what exactly is wrong with this?
why have we been programmed to believe that putting hard work into making something great is a bad thing?
this was not the case a few short years ago.
again: what the fuck happened?
why have we been programmed to believe that putting hard work into making something great is a bad thing?
this was not the case a few short years ago.
again: what the fuck happened?
With that out of the way, I think hard work is great. Making something cool is what gets me up and to work every day. What I think isn't great is being commanded to be "hardcore" and work at "high intensity for long hours." To me, that implies having to work for more than a typical work day and with little slack for any hiccups. Add to that the expectation that anything less than "exceptional performance" is a failing grade. Taken together it strikes me as a recipe for burnout and anxiety. At a minimum I don't see how it's possible to have any sort of work life balance in that arrangement.
Jobs with that level of intensity are fine if the rewards are there. That's been my life for a while, working on an indie game. I don't think that's the case for Twitter. I also think it's a raw deal for a boss to walk in one day and completely flip the expectations. Of course fairness has nothing to do with it, it's Elon's company. Still, that doesn't maen he's free from criticism.
Many things can be true simultaneously. Many of the Elon criticisms are valid: Cruel and puerile behavior on Twitter, shockingly bad product decisions that any associate PM would avoid. Many of the criticisms are unclear: dismantling of teams like "Responsible AI," which sounds like a navel-gazing college course, not an organization in a company. Many of the criticisms are stupid: Cutting free meals that nobody was eating, implementing return-to-office.
I'm observing a noticeable societal shift that I have directly experienced occurring within my lifetime, and I have a hard time believing that this shift is wholly organic. like I said elsewhere in the thread, this demoralization and disintegration of innately self-evident core values like "working hard to make a good thing good is good" is exactly how I would poison the well of an adversarial nation that I wanted to destabilize at the foundational level.
it's quite nice to see some pushback against this.
> What I think isn't great is being commanded to be "hardcore" and work at "high intensity for long hours."
> Jobs with that level of intensity are fine if the rewards are there. That's been my life for a while, working on an indie game. I don't think that's the case for Twitter.
I'm confused. you're an indie game developer, and I don't know the details of your team and project, but that entire field is basically built on hard work, long hours, high-intensity effort, and yet you find it fulfilling, despite the great personal risk usually associated, especially being indie.
so why do you think it's impossible that someone else would find a job of this level of intensity but cranked up a notch, but compensated for with a large salary and lavish benefits, to be a compelling job prospect? like I'm with you, that proposition doesn't sound like a great personal fit for me, either—but why is it unthinkable that anyone would find the job compelling? you know as well as I do that, on some level, the entire video game development industry "preys on" developers' love of the medium and feeling of satisfaction caused by creating something cool after oftentimes plural years of development before having a concrete product to show for all the work you put into it. why is that OK for the video game industry, but not for social media companies?
> I also think it's a raw deal for a boss to walk in one day and completely flip the expectations.
I can see this, but also, how long was the Musk buyout deal in the works? how many months? of course, all the while, almost literally everyone on HN told themselves and everyone else, over and over again in comments threads, the deal will never happen, there's no way it'll go through, ahaha look at this new roadblock that came up, Elon will never get past this one! (seriously, go back in the archives and take a look at some of those threads, the self-assured self-righteous agreement that the deal would never happen is pretty crazy to look back on now.)
any Twitter employee who was ideologically opposed to Elon Musk had plenty of time to look for another job in the case that he actually completed the buyout. of course I'm sympathetic to anyone suddenly losing their job, to some extent, but this sympathy is balanced out somewhat by vindication at seeing bloated "tech companies" finally getting some fat trimmed such that someone who works at a company like Twitter—making much more money than I do at my job—actually has to work hard to earn the paycheck and benefits they enjoy.
I mean... he literally tried to weasel his way out of the purchase agreement until it became clear that the courts weren't going to let that happen? I'm not sure this is the dunk you seem to think it is.
is it not interesting when hundreds of people are absolutely convinced that something is impossible, and then it happens anyway? is that not cause for reflection and introspection, to figure out how so many people could be wrong about something? is that not just standard operating procedure for anyone who makes any sort of prediction/assertion that turns out to be inaccurate, in order to assess things more accurately in the future?
again, taking a step back and reflecting on things can lead to the discovery of such patterns repeated across recent history, which leads to key insights about how and why these overemotional public melodramas play out the way they do.
Working hard is necessary to make something good, of course. Working "hardcore", where 100-hour weeks are _required_, and only "exceptional" performance is acceptable, is _inhuman_.
I'm saying this as someone who's managed several teams over several years, but also someone who's read the literature: the surest way to get bad performance out of someone is to put that kind of pressure on them, _especially_ long-term. People in that situation get tired and/or sick, can't straight from the anxiety and pressure, and because of all of that that they'll make simple mistakes that take a long time to sort out (because everybody else is in the same situation).
In my experience the best work comes from people who are calm, healthy, and well-rested, _especially_ over the long term. Those well-rested people are the ones who are capable of putting in the discretionary effort to make something good.
this is something you and everyone else read into the email that was simply not written there. out of curiosity, what drives you to take "hardcore" and "this will mean working long hours" just about as exaggeratedly, hyperbolically uncharitably possible? I can't find a valid logical reason for doing this, yet everyone seems to be doing it, and I can't figure it out.
I know my value and won't work in that type of environment.
Why in the world would you find it acceptable to work at a place where the baseline is extreme hours and where extreme hours are required for just an acceptable performance review if you have other options?
I have worked extreme hours in many jobs but that has always been because either it was an exceptional situation or I was doing it of my own accord. Other than those two situations the only other reason I would do it is either:
1 I am working at a startup (preferably it's my own or I own a lot of equity)
2 I needed the job that badly
3 There was some "higher mission" associated with the work (eg manned space travel to mars, rushing to find a vaccine)
2 doesn't apply to twitter engineers and 3 certainly doesn't apply since twitter whose "higher mission" is selling ads.
A global pandemic that empowered workers to advocate for themselves? There is a difference between 'hard work' and working more than 40 hours a week.