Why do we buy into the 'cult' of overwork?
bbc.com
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It just seemed like it was 1/10th the normal speed, somewhat Luddite... and every task seemed oddly fundamental.
I've also encountered towns like this in Spain, Greece, Austria, Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, Uruguay, Thailand and Cambodia.
After reading these comments, I would never have believed that so many small towns exist that seem untouched by 24-hour stores and everything cheap and on-demand. It sounds inevitable that everyone is eventually pushed into hyperinflationary always-working mode. But yet, these places persist. I might even chalk it up to depressed economies and "third-world" nature, but my samples include all sorts of economies.
I think we choose what kind of lifestyle we want, but it needs to be done at the community level. Without going all "we should all be farmers hippie dippy portland nature fetishist", it does seem like decisions have consequences and it is possible to steer away from hyperactivity.
If you want a chill town in the West I think Boise, Idaho or Santa Fe, New Mexico, are a better fit. Although I do admit that people don’t generally think of the hippie dippy type when they think of Boise.
Boise is simply too far right. I don't want to live in a light purple zone surrounded by bright-red crazies. I'll prefer the type of crazy that protests for social justice over protesting to keep facism and white supremacy. Yet Portland has great examples of progressives who have their heart in the right place but forget to think critically.
New Mexico is collapsing. Outside of ABQ and Santa Fe, it is full of ghost towns. Quite literally boarded up towns between Las Cruces and Roswell. It's a state in decline.
Raise wages, lower cost of living. This will benefit everyone.
@employers of HN: Compare your wages with the cost of living in the location you expect your employers to be. Ensure that their rent plus fixed expenses is at most a third of their wage, and ensure that they need to work at most 40 hours a week to earn that. If you do not meet that standard, you are underpaying your employees. If you make them work more than 40 hours a week - either directly or indirectly via e.g. slack channels - pay them gratuitous overtime on the one hand, and see to reducing the need for it on the other.
That sounds all nice but why would they do that when they can find people who accept to work longer for less?
It's the same reason why most of the chocolate sold isn't fair trade and there's often modern slavery produced beans in mainstream products.
Calls for voluntary improvement are great, and may be heeded sometimes, but aren't uniformly reliable when there is no effective legal requirement and financial incentives point the other way.
If this isn't a defense then what is the point of adding this?
We are aware it's par for the course. But "controlling costs" doesn't necessarily mean "paying the absolute minimum of what the market will bear." That thinking may as well belong to a cartoon negligent fool, one who ignores the impacts of their actions simply because those impacts are not immediately obvious to them.
The reality is that businesses don't just pay people because they need the money to support themselves. They don't see underpaying employees as a "problem", not necessarily at least.
So they're not carefully accounting for their employees personal needs so they can provide sufficient pay. That's probably not going to change, at least not much. There's other things that can change.
OP: > @employers of HN: Compare your wages with the cost of living in the location you expect your employers to be. Ensure that their rent plus fixed expenses is at most a third of their wage, and ensure that they need to work at most 40 hours a week to earn that. If you do not meet that standard, you are underpaying your employees
> That sounds all nice but why would they do that when they can find people who accept to work longer for less?
> Because not everyone thinks like Gordon Gecko.
Simply reducing the players to cartoon characters that think greed is good doesn't help the problem. I'm not defending our current system, I think that we need to change policies, tax incentives, minimum wage, and real estate policy. I'm also wary of wealth disparity among management and executives, but am even more pessimistic there.
I don't think expecting corporations to be altruistic or else calling them villains, fools ect. is the answer. At the end of the day they're concerned that they will get out competed, or about their responsibility to shareholders, and that's how budgets get set. Saying "come on, have a heart" doesn't help.
UNIONS
The nefarious angle of the work culture myth is that it perpetuates by our own hands, or rather, it is supposed to. Anyone who speaks out against it is a "unionist commie" or "lazy". It is self-reenforcing, where one group of workers is scared of losing their jobs so they attack the ones who want to unionize for better conditions.
FEMINISM
There's a similar analogy in feminism, where women who have internalized misogyny actively work to make sure other women don't try to upset the status quo in the name of liberation. It is why you sometimes read about women tearing each other apart because one might chose to not shave her legs or armpits, or wear makeup or heels to work: why should THEY be free of oppression when I'M NOT. Self-policing is very effective for the upper classes to retain control.
RACISM
It goes even further. Read "The Invention of the White Race". The idea of pitting poor white people against poor black people wasn't intentional: the hierarchy was constructed because wealthy land owners needed help policing their slaves, so they created the notion of white / black superiority which led to former white slaves earning their freedom becoming slave masters. (I'm simplifying, but that's the gist.)
Self-policing is highly effective way for those in power to leverage fear and keep the oppressed classes at war with each other and not the people exploiting them. Your comment is spreading that fear.
even as a person who wants their team to be as tight-knit as possible, it seems paternalistic for me to decide what level of housing is acceptable for my employees. Where's the line?
What if I let them dictate all of their terms?
So they're not generally in the business of carefully ensuring they don't make the "mistake" of underpaying their employees. If they're underpaying that's a good thing, with some exceptions.
And just how are we supposed vet and/or collect data on employee housing? I don't want that. I want us to work on fixing the housing market, and employers to offer remote work options. I want more flexible hours and vacation time. We need cultural standards and legislation to protect against these things.
> And just how are we supposed vet and/or collect data on employee housing?
First step is to ask them. Second step is to go to your local government agency that collects data on housing prices and rent values. And third step is to check the prices your self by inspecting rent ads that disclose the price.
> I don't understand comments like this [...] If they're underpaying that's a good thing.
Only from the perspective of the boss. Put your self in the shoe of a worker and then perhaps you can begin to understand what the parent means. Workers also have bargaining power through collective bargaining. The longer bosses pay us lower then what we deserve, the more we will collectivize. A workers union will eventually form and you have to pay us a living wage anyway. In the meantime you must deal with us quitting, calling in sick, striking, advising your potential workers against working for you, etc.
I wouldn't be so sure about that.
An example:
The company I work for pay my broadband bill as does most IT companies.
Now my broadband provider is also my TV provider. They have of course noted this so guess what: they kept sliding the split between broadband and TV cost until it was ridiculous[1].
Guess what I think will happen if it becomes well known that employers pay for hosting?
Prices will go through the roof.
[1]: That was last year. Last I checked I now pay $0.6 for the broadband and $90 for TV. I haven't figured out why this is but I guess financial incentives at some level.
Younger generations that have no family business or real estate to inherit, have no option of such a cushy lifestyle so their option is moving to big cities/wealthier countries and grind on the hamster-wheel or risk being left out of the game due to ever increasing real-estate costs and stagnating wages.
Near the Austrian alps, a region of mostly farmers in the 1950's, most of the land there could be bough and houses build for pennies, with very little regulations. A father could get a factory job with no advanced formal education, receive training from the company and make enough money to support a family, take them on vacation and even buy a second home.
Fast forward to today, real estate prices have exploded there while wages have stagnated and competition fiercely increased along with the requirements for education. Homes in that region that were just poor farmers about 7 decades ago, are now worth millions and the small family business there are making bank thanks to the tourism boom, but a factory worker today can't even dream of building a house there anymore, hell, even a SW dev can't afford to do that due to the scarcity of land and increase in regulations plus wage stagnation.
The roots of the valorization of work may well have been religious, and maybe Christian (though I very much doubt it's exclusively Christian in its origin), but it's definitely spread throughout much of the world, even among the non-religious and even atheist population.
I can't count the number of times I've heard people praise others as "hard working"... in all sorts of contexts, in many different parts of the world, native or immigrant, hard work is praised to the heavens and one of the best things you can say about a person is that they're hard working.
I almost never hear the value of working hard being questioned, except when the subject turns to burnout. Then everybody nods sagely and agrees that overwork is bad.. the next day they go back to praising hard workers.
You can see it in Stackoverflow as well. The gamification encourages people to prove they are "worthy" of even deigning to ask a question by showing they've done "the work". Those who haven't are subject to humiliation and dismissal, regardless of need or authenticity.
I don't see how stackexchange's policy is related to the article, or "Protestant/Calvinist work-ethic". They are banning low-effort questions (e.g "File couldn't be opened" when the person just has a typo in a file path) because they devalue the platform, waste time that could have instead been spent on useful questions.
> I suspect that's because it's an export which they've accepted as their own because it happens to jive with the strict authoritarian hierarchies which are common in Asian countries.
Or they independently developed a glorification of hard-work from other sources. It's nothing new. All the Abrahamic religions do, and the same is true for secular ideologies such as communism.
Given the history of human ideas, it would be equally foolish to assume there was not.
Atheists do a lot of things religious people do because they are still part of a tradition even if they don’t ‘believe’.
Issues like sexual shame, circumcision, censored language, etc. are all commonplace in America because they are actively promoted by religious conservatives and (for the most part) passively ignored by critics.
It's difficult to be critical of values that religious institutions have without being generally dismissed as overly antagonistic.
[n] https://medium.com/incerto/religion-violence-tolerance-progr...
You should see the Japanese go at it. I hear the Chinese are every bit as bad (996). Not many Christians, there.
The Japanese take a certain pride in it. I feel that their efficiency suffers, and burnout is a big problem, there.
In Japan you need to be at the office before your boss and can't leave before they do. And this goes all the way up, meaning that the lowest employees practically live at the office.
Combine this with a culture that doesn't really allow questioning your superiors makes for a really stressful work life.
One anecdote I heard was that a company had a one hour meeting with the Big Boss, who told what he wanted people to do. After that they had a two-hour meeting where they figured out what the boss meant. It was not proper to ask questions directly from the big boss.
Americans on the other hand glorify working two or three jobs, suffering 80-100 hour work weeks is a badge of honour. And they still just barely manage to get a living wage.
Don't know if that list is exhaustive; it might be.
Totally believe that. I worked at a Japanese company for 27 years, and attended a lot of meetings. Japanese managers pretty much spend their entire career in conference rooms.
The Chinese, however, have the concept of "996," which means "9AM to 9PM, six days a week." The Japanese also do that, but it's not quite as explicit.
But if you look at the Middle Ages, you'll find something like 100 days off a year, tons of feast days and days off, limited working hours in the remaining days, and not at all a culture that valorized work even thought it was much more deeply Christian than modern Europe. It's all about what you worship.
