Maybe you should do less 'work'

This was a very large factor in why I quit - old job wouldn't let me cut back hours, even at reduced pay, even framing it as "leave without pay", so I had no choice but to quit to get my time back, and I had enough money.

As it is, I'm content staying in that "learning and broadening" mode, even though I'm 20-ish years in on my career.

I don't think I'll go back, unless I absolutely have to, or a project catches my interest, but even then, no amount of money is going to convince me to work so many hours or ever in an office again (another reason I quit was they wanted us back in the office, despite my being much more effective working from home).

I've been part time for over a year now, 4 day weekends every week. It is pretty great. I don't do anything much productive with my days off, but that's okay. I worked full time for about a decade prior to this point.

Perhaps part of this is having negotiating power to frame the switch to part time not as a request, but instead implicitly framing it as "we need to figure out a part time arrangement or I'll need to find another employer that does", rather than requesting a switch to part time. Part of the negotiating power is being good enough at what you do for your skills to be in demand, and having resources or alternatives to fall back on if company is not willing to agree to a part time arrangement.

I spent around 10 years working about 20 hours a week doing freelance work.

It's good until it's not. Basically, yes you do have a lot of time and often times you can decide to be done at noon if you'd like. Taking entire days off is also possible unless it's expected to do something in a timely fashion such as meet with someone or produce results by XYZ day. I found in practice it wasn't possible to really drop off the grid for continuous 4 day weekends.

I came to the conclusion this lifestyle is only really worth it when you have more money than you would likely ever have if you worked this schedule for a long time. For example, if you only worked 3 days a week but had millions of dollars then this would be super interesting because you could go and do fun things all the time. Having $5,000 a month to spend guilt free to do whatever would be amazing if it didn't cut into any type of retirement fund because you're already set.

But if you're working for half a salary chances are you don't have millions of dollars tucked away unless remarkable things have happened to you. So what you really end up doing is finishing at noon some days and then procrastinating on everything while you do nothing productive or fun because you've done everything you could with your budget 100 times over after years of this lifestyle. At least that's what happened to me. Your mileage may vary.

I realized I'm happier when I feel like I'm maximizing my time. That doesn't mean always working but it means feeling like I'm making enough to where when I want to take off 2 weeks a few times a year to do something really fun it's fully enjoyed. Then I fill in the gaps between trips doing assorted fun but not crazy things. With 40 hours of payments this becomes less of a financial burden. Only problem now is having less time to do them.

> When did we become so not only complacent but also discouraging of any genuine effort?

And these same people are going to expect nothing short of the best of the best from surgeons / plane pilots / car manufacturers / etc.

So they can slack of... But doctors are expected to do the work!

This looks like what exactly the author says in the article to me

People perceive (perception being more important than reality in this case) growing inequality, and see that society as a whole isn't moving toward any goals they care about, so they just grift as be they can, coast and collect their paychecks. Society used to dream of a future of abundance and robot house-maids, now we picture the future being scarcity and catastrophic climate change and nuclear fallout. Am I wrong? Please tell me I'm wrong. I want to hear what future dreams society is persuing other than moving money around and making investment portfolios grow.

Overcorrection for burnout and other consequences of poor WLB. And because WFH has distilled many white collar remote jobs to their essence shorn of the trappings of the office, causing people to reflect on what work really means.

> When did we become so not only complacent but also discouraging of any genuine effort? It is as if everyone is so aloof that if you show any effort or appreciation of your craft that you're societally[sic] acknowledging your own serfdom or that you're serving "the man".

In my decades long experience in corporate programming, when people accuse everyone around them of not putting in enough effort one of two things are happening.

The first, which is very rare, is that you are truly in a dead end job with a toxic work environment. If this is the environment you're in and you aren't looking for the first exit and interviewing constantly, frankly, you deserve to stay there and suffer. You may succeed in the short term but only because you'd have to dig 6 feet into the ground to find the bar. Your managers only see you as a resource to exploit before you burn out and fall to the same level as your co-workers.

