Comment by usecontainers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by usecontainers | Hacker News Reader

The top firms all recruit heavily from biz schools with the #1 criteria of billing a crazy amount of hours. I'm not surprised they're trying to market themselves as "less ridiculous" than the competition but don't really believe it. We would work until 7 or 8, go eat dinner and drink on the company dime (purposely with only other consulting team members) then go back to work, drag ourselves to (most likely) a hotel room for a few hours of sleep (because they prefer to keep you on the road) then back to work and repeat. Low utilization was 2200-2400 hours annually with many (most?) billing substantially more. It's hard to believe that a business built on taking a piece of every hour worked would be serious about cutting back the number of hours.

They treat young workers like oranges, squeeze out all the juice and pitch the rinds. The math says not everyone can make partner so don't worry about keeping people happy, just load the funnel with new grads.

Borders to slavery in my books. It doesn’t even matter whether these are productive hours, it’s just forced labor using social anxiety peer pressure and FOMO to force people into doing your bidding.

Thought we had labor laws for that...

Peer pressure / FOMO != "force". Please do not conflate the two.

There’s certainly no physical force applied, but using the right techniques, we can predictively force a large part of the population to work against their own best interests using psychology alone. Obviously, this is an amalgam of social elements, redefined value system, stress response and sunk cost fallacy.

Nobody is conflating them but they are de facto identical in terms of results. The physical forcing has been replaced by social pressure and guilt tripping and they are just as effective into getting you to work more hours as were the physical tortures of the times long past.

The major difference being you can just say "I will not succumb to social pressure", where as you cannot say "I will not be forced physically". That's why it's called "force".

Nobody is forced to do it, you can quit if you don't like it, and you get compensated very well. Please explain how it "borders on slavery" to allow people to work a lot for a lot of money out of their own accord?

This seems like a very different story from a developer working at night because they need the alone time to catch up.

This, and not only developers I think most people or at least people of a certain persona need that alone time to process clearly.

Agree. I write (code for the human compiler) and that is true, although I am more Lark than Owl

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