I think you have an incorrect view of subsistence farming. It does not require constant work, and you do not see constant work in traditional societies. You do see many days off. Now during harvest time there is lots of work, but that is a small period of the year, say 7 weeks out of the year. Other times the farmer has the option of when to plant and how much, when to weed and how much, when to work on processing food and how much. And these fall into familiar patterns from which things like feast days emerge as the interstitial times when the above does not need to happen. The idea of constant backbreaking labor all year long may be appropriate for something like a large Jamaican plantation, but not a small farm in Europe. Of course if it was an American farmer, they would enlarge their farm, bring in more livestock or auxiliary sources of income to fill up whatever daylight was available, and keep adding work until they and all their hired hands were busy all the time. Then they would take the earnings and use it to buy more land and hire more people and expand the work even further. But traditional societies did not organize themselves this way, nor is this something required of farmers.
Here is some data: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...
"The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official -- that is, church -- holidays included not only long "vacations" at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints' andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking. In addition to official celebrations, there were often weeks' worth of ales -- to mark important life events (bride ales or wake ales) as well as less momentous occasions (scot ale, lamb ale, and hock ale). All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.[5]
The peasant's free time extended beyond officially sanctioned holidays. There is considerable evidence of what economists call the backward-bending supply curve of labor -- the idea that when wages rise, workers supply less labor. During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work "by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day." And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year."
Put into working terms, the basic clothing of our six person farming family requires 7.35 labor hours per day, every day of the year. Our ‘comfort’ level requires 22.05 hours (obviously not done by one person).
https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t...
The main difference between the subsistence farmer and the wage worker -- and ACOUP goes into this in detail -- is that the subsistence farmer has to optimize for security over productivity, meaning that the marginal returns for working harder/longer hours are much less. Working twice as hard to till twice the fields won't help when a summer frost nukes the whole crop.
You quote quite a long article - yet you do not give the full data. 7.35 labor hours per day whole year is to produce 21 sq meters of cloth, using estimates about ancient world, not pre-modern Europe.
20 sq meters of cloth using a bit more modern (Middle ages) estimate would give you 3 hours per day whole year by one person. Also keep in mind that those farmer households would not change their clothes every year (and that's an understatement)
That doesn't lower the total amount of labor required. Someone still has to make the garments. Garments were also very expensive, and most farmers wouldn't have had enough surplus crops to purchase them.
> more modern (Middle ages) estimate would give you 3 hours per day whole year by one person
That's after the invention of the spinning wheel, which didn't exist for ~90% of the Middle Ages. The second estimate from just before the invention of the spinning wheel (1300s) is close to the ancient estimate.
> Also keep in mind that those farmer households would not change their clothes every year (and that's an understatement)
One garment per year. That doesn't mean they throw away the old garment. They might keep it as a spare or repurpose it for other uses. He also justifies this estimate based on historical data for people who were issued garments by their employers (slaves and soldiers). Cato the Elder recommended issuing slaves one garment every two years, and was infamous for being cruel and parsimonious towards his slaves, so that is probably about the bare minimum for subsistence. Soldiers in the Roman Republic were issued two garments per year.
Assuming that subsistence farmers aimed for a standard of living above that of the most poorly treated slaves seems like a reasonable assumption.
They used to produce most of stuff by themselves, because functional market requires good roads and a lot of people. And if course, if you are buing it, you need to produce a lot more food, so that you can sell it or exchange it.
Do you have any data that supports it?
I think it is fair to say that at least in Europe both Western and Eastern from onset of Middle Ages people living in villages were actually able to travel to the adjacent towns and to yearly market fairs. That wasn't a daily trip of course but I do not see an issue of farmer exchanging some bags of flour for some clothes once in two years.
>> And if course, if you are buing it, you need to produce a lot more food, so that you can sell it or exchange it.
Well, yeah, that's generally an intention when you are a farmer :) Also farmers were serfs often and had to give up some part of what they gathered.
People still needed food during holidays, which means food preparation that day also more work before holidays. Holidays themselves had to be prepared. The special holiday cloth had to be decorated and sewn. All that is work. Work/leisure trade off for organizing "bride ales" and such is an additional work. Just like the Christmas today are basically a lot of work, cleaning, cooking, gifts shopping and stress before celebration in exchange of two days of rest.
It is also odd to equate The ancien règime in France with like a lot of leisure, since it led to quite a lot of social issues - poverty, famine and such.
My grand-parents were Eastern-European peasants and they certainly had "days off", you were not allowed to go to the field during a religious holiday (and one was not allowed to do it on Sundays, either).
25 years since I last helped my paternal grand-parents to collect hay I can still remember those religious holidays when we'd just sit around the house, not going to the field: July 20th (Saint Elijah), August 15th (Assumption of Mary), August 6th (Transfiguration) and I think also June 29th (Saint Peter and Paul).
this reminds me of how, in the US at least, society has settled into the pattern of saying "thank you" to the "heroes" who fight our wars, protect us from fire and keep our for-profit prisons full. it's because the rest of us have no interest in doing any of those things, so we blow smoke up their proverbial *. fuck the protestant work ethic, and fuck being guilted into wage slavery, for at least, you know, the period of your life that lasts from the time your young and healthy until you die.
The grammar of achievement is performance and excess. Everything is possible, and you must exploit yourself while trying to exhaust the possibilities. Except you can't and therefore it is a slow burn spiritual suicide, until you burnout, get into depression, have autoimmune problems etc and hopefully get a wakeup call. Except your therapist is not going to tell you to take it easy either, because they can't come up with any answer to lack of meaning other than work (and maybe to get a family) either.
Not that there is any evil conspiring forces that have set this up, but it also happens having people exploit themselves in the name of achievement yields more than being exploited by someone else directly; to be told what and what not to do all the time is unnecessary when people are equally capable of auto-exploitation. Everyone carries little walking labor camps in themselves.
That is of course not true. Individually curated means synchronized with others as no individual exists in a vacuum; it feeds on others, on the environment, on history, and others feed on the individual, and the environment is modified by the individual, and history written by it. That it is free to evaluate its own future path is not the same as not being also part of something else, much less not take into account the something else.
Achievement in itself is, unparadoxically, and achievement. That you don't agree with it says more about your synchronicity with the rest of society than the opposite.
You misunderstand. The question is whether individual value structures converge/approximate to a superstructure outside every individual, not whether individuals can use environment, history, each other etc as an inspiration for their custom tailored lives. The sense of the former was destroyed with the end of modernism. Everything dissolved in an acid vat of infinite relativism. Every normativity other than growth in the market got destroyed/crumbled. And individual achievement is merely the projection of that at the atomized level.
> Achievement in itself is, unparadoxically, and achievement. That you don't agree with it says more about your synchronicity with the rest of society than the opposite.
I take that as a compliment because one of the things I aspire to is to not get dissolved in the blind allegiance to achievement and excess positivity. It usually gets unnoticed but when people excessively project themselves to achievements and future growth; they turn into massive narcissists. And I am not using that in the pejorative sense; they lose a grounded sense of themselves. The freedom from "improving", being able to have leisurely, contemplative time, enjoying "returnless" social encounters for their own sake, having a sense of limits etc counter that. I wish they were valued more.
You misunderstand. They of course converge, there is no other alternative but for society to be a reflection of their individuals. You don't like the answer so you pretend what they converge into is not worthy somehow because it doesn't adhere to some high societal morality standard which by the way just so happen to be the morality you ascribe to, which is of course nonsense.
> I take that as a compliment because one of the things I aspire to is to not get dissolved in the blind allegiance to achievement and excess positivity.
> It usually gets unnoticed but when people excessively project themselves to achievements and future growth; they turn into massive narcissists. And I am not using that in the pejorative sense; they lose a grounded sense of themselves.
Oh the irony.
If you don't have a counter-argument that is not an ad-hominem attack, strawmanning someone's position or shallow namecalling, you don't have to participate. This is not the forum for that.
Here is HN Guidelines for your reference. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In particular;
> Be kind. Don't be snarky.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Incidentally, this is a good example to the value superstructure I was talking about. It is not a passive culmination of individual preferences, it is an aspirational guidepost sitting outside of us as a reference point. It allows selecting what behavior belongs to what extent and what doesn't. It tells us we can do better and what that better looks like.
Society decides its morals, not I, certainly not you.
and yet, this is what led to most, if not all human achievements and progress. The modern quality of life that most people have come to enjoy is off the backs of people who _are_ doing their utmost to achieve performance and excess (aka, earn more than their spending).
If everyone lived an idyllic, and idle life, we'd have much less modern life amenities and conveniences; stuff would be more expensive, and less wealth all round.
Stuff like creative output suffers greatly if you push yourself to the limit, for instance.
"Here lies marvin, who valiantly sacrificed his life in the name of progress.
Thanks to his heroic efforts, the trees in GTA 7 look very good."
I'd love to read a proper study on how people experience different types of hard work. I've worked overtime myself, and it's been a memorable experience when it's been for just a few weeks or months, and in pursuit of something that meaningfully advances the world.
But it would not be fun if it was only a peripheral advance, or it happened regularly. For me, it only works if it's something exceptional, to be done a few times.
It's pretty sad if we consider Facebook, Google or Apple as the pinnacles of human achievement. Sure it's useful to have a phone in my pocket that can tell me at any time of the day what's the weather in Hong Kong or how to cook Pork Hock. Sure it's nice that I can connect to relatives in Spain or Brazil through Facebook or search for the number of current Covid cases in South Africa. But I could live with those "achievements" having come later if that had not meant a work culture that forces me into burnout.
Same for space rockets bringing robots to Mars, electric cars for the upper class and drilling tunnels under some Bay Area city.
And for those claiming the climate catastrophe is here and we need to act now .. yeah, let's think for a moment how we got here and whether overachieving and overworking have something to do with it.
Wealth is the ability to do more with less effort. Some of that free labor goes to arts, science, or philosophy and advances humanity. Maybe too much goes toward building even more wealth or a fancier house/things but you would not have the former without the ability to get later.
But this is about working 80+ hours a week to achieve that. Changing the world is possible in 40 hours a week. Or 30, or 20. It may happen more slowly, but it won't leave so many train wrecks of burnout in its path.
(Apart from overall total productivity not necessarily being lower with a 30 hour week than a 50 hour week as the increased energy and motivation can often times easily offset the fewer hours.)
