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Comment by fnimick | Hacker News Reader

Not just that, but every employee who wants to work nights and weekends puts pressures on those who don't to catch up or be cut. It's a race to the bottom that leads to people who do have things they need to do scheduling emails to go out late at night, changing the times on their commits, etc to look like they are as "committed" as the rest of the team. It's harmful and damaging and I'm not at all surprised that people here support it.

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Did Steph Curry or Kobe Bryant harm basketball because they plain worked harder than everyone else? Prince in the recording studio? Did they cause a race to the bottom?

Steph Curry injured his ankle in the 2010 preseason. He failed to recover properly, leading to surgeries and an ankle that keeps failing.

We can speculate whether overwork is related to Prince's drug addiction and eventual death.

So yeah, failing to rest properly does have bad consequences.

Point was race to the bottom, not "bad consequences"

Ok, I'll fill in the blanks here. The race to the bottom happens because other coaches and players see Curry practicing and playing on a schedule that's unhealthy and feel that they need to do the same thing, so they also fail to recover from their injuries.

So yes, overworking does create a race to the bottom.

To pop up a level, your comparison is very bad. In Twitter's case, the "model" behavior is that engineers are working longer hours, and not whether they are producing better results. A better analogy would be a sports player who trained extra hard and extra long, but didn't improve their level of play, but still all other players were expected to work extra long hours anyways.

Prince recorded his first album by himself and played all 21 instruments, so he's not the perfect example for this.

Michael Jordan might be a great example though, he worked harder then anyone else, and ALSO raised the standard of how hard people needed to work on the team beyond the normal limits.

They all did benefit from the Championships that followed, but it was certainly also a strain of the mental health of players like Dennis Rodman.

> Prince recorded his first album by himself and played all 21 instruments, so he's not the perfect example for this.

Why isn't he a good example? He worked hard and wrote a bunch of good music. He didn't seem to cause a race to the bottom.

I thought the parallels was that his hard work would have caused on a strain on his bandmates, which it didn't, because he didn't really have any.

I thought Band Mates was the best comparison, because we were talking about fellow employee's suffering at a company. And if your comparison was of Prince to The Music Industry at large, it sort of works, but sort of doesn't because other musicians are Prince's competitors not team mates.

Yes? They raise the bar for every other player. Great as a spectator, bad as a participant.

Don't turn our field into one where you have to sacrifice your personal life to succeed.

> Don't turn our field into one where you have to sacrifice your personal life to succeed.

I'm glad you think I have that much power! Seriously I'm not suggesting any such thing. But why shouldn't people who work harder reap the benefits. And more to the point, does that cause a race to the bottom?

Pay me their salary and I'd be all the happy to work weekends.

Hell, I'd be able to buy a house after a month.

What a fucking stupid comparison...

The comparison is hard workers vs less hard workers, and the former causing a race to the bottom. Mind telling me why the comparison is stupid?

If people are scheduling emails and faking commits to feign value then they should absolutely be cut.

> "If people are scheduling emails and faking commits to feign value then they should absolutely be cut."

While you're 100% correct in that, I do believe the "parent" post is against people being put into situations where they begin to feel that such actions are their only remaining option if they ever want to have a life outside of work.

So when your new teammate decides to start working through the weekend and suddenly you need to do so as well in order to match them in the performance review, what's your response? And notice that I didn't say anything about the quality of work being delivered - when you need to be visibly pulling overtime with the exact same work output in order to compete, what do you do?

So I'm actually in that situation (I have young kids and can't realistically work more than 8 hours/day), and my actual response was: switch into management and have the young, enthusiastic employees work for me.

I feel like this thread contains a lot of people upset that other people are better than them at a game that's not worth playing anyway. Promotion is an extremely artificial game setup so that neither companies nor employees have to play the actual game of capitalism. In a real market economy you deliver value by trading with others; if you feel that others are capturing more value than you, take the other side of the trade. When competition requires that you work 60 hour weeks to be considered good at a field, that's a sign that there are too many people in that field and you should get out of it and instead consider employing that field in your new job instead.

Either compete or go to a place that measures performance correctly.

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