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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

Yup, it's not like people working manual labor or machine shop labor can kill themselves or others if they're tired. Clearly the fact that we need to think about overengineered microservices written in JavaScript means our lives are just as hard.

For fuck's sake HN we're talking about waking up and going to work. Most of us here are getting paid $100k+ (or twice that in SV) to type for a living. Stop trying to pretend your life is so difficult because you need to set an alarm, be presentable at an office, and work normal hours.

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I love this statement (maybe I shouldn't). Being an Army vet transitioning to software, it was difficult for me to understand why people come in late and complain about having to work too early (9:30 being early is quite laughable).

I also understand that you need to be in the right frame of mind to preform optimally, however if the people signing the check want you to come in at 9am then you adapt and overcome (your body will adjust), or find someone else to sign the check. If coming in early to code is the hardest thing you had to do today you're pretty lucky in life.

All you've done here is restate "there are children starving in Africa, so you are not hungry." It's even got a dash of "I'm from Wisconsin, you call this cold?!"

I don't think anybody is arguing that we engineers are not better off than starving children in Africa or soldiers who are forced to potentially suffer permanent harm from bad sleep culture[1], it's just being pointed out that due to the nature of the job, there's usually no reason to come in early, and there are reasons to come in late (health reasons)

[1] https://taskandpurpose.com/military-sleep-problems-research/

A lot of software engineers grew up working late and it's hard to break that habit or it just doesn't feel natural. I have no problems with waking up at 6:30 to make it into the office but if I had the choice I would pick 11 because it fits with my natural preferred schedule I've spent most of my life living.

Unless you have a legitimate medical issue it only takes a few weeks to reset your schedule.

The obvious resolution is that all workers should be able to set their work conditions so that they can do their jobs without sacrificing any bit of their wellbeing.

That would certainly seem like the ideal.

Ah, the old, if you don't like it go somewhere else argument employed by privileged capitalists everywhere.

"People who are worried about the negative conditions at Uber shouldn't drive for Uber! It's not anyone's problem that those conditions are negative. "

Nobody here is talking about sexual harassment, discrimination, or anything of the sort. Nobody is defending those.

But being present for a daily meeting during normal working hours is a pretty low bar to meet. Not everyone can meet that bar! That's fine. Not everyone can do every job. If you have some medical, psychological, socioeconomic, or ideological reason why you can't be present for a meeting from 9:00-9:10 Mon-Fri, it's not a violation of your human rights to suggest maybe you can't do whatever that job is.

I don't care about morning meetings as a bar to meet; I just think they're almost always useless or harmful.

Luckily I now work remotely, set my own hours 100%, and collaborate asynchronously with no daily synchronization points.

I could rush off to an office at the exact same time every morning... but why? It

Being at a 9am meeting is not a sacrifice to any part of anyone's wellbeing.

That’s overly broad and simply false. It can be quite damaging to the wellbeing of people with severe circadian rhythm disorders.

One would think those people would not be applying for work that required you to be in an office before 9am then.

Good luck with that. I had aspirations of being a developer but ended up being a wedding photographer instead due to my circadian rhythm issues. Maybe in major cities you'd have enough options to find something that'd work, but in smaller cities or rural areas there's no hope.

What's your justification for that?

Show me the data that supports your claim.

> Yup, it's not like people working manual labor or machine shop labor can kill themselves or others if they're tired.

If you're going to make a comparison, at least be honest about it. Plenty of software engineers work on mission critical software that can cost lives as well, while not all "shops", whatever you mean by that term, are life-threatening work.

Plenty in an absolute sense, sure. I don't appreciate the implication I was being dishonest, but let's really be honest.

If you pick a random software developer in 2018, they're writing forms over data web apps for a line of business application. It's a fluffy job with no real physical danger. That was my point.

And the same applies to "shop" workers, which can mean anything from retail to machine shops. You seem to have employed a rather narrow interpretation of that term, an interpretation which perhaps is culture-specific, but whose context is not specified in the posts that started this thread.

You know I specifically said "machine shop" in my original comment so I'm not sure why you're talking about retail.

Because no one before you said "machine shop", you're the one who interpreted "shop" in an overly narrow sense and then ranted about it as if that's what everyone was talking about.

100% of those software engineers have a plethora of safety checks that are applied continuously and repeatedly before their work is ever used in an environment where any harm might actually be done to anyone.

Someone operating a backhoe for example might dig into a gas main, swing their boom around and crush or decapitate someone, swing it across power lines and electrocute themselves, etc.

Yes, mission critical software can kill people if it's not done right. That never happens because the developer was tired of a morning.

So, back at ya with that honesty bit.

> 100% of those software engineers have a plethora of safety checks

Well, this is simply not true. I suspect you conjured that figure out of thin air. Case in point, the famous Therac-25 accidents caused by a software bug causing large over-irradiations of cancer patients : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

Yes, software from 40 years ago is absolutely relevant to this discussion. You think there are a lot of developers using those same practices today?

Bugs happen, but with software you have several layers of safety checks to prevent them from becoming dangerous or fatal. A common one is having the code reviewed by one or more other developers. The odds of all those developers being unable to detect bugs at 9 AM are kind of long, wouldn't you say?

Not really, sad to say. I had a PR approved during the day yesterday by one of the smartest guys I've ever worked with and that passed all tests yet, due to a subtle issue, caused a problem in production this morning. It wasn't the end of any worlds, but this kind of thing happens all the time with complex systems.

I guess as long as those catch 100% of the issues. Even still you're solving the problem on the backend instead of the source.

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