If the phenomenon seems like it's global now—even appearing in parts of the world that Protestantism never touched—then that's because, well, capitalism is global.
I have a strong suspicion you work nowhere near as hard or long as the Puritans did.
Subsistence farming is no picnic.
The majority of traditional cultures practicing subsistence farming often work much less than 40h/w, still today.
During the middle ages it was common in many cultures to have less than 200 working days per year.
And that's one of the roots of this cult. You don't want to be perceived as slacking off, so you sacrifice work-life balance and work overtime. That's such an enormous misconception. You can be very focused 9-to-5, and then you go home and don't look back until next morning at 9 am when you again are as hard-working as the day before. Somebody who is 12 hours a day at the office but spends half the time chit-chatting at the water cooler and browsing facebook is not "hard working".
Hard-working and work-life balance are not opposites. That's something people really need to understand.
The article is referencing "The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", which is a seminal work on the history and structure of labour. It does not, in any way, imply that this is a religious phenomenon any more than capitalism itself.
Just because one proclaims to not believe in God doesn't free them from the values that were drilled in their head during childhood. So many people proclaim to be "atheists" but otherwise strongly believe in and defend Christian values (Bill Gates is a prominent example).
It's not just childhood, it's social pressure. It's extremely hard to publicly hold values that go contrary to the group, even more so when those contrarian values don't bring success and therefore don't have much to show for themselves.
Diogenes was a true hero.
On the other hand there is nothing admirable about taking it easy. Anyone can do it and it does not lead to any achievement. Of course some people care about achievement and some do not, that is fine, but lets not pretend hard work is not necessary for it.
I had the luck of getting a four month severance when a company closed, full salary, full benefits. I lined up a new job and just said I will start later.
Let me tell you, going back into a tech job, 10 to 6-ish PM every day was no joke, after three months of not giving a fuck. It was torture. I could not understand how I did it until then. And there was that painful realization of "what am I doing here for eight hours a day? I am clearly not using all of it. Give me four hours and I will do the same amount of work and go live my life".
And that's when I knew that I am not going to be the guy on his deathbed, realizing that he worked too hard and didn't live, after winning the cosmic lottery of being born on such a rare place as planet Earth.
As a consultant, after a _very_ quiet year due to covid (I had travel and entertainment clients - yay me), I am finding the same. I have zero drive to go out and win business.
I don't want to spend days building software to enrich the bosses and "streamline operations" so they don't have to re-hire the staff they laid off. Or work long days. Or have to kiss ass.
It can't last because the money won't, but a break from work has challenged me.
I decided years ago that I didn't want to work on adtech or fintech, and while it's meant passing over some opportunities, it hasn't limited my career much.
But, I am talking specifically more about most of us going back to the office for 50-hour weeks. People have NO idea how jarring the experience will be. It will break you, it will ruin office work for you forever. And you know what? Perhaps that's not the way to live then.
In communist states it was a standard as recently as in the early 70s.
The saving grace is that there are more holidays here than in most of the first world.
My parents both either worked some Saturdays or after hours.
Looking at the statistics our countries have strikingly similar annual hours worked.
That would make sense, because it's a public secret that we're actually a third-world country propped up by EU money.
Here in Chile we are not that different than Poland or Brazil in weekly working hours. At least we have more working holidays than Mexico.
I'm reminded of Innuendo Studios' statement about porn: what becomes standard is not often what the majority wants, but what a minority wants and the majority will tolerate.
Developers optimize for developer profits. They know a bigger house will sell for more than a smaller one, so nobody builds smaller ones. And since "no housing" isn't an option, people will begrudgingly accept housing that is bigger and more expensive than they want, if it's the only realistic option.
My choices aren't constrained by my own greed; they're constrained by that of people with far more capital than me.
The majority of people today don't have 4,000 sq. ft houses, don't buy new cars excessively, or take big vacations. You're describing how a small segment of the upper middle class lives.
Whenever I try to think about these large scale systems I end up realizing how difficult it is to predict the outcome. Everything people are buying has to be produced. Everything produced needs people (or automation) producing it. Somewhere there is an equilibrium.
What's happening globally has an impact (e.g. we possibly had a better standard of living by taking advantage of places that had a lower standard of living). Competition (and inequality) has an impact because not getting ahead of the game can put you in the bottom rungs where you're really doing badly. In a game where only the top 20% are doing well there is fierce never ending competition to be in that 20%. In a game where everyone has some guaranteed basic standard of living you would expect the competition to be less fierce.
Another note is that people used to work crazy hours during the industrial revolution. Similar story there, you had to get some work if you didn't want to be poor, and it was easy for employers to take advantage of employees.
It was never sustainable, only something possible for a point in time.
The stagnation in standards of living since the 80s is fully engineered - it's a choice. Tax cuts, regulatory changes, disarming the antitrust, union busting, deregulation of finance and similar changes redistributed $47 trillion to the top 10% from 1975 through 2018 (1), enough to give every worker in the bottom 90% a raise of $1140 per month.
(1) https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri...
And how can you, or anyone, guarantee something like that? The standard of living we have, however imbalanced it might be, is a byproduct of fierce competition.
To guarantee any kind of basic standard of living, specially one without even more fierce competition, the only alternatives are: a much much lower standard of living, much lower, or, a much much intense exploitation of natural resources. Pick your poison, as they are both catastrophic, and there is no third option.
Competition does play some role in incentivizing people but I don't think it's the entire story when it comes to progress/improved standard of living. When 8 hour work days were introduced was there some sort of sharp drop in productivity or innovation or standard of living? Or when the work week was shortened to 5 days from 6 days? I don't think so.
Three very resources rich regions. They are exploiting their natural resources to compensate for their (relative) low productivity.
> When 8 hour work days were introduced was there some sort of sharp drop in productivity or innovation or standard of living? Or when the work week was shortened to 5 days from 6 days? I don't think so.
Yes there was a drop, if you consider everything relevant. When the 8 hour work day was introduced new workers were still being added to the workforce. Almost half the population in productive age joined the work force in the later part of the 20th century alone and women were for the most part not working when the 5 day work week became a thing for example. Individually the work hours came down, but as a whole we work much much more today.
But we don't have that luxury now, we don't have an untapped work force to lean against. And of course, the elephant in the room: our declining and aging population. Fewer and fewer working adults will have to provide for an increasingly large number of retirees.
The situation particularly in the west is dire. Pension funds are at very high risk of collapsing almost everywhere and the solution will not be to work less. Maybe, because politicians are politicians, the 4 day work week will be a thing, but retirement will creep into the 70s, it's already being proposed in some countries.
Increases in leisure time will be only on paper, done only in exchange for votes.
This can't be the reason, simply because the relative share of GDP is so small. For Denmark, Sweden and Finland natural resources amount to less than 0.5% of GDP. For Norway it's 7%.
For Australia it's 5.4%, and for Canada 1.9%.
For comparison: In Congo, Lybia and Kuweit natural resources explain nearly 50% of GDP.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.TOTL.RT.ZS?most_...
You are basing this on some research? Or just general experience?
How is that the case? The retirees income is by neccesity balanced by the working population's output.
And also, any inflation graph I look at shows no "doubling in price" at any point. Or anything that looks loosely like it.
And this was not long ago. I have likely been around the sun fewer times than you have.
Raising 6-7 kids on less than 100k sounds tough, although I'd guess you're getting towards the upper end of middle class by that point. The median household income in NYC is around $64k according to USCB, which leaves around $52k after taxes and social security. The rent on a three-bed in Brooklyn doesn't seem to go much below $2k per month, which leaves $2.3k per month for bills, groceries etc... .
And your father was well off compared to what is described in the Parent's comment. Some good evidence of my point is that the average house in 1950 was about 1000 sq ft and had one bathroom.
Today, the average American home is about 2800 sq ft with multiple full bathrooms.
Another example is that in 1950, very few American families owned more than one automotible. Today it is normal to own 2, 3, or 4.
Food is much cheaper as a percentage of income, travel has gotten dramatically cheaper, and of course cheap technology and entertainment is coming out of our ears.
Not to mention modern medicine and creature comforts such as year round air conditioning in the home and auto.
People who think there has been a decline in the average Americans living standard since 1950 are either misinformed or trying to push a sketchy political agenda.
But it did not doubled, because such proposition assumes zero female labor participation in 1950 and that was not actually the case.
Also, the healthcare costs and education costs went up significantly. Yes, there is more space, because space is cheap in suburbs. In a lot of ways, the gains are something I would happily gladly trade for cheap healthcare or college.
Plus again, if you live in suburbs which were build and poplar only after 1950, the two cars are necessity. Because otherwise one partner is stuck at home without even being able to go shopping or take kids to school. In places with good public transport, the second or even first car is luxury. In suburb, you are way more pressured to have it.
And I believe the relevant economic effect was not so much an increase in the price of consumer goods but a suppression of wages, which otherwise might have been expected to grow at a rate closer to that of the GDP.
People will say that you can move out of the cities in the same breath as telling you to get an education in order to get a higher paying white collar job at a big company, so which is it?
It seems no matter the configuration of life the numbers end up weighted in favour of rent-seeking capitalism and even the salaryman following all the society best practices is pinching pennies just to enjoy a coffee.
Even when I earned triple figures I couldn't afford to live in the suburbs. So why play the game at all if the grand prize is just scraping by?
CPI 10x'ed since 1950
With 10-15k saved you can then buy a starter home in a smaller city or maybe outside the metropolitan area of a midsized city.
>> The demanding conditions sapped the life from workers. "You don't notice any old men here," said a Homestead laborer in 1894. "The long hours, the strain, and the sudden changes of temperature use a man up." Sociologist John A. Fitch called it "old age at forty."
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carnegi...
Modern times show us the '996 icu' work culture rising: https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU
My greatest fear is that there will not be enough jobs for everyone, and Andrew Yang's proposal for UBI will become even more important, but the 'cult of over-working' will keep it from ever being implemented:
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/18/womens-...
Gentle reminder that female employment was not 0. Depending on age, it was in between 35% and 39%. While it is significantly lower then male employment, the idea that no woman worked outside of house is a fantasy. They did earned less money then men and faced discrimination. But their salaries were important either to feed themselves, kids or generally add to family income.
