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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

Yeah but he doesn't recognize that his entire argument is personal choice elevated to moral imperative.

> an easy way to do that is to be more productive at work and spend less time working

Why is need to be more productive at work framed as a prerequisite to spending less time working? Just spend less time working. His moral stance, which he never reflects on, is that working is good, and relaxing is predicating on completing the work first. None of that is necessarily true, but it does fit well with the Protestant Work Ethic, which is, of course, a moral framework for putting work before leisure.

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While I agree with your point that it should be perfectly acceptable to not invest oneself fully in getting the best performance in a job as long as you can do the job you are hired for, I think you are mistaking OP's statement for an absolute one: these are from an opinion piece on a personal blog, and the arguments they bring up resonate with them.

Nowhere did I see any judgement for those who don't agree with them: they merely proclaim what you can easily achieve with deliberate observation and practice and how it matters to them.

You will get fired if you don't get enough done at work. Higher productivity means you can accomplish enough tasks to not get fired in less amount of time.

But that's just taking the moral argument another level deeper. Why should a person's leisure be subject to the whims of employment?

> you can accomplish enough tasks to not get fired in less amount of time.

And how many employers will look at the work you got done in less time and tell you to go home for the rest of the week because you've finished everything assigned?

> But that's just taking the moral argument another level deeper. Why should a person's leisure be subject to the whims of employment?

This isn't a philosophical discussion, fact is that either you produce enough value at work or you get fired.

> And how many employers will look at the work you got done in less time and tell you to go home for the rest of the week because you've finished everything assigned?

You don't have to tell them you are done, you can just relax and browse HN or whatever. Being very productive at work gives you a lot more freedom at work, even if that freedom isn't 100% fairly allocated to you it still improves your situation.

> Why should a person's leisure be subject to the whims of employment?

Even the leisure time of fish and rabbits are subject to eating leaves and kelp. Time is useful. Your work may give 100x more leisure time to thousands of people. And even if it doesn’t, it’s still necessary - who will maintain the back ends for the porn sites? The mind reels to think of what would happen if Netflix’s sysadmins became simple bumbling 1xers. So many kdramas unwatched! One slip up in 2010 and million basic whitegirls not knowing be soft touch of The Office!

every moral imperative is also a personal choice. And honestly, if being a better coder saves 100k people a few hours in wasted time once, that’s ten person years - coming close to moral imperative! If your productivity tool’s new feature enables some engineering collaboration that builds a new bridge in Kenya, that saves a thousand person years?

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