Comment by kevinalexbrown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevinalexbrown | Hacker News Reader

The workaholic v just-a-job tension seems to stem from the fact that it's difficult, in a team environment, to hire someone for the value added. If you could, then the workaholics could work more, learn more, and get paid more, whatever, and the just-a-jobbers could just work, and everyone would get paid by what they contribute.

To borrow the ideal-world-artisan metaphor, if I want a table made by a carpenter, I don't care how long the carpenter spent making the table, and I (ultimately) don't care if it's just a job to her. I care whether my total investment of waiting and money is worth the table she makes.

Problems arise when it's much easier to measure 'passion' and time spent working than value added. These are probably correlated within reasonable bounds, just like total words in a comment and value added to a discussion are often correlated, but I don't upvote on length. It's annoying to see someone getting more respect than you, but turning out crappier work, just because they stay late and fit the cultural bill.

But the flipside is that if time spent and value added are correlated (and I suppose that's very loose across persons, and even within persons), then pay, and perhaps even personal respect for someone's craft, will be tied to that.

501ers recognize that it will probably result in having less opportunities:

We recognize that your willingness to allow your employment to penetrate deeply into your personal life means that you will inevitably become our supervisor. We're cool with this.

I think that's a good attitude, as long as it's acknowledged that without putting in the extra hours to learn, grow, or ship, you might not grow over time and earn the same respect in the workplace[1], and you might not get paid the same.

[1] Respect as a person, of course, should be independent of work, and respect for your craft should probably be based on what you can do, not how long you spend doing it. My closest friends are extremely talented, and also more on the just-a-job end. This doesn't change how I feel about them at all. It's their life, after all.

"...as long as it's acknowledged that without putting in the extra hours to learn, grow, or ship..."

Something is wrong with a job that doesn't fit those things within a normal 40 hour work week.

It's not the job so much as the market. There exist people on the market who are willing to put a lot of effort and are able to become very good at what they do. Even if you had a job that gave you half-and-half (20 hours for work, 20 hours to learn, grow, or ship), there would still exist people on the market who are willing to put in a lot more extra effort after the 40 hours.

Those are just the facts of the industry. It doesn't mean there's something wrong with the job, but rather, that there are inevitably going to be some highly-skilled people who got those skills by doing things on their own time.

I agree with this. There are certainly situations where more than 40 hours of week are a necessity, but those situations should typically be temporary for the majority of employees. If you are in an organization where meeting your goals requires more than 40 hours a week, week in and week out, then I would say there's probably issues that go beyond your work ethic and personal boundaries.

It really depends on what your goals are and who is setting them.

If your employer is expecting you to work >40hr/week to accomplish their goals, and that violates your personal boundaries and goals (e.g. I want to make sure I'm home for supper with my family every night), then there IS a problem. It's not necessarily your employer's problem, and it's not necessarily your problem, but there's a definite mismatch between expectations that needs to be addressed.

If your goal is to become an exceptionally good developer, and your employer is expecting you to be spending all of the 40hr/wk doing work (instead of learning), then you've got the same problem. There's a mismatch of expectations. You're expecting some portion of your time during the week to be on self-improvement, and your employer is not.

But, there are equally situations here where there isn't a problem at all!

If your employer is expecting >40hr/wk, all working, and you're more than happy to collect the overtime, then that's totally fine! There's a match!

Likewise, if you're a decent developer (I'm hesitant to use the word "average", only because North American society tends to cast that word in a negative light), and you're happy working 40hr/wk and staying at roughly the same level, then where's the problem? You're happy where you are, your employer is happy with the work you're doing, all is well.

And, if you're passionate developer whose goal is to become exceptional, and you go home immediately after work and hack away on open source stuff/your own projects/whatever, then that's fine too!

There's a few really important things that everyone should be asking:

* What are my personal goals? What are my priorities? * Are my current employer's expectations well-matched to my own personal goals? * If not, what do I do about it?

> "then the workaholics could work more, learn more, and get paid more, whatever, and the just-a-jobbers could just work, and everyone would get paid by what they contribute."

Its not hard, its called contracting for an hourly wage. The problem is that many employers want workaholism at a 40hr a week wage.

It's not really possible here; the value of you going out and doing some unrelated pet project is much lower per-hour than working on an actual company project but it is non-zero. It's not like the company can look at what you are doing hour to hour and negotiate some random hourly amount that changes every hour.

Besides, hourly wage really doesn't make any sense for most jobs and certainly not software engineering. If someone works for 5 hours a day and gets more as much done as someone working 10 why would they get paid less? You could do some backwards math and come up with some hourly wage for the 5 hour guy but that's really just putting the cart before the horse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com