Notably, Rosa Parks was employed and her unemployability after bus sit in was a big issue for her.
Yet moreover, issues like domestic violence were really acute for many middle class women too, having good job makes escape so much more easier. Career is not just frivolous thing, it is safety. Yet moreover, middle class men get sick, injured die and career makes you safer.
And second, discrimination on the jobs was as acute. Those women (and their families) needed work, full stop. Them being paid less or having bad working conditions was something that impacted them a lot. It was not just pocket money where the difference does not matter.
In all honesty, most software developers I know could probably sustain a really decent living working 50% of the time they are doing now, if they really wanted to. But for whatever reason, we _don't_ want to. It's almost like our expectations are what have inflated.
[1] Some things have gotten ridiculously expensive, like housing. However, other things have not, we're just buying much, much more of them. It's hard not to draw comparisons between our own children's environment and our own upbringing, as cliche as that might be, but they have a lot more "stuff" than we did, be it phones, tablets, sports classes and coaches, you name it.
And then there's the difference of lifestyle: In the 1950s most people did not own a car or a television. A family home would many times be smaller than a present one, even though families had more kids. And finally nowadays it's pretty normal to go on holiday abroad twice a year. In the 1950's this was unheard of.
This was a unique situation, only in the US, which was a small fraction of the world population. The majority of the world was in poverty. The average human lifestyle has seen drastic improvements since then. This comment seems to suggest that things have been getting worse, but it's the exact opposite at the global level. Things have never been better.
I don't even think it's necessarily that popular in American culture any more after the sort of financial excesses of the late aughts. The stereotypical banker who is coked up and accidentally destroys the economy isn't really as cool anymore as he was in the 80s
How is it seen if someone is at work by 7am? Or even 6am? Genuine question.
For a couple of reasons, I spent a period of time going into work at 6AM. Most came at 8 or 9. Far more people commented when I stayed until 6PM one day.
A former co-worker of mine used to do this as well. I didn’t notice for weeks and only because I logged in very early one day.
What no one seemed to notice was I was coming in at 11. I never felt the need to correct anyone.
Even in finance, the phenomenon of working crazy hours didn't end with the 80s. I'd be shocked if it wasn't still the norm there.
In the medical field, it's quite typical for doctors and nurses to work insanely long shifts and get by on very little sleep... this was the case even before the pandemic hit, but as everyone knows it's gotten even worse since as doctors and nurses started getting sick, dying, and quitting, leaving more work for the rest.
It's long been common in the tech field.. especially in startups, but even among established firms working long hours is quite common.
All sorts of people living paycheck to paycheck and undocumented workers are routinely exploited, and working long hours is common there too.
In many parts of the world it is the fortunate minority who can afford to have a healthy work-life balance and get enough sleep.
Making tired people less stupid would require a fundamental breakthrough in neuroscience---and it's not for want of trying that no one has found a way to do so yet.
My mum worked for the NHS and I'd regularly hear her complaining for weeks/months on end about new IT systems that either didn't work, were hard to use or were months or even years behind schedule. All while knowing how much these projects cost (it's all public info here) and that the people working on it where getting paid in a day what she would be lucky to make in a week.
There's, I suppose, a weird societal level "getting your money's worth" from their compensation - since their actual hourly rate would plummet on the basis of working 30 hour shifts non-stop and the like.
Not to mention that the institution as a whole has enormous difficulty actually properly handing off care between different providers, yet we would only see benefits from being effective at doing so - not to mention minimizing the impact of bad doctors.
Another thing is hospitals adopting air industry style checklists, which doctors fought tooth and nail as 'insulting'. Despite every ounce of evidence massively pointing toward this saving lives.
He also was a serious cocaine addict who injected it every day. It's of course an oversimplified historical narrative, but at least part of the reason medicine does things this way is the traditions were set up by someone out of his mind on coke.
One study compares the ACGME limits (max 24 hour shifts) against a "flexible" system with 28 hour ones. Unsurprisingly, there's no effect--since both groups are totally zonked at the end. Meanwhile, data from lab experiments and virtually every other field (trucking, aviation, etc) shows that performance craters well before that.
The rationale for long shifts (other than money) is "handoff": when a new doctor takes over, details about the patient's condition and treatment plan get lost in the shuffle. In some cases, they might not ever have been recorded (e.g., a subliminal impression of a patient's color or breathing). Many people are weirdly nihilistic about improving this, but it seems like it almost has to be the lower-hanging fruit since solving it doesn't require butting up against fundamental limits of human physiology.
I felt dismayed and sad. Was this life in academia? Luckily, only a short while later I went to another conference, this one dominated by European PhD students. More chill discussions over a beer at five o'clock, more talk about people's hobbies and free time. Still, hard work, but also life. I was relieved.
I have not been exposed to the work life of "ordinary" Americans, but all the stories seem to indicate that this attitude is pervasive. It's sad, I think. And certainly unhealthy. And it must also make work culture unbearable for Americans that do value a healthier work-life balance.
In American Psycho Patrick Bateman has it pretty chill, spending all his working hours on watching TV, reading magazines and talking trash with his peers. I used to think it was just another example of how unhinged he was, but maybe it’s a comment on some kind of double standard on workload vs. compensation in the corporate life.
And that's not even considering the management of expectations to prevent complaints about income inequality. I mean, you didn't work 80+ hour weeks, so, who are you to complain?
This. There's nothing bad in wanting to do a great job but most often you're not the one to benefit from that. Especially software devs, some of them can work miracles almost for free, just to get some recognition (but not too much, we don't want them to think they provide something extraordinary )
And I had a taste of something similar myself. Project dropped out of the sky on my plate with due date a little too close for comfort. So what do you do? If you want to deliver, something has got to give..
Obviously, this project wasn't important enough to be given to you with enough time to get it done. Deadlines are often artificial, and this is probably what it was. In the absence of any specifics, I'd say push back on the deadline, negotiate for what you need to deliver something acceptable within a reasonable time, and don't kill yourself for it. If you do kill yourself for this one project, that just sets an expectation for next time that you don't want to have set.
"We said we'd give them X, Y, Z by A for $N. Let's see how close we can get to it." Is not abnormal from my experience with major clients as well. I work in R&D so there is usually an expectation of delays and failures but in this world, the client has an idea of what they want and an upper budget if what they'll spend. People try and feel this out to get as close to their budget as possible and as little as the client with agree to for that budget. Actual budgeting based on requirements and planning doesn't happen, you simply grab the opportunity and run with it. Yes, much of R&D is complete shit show.
if dates can't be changed, you push back and ask for more resources to be hired.
As an analogy, a house can be painted by 1 guy over 10 days or 10 guys in 1-2 days.
You cannot always just slap more resources on a task to get it done on time. Something that a lot of management does not seem to understand.
But, the type of deadline you point out (we said we'd give them $STUFF by $DATE for $PRICE) is often flexible, if not artificial. For instance, maybe you can work out a schedule where by $DATE, you deliver $SUBSET_OF_STUFF for $LOWER_PRICE, while continuing to build out features to satisfy the original request, ending up delivering $STUFF for $PRICE.
Admittedly, this can be tricky. But, it can be done. I've done it before. Once a client has already agreed to a deal, they're generally inclined to stay with you, provided you're working in good faith with them. This can be somewhat of a sunk cost mentality, but it doesn't really matter as long as you're not taking advantage of that to soak them for cash.
I guess the moral of the story is that any contract is amendable and re-negotiable, if you approach it right. If it's not possible to deliver by $DATE without killing yourself and your team, then it's time to consider re-negotiating. And, as you said, in the real world, delays happen; clients may be willing to accept some small delays.
Even regulatory deadlines can sometimes be a little flexible, but that's a whole higher level of negotiation, and government agencies sometimes don't have the discretion to delay enforcement of new regulations, or the incentive to work with you to get you into compliance. In that case, the choice comes down to either a one-time push to deliver what's needed (and, you should be explicit that it is a one-time push), or temporarily eating the fines while delivering on a realistic schedule. I've never been in this type of situation, but I have dealt with government agencies before, and it can be a pain.
Reply with this: “Poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine.” ― Bob Carter
In my previous team, it would have been "yeah I'm sorry, but there is a fire, this customer is paying us XYZ and threating to take their bussiness elsewhere, ...". Saying "no" would at best give you some additional resources.
(Note that I did say "previous" team and the reason this kept happening is precisely why that team is no longer my current one)
If a problem needs solved by end of week and it takes at least 3 weeks to do properly, you document what you can do within normal office hours by the deadline and ask if that's enough.
If not, then they either need to approve overtime or extra resources. There's exactly zero chance I'm going to be using my free time to fix someone else's fuckup without proper compensation.
Who would be afraid of having to sit and twiddle their thumbs for half an hour waiting for the next meeting, if not someone desperate to uphold an image of being an over-worker?
If you read "The Meritocracy Myth" by Yale University law professor Stephen McNamee, you will understand the game being played here quite well. There are upper class Americans in particular who basically work extremely long hours (80-105 hour work weeks) to game the system, with no net productivity gains whatsoever compared to the middle and upper middle class who typically work 40-60 hour work weeks at maximum. In fact, the productivity gains generally wane off at about 32 hours per week, and we really do not need longer work hours in modern society, unless it is for the upper class to "protect" their status. Just like sleep is critical, rest is critical too, for recharging, so you can do a good job at work. The health effects of working extremely long hours, even if it affords you things and experiences others do not have, are just simply not worth it.
My father, who grew up as a very indignant American youth, who literally paid for all of his clothes starting by age 12, knew how to play this game very well. He was able to transcend the poor, working, and middle classes, and was comfortably in the upper middle class as senior level management, in the private sector, in finance, as a certified public accountant by training, by the time I was born. At my grandmother's funeral (his mother's funeral) people wished they were industrious as he was in his youth! The sad part about it is he died before he turned 60, and before his mother. It comes at a huge price.
There is some confused language being used here. If you're saying the marginal productivity of the 81st hour worked in a week is 0, then that is almost certainly wrong. If you're saying that the marginal productivity of the 81st hour in a week is less than that of the 32nd hour, that may well be true, but if so, nothing else of what you said follows from that.
No, I am correct here, and there is no "confused language" in my writing. This has been studied by prominent economists at Stanford University, which is ironically one of the worst Universities in the US for encouraging "working nonstop".
