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Comment by friedman23 | Hacker News Reader

I used to be amazed wondering how people claimed to work 12 hours a day until I realized they consider writing emails and talking to people on the phone work (which it is). But of course me being a software engineer I imagined for some reason when they said work they meant something like coding which after 6 hours has me drained.

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after doing a few kinds of jobs:

  - food retail: producing hundreds of sandwiches an serving hundreds of customers back to back, teaches you about productivity

  - landwork: 8000 picks per day teaches you about work

maybe i'm masochistic, but whenever I see people relaxed at work, neither doing much nor thinking much, I consider it's not work. There's no difference between what they do and me at home chilling.

I've done tough physical labor, and repetitive physical labor. They may wear out the body (or may invigorate it, depending on the load), but the mind is fresh even after 8+ hours, in my experience. And it feels good.

After six hours of typey-typey in front of a screen I feel used up. Worthless. Dead. And that's a very good day—four is more typical for "how long can I do computer work before I just want to curl up and do nothing until I fall asleep?". I mean four hours of actually working, mind you, not screwing around, but still.

I know for a fact I don't have a general work ethic problem that prevents me from going past 4-6 hours of computer work in a day—I have a "this particular shit—computer shit—sucks the life out of me like nothing else" problem. Always been that way, even when I was young. Work? I'll do it 'till I drop and feel good about it. Computer work? Uuuuugh, if I have to, I guess, but I'll hate it the whole time and feel like shit when I'm done, which, BTW, won't take long.

But, anything I could do that wouldn't involve sitting in front of a computer much of the day would mean a 60+% pay cut, so... here I am.

I've always had a somewhat weird work process. I probably spend a large amount of time just plain fucking around. But it's interspersed with exploring solutions to the problem.

The fuckaround time is important. It lets me re-evaluate the problem with a clearer mind.

Oftentimes this looks like I'm doing nothing for a day or two. Then by day 3 I just write everything that needs to be written in an hour or so.

I'll add that it's different when I'm coding and have full autonomy - I could practically go all day on personal projects.

When I have to yield to hierarchy, maintain "agile" processes, and put up with other bs, it drains the work drive and gets tiring real quick. It's not just toll from hard mental labor but also from bad environments - which can exist in any industry.

I think when you begin to work on something, there's the phase where you are "stuck" and need understand the problem well enough to generate an acceptable initial idea to get started. To me, this is the draining part. However, once I have that understanding and can start exploring it, I can easily work for hours; it still requires mental energy and is still draining if I go overboard and don't stop in time, but it's not the soul-crushing kind that being stuck on a problem can be.

Now there may be bio/psychological differences here, you (and I) seem to enjoy physical activity. Some might very well not.. I'd say it mostly depend on how the activity fits the person too (speed, effort, balance of type of efforts, sense of improving skills and not just mindless sweating).

I like computing work, but it depends the context, if it's grinding through obscure and unreliable program semantics .. it's less fun. Unless you approach it mathematically (like scientific inquiry trying to discover how it may work), it's gonna be grinding.

If you have simple building blocks and you can just unleash creativity.. then it's different, it's pleasurable. You're the only limit.

Now even in that case, my best days is when I can alternate thinking hard, and sport. 20 min of jogging whenever I'm stuck on a feature branch helped me a lot getting stuck mentally and emotionally.

And in a way, thinkers rarely sit down, they move around, it's vibrant.. it's not just grinding on a keyboard.

Woah - that really sucks you're in a job that you hate. For your own health you should try something else that you don't hate.

Having done both -- there is as much problem solving in digging a ditch as in building a web application.

And that's not denigrating programming, it's pointing out the reality that physical work requires mental effort too.

None of that experience translates to programming work imo

It does teach you about effort and pragmatic productivity, which is a general skill.

I've spent years trying to design code that would give me some benefits but in reality they were taking too much time for low use-case value. When you have time pressure, you write code very differently. You aim at the smallest patch that can solidly implement a feature. It minimizes code changes, patch size, bug introduction, time spent, client happiness. Also mentally beneficial to see tiny regular results.

I argue that those things are a different skillset and don't have overlap with the previous examples.

Strange, to me its obvious. When you have to be tight you learn to be tight, you aim for faster, leaner operations.

Somehow, this never really clicked for me before.

Mind blown.

Thanks!

How much sleep do you get?

My problem isn't sleep, my problem is skipping meals which screws with my energy. I always get at least 8 hours of sleep.

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