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Comment by alexashka | Hacker News Reader

It'd help to avoid lumping all jobs into a single pile and proceeding to suggest a planet-wide remedy.

A software developer has different needs from a convenience store employee. I hope that's obvious.

I don't understand why this is even on HackerNews, because this article contains no news at all. It's just pandering to those who feel that working fewer hours is a good idea for them, nothing more.

ps. if you're in a job that involves using your brain, you're not working more than 3-4 hours/day max. Maybe when there's basic income, we can start having honest conversations about how people actually work in software.

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> I don't understand why this is even on HackerNews, because this article contains no news at all. It's just pandering...

Same goes for the constant cycle of "Hiring Software Developers Is Broken" articles that never fail to get a million comments.

> if you're in a job that involves using your brain, you're not working more than 3-4 hours/day max.

There are stream online of people doing mental work for 10 hours (with 5 min bathroom/snack breaks). I don't know if it's genetics or training, but some people can do it.

When I had the freedom to set my own schedule, I found my max productivity came by doing 2-3 days of 14-16 hours grinding, followed by 1-3 days of break where I didn't "work" at all. This corresponded to just how complex an idea I could fit in my mind at a sufficiently fine-grained level of detail to do real work on it.

Cal Newport's "Deep Work" is another approach to this, turning maximum productivity into a daily, scheduled system. I've also been influenced by "Four Disciplines of Execution", specifically the first discipline - pick no more than three Wildly Important Goals, and do not work on anything else. If it's not a Wildly Important Goal (and it's not an actual emergency), it deserves zero attention.

I've been lucky at my current gig to be able to speak this language, to talk about the cost of interruption. When you have one job, you can focus 100%. When you have two, you don't get 50/50, but more like 40/40, with the remaining 20 lost to context switching. And the more often you context switch (or "multitask", hahaha), the more focus and momentum you lose. I'm sure a lot of knowledge workers lose north of 50% of their available productivity to the thermal losses of context switching.

Whatever they do for 10 hours, will be automated in 10 years, by people who work 4 hours or less.

My opinion of course :)

Isn't John Carmack able to code for 10+ hours straight? Will he be automated too? :) My point - as much as this forum seems to hate this notion (I usually get downvoted when I point it out), there's variance in human aptitude and stamina.

Ok, but you can't argue that talking in vague generalities is wrong because of one extreme outlier. Sure there's variance, but what does the distribution look like?

That’s a great question. I wish some psychologist did research on this.

> ps. if you're in a job that involves using your brain, you're not working more than 3-4 hours/day max

This (not necessarily the quoted part, more so the article concept in general) is non-sense. People don't work enough. The problem is not the long hours, it's that people no longer have the stamina (mental, physical and emotional) to sustain a long work cycle so they think they "burn out".

>People don't work enough.

Based on what metrics?

What makes you think they ever did? And why should they anyway?

> so they think they "burn out".

Do you not believe burnout is real? If so, I hope you never find out, because it is very real and sucks a lot.

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