Once you work over 55 hours per week, your productivity at that point effectively becomes zero [1]. You effectively cannot accomplish anything more, productively, as a human, past 55 hours of work per week.
I suggest that you become more aware of human limitations, along with becoming more aware of human behavior, especially human tribalistic behaviors. Then you would not fall for these kinds of falsehoods. It would help you play "the game" more successfully, which you seem to take interest in.
[1] The Productivity of Working Hours (Stanford University study by economist John Pencavel): http://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf
As another commentor says, it simply can't be that marginal productivity drops to zero. At least, if you're trying to produce, there's some external motivation, then it'd take something really serious (starvation, massive sleep deprivation, etc.) to make it actually zero; more than just 'a long week'.
It's like if you're super motivated and work all-night on something exciting: if you were rational for a second, you'd realise you'd probably accomplish more on it with a few hours' break to sleep. But that doesn't mean the alternative is doing nothing in the last x hours.
It can even fall below zero. Imagine the totally overworked surgeon killing his patient because of fatigue and total exhaustion. His net productivity has fallen, reducing the outcome of the last 12 hours.
His contribution to 'product' is providing the service of surgery; he has done that.
But yes, overworked and tired surgeons are more likely to kill patients; killing patients bad; overworking surgeons bad. (It's just not a 'productivity' issue.)
This is just false but I suppose it’s all a matter of what you call “work”. For some people, going to client dinners and golf outings is “work”. I agree coding for 55+ a week is difficult but there are plenty of folks that have this ability to sit down and grind.
The idea that some economist at Stanford discovered a secret 55 hour breaking point for productivity that generalizes to every human on earth is beyond preposterous.
I suspect like many economist papers this does not replicate and is simply a means for generating headlines to help this person get tenure or funding for their work.
This is borne out in data from a British bomb factory during WWI. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ecoj.12166
Figures 1 and 2 (page 2060 and 2061) show that, across four cohorts doing different tasks, output plateaus at about 48 hours/week. Indeed, output from 70 hour week (10 hr/day x 7 days) was slightly lower than a 48 hour week (8 hr/day, with Sunday off). These workers were pretty motivated by the circumstances and doing skilled but not particularly creative work, so I suspect this is likely an upper bound.
There's lots of interesting data about working conditions from the the Health of Munition Workers Committee.
Law firm partners also don't generally make the same money on their 80th hour. Partnerships will split up the profit at the end of the year, and the number of hours billed and size of the partner's "book of business" factor in heavily here. The size of the book of business depends on the number of hours the partner bills (overseeing associates and paralegals, as well as doing independent work), so working more will increase a partner's share of the annual profits.
Also, a partner whose time is in high demand can raise rates (sometimes done by reducing discounts or charging clients a "NY rate"). So a partner who has plenty of work and doesn't mind not having more work can simply raise rates and make the 80th hour more expensive for clients.
I think you need to be a lot more specific citing 'evidence'.
I work a full time job and contract for at least 25hrs/week.
In my full time job I’m paid for 40hrs but not all 40 of those are productive. I take an hour lunch, we have a bunch of meetings and social things, etc.
If you ask, I work 65+ hours per week. If we’re being honest I probably only work 40 or less between lunch, catching up with coworkers sitting in meetings not doing anything, etc.
After the 55th hour, there was certainly productive work being accomplished. Less productive than the 1st hour I am sure, but the amount of valuable work being done was more than zero. It was observably evident.
BUT if you know your workday is exactly 8 hours with a 30 minute lunch in the middle, you'll pace yourself differently.
The difference between two equal people doing the same thing, one working until they drop and the other working 8 hours and leaving, isn't big enough to warrant the longer hours worked in the long run.
The one working longer hours might get more work done for a day, maybe a week or two. But after months of work the first person is burned out and the second one is still going strong.
I love technology and I enjoy my work, but it doesn't define me as a human being. There are opportunities I've had to do some work at what people would consider "prestigious" companies but I've turned it down in order to have better work life balance.
This is it.
I've had various issues with unrealistic requests and timelines from those to whom I report, and it feels as if I need to, somehow, "work harder" (whatever that means) to prove that I'm trying to execute their impossible plan.
When I get home, however, the mere presence of my wife and kids, and even pet(s), remind me of how I actually define myself, WHO I AM.
I like art. Be it paintings, music, film, TV shows. That's where I find "myself". I'm good at things I do for work, but I don't care about it the way I care about the meanings of life I can find staring into a painting, or listening to a song (anywhere from Mr. Bungle to Debussy) or watching a TV show (anywhere from Adventure Time to For All Mankind).
I'm privileged enough, and have planned ahead enough, that I could significantly downgrade my already not-very-prestigious, but quite demanding job, and live well.
My job doesn't come close to defining me, to myself anyway. That's probably the other "thing" - how people want to be able to define themselves to others. I'm relatively unaffected by that particular neuroticism.
I like coding. The thinking, the problem solving, the expressiveness, the chiselling out of a solid block of emptiness. It is my art.
I made it my trade. It's a double-edged sword, with which I badly stabbed myself a couple of times. I tried to drop out, but can't help but come back to it.
The job's not me alright, the coding is a big part of me for sure.
> The thinking, the problem solving, the expressiveness, the chiselling out of a solid block of emptiness
Beautifully illustrated. I like a blank whiteboard; it represents potential.
By not coding for 8 hours. There are many more aspects to being a developer than writing code - documentation, code review, testing, planning, mentoring, etc. Even if you're quite junior and don't get involved in things like planning you can being doing "low mental workload" tasks like writing lots of repetitive-but-necessary tests or manually QAing your own tasks before pushing them to a PR. Your day absolutely should not be 8 hours of extremely focused dev work except on rare occasions when it's needed.
This I tried, took me a long while to realise I should not have, because "low load" is still load, and what I really needed was rest because I had myself throughly mentally exerted.
On top of that "low load" doesn't mean the task is of less importance. Mistakes come by easier when one's already exerted.
I don't think the parent meant it that way but suggesting that solution can come out as demeaning for people that already are on the edge of exhaustion and internally questioning themselves.
I can do that kind of deep focus, I just can't do it two days in a rows and expect any efficiency the second one, let alone a full week.
Truth be told, I somewhat have to do that due to some sort of mild attention disorder (I can't imagine what life must be like for those with a more serious condition).
Thankfully over the years intentional practice of a great deal of sports taught me that long term consistency is what matters, doesn't matter if I do things in bursts as long as I don't overexert and rest appropriately (and especially don't bash myself for it).
But that requires full agency over my work time, something that I took a decade to unlock via being remote: in a 9-5 office people can't help but wonder why you're slacking all day and dragging your feet in order not to straight up not turning up for work.
The feeling of wasting time and the judgemental attitude (both from others and myself) just made me feel miserable, even though overall I was outputting the work and then some.
I don't care about prestige, I just care about my well being, and not being disparaged.
I sometimes enter "the zone" in which I lose track of time and work just flows. But not every day.
People in the upper class don't need to work because they're able to live off of, and build wealth from, their assets.
The lower and middle classes are defined by their economic precarity that hinges on their ability to sell their labor. If someone needs to work to "protect their status", they're upper middle class at best.
I think this is a pretty clever meta comment, but for those who don’t know, it’s a quite graphic book. I never had the stomach for it.
Put this way, 'overwork culture' would be a collective action problem in the context of an economic system where owners have more leverage than workers.
So what about tech, where workers seem to have high leverage? Why do they still overwork? One factor that may be overlooked is this: workers are not only competing against their contemporaries but also future workers (which may be more numerous and perceived as less expensive).
Do they?
In my experience, most software engineers do experience a better work/life balance, especially at startups where they have more leverage. Even so, we can do better.
1. Efficiency wages. Highly motivated and skilled programmers are so much better at their jobs than unmotivated and unskilled replacements that it's best to "overpay" above the market-clearing price, giving employers meaningful choice in applicants and regain some of the negotiating power in the relationship.
2. Tournament theory of compensation. Quantifying performance of engineers is difficult, but rank-ordering them (especially without an explicit stack-ranking) is relatively easy. So an efficient solution is to overpay the best-performing "winners" and underpay the rest, getting the same incentive effects as piece work without the cost of quantifying work output.
It annoyed me so much that I decided to create https://4dayweek.io/ - Software Engineering jobs with a better work / life balance
Where I’m at 10am to 4pm are the core hours and the rest is flexible. Overtime can be recouped in half days or full days off if you’ve organised appropriately with the team.
My suspicion is that it’s simply easier to make disgruntled noises generally about 9-5 than actually negotiating seriously at the smaller end of the scale on behalf of you or your team.
Watch their jaw drop
edit: use responsibly, social intelligence required (like don’t say it to your boss, but as a jab at a good friend)
It's a very true sentiment though. Another one that often comes to my mind when people brag about amount of hours work is something along the lines of: "Do you know that you're effectively being paid at near minimum wage?" (obviously not true for everyone, but some people's salary goes from 'decent' to 'minimum wage' per hour worked)
But it's even worse than just being paid less per hour worked:
For each hour you work, you lose an hour of 'life'. Working 10 hour days instead of 8 hour days means that you lose 10 hours of 'life' a week.
I think a better response would be "why are you proud of having less free time than me?" I remember in school people would often brag about how little sleep they got and when they said that to me I'd say "why are you proud of how unhealthy your life is?" I would NOT say "sucks for you that you're too dumb to study enough and get to bed by 11". That would be a dick move.
Yeah, people tend to be surprised when someone says something intentionally hurtful
Others have already pointed out what an asshole thing this is to say, but I think a more important thing to note about it is that it's simply incorrect. If your income/wealth is directly related to total output, and your capacity isn't capped, then regardless of how good you are at it, doing it 2x as much means 2x the value produced.
I'm good enough at what I do that I never have to work again if I don't want to, but I still work 10+ hours every day because it's fun and I like it, and maybe it would be nice to have a boat one day.
"Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration." -- Edison
"Had Edison thought out his work and spent more time in preparation, he would not sweat so much." -- Tesla
Is this “cult” about daring to spend less of your life watching TV? I’m missing some central perspective judging my the comment thread.
Richard Feynman
It sounds like giving up on "working" can sometimes be the first step to high output for some people. I know I've had that experience.
I see it as a rediscovery of how Feynman’ work was his true calling after all and how he chose to do more physics, instead of more reading, for pleasure.