The second, and this is the most common, is that you are sprinting constantly and have yet to develop any sense of work/life balance. In essence, you're convinced the world itself is insane and you are the only one truly "working". You are on the path to burnout and the people who are "aloof" are actually trying to help you find a path to long term work over decades.

Mind you, maybe you just work in bursts. You find a high pay/high pressure cooker of a job, throw yourself into it till you just can't, and then take a year long sabbatical. I don't know you, but I've seen these sentences so many times and 90% of the time it's the same unawareness and inexperience with maintaining a sustainable level of work.

I'm not trying to attack you here. I am trying to impress upon you that I was once of the same opinion as you. Through the years I've become more open to the idea that that Good Work Ethic is mostly a product of Capitalist Propagandizing (TM) starting as early as primary school.

Even though I maintain and am praised consistently for my "work ethic", I am keenly aware of the constant pressure to produce more value for a vanishingly smaller share of that value. That awareness makes me able to make better decisions about how much and for how long to disturb the equilibrium of work/not-work, and how much time a task takes at both a sustainable pace and at a "crunch" pace.

Burn out and the more obvious visible symptoms take years to set in, and then it takes almost as long to counteract, if you can at all. Some people burn out permanently and never truly recover. It's just better to not get to that point at all.

The ways around this are individual, because what is sustainable is individual. One co-worker works roughly 4 10 hour days and is available-but-not-working on Fridays. Another is very strict about having a 3 day weekend every month. One often works lightly during the week and then works Saturday when they can have more heads down time.

TL;DR: If you feel that everyone around you is telling you you're working too hard, you probably need to assess the sustainability of your level of work. You may or may not need to make changes, but (again, in my experience across tens of years and companies) you almost certainly need to put in place long term plans if you're running net-negative on your burn out battery.

Is this a new kind of brag? Maybe an “offense brag”? This article makes me, a very conscientious and productive person, feel offended because it tells me that I should chill out a little. (Except that’s not what it says; more on that later.)

> Doing my tasks diligently and in a timely manner affords me more time to relax, review what I have created, and enjoy it rather than drag myself to the next task.

From the article:

> If you can meet these expectations in fewer hours than you are supposed to work, then you shouldn't just find more to do. Instead you should do something different.

Completing tasks in a speedy manner makes it so that you don’t have to rush to the next task. Seems in line with the article.

> When did we become so not only complacent but also discouraging of any genuine effort?

From the article:

""" If you optimally fill your time at work doing 'work' work, then this means that you are likely:

- Not developing other skills

- Not building your network inside the company as well as you could

- Probably working less efficiently than you could

- Unable to respond to new or changing demands without working longer hours or stopping something else that you think you need to do. See the ongoing supply chain crisis for why you should have some slack in your system. """

Two of those points are about working on other things than whatever narrow task that you are assigned. So apparently it’s not about being complacent at all.

Don’t fret. This is HN. We are all A-type, elite white collar workers at this place.

The author isnt saying dont give a shit. They are saying when you finish your work you don't have to ding a bell and say, "NEXT TASK PLEASE" right away. There are other aspects of work that are important too.

I wonder how prevalent this notion is in the industry. It often feels we're cogs in a pipeline.

Feels odd to me to make a statement like this. Is it in jest?

In my view everyone should pull the same minimum. Not have some people work more to offset other people working less.

When health insurance and housing rely so heavily on work (speaking from the perspective of an American), not working feels terrifying.

Sorry, but it's definitely not ok.

Edit: why downvote?

Sure, but putting more craft and care and study in your tasks benefits you a lot too.

e.g. I have spent two weeks on an airbnb-like image gallery, could've completed the task in four days, used the time to become black belt in images in the browser, which makes ME a considerably better and more prepared professional. The way I see it I'm getting paid for educating and specializing myself. AND it benefits my current employer and our customers.

Meanwhile my colleagues rush into the next task don't rip any of these benefits.

I agree. Thankfully, my culture does not shun 2-3 year job spells on your resume. Typically, this is what I do. When I learn enough to do my boss's job, I leave. I am now at a point of running my own, small consultancy service. Only need a few more clients to finally quit my day job for good.

