"No, it's less effort than that"

“Pushing sales people to increase their amount of sales/quota is like asking meteorologists for sunshine”.

Hmmm it doesn’t seem unreasonable in that context? You’re really asking people to work more effectively, to accomplish the same amount of work more quickly.

It’s like asking sales people what their quota should be. They pick a number that is no-brainer hittable, because there is a lot of complexity and many unknown variables in getting deals signed, so to prevent looking bad they’ll pad their number. But their no-brainer number is below what the business needs.

So you tell them their quota is going to be a bit higher. They’ll have to stretch to hit it.

And it’s even MORE important since their comp is DIRECTLY tied to hitting that number.

And yet sales people aren’t writing article after article about how self-set quotas are sacrosanct, should only settable by sales people themselves, and how clueless management is to try to get more performance above the no-brainer target.

There’s a consistent belief here that Programming Isn’t Like Other Work™ and that you can’t estimate it, it’s so mentally taxing that you can’t do it for more than a few minutes at a time in complete silence, and that it’s closer to Da Vinci sculpting the Sistine Chapel than kludging together a few APIs.

It’s fun to think you’re special and easy to do when you’re paid a shitload of money.

This is a bitter exaggeration. Programming is indeed distinctly unlike almost all other work that we have built experience managing as a society. It might be more accurate to say that it combines properties from other existing types of work that are not seen combined in any other type of work.

Go to any thread here on HN about WFH, open offices, 8-hour work days, etc. and tell me I’m wrong.

Regarding open offices. The Fed commissioned MIT to do a study on the effect of public observation and found that it significantly reduced people's effectiveness at solving puzzles.

Just proving my point. Significantly reducing some tech bros ability to do puzzles doesn’t mean that private offices are needed to make the 10,000,000th Rails app.