Sadly here in the US that's seen as bad or unproductive. The whole chasing the productivity numbers has become a fetish in this country where we can't imagine that productivity is better measured in how little we waste our time versus how much more profit we make. If it takes an hour to make the same profit versus last year that should be celebrated and rewarded but it seems the latter part, the reward, is always withheld. Even if it's something silly like pizza for lunch or a gift card. There's just more of the "well work more" attitude which is just nonsense to me. The whole "line must go up" cult needs to be expunged from the human species, I swear.
My company is really good about work life balance. But there are plenty of people, myself included, who log in on the weekends or at 2AM and write code or review stuff. Coding is fun!
There are people out there who do for pay something very similar to what they would do if they had millions of dollars.
I'm not recommending flipping burgers for free overtime, but it's ludicrous to claim that working hard doesn't pay dividends in professional high-skill fields for fair employers.
I'm also a well paid software developer, but I spent my 20s recording albums, learning to garden, staying fit, and generally not spending my time making money for someone else for free.
(obviously you need to work for a startup which reciprocates. but most do).
People fought hard for our rights to free time. People died for this right. If your work makes your company more money, they should pay you. They shouldn’t reward your hard work with something vague like job prospects and opportunities, no they should pay you overtime with money. If you work more then 40 hours a week, you should get your extra hours payed in overtime (not less then 90% of your base wage). If they don’t want to give you that, you are being exploited by your bosses.
Do know that you can practice your skills and get your fair share for your work. Don’t let anyone exploit your work. You’re worth more than that. Solidarity.
I don't need your patronization or protection.
It would be more effective than going around trying to convince software engineers they are chumps for working hard.
You see the more workers that do work for free the less value all our work is. And hundreds of years of labor struggle will all be for nought.
Cut down the tall ones because they create problems for the shorter ones.
Maybe fix your company culture to create norms? If some exceeds those norms so what?
The labor struggle is one that is fought bottom-up. Unless we stand united, the bosses hold all the cards. A single worker has no power to fix their companies culture, but a united workforce does. This is not applicable to the tall poppy syndrome at all.
In fact if you want to find a silly analogy, call it the weak link problem. An almost united workforce will get exploited through the few that aren’t.
If more work and more hours make your bosses more money, they should pay you more, if they don’t, this work is wasted on making your bosses more money and cheapens the value of the work for the rest of us. If you realize this and stop working overtime, that is also a good thing. More time with your family, at your local chess club, the pub, or in your personal code repos.
I think the myth of (3) unions stagnate job efficiency is a result of bad union practices (I don’t know of examples but I’m sure there are plenty) then of solidarity. There is nothing inherent about a union that will make job efficiency stagnate.
This is what folks who worked at GM in Detroit told me. Guys would punch in, then head to the bar. I remember seeing local new coverage with undercover video of these guys being at strip clubs while on the clock. Was going on for years.
Here is a more recent example...
https://www.autoblog.com/2012/12/10/chrysler-workers-fired-f...
Culture matters.
https://www.good.is/money/france-lets-you-disconnect
> In France, if you’re a company of 50 employees or more, you cannot email an employee after typical work hours. The labor law amendment has come about because studies show that in the digital age, it’s increasingly difficult for people to distance themselves from the workplace during their off hours. This new provision allows people to get the full advantage of their time off.
> “All the studies show there is far more work-related stress today than there used to be, and that the stress is constant,” Benoit Hamon of the French National Assembly told the BBC. “Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash — like a dog. The texts, the messages, the emails — they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down.”
I admit that it might just work well for me as I don't actually need work life balance or really use the time off. What I mean is that I have never experienced any pressure to work beyond regular hours. I am not sure that the weekend/2AM logins/commits are supported. I have never heard much comment on them at all really.
Setting the example for the rest of the team when you are explicitly/implicitly recognized as the leader is very important. I had to learn this lesson recently.
For example, I signaled to the team last Friday that I was not going to be working at all this weekend. Checked my email just now and neither did anyone else. If I put something up for code review on Saturday afternoon, someone else on the team is likely to pop in for review and then likely do some work tasks themselves. Its not that this is bad, but you have to be aware that it is happening and moderate it accordingly.
That's ridiculous. The protection should be to protect the employee who sets their phone/computer not to check email during off hours, not a prohibition on the sender uploading a message to their mail server's queue.
I email my staff at 2am constantly. I don't expect replies until they're "at work" (wherever and whenever that may be).
If someone wishes to volunteer to work 24/7, it isn't my job to stop them. It's insane of them, though, and I might contemplate firing someone who felt pressured to act/respond at 2am (for being dumb and unreasonable).
Just because you think there is no pressure to reply, doesn't mean there isn't a societal/workplace culture that pushes people to do so when their superiors ask for something. Same reason you can tell a co-work something is dumb, but you would say 'lets look it from another angle' to a manager or ceo.
That's usually the case, the above source didn't explain it correctly.
The law actually only obligates the company to agree a set of rules with the staff elected representatives (usually from a union). In almost all cases, those rules are simply that employees cannot be obligated to connect outside their paid work hours, and not suffer any consequence for not connecting.
Gaslighting your team could backfire in any number of ways.
It is normal to work at 2am if you work the way I and most of my associates work.
I think it's fairly common for hackers and other deep-thinking types to work very intensely for 2-5 minutes at a bunch of different times all throughout the day.
But why not work on a fun personal project instead of giving your labour away for free? (I am assuming you are not the majority owner of your company)
If your company doesn’t allow taking the following morning off. Don’t do this. They don’t deserve your extra work. Find a technique that takes your mind off you work (personally I like to count up the American Presidents since Lincoln; or the states admitted in order since Vermont; takes me right to sleep before I reach Oregon [although my company allows me to take the following morning off, most of the time I feel like sleeping rather then working]).
Now I sleep with a notebook by my bed. When this happens, I write down enough of the solution to convince my brain I won't forget it. Then getting back to sleep is easy.
Either a digital todo-list or a physical notebook both work for me.
As long as you can convince your mind that the task is stored in a safe place so it's OK to stop thinking about it - you can get back to it any time you need to.
Please consider that before you clock in at 2AM to write code so that your bosses can make more money. Your work, your body, and our solidarity is worth more then that.
I’ll start by clarifying: I’ve never said GP can just stop doing work. What I’m iterating on is that their work is worth something, and their overtime work is worth more. They should not be doing overtime work unless they get fair compensation.
Now that that is cleared, I’m gonna assume you are answering some of my other posts where I talk repeatedly about solidarity. My call for solidarity is a plead to not work overtime without compensation because it cheapens the work for the rest of us. I’m asking GP (and others on this thread) to not give their bosses free labor because I don’t want my bosses to demand free labor from me. You see solidarity is needed because if most workers our industry gives free labor, then I can’t be expected not to, I’ll just get fired.
There is no win-win in a class struggle. For us workers to win, our bosses must loose. Past labor activists have fought hard to give us our benefits which include paid overtime. If we don’t use it, we will loose it. 1-0 for our bosses. However if we use it, and get paid overtime: 0-1 for us and the struggle continues.
I’ve worked with people who have dedicated their lives to their work. They like it. They’ll work weekends and evenings. Nobody is making them do it.
So much this. I have worked places where the work was boring and everybody is just phoning it in 9-5, and places where people work weekends because they're truly engaged in their work.
In theory, the former has great work/life balance but every hour at work felt like a drag, I wasn't engaged, I wasn't growing. And worse still, I didn't even really understand this when it was happening. I just thought work was awful like this and even started looking at other careers to get out.
Then I worked at a couple places in that latter category. It was night and day. I was still able to live my life, but I was more engaged, getting amazing opportunities and growing a LOT more.
I've always tried to be careful about the message I send by working weekends or nights. I don't brag when I do it. Try to keep it low profile by not communicating with coworkers (unless it's an outage or something). If my manager asks me to more than on rare occasions, it's also not acceptable.
I've had to physically take away a "coding is fun" -person's laptop, disabled all their logins and their office keyfob and force them to take their mandatory vacation.
Without this they would've worked during vacation and committed a bunch of stuff on their first day back to not get caught working during holidays...
Even then they replicated the Java stack they were working on with Rust, from memory, at home during the vacation. Just for fun.
When you love your job, maybe a bit too much, it becomes really hard to see when you've burned out. Sometimes dreaming about code is a good thing, your subconscious is working on a problem. Other times it's a sign of burnout.
I've been there and now I know how to not end up there - and I try my best to not have people who work with me burn out either.
In psychology it quite often arises that something we perceive as a good trait but is generally kind of vague (like say self esteem) turns out to be correlated with what we consider bad more tangible traits (like narcissism, and criminal behavior). I wouldn’t be surprised if work enthusiasm is similar and correlates way more with stress, burnout, and high turnover rates, then with the popularly believed successful career.
I did a quick scan on search results for "work enthusiasm" google scholar and the research seems mixed. There are a lot of studies that correlate work enthusiasm (or worker’s zest) with good outcome, but a few in between that correlated it with burnout. This was also the case before the self-esteem camp was brought down with quality research.
If you are enthusiastic there is one more thing that might burn out. I am usually quite enthusiastic when at a new job, but as soon as I start to despise the process or are forced to do a half assed job it the enthusiasm fades.
It got way less stressful for me when I stopped to care that much about the end result and worked less hard (I never worked overtime, I mean per hour) since I figured that I did not have the authority anyway to change most stuff. I guess that is some form of burn out of spirit.
In the beginning of my career I though I was way better then my colleges, but I realized that they had mostly just "burned out" before me and did the bare minimum.
I spent my early career doing stuff way too fast and thoroughly. After the fifth time a spec changed midway and invalidated most of my work I slowed down to the proper level and started getting praise for being so fast =)
As time goes on it feels more and more like the developer community is here for the money and not the challenge/fun/etc. And that is totally cool. I just worry about the higher order consequences of technology employees principally motivated by money and not the inherent correctness or value of a technology solution. Accusatory phrases like "NIH Syndrome" seem to be used less frequently by those who enjoy programming regardless of the money. Perhaps there is the risk of leaving some innovation on the table if your entire team is full of people like this. But maybe it makes perfect sense for your business model (i.e. just vendor everything out).
