It's sad that we sacrifice health for more money only to spend it on health-related issues we accumulate from our career choice.
I always thought that maybe having to carry a medicine ball up a hill in order to deploy a service would be fun.
I've worked manual labor jobs. They suck, and they damage your body. If you think sitting all day long is bad for your health, imagine what even just pushing a broom thousands of times a day is doing to say, your rotator cuff.
Pack a healthy lunch, keep your hours reasonable, get up from your desk and walk around every couple hours, exercise in your free time, and your office job won't kill you.
As to which type of job is more "fun" - a construction foreman once told me that he always sees these guys who try working construction to get away from their office job, who try to find meaning/enlightenment through manual labor - a sentiment you hear here a lot - and they always go back to their office job. Always.
But the guys who manage to escape the jobsite for the office - they never, ever come back.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/construction-workers-topped-r...
Personally, I really couldn't agree more with what you're saying. The prospect of doing manual labor for a living just sounds awful. Getting dirty and smelly, blowing out my knees and ruining my back, having my brain stuck in idle for 8 hours all day every day, massively increasing my probability of suffering a crippling or fatal work-related accident. And an office job has the possibility of leading to a work-from-home situation, which would allow you to get whatever level of exercise of whatever type you want every single day of the week.
>Now look at long-term health and economic prospects of the two careers, beyod short term satisfaction with survivorship bias.
Economics seems to be the real reason the original poster saw people switch away from manual labor after trying it for a while. Construction workers may be happier and more fulfilled day to day, but software engineers are paid more and it's hard to say no to a larger, more consistent paycheck.
You'd be surprised how many times manual labor requires solution finding. Even figuring out a leaking pipe or a problem in the electricity panel requires ingenuity. Designing and making custom furniture can be complex. A competent construction worker / repairman can be like a dev and payed like one (& sometimes harder to find). Take a look at those DIY videos to see what I mean. Not to mention the tooling these guys have in their shops ...
I know people who work(ed) construction who are actually very smart and they constantly belittle their own intelligence because they don't have a college degree or have a job that works with computers. Vice versa I know people who attend graduate school at tech institutes who are actually stupid in many ways but are so full of themselves because they've managed to memorize enough to pass engineering classes.
Believe you. I've been wet an got electrical shocks from wet equipment more than once on a particular site.
But part of it is probably also that office jobs typically pays better and people find it hard to return to a lower salary.
What I liked best was when I had my own office but lots of trips to install, maintain, upgrade and verify the systems I programmed ;-)
But enough IT types talk about RSI problems, wrists and such, that it ought to be on the radar screen if you are considering a physical job.
An uncle of mine had a physical job in a hospital most of his life and suffered from spinal stenosis, which I believe caused incredible pain in his retirement.
My mother was a computer programmer, but the whole reason she got a college degree was because she studied like mad in high school, because she was driven by escaping manual labor on the family farm. None of her siblings became farmers.
3 years ago I had a severe allergic reaction to an antibiotic, which affected the nerves in my dominant arm. This was painful to the point of waking me up from sleep and my arm was almost useless in certain ranges of motion. Prior to this I had neglected working out for about 5 years, but started again; it took about a year but my arm is back to normal now and I can do more consecutive pushups than my age... and I'm 58.
Ignore the pain and workout.
What helps me is having someone, anyone around, to distract me from myself.
but I'm not sure "always" is the right answer ... always.
I do agree that a lack of physical exercise can cause its own type of pain that counterintuitively can be relieved with movement, or the best thing after a long run is a brisk jog the next day, but if I severly sprain an ankle, maybe it's best to just rest that ankle for a while.
The job was to help with building a hotel during a sweltering hot summer in Georgia. I'd be soaked in sweat before noon. We spent all day carrying heavy pieces of drywall up and down rickety staircases that somehow never collapsed, injuring our fingers, stepping on rusty nails, walking through rooms full of brightly colored dust and gas with no masks on, etc. I felt like I'd cut into my lifespan after just a few days. My whole body hurt by the time I got home, and I was so exhausted I couldn't do anything else.
Construction work can be simple, sure. But it's not easy.
When I was a removal man, one guy had to come back to work earlier than recommended after open heart surgery as they only got the UK statutory sick pay which was fuck all. We were taking a sofa out of a building over a first floor balcony when the sofa slipped and banged him right in the sternum. I can still remember the scream of pain he made :-(
Besides, they owe neither you or me an explanation. Our hypothetical people said that’s not a workable option, what else ya got?
I bet almost everyone can find at least half an hour for their health if they wanted to. Very few people actually have a "I don't have time!" excuse. These people better be spending every single minute of their existence at work, doing something essential with their family, or sleeping then. Even then, could they seriously not function with half an hour less sleep? Can they not do something physical with their kids like sport or even just a walk? Maybe you and some others actually don't have time, but most do. Even Obama found time for hourly golf and reading pretty much every day. I really dislike the victimhood/making excuses mentality. I don't think it's a good thing for most people. But yes, I understand that for a very small portion of people, they really don't have time.
