Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

motohagiography

Clicked for me recently that working hard is like driving in first gear. Necessary initially, but if you don't shift up into higher gears, you're probably not doing it right, and not getting as far as fast as you probably should. If I'm tired, it's necessarily because I'm mismanaging my work and time, and that's a signal it's time to step back and figure out what's wrong.

Some people are really good at that initial torque boost on projects and can sustain it longer than others, but if work doesn't get easier it's because you're doing something wrong.

From a market-fit perspective, I think startups that drive around in first gear never get very far either. Things are only hard because we're being stupid. Nobody ever looks at a person driving a ferrari and thinks, "wow, they must have washed a lot of dishes to afford that car," and yet we still think "if I just wash these dishes hard enough I'll drive a ferrari one day."

I'm guilty of this as much as anyone, but burnout is my body intervening to tell me I'm being stupid.

> Nobody ever looks at a person driving a ferrari and thinks, "wow, they must have washed a lot of dishes to afford that car," and yet we still think "if I just wash these dishes hard enough I'll drive a ferrari one day."

I'm saving this quote to tell people this later on.

the twist is to make others wash dishes obviously

dish-washing is a cost-center, not a profit-center, so really the solution is to cut costs by washing dishes as little as possible :)

Sign up for my dishes-as-a-service subscription NetDish. Get clean dishes until you stop paying.

Also check out my dishwasher-sharing service Dishdash.

We (royal/canandian we) have skipthedishes.com, who have already solved this problem, and were acquired for $110m. :)

It's the difference between "hmm, washing dishes is hard, I will do it better until someone notices and rewards me," and "average person buys less than one dishwasher in their entire lives...but they have to eat every single day...they could skip the dishes altogether!"

So if for some reason, you guys decide to block my account, I'm stuck with dirty dishes? And then I won't even be able to share with my friend who has working dishwasher? Ouch, that is hard!

And your dishwashing based social media platform WashedUp

Sodexo washes your dishes (etc) and has a $10.6B market cap.

Sodexo sources dish-washing people. They're recruitment / labour hire / logistics. Dish washing (or whatever other actual physical outputs) are just a side effect of their actual business.

I believe Sodexo is a contractor that offers kitchen services, among other things. Companies pay Sodexo to wash dishes.

Ideally build a machine to wash the dishes, then build a company to build and sell the machines.

That loses your ability to charge them a recurring subscription plan. Maximize profit, acquire currency.

"Caesar built a bridge" old saying, meaning others built one "for him".

One of my first jobs was in retail, a backpacking outfitter located at the top of a scenic and winding road that's very popular among fast car folks. Summer weekends when the weather was good, we'd sell huge amounts of soda and trinkets from a gift shop in the front of the store.

One day, a guy come in and ask for a jug of water for his car, which had overheated. It turned out to be a yellow Ferrari, I got him some water and he headed on down the other side of the gap. Neither the fancy car nor needing water for an overheated vehicle was too far out of the ordinary, but the combination was curious - a sports car should be able to handle that road easily.

At the time, I lived with my dad. That evening, he mentioned that he had been in town and a yellow Ferrari had driven by with the engine revved way up like it was stuck in first gear...

Although I don't doubt someone might not understand how to shift gears, you may be overestimating the reliability of exotic cars!

Having driven a sports car (nothing like a Ferrari, sadly) for many years, I can attest to the fact that being sporty makes cars less robust, not more so. Partly because they're designed with tighter tolerances and run closer to their limits, but more largely because they're lower volume and so tend to have less spent on their engineering, ironically, than cheap ultra-mass-produced vehicles.

> If I'm tired, it's necessarily because I'm mismanaging my work and time

Is it though? What if you are (always) on call? What if you get a message from your boss late evening asking for stuff for early morning? What if you have late night meetings or very early morning meetings (and what if both are present)? What if coworkers from other timezones are messaging you outside work hours (if you even have defined work hours) with 'urgent' requests?

Often, the time mismanagement is external.

True. That's a case where 'change your organization or change your organization' applies. Like it or not, that decision is more in your own hands than in those of the external mismanagers.

This is a good point.

I’m trying to learn to push back more forcefully against unreasonable behavior by coworkers.