Also, working 60 hour weeks on a regular basis is not viewed as "healthy" by some, but I feel fucking incredible doing what I am doing right now. If I had not pushed through some painful adventures, I probably would not have the level of experience & autonomy that I get to enjoy today.
I do recognize that there are a lot of work environments in which certain virtuous cycles are not allowed to iterate properly. I did have to change jobs 6+ times before I found something that fit me. The notions presented throughout HN regarding "toxic" interactions/teammates/et. al. are certainly the most adverse force I have encountered in my career. Nothing is more devastating to innovation and career advancement than some salty crab pulling the rest of the crabs back down into the bucket. If you love technology but cant stand the work for whatever reason, maybe pop in for a few interviews elsewhere.
I am certain the apocryphal slacker is out there, otherwise we'd not have the parody. From my perspective at least, people had to produce, regardless of what they were expected to deliver. If they didn't, they eventually got moved out.
Just grab an empty box and say you're delivering it to the other end of the factory when someone asks. Works every time if you're confident enough.
They definitely work more and things like parental are also not really a thing.
Source: a friend of mine works there now.
Everything I know about Tesla would lead me to believe that it would be a high pressure/high output environment; seems like there's more than enough publicity about this out there.
The attitude tends to attract more responsibility (which can sometimes mean more work) and leadership opportunities. Both in career settings, and organizations where I volunteer. And I've noticed it can be contagious. e.g. If I'm willing to sit "in the trenches" with a developer on my team to help them solve a nasty bug, they'll often take advantage of the opportunity even if it's after hours once the regular workday has quieted down.
I do consulting now, and usually charge by the hour. It's a good arrangement - for my clients because they get as much (or little) of my attention as they need, and for me because I know at least when things get demanding my compensation scales accordingly. Once a CEO dragged me into his office and complained I was the highest "paid" person at the company, including himself. I explained why he was getting incredible value, asked him to point out anyone who put in the same hours and suggested hiring more staff so they didn't need to lean on me as hard.
On the other hand, there were times I under-quoted fixed contracts, and ended up effectively netting less than minimum wage. But my work ethic stayed the same throughout.
I've noticed backlash on HN lately against people who work long hours. I'm not sure where it comes from. If there are devs here who bought into the vision at a startup which didn't pan out and came away feeling cheated, or if it's plain old laziness or entitlement.
I get that people have other priorities in life, and that's just fine. I've worked with 9-5ers who diligently stick to the clock. They're focused on family, other interests, etc. Nothing wrong with that. I know people for whom the job is "just a job", not a passion. That's OK too - although sometimes it makes me sad when I get the sense it's not so much a question of work/life balance as it is they just don't enjoy it and might feel more inspired doing something else.
Whatever the impetus, it's no reason to beat up on hard workers who've chosen to make their career a priority.
My pet theory is that with higher wages and popularity, the fraction of engineers who build stuff for fun have gone down and there's more people who are doing it purely for money. They care less about the "craft", the joy of problem solving and building, and don't see their work as their "calling". Rather, it's purely a means to an end, and they only care about minimal efforts and maximal monetary returns.
Given this anecdote, I don’t believe most people are talking about exceptions like you. The majority of people don’t make much money for working long hours, both in blue collar and white collar jobs.
There's no problem with this. You get compensated by the extra hours you work.
BUT when salaried workers start "doing whatever it takes" without any compensation except for promises of a brighter future, that's when things start falling apart.
If the employer isn't willing to pay for overtime, the project clearly isn't in a hurry. Of course everything needs to be ready NOW, but when they actually need to pay for getting it done faster, suddenly it isn't that essential any more.
I've been in the industry for 20+ years and I can count the times I've gotten overtime pay with one hand. One of those times paid for a full kitchen remodel (200-300% pay, 24 hours worked over a weekend to get shit working in prod by Monday).
https://ourworldindata.org/exports/annual-working-hours-per-...
In the past most work was directly tied to feeding your family.
E.g.
Job 1: average 40 hrs/week, 30 days PTO, yearly salary $100k
Job 2: average 50 hrs/week, “flexible” PTO, yearly salary $130k
The maths:
Job 1
40(hr/wk) * 52(wk/yr) = 2080(hr/yr)
2080(hr/yr) - 240 hours PTO = 1840 hours worked per year
$100k/1840 = $54.35/hr
Job 2
“Flexible” PTO is a tough thing to estimate, obviously, but I’ll be generous and assume one takes 20 days.
50(hr/wk) * 52(wk/yr) = 2600(hr/yr)
2600(hr/yr) - 160 hours PTO = 2440 hours worked per year
$130k/2440 = $53.28/hr
So there ya go. Even with a 30% pay “increase”, overworking yourself as a salaried employee at Job2 ends up earning you less per hour than the salaried position at Job1. Obviously, there are all sorts of fair arguments for what _potential_ benefits you might reap from putting in those extra hours, so it’s entirely personal whether it’s worth it or not to you. Depends on how valuable 600 extra hours per year of free time is to you. For me, it’s Job1 999 times out of 1000.
Boy did I misjudge the general insanity of MORE MORE MORE FASTER FASTER FASTER all around me. If my team didn't deliver 'X' by 'Y' (for some 'Y' that wasn't obtainable without overworking my team) the entire management chain above me was flipping their shit. There were sales and PM shooting daggers at me out of their eyes as I explained that our plan requires 6 months to execute with excellence, including thorough testing and having the right metrics in place. I had one PM flat-out say that his own promotion was on the line if we didn't go balls-to-the-wall on the project and cut whatever corners we could, but there was absolutely no external force that required us to shave 45 days off the schedule. These were enterprise contracts in a huge industry with mountains of leeway on what we delivered and when.
My team did deliver, and we did a fine job of it, but the entire thing helped convince me that engineering management just isn't for me if I am not allowed to work at my own pace and prioritize the things that are important to me, such as delighting customers and building reliable systems. I left that job to be an IC again, and I'm back to working reasonable hours and really taking the time to do the sort of "deep work" with a refreshed mind that I need to do in order to come up with good ideas and durable systems. I'm not going to make as much money as quickly as I would have if I were willing to overwork myself and my team, but in the end, I take Joseph Campbell's philosophy on career ambitions.
"It's not worth it."
edit: My point is that believing hard work pays off is a much more effective framework for achieving literally anything.
It's important to realise that both play a role, because you don't want to self sabotage when your business fails due to extraneous circumstance. Perhaps you should try again, preparing better for things you can't control. Perhaps it really just was a bad time to get promoted and you should stick with the company longer.
It's also important to realise that someone who got a couple mill as an inheritance or "boost" for their business will always have a leg up - if you're measuring success in monetary terms. The same goes for challenging entrenched competition in your sector. Perhaps you should re-target to businesses that will be amenable to your agility and tailor-made solutions, because that kind of service might not be offered by well-established competitors.
Equally important is realising that there is a basic truth to the biblical parable of the talents: no matter what you get, you won't get anywhere without applying yourself, whatever that means to you.
I don't know anyone glorifying this lifestyle.
Somehow everyone’s always busy with things to work on, even the guy I see watching YouTube videos after standup.
Work _IS_ exciting if it fits with one's target. I think the key takeaway is that one _CAN_ love his work, or at least part of it, which results in overwork, which is normal and even should be encouraged. But none should be forced to overwork in the ideal world.
>"We glorify the lifestyle, and the lifestyle is: you breathe something, you sleep with something, you wake up and work on it all day long, then you go to sleep," says Anat Lechner, clinical associate professor of management at New York University. "Again and again and again."
IMO this is actually indeed the ideal way to live. You burn your life for something you love. You live with it, expose your soul to it and you bet all your awaken time on it. Gekko, regardless whether his actions were legal or not, indeed worked the job he loved and as a fund manager he had his way in the fund. This is perfect for anyone.
On my side, let's just say that work, albeit that 80% of it is boring, is still a lot more interesting than non-work, that includes changing diapers, cooking meals and others. Plus it pays the bills.
I doubt Musk saw 100 hr weeks as soul-draining drudgery where he needed to run out the clock.
(N.b. I recommend Josef Pieper's "Leisure: The Basis of Culture"[3] if you want to understand what leisure is and how it differs from recreation.)
[0] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=culture
[1] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=cult
Are you willing to name and shame? 60+ hours a week, much less 90, sounds utterly and completely insane to me. I would consider those companies outliers, and have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that you've apparently found yourself at 2 outliers in a row.
Obviously location matters, so for reference: I was in Seattle while at a FAANG, and now work fully remote.
Perhaps you have to learn to say "No" to things you don't have time for in a regular workday.
As Stephen Covey put it in 7 Habits, when asked to do more, pull out your prioritized, filled-out calendar and ask which item they'd like you to deprioritize to take on the new task. Then you'll discover their real priorities.
Don't work 80 hours a week unless you're compensated for 80 hours a week.
Working so that others may get rich at our own expense is relatively new, and it’s largely a marketing message, done by those who are getting rich, and they are tapping into what’s wired into our brains.
Largely because listing ALLLL the things, large and small, that gets done in a work day is a hard problem, especially for managers to track. And employees don't really want that level of invasion into their day.
However, maybe I am missing something in most of the comments in here. Everybody seems to agree with the article and against working longer hours.
However, how are you supposed to 'get ahead' if not by working longer and/or harder than your peers? There is obviously a balance here, but knowledge and, implicitly, higher income doesn't just happen. If you don't push harder, you won't get more. And I honestly don't think I can ever be satisfied with any given salary in perpetuity.
If you're a well-paid SWE, you're probably in the top 1% of the world: eating anything you want, living happily, likely without debt (or could easily pay it off). And here you are thinking you still need more, and thinking you'll never be happy with it.
Suppose I can produce the required output in less time (say 20h per week) because I’m just so smart.
Then why would I spend the other 20h just watching TV? Why not produce up to twice the output by working 40h?
If your answer is “I get paid the same regardless of my output,”then that’s the wrong terms for so smart a person.
Employment is for those who (unlike you) aren’t confident about their output capacity and have to resort to selling their input capacity.
If your answer is “I don’t need that much money” then I guess the counter is “I don’t need that much recreation”.
- TV/video games/Facebook
- drinking/drugs/gluttony whether as thrill-seeking or sedatives
- a creative “hobby” (i.e. another job that they’re not good at)
- “traveling” (larping to farm for Instagram validation)
I just find it more interesting to pursue my actual trade.