Let’s be clear though: you may need 4 hrs but sometimes you may need 12. Creative professions can be that way. Reaching an understanding that both can happen and accepting that fact is important.

To a certain extent, it’s just recognizing the reality of what actually happens today anyway, rather than trying to fit into the 8hour workday concept.

20 hours a week is pretty much the ceiling in my experience beyond big crunch times, special events, etc. If people really stepped back and thought about how much time they spend screwing around at work I think they’d be surprised, like how many people were surprised to discover how many hours they spend on social media apps when screen time tracking was introduced in phones.

I worked in the film industry for several years on the Hollywood side before switching over to commercial. 12 to 14 hour workdays were pretty much the norm. When I flipped over to the more commercial side, our workdays typically ended at 8 to 10 hours. And let me tell you, the commercial productions were exponentially more efficient. We got more done per day by a large margin, no matter the scale or complexity compared to the films I worked on. When you know there is less of a threat threat of the company extending the hours, you tend to get things done in the time allotted.

Learning be as draining (or more) as work! Figuring out and internalising new stuff takes a lot of mental power. I don't know why people propose it as some lightweight way to fill the time.

In the end I moved companies and got a raise of about 35%. I'm back to doing the same amount of work I was doing before I tried to get promoted.

I've been promoted at every job I've had by working both smart and hard, but never exceeding 40 hours except in very rare exceptional circumstances. Devs have higher IC roles to fill so that helps. But now I get to be miserable as a manager. Be careful what you wish for. And please, be smarter than me so I feel good about you taking my place when I leave.

That said, I don't think many people are productive for more than 20 hours a week for sustained periods and we should all work less.

What I have learned about this phrase is "I work best when I am hyper focused on a singular <event, issue, project, task> and that is usually associated with being "under pressure" that causes us to slide into a state of hyper focused thinking.

Implying that everyone who runs a company is mature and makes responsible decisions, which is not true.

This is a poor analogy and and an analogy that isn't needed (what exactly have you simplified for the reader here -- the concept of self-determination?). Not sure why you think that every person is basically a temporarily embarrassed CEO of a minuscule company and then to grandstand on that as if anyone who doesn't subscribe hasn't hit the same threshold of maturity.

When you truly internalise that life is about making money, that you need to make a good return for your stakeholders (aka family), etc is the day when you have been fully assimilated into the borg.

This makes no sense from my perspective.

I could literally put myself through anything that I needed to, if it meant the safety or well-being of my children. It's not a company, it's a primal force from thousands of years of primordial reinforcement. I'd manage with less capital, so that my kids have a chance at college. I'd manage with less chance of promotion, so that my kids can have my presence at important functions. I'd manage with anything that arose, if it meant something better for them.

I think it's important to understand, and deeply internalize the personal responsibility that adult life brings and the extent to which our decisions influence the things that end up happening, but this analogy of yours borders on psychosis if taken to it's literal end.

A little deeper still, and I think what you're really pointing at is the boundary that decisions can't cross, that certain things are out of our control. Risk management can come into play, but ultimately risk can never be negated. You can only shift it. You can evade the risk of being run over by a bus by never leaving home, but maybe that raises the risk of dying in a house fire, or by being poisoned by lead paint, etc. These aren't "company decisions" they're just a byproduct of life in the natural realm.

I sincerely hope that you don't actually conduct this thinking deep into your lifestyle, perceiving things as though one big company spreadsheet of assets and liabilities.

Much love, friend.

Also maybe don't focus so much on _"Personal Responsibility"_.

This is so sad, really. We are NOT companies, we're not robots only driven by free will, we don't live in an economy. We are hardcore social animals with huge biological & affective needs, this is scientifically proven.

I hope young people don't read this and blindly believe it.

this reads like a teenager, or ironically someone who never mentally moved past the point of being a teenager, who just read Atlas Shrugged for the first time

Humans have lived on the planet for 200000 years. This way of organizing people as a company interacting with the labor market with assets & investments & risk management...is at best a 100 years old. Its like a drop in the ocean of time.

That said, when I was taking courses in Finance as a young 20 something, I came up with this same exact analogy & took it to its logical end - I conceived a stock exchