Comment by epalmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epalmer | Hacker News Reader

Just yesterday I was explaining how I did projects to satisfy bank examiners for a prior employer. The bank examiners would ask us to do work that would, under normal conditions, take a year, and to do that work in 3 months. I got great feedback by the examiners on the solutions provided. Better comments than most of my peers were getting. But the next day my boss would give me another one of these 80 hr / week problems to solve. Not even a day to breath again. Darn.

So I left to work in Higher Education where people complain about the workload and I just laugh. 40 hr work weeks, fun people to work with, and only a few crazy schedules. We even have time to have a cup of coffee and chat.

My health has improved dramatically, my kids actually now think I'm a good dad and my wife and I have time for each other.

I got my life back. took a big pay cut, never looked back. Life is too short to over commit for someone else.

> I got great feedback by the examiners on the solutions provided. Better comments than most of my peers were getting. But the next day my boss would give me another one of these 80 hr / week problems to solve.

Isn't it so odd that doing good work efficiently is always "rewarded" with yet more work to do. In my experience it creates a perverse incentive for workers to just drag their feet.

I think the logic is that if you reward someone for finishing work quickly then they will rush through their work and quality will suffer.

The counter-point to that is you can balance that out by having quality controls such as unit tests and code reviews. If someone writes shitty code then it'll be pretty obvious and they should be corrected.

I did something similar, the worst part is that my employer never understood how crazy it was to work 70 hrs/week. Really, I tried very hard and with a lot of honesty to explain it, but I couldn't stop this.

So sad when the boss does not get it and others seem to think they need to model the bosses behavior.

My boss is retiring on June and she has no outside interests. No golf, no card playing, no anything. She works 70+ hours and has for years and claims she loves her job. I think as the daughter of a 3 star army general, she loves being responsible. She sets a bad example for balance and I think her love for work is more a fear or what is beyond work for her. I'm 2 to 4 years away from retiring and I have a lot of interests (maker, mentor of k12, concerts, travel, learning to draw...). I love what I do but I love the weekend more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com