Of course we all need some amount of rest to stay sharp, but excesses of leisure never seem to produce much, not even happiness. YMMV.
When you say ”I don’t get it...”, my interpretation is that you lack empathy toward people that face life differently from you. Not that is any sort of puzzling behavior, it’s just you failing to make an effort to understand other people.
My observation is merely that a) people rarely seem “happy” in proportion to leisure time spent, b) most people’s leisure time consists of trite activities, steered by indulgent appetites, and is easy prey for others to profit off.
The thread at large makes it sound like all these philosopher kings would pursue their true calling and have wonderful adventures, living life to its fullest, if their boss never wanted them to work late.
Maybe a warmer more empathetic person would refrain from pointing this out. Would people be better off not hearing uncomfortable opinions? A consequentialist might approve of some tough love at times.
I am not reading between the lines, I am reading the lines that you wrote. Accusing me of that ”betraying my own disdain” is just silly.
Obviously you have a very high opinion of yourself. I don’t. I just think you are wrong and silly at some times.
Isn't this you "judging"?
Observation: most people suck at dancing.
Judgement: most people suck at dancing, and that makes them worse than me, for I’m a great dancer.
You may like to work your trade, and that makes you happy, but it doesn't apply to everyone.
The point is that most people, given leisure time, let themselves down. People waste their free time mostly unintentionally. The best of intentions gives way to base impulse and then we rationalize.
Shorter hours would not make you finally learn that instrument.
Why do I do it?
Because there are plenty of things I want to do with my free time and I need time more than I need money. I want to trim my bonsai, I want to go bouldering, I want to go the gym, I want to have time to shop without the after-work rush, I want to work on hobby coding projects, I want to read, I want to solve differential equations, I want to watch TV, I want to clean my house in leisure.
So... why would I produce 25% more for my employer in exchange for 25% more money that I don't really need to lose that time doing things I love? Is anyone's life so simple that more personal time equates fully to just more tv time?
People do more than just TV.
It’s more time spent in with your community. Gardening and spending time outdoors. Time spent exercising or taking a long walk. Spending more time with my child in their formative years. Making music or painting to stimulate my mind differently than the usual work. Reading many books.
What is production, without free time is. What is production, without a life to enjoy.
An active community, body, or brain is not recreation, it’s oxygen.
When I look at what people do off work, it’s mostly TV. They paint like once, then throw out the art supplies. Their kids are watching YouTube on iPads. Participation in the “community” amounts to celebrity gossip, out-group fear-mongering, or inane small talk.
The bubble you live in and describe does not sound like all bubble or even most of them. Canada, Europe, Argentina, many places where I don’t see what you described.
A lot of people also have this thing in which work has actually become their comfort zone and they make no effort to learn hobbies or take more responsibilities out of work. Not saying it's right or wrong, just to them "not working" isn't that easy nor enjoyable.
However as a freelancer I had more or less total control over the amount and kind of jobs I would take on — now that I work in a fixed position this control is somewhat gone (or I have to learn deal with it in a different way). My goal to do work up to my standard stayed, which means there is an inbalance between the amount of work I got to do and the time I have. This also has to do with the quality of my work: Doing things well does take longer, but more importantly if people know you are doing things well a lot of things will get pushed your way.Now I could lower my standard, but in fact I'd rather quit than lower that standard.
I probably need to say no more often within the job.
Ever since I switched from 8h/day 5d/week to 4h/day 4d/week I'm far more productive than I've ever been. Hard focus for 4 hours is way more efficient than fucking around for 8 hours a day. In software engineering that's also where the worst bugs appear, out of annoyed/tired/overworked brains.
Now I work freelance and I let my clients know that I'll work my own hours, but I get shit done. So far, so good.
Because we are frequently utilizing any and every method to increase our self worth, to not only justify fleeting happiness, but give reason to our ever-fading presence on this cold rock we call home. The latter is particularly difficult to encapsulate.
One of my favourite quotes:
> "Finally, we now have at our disposal a set of technologies that would be able to make most of human labour redundant. Instead of profiting from the ease allowed by a production devolved to machines, humans find themselves competing against technology and are thus forced to reduce their demands and expectations to the level of the machine. We try to work as much and as tirelessly as machines do, and by doing so we turn ourselves into second-rate production machines, never as efficient as the real ones." ~ Federico Campagna
But the thing is, work (ethic) is essentially the only thing that one can control.
Other people may be more talented, or have more intelligence but work ethic comes from within. Just like being disciplined and working out and exercising (which is also similar as the motivations to train vary widely).
I remembered this from Will Smith talking about it. His movie pursuit of Happyness is relevant to the topic https://youtu.be/05nOroFYIF8
I don't think enjoying life when old (fire or rich pension plans) is a good plan either as it's not that likely to even get there without serious health issues (statistics, not because I'm unhealthy) and my today's money is worth nothing then when I would need it.
Working little but smart, don't be wasteful with your money and invest smart is kinda what I try doing.
If the work is interesting I'm really excited to solve problems but I definitely don't want to do it all my life.
I'm 33yo and just trying to feather my nest.
I think I'll always work and never retire but would love to only work maybe 2-4 hours a day on my own terms
“As long as there are those that remember what was, there will always be those that are unable to accept what can be.” (Avengers: Endgame, 2019)
Solution? Same need to reduce everything till last atom and start again..
I make very sure to balance it out though and if my company doesn't do or require time tracking, I will do it myself.
What I do though is to be 100% there during work hours. Meaning in the office it's work not play or personal time. Reading HN is not for work hours for example. Same now with the WFH. Work time is work time and I get everything I want to done in the regular hours and fingers crossed so far nobody has ever complained to me about it.
I am very allergic to deadlines dropped on me because someone else didn't plan ahead properly as well. HR, C-level and marketing come to mind.
Everyone else can complain about the situation this imposes but those people have a right to over work themselves. And of course, ON AVERAGE, they are going to make more money and be more successful. So other people try to follow suit because they want the same results.
No one is forcing you to overwork. I can promise you there are many many people living on communes all over the world who spend all day doing aerobatic yoga and eating organic quinoa and getting one over on "the man". If you don't like it go and join them.
The US needs to get back to the 8 hour day, the 40 hour work, time and a half for overtime, a living minimum wage, and a union rep to push back when the boss wants to violate that.
Unions. The people who brought you the weekend.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/08/where-t...
I disagree for most salaried positions though - soft skills, politics and luck play a huge role
Anyways, it's not exclusively true that work-life balance has to be sacrificed. I met a very successful business owner (millionaire, to quantify) a while ago who didn't do meetings before midday. Hated it, and would prefer to meet late afternoon. If being "somebody" includes financial success, they illustrated that it's not necessarily incompatible with a happy work-life balance.
Tbh, I'm not interested in being that kind of somebody. I'd rather be a good friend, good at my job, and doing the work my God has set out for me to do.
If I can nail those I think I'm doing pretty well. Dare I say I might even be satisfied.
I found a job where I worked remotely and people legitimately cared about what I accomplished over weeks and months without even seeing how long I worked each day. I took full advantage and worked weird but not particularly long hours. Counterintuitively, this helped me do more: I wrote maintainable code with fewer bugs, so, once I had a solid foundation, I could do experiments and add new business logic fast. Based on code I've seen on other projects, it's not hard to imagine a different codebase doing the same thing where a one-day feature in my world would have been a two-week feature instead. Now I'm sure you're thinking to yourself that I'm exaggerating, but I've absolutely seen teams and projects with this kind of productivity delta.
It's always hard to convince people about counterfactuals, but in software "slow is smooth and smooth is fast" is absolutely true. If you take your time and avoid unnecessary deadline pressure up-front, you will average substantially less time on new logic and debugging. The difficulty, of course, is that when you do this right it looks like you're solving easy problems while the team that coded themselves into a corner and constantly have to fight fires look like heroes burning the midnight oil. (There's the cult of overwork again!)
It helped that I ended up contrasted with somebody who took on a lot of responsibility only to strew overcomplicated garbage across multiple parts of our codebase. The rest of the team took a depressingly long time to recognize the problem, but it eventually wasted too much of everyone's time to ignore. I am not sure that anything short of a painfully tangible demonstration in this vein would convince people without direct experience that the dynamic I'm talking about is real and important!
Anyway, working reasonable hours actively helped me do better work and I am convinced this is true for most software work and most people. As a bonus, it worked out pretty well for me, I got promoted. I still have reasonable hours but the work is now far more people-oriented which means my impact, if anything, is even less related to my hours! What I'm realizing is that if you're a manager and you want to build a resilient and productive team, you actively do not want your ≈staff engineers and data scientists working anything that even resembles long hours! But that's a post for another day...
The moral of the story is that it's possible to find teams which legitimately care about output rather than input, which will let you have a solid salary with great hours. Unfortunately I still have no idea how to evaluate teams on this axis as a job candidate; I just got really lucky stumbling into this particular job. I'm not sure how to reproduce that for future roles (always looking for suggestions!), but at least it's nice to know that such teams do exist.
First, reduce labor costs. One way to lower wages is to get salaried people to work as many hours for their check as you can convince them to do. This is one place where sociopaths shine.
Second, the ideal labor cost is $0, aka the ideal state of capitalism. When humans are involved, this means slavery. "Ideal" means the same as above: reduce labor costs wherever possible.
Convincing people to overwork is a sales job, and bending everybody around you to your preferred activities is practice for when you're going for funding or acquisition. Is there any MBA who wants to help build a company that doesn't get acquired? Gonna need those persuasion skills.
Working 80hrs a week? Congratulations, you've cut your own salary in half.
The labor participants are engaging in capitalism as well; earning $0/hour is not an ideal state for me as a service provider.
School starts at 7:30 am, ends at 2:30-3. After school club, then there's homework. Kids who use the 4pm to 10pm kids who study/grind hard get better grades are praised - look at Billy or Suzy here!
Taking a step back - this is what happens when there's a limited resource. Any competition for a limited resource will naturally create a 'workaholic' culture since that's the way to get more of whatever limited resource there is.
That's why I'm 1000% for the StarTrek replicator. We tried communism - it doesn't work.
Alexander the Great found the philosopher looking attentively at a pile of human bones. Diogenes explained, "I am searching for the bones of your father but cannot distinguish them from those of a slave."