Knowledge workers\nPublic.icon\n\s/nishio/知識労働者\n\s\sare mostly copying from here\n\s\sPost-Capitalist Society which I recommend because it's interesting.\n\n\sThe concept proposed by Drucker in "The Effective Executive"\n\s\s>says that knowledge workers do not produce something that directly generates profits by themselves.\n\s\sKnowledge workers create knowledge, ideas, and information.\n\s\sThe boundary between manual workers and knowledge workers depends on whether what they create becomes directly productive or not.\n\s\sWhat they create is not measurable and does not generate sales directly, which means that their efforts may not lead to productive work.\n\n\s\sResearch professionals are easy to classify as nonproductive cost centers\n\s\sBecause if you try to measure their productivity by the number of papers or patents they produce, you end up with examples of failures where they produce such things haphazardly, almost like for numbers' sake.\n\s\s\s"Do not develop a performance measure because you do not want to be compromising your system by (corrupting) what you are measuring."\n\s\s\s\sSummary of things like "If you define it, it will be hacked"\n\n\s\s"What does not lead to direct production" and "what they create is not measurable" means that even programmers who are assigned to "implement this feature" and are doing it are not necessarily considered knowledge workers. They could probably be classified as manual laborers.\n\s\s\sDefining "what makes a good product" would be part of the knowledge worker's job because you cannot measure "quality," but implementing a function that was already determined to be necessary as part of making a good product would be considered manual labor because it is measurable as either "done (1)" or "not done (0)." During that implementation process, the work involved in considering things like "this is a better design," "this will be easier to read", and "this will enhance maintainability in the future" would not be measurable, which is why it would be part of a knowledge worker's job.