It can be very socially stressful to stand up against powerful folks in the organization. But if they aren’t called out, it will just continue.

In that case 'mismanaging my work and time' means 'not finding a different job[1]' :)

[1] Or forming a union and demanding better conditions, but, y'know, programmers.

That's still mismanaging your work and time, but indirectly. Find a better job where your colleagues respect your personal time.

Fine. As long as we recognize that's a very privileged position. Many people on Hacker News have skillsets that are in high demand (across most geographical locations) so they have the luxury of moving on a whim.

This is not the case for many (most?) people.

That's a stretch too far in my opinion. Sometimes we end up in situations that are unpleasant and the time it takes to change those situations is not necessarily short. As usual it's easier said than done. But it is doable, sure, I agree. But they still take a huge toll. Think about the hiring interview wall that's been going up recently. If stressed already one doesn't feel like jumping to leets code in preparation for an interview. Also there are other circumstances that make some of us not leave a job right away when we feel something is not right.

Are you familiar with the /r/wowthanksimcured/ subreddit? Might want to check it out.

There are several problems with your statement:

- find a better job: the job market is not ideal right now from the worker's perspective. Not to mention the difficulty of onboarding remote employees which is a stressor in itself. Not to mention the stress and the added workload of joining a new company/role while you have to build trust in a short amount of time.

- finding and landing a job is stressful. Assuming we're talking about jobs in CS, the prep is long, takes a lot of your personal time and ultimately you need to deal with a good amount of rejection. Stressful af.

- after landing a job, figuring out if it's a better job is hard. You really can't. There are yellow/red flags you can notice during interviews along with other intelligence you can get from insiders but more often than not the situation on the ground is more or less a crapshot.

- respecting personal time is subjective. Also a thing which you can't really figure it out unless you're in the specific situation and see if it matches your expectation.

I would somewhat disagree. While I don't think the factors you mention can be ignored, putting too much emphasis on them starts to feel like anxiety. It's a lot easier to cede personal time to your employer when you've already convinced yourself that they deserve it. Anxiety just makes it easier to fall into that trap

Work hard at getting a better job instead of work hard to keep your current one if its shitty. It doesn't always apply, but it is correct most of the time.

Communication is important, too. Your teammates should have a rotating schedule and understanding of client deliveries so an exhausted person can rotate off for a fresh one.

What if you're on 3 different projects with 3 standup/checkins a day?

Then you need to follow the advice of health professionals:

https://www.theonion.com/health-experts-recommend-standing-u...

You skip those meetings that fail to prove a relevant agenda upfront. Ofc this filter away everything, so you go where you'll be useful and explain to your direct manager your prioritizations.

At that point it's time to fire your boss and take your life in a direction that is right for you.

Thanks for posting this. Startup DevOps with 24/7 on call is brutal, especially if you're a very early employee.

I'd recommend learning to set personal boundaries because every regret will come from the times you didn't keep them, imo.

This is hard to do. I heard a quote from like 1950 that you should work all out until you have 100k, then relax. Was said by a billionaire in why he didn’t burn out. After that, he was less stressed and did things he enjoyed more, which happened to make money.

But everyone has to wash dishes anyways. Now we have machines for that.

I want to use that analogy of endless busy work to break away from your analogy in saying that:

Maybe there is a breakaway in replacing parts bit by bit to build the fast car you want that can shift into the gears you need at the moment.

IDK, sometimes you're just going to be washing a lot of dishes.

Counterpoint: If driving a fancy car is your highest priority then most places in the developed world you can skimp in other places (family, time off, apartment size, etc) and save for a few years to pay cash for one if you haven't drawn a particularly short stick in life. A brand new GT-R costs something like 5-10yrs savings for a slightly-above-full-time pizza delivery driver who avoids most other luxuries.

I would label this as "missing the point" instead of "counterpoint".

Choosing to engage with the entire comment isn't necessary for a critical discussion on HN is it? They could've picked any example of an unattainable luxury (or better yet some notion of _easily_ affording such luxuries) they liked, but instead they picked an example that's so far within the realm of possibility that there are subcultures dedicated to it, and there seems to be general agreement that it's a good example to parrot back to others. It might be a workable or relatable point of comparison, but that doesn't mean we can't analyze it and try to do better.

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