the age of the self-defeatist software engineer.
Phone lines absolutely did not go down. Physical POTS lines (Yes, even the cheap residential ones) were required to have around 5 9s of availability, or approximately 5 minutes per year. And that's for a physical medium affected by weather, natural disasters, accidents, and physical maintenance. If we or the LEC did not meet those targets contracts would be breached and worst case the government would get involved.
> we absolutely need 24/7 productivity is a new one
We don't need it, the owners want it
We don't need it, but we might need it to maintain our quality of life now.