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Comment by muzani | Hacker News Reader

I've done all kinds of jobs. I'd take a 14 hour physical labor job over a 8 hour mental labor job anytime. Mental labor is painful... in the form that stalling the main thread of something is.

But that's data entry. Development is much less mental labor, and I'd agree with the 4-5 hours/day assessment.

Most people can't actually do this, which is why a lot of people hate math. Math class is dealing with intense focus on a poorly documented thing. Development has little to do with it, but it's the same soft skill.

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I have done all kinds of jobs too, and I will take a programming/middle management job (no matter how soulless) over a 14 h, or even 8, physical job, every single time. Most of the blue-collar workers will tell you the same. Your skin suffers, your knees suffer, your lower-back suffers, honestly I doubt you have done it for a long time, it is people in that category who naively fantasize about how cool is to work 14 h under the sun or in a plant/warehouse/construction site.

Second this. I barely made it a week at a construction site when I was younger, and I was convinced the experienced shaved a few months off of my life expectancy. I was also just as exhausted coming home from work as I would be from an equivalent amount of time spent thinking about hard mental problems. At least for me, it wasn't even in the same universe as sitting down in an air-conditioned office and writing code all day.

>I'd take a 14 hour physical labor job over a 8 hour mental labor job anytime.

No you wouldn't. Physical labor varies in difficulty somewhat depending on the type of work, but many blue collar jobs are hell. Forget the anecdotes you read here; they are the exception and not the rule.

That's not to say that coding can't be difficult. But physical labor can be much, much worse.

I'd put the desirability hierarchy something like this, best to worst:

1) mixed labor (mental, physical)

2) moderate, varied physical labor

3) jobs that are mostly just being present and don't make you pretend to work most of the time

4) mental labor

5) jobs that are mostly just being present but do make you pretend to work most of the time

6) repetitive moderate physical labor

7) repetitive sedentary labor

8) hard physical labor

With 8 being at the bottom mostly due to typically being high-risk and coming with major mid-term harm to health.

Yeah, I think the repetitive part is what drives us crazy.

The worst jobs are probably done by prison labor and slaves. 8, I would actually classify as dangerous labor, things like how prisoners are made to peel garlic which corrodes their fingernails and teeth.

> Math class is dealing with intense focus on a poorly documented thing.

I like this and think it's accurate. Funnily enough, it gets better if you go on to major in maths. The quality of pre-university maths teaching is just unconscionably bad. (Then it gets bad again as you reach graduate-level maths, but this is because you're expected to be able to deal with that at that point.)

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