Also, walking your dogs could be a form of exercise.
Exercise can be done - but only if you adopt the "5 minutes are actually fine if there is interruptiom" mindset parent recommends. And only if you did not exercised for long, because otherwise those small chunks are frustrating and make you hate them (as you are painfully aware of difference between old one and this one).
But the all-or-nothing attitude I mentioned above is problematic if someone has in mind that they're going to work out for an hour in the morning. For one reason or another they suddenly only have 45, 30 or 15 minutes for a workout and they write it off because they don't have time for their "workout" rather than using the time they do have.
But even if one only has 5 minutes you can make something with that time, whether it's a set of pushups, squats, mobility work or a quick jog. Then later in the day if one finds another window do something then.
IMO the best approach is try to move 5 minutes a day, everyday, regardless of the form it takes. Build the habit that you do something every day. Then build from there. Modulate intensity and movements. If you can do more do it, if you can't, don't stress over it.
You don't even need an hour. 30 minutes does wonders. It doesn't need to include a trip to the gym either. Pushups, situps, squats and such go a long way.
I live in the inner part of a mid sized Great Lakes city. Commute and lunch are short walks, groceries and shopping is a bike ride, friends and social groups are with in biking distance and the city's cultural and social activity is centered in walkable neighborhoods. Bike culture offers rides across any social group you can think of. Off road bike paths connect the country in the warmer months.
Even on a regular work day I'll walk or ride in the evening to wind down. In a city there are many routes and parks to wander through, the landscape and texture constantly changing thought the year. The routine keeps you going even through the snowy winter months. You can walk or ride as fast or slow as you want to adjust the "workout".
In contrast a lot of my exurban coworkers spend an hour plus per day commuting to work in the car, and live in isolated developments that are unwalkable past the arterial they are on. Exercise becomes a drive to a gym or park for and is easy to forgo in a busy day.
I recognize not every city is affordable enough to live and work in a short distance, but I'd trade any amount of yard space for an accessible city.
It didn't involve stretching. It was just the most comfortable position for brushing teeth for a tall (and very limber) person where the sink was too short. I tried to avoid it and found I was very uncomfortable trying to stand "normally" to brush teeth.
So he may not be stretching at all. He might just be making himself comfy.
Also, if anyone find the stretches he does comfy I don't know what.
Or maybe we'll just look like the 'bros in Silicon Valley. Ok, point taken :)
The second is mitigated by the fact that you're just doing smaller sets. We're not talking about a full work out. If you're sweating after 10, 20, 30 pushups or 30, 50, 75 squats, you were probably sweating anyways. Get a fan.
Soon you run out of excuses and you're back to "if you had the discipline, you would do it." Just like eating healthy.
Please get personal trainer's help before you exercise again.
Doing a few exercises every 30 minutes is far better than doing nothing and you could argue that doing any more than that has decreasing marginal returns in terms of your fitness indicators. But it's still not the same as having a physical purpose that you can hone and push yourself in.
Fittingly Sisyphean.
When waiting for the computer forces us to idle, most of us try to fill the void with attempted multitasking. Be it half-assing something productive or trying to grab some instant gratification from our favorite distractions, it doesn't matter, it throws us or our the flow. This is why faster compilers raise productivity by much more than the directly saved man-minutes.
Now what if we could actively speed up the build? (or whatever else we are waiting for?)
Imagine a system that throttled down a bit during "unattended" builds (developer staring at hacker news would count as "unattended"), and only opened up fully when the user does "the compile thing", similar to your idea of carrying a medicine ball for deployments. It could be something hardly physical as repeatedly (impatiently!) tapping a button, but it would feel much better with a more physical activity.
What I envision is a big, satisfying crank. The Compiler Crank. With a subtle sound (or haptic) effect that stops when the build is done, bonus points for force feedback via modulating the resistance according to occupied cores.
It's not intended as a fitness device, just something to keep you occupied with something that does not cause the dreaded context switch, and does not promise occasional gratification (never ever try filling those gaps with Solitaire!).
Whatever productivity it would waste during hn-induced "unattended" builds, I think it could make up tenfold by maintaining high engagement whenever engagement is sufficiently high to actually use the device.
Ahh, well - you gotta put something on the old tombstone someday right?
Just drink a lot of coffee so that you're forced to get up and go to the bathroom every 20 - 30 minutes. (Or mint tea, if you want the same effect without the caffeine.) As a bonus it will also prevent Parkinson's.
It would probably be pretty bad for me if I had milk or sugar, but luckily I like just plain black tea.
The only problem is that I now have to wear shorts to work or I get excessively sweaty during the day, so it may not be feasible in less permissive work cultures.
But as I said, it's only sometimes.