Comment by mdifrgechd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdifrgechd | Hacker News Reader

> The escalators I take to work are filled with the same desperate faces and vacant eyes I feel staring through me on the subway, except instead of standing still, they’re bounding up it, subconsciously aware that below their feet is yet another opportunity to optimize on an existing convenience.

This is a super pessimistic take on what the author is seeing. I the last five years I have worked between two cities in my country, one where the federal government is the major employer, one the financial center. Getting off the train downtown in the financial core, I see engaged, enthusiastic, and hungry people heading to work to make something of themselves. They bound up the escalator because they have energy and drive and want to improve theirs and their family's lives.

In the government town, I see lots of people with unfulfilling, boring, and secure jobs, and the whole vibe of the town is defeat.

For many people, competition and pressure are essential to enjoying life, and we want to optimize what we do to support that. Without the pressure we atrophy. There are lots of places (like a lot of government work) where you dont have to work hard and can enjoy other parts of life. But what I've seen is that usually it doesnt work that way.

I may have witnessed something similar. Pre-covid, I used to walk to work for several years. The shortest route took me through a parking lot for a large state office building. In the mornings, I would often see people sitting in their cars--reading, smoking, listening to the radio, whatever--but pointedly not going inside the building, at least not yet. And it was like this every day, not just occasionally. Some people were very consistent and I would see them nearly every day.

I've worked in various places, all private sector, and I couldn't remember ever seeing anything like this before. It finally occurred to me that perhaps they were deliberately waiting until the exact time when they were expected to be present to actually enter the building. The implication being that they'd prefer to sit in their cars rather than start their work day even a few minutes early.

Edit: Which, to be clear, is perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned--I just had never seen or done anything like that before, and I've also never worked directly for a government agency.

It might be because their computers are monitored so they're not comfortable goofing off if they come in 15 minutes early?

Or they were told that if they logged in early then they would automatically get OT and that's not allowed. That happened to a friend who works for the state.

They couldn't leave early ?

Dunno about that job, but at mine, it's important somebody is there at the end of the day, I can't just leave early because I got there early

Practically speaking, when I worked for the state this was because only a few managers actually had the keys to the office, so if you showed up early you would be sitting in the hallway.

> The implication being that they'd prefer to sit in their cars rather than start their work day even a few minutes early.

If you're supposed to work from 9 to 5, why would you start earlier if it doesn't benefit you to do so? If your work starts with a team meeting, why enter at 8.45? You could, but my experience is people want you to socialize then. For me (I am autistic) that's draining, not energizing. When I worked for Dutch equiv. to IRS, we had to be logged in at 9, not enter the building at 9. With Windows NT and everyone logging in at the same time this meant you had to start your computer at 8.50 or you'd be too late. I only hike quick, so I was logged in on time (even had time for a cig). Either way, they'd mainly look at the performance reports.

>If you're supposed to work from 9 to 5, why would you start earlier if it doesn't benefit you to do so?

This goes to the GP. A government worker doesn't see any benefit. They're career is basically seniority driven if there's any advancement at all. A private sector employee would be noted for their extra effort and see a bigger bonus/be promoted.

It could be that they have left for work early to avoid the traffic. ie if their start time is 9am then they could leave at 8am and take an hour, or leave at 7:30am, take 30 minutes and then spend an hour in their car reading.

Plenty of firms have fixed hours so you gain nothing by starting early. The office might not even be open for employees to come in early.

I've found myself doing this about 10 or so years ago. Very literally sitting in my car, staring out the window at the office front door, gathering the will to get out and go inside. Not in government work either, this was a private sector SaaS company. Started about 6 months after my employer adopted Agile development. Came to realize it was the signal that I was sick of what my job had become, sick of the ceremonial routines, sick of feeling like a generic cog in a machine, and that I needed to start looking at alternatives.

What about agile did that?

What about agile did that?

Probably the bit where you need to justify your existence every morning in front of your peers and management. “I spent the day learning” doesn’t go down well, there is pressure to be seen to be busy all the time.

Programmers think Agile is for them, but it’s for the benefit of management, always was.

There's a plausible alternative interpretation.. many many people in public sector enjoy not being pressured, not because they're lazy or sad, but because they'd rather respect themselves first. In the private sector, your job is on the line, the burden is on you and you'll have to bend over to avoid being fired.. it may not necessarily be sane motivation driving people to enter the building.

I appreciate that you qualified the generalization as "a lot of" government work. I wanted to take this moment to mention that I've often seen tech circles to sound dismissive of government work altogether, as somehow less valuable/meritorious than industry, and I think that's unfortunate.

For someone who moved back to industry (from an amazing small team, working on positive federal programs), and thinking startups were probably the way to go for impact and being able to wield many skills, two of the barriers during the search were:

* It was hard to find startups with missions that I felt good about working on. Like many people, I work very hard, bring a lot of capabilities and potential, and want more than a paycheck and a lottery ticket. Scrolling angel.co blurbs was disheartening ("like Uber for embedding marketing insight electrodes into babies' brains, now with blockchain ICO").

* I heard some dismissive comments of some accomplishments simply because it was in the context of gov't, and some other times strongly suspected those dismissive sentiments (when I'm pretty sure the same accomplishments at a random startup would've been seen as very impressive)... and then I'd see comments on HN seeming to express the same prejudice. I don't know how prevalent that prejudice is, and it's far from the worst prejudice in the world right now, but it seemed to be a barrier.

Although I did eventually get offers from three startups working on good things, the process of finding them was so miserable, that I think next time I'll instead start by looking at 2-3 of the FAANGs and some other large organizations. Maybe the larger orgs, having institutional experience with much larger numbers of employees, might be less susceptible to prejudices of interviewers than at the average startup? (Well, that might be wishful thinking, but prejudices can take generations to erode, so, in the interim, doesn't hurt to mix up the approach, as a possible workaround.)

Yes, there was a time when government work attracted the best and brightest.

It is a shame we have lost so much of that. Because we all want the government to deliver us certain services, and I think most of us would like these services delivered by competent and motivated people.

[of course there is disagreement over what those services should be]

Well, even that comment could be an example of ideas, which people read and think, that can lead one to prejudices against everyone who does government work (as well as aversion to getting into that work oneself).

It seems ordinary for people to have prejudices about groups of people. Some prejudices, we're generally more sensitized that they're unfair to individuals, and harmful, and mentioning them is taboo. Other prejudices, we aren't as aware of, and still voice openly, even though we could see that reinforces/perpetuates prejudice that unfairly affects individuals.

Again, prejudice against people doing gov't work isn't the worst injustice in the world, but it's unfair to individuals, and also would seem to discourage many people from going into gov't work that affects society as a whole, and so this prejudice seems a problem to address.

Agreed, this matches my own experience with burnout and pressure. I've worked two different jobs with totally different amounts of pressure (one lower pressure and one higher pressure) but I've experienced burnout in both. It's not the level of pressure & optimization that leads to burnout, in fact the best periods of my career were at my high pressure job working pretty hard.

FWIW there's a comment quote that I think really nails burnout perfectly [1]:

> Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It's the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.

> My suggested remedy would be to reassociate work with success by doing routine things such as debugging or code testing that will restore the act of working with the little "pops" of endorphins.

> That is not to say that having a healthy life schedule makes burnout less likely (I think it does; and one should have a healthy lifestyle for its own sake) but I don't think it addresses the main issue.

My 2c is that if you're interested in working out & solving your own burnout, this is how you need to understand burnout. There are so many bad and weirdly political interpretations on burnout that basically sell "the solution is to work less" or "the solution is for society to work less". I want to save you the trouble of discovering that working less doesn't actually help you feel more fulfilled and will probably make you even more miserable if you have even a little bit of passion & curiosity & ambition.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630618

This fits my experience. It doesn't even need to be 'failure' per se. I got burned out as a post-doc because I found the publication process really draining & ultimately being published didn't feel very rewarding/meaningful. So, it was technically success, but it felt like a waste.

I've noticed something similar but to align it with the post's optimization theme, here's how I previously thought about it:

We, as humans, naturally try to optimize for the lowest energy output. Most people, when strictly externally motivated, will take the easiest path. People prefer to sit rather than stand, prefer to watch TV rather than do yard work etc. For those without ample job security, competition creates a bulwark against this by forcing people to try harder in order to get a reasonable level of security. Those who already have that job security (in government positions, for example) revert to that "lowest level of acceptable effort", which tends to be a bit lower without the added job security pressure.

Of course, there's always those few who are intrinsically motivated and highly conscientious that try hard no matter the circumstances.

Do we? I'd prefer to do yard work than watch TV, but I don't have a yard and neither can I afford one.

In general, I think so. I like yard work too, but that’s largely because I’ve deliberately chose a small, low maintenance yard so it never really seems like “work”. Those I know with acres of land lament the upkeep but have no problem watching hours of tv. There’s a reason why landscapers and gardeners exist while we don’t hire people to watch tv and give us a summary.

Maybe yard work is a bad analogy, but if you watch tv seated rather than standing, it’s because we have a preference for lower energy states most of the time

>For many people, competition and pressure are essential to enjoying life, and we want to optimize what we do to support that.

This is a good example of finding a middle ground aka finding a local maxima. Either extreme isn't well suited, but the grass is most likely greener in between the two extremes.

This sounds like a gross oversimplification based on your biased assumptions devoid any factual observations.

You're challenging an anecdote? Please keep the HN Guidelines in mind:

>"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."

>"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

I can never understand why these are the only two sides of the triangle.

Instead of competing against each others or not competing and rotting .. you can also compete to make everybody joyful, sharp, skilled. Competing to make the smoothest organization and choreography.

In both private and public sector I've seen enough inefficiencies one human needs to see.

Do you live in an Ayn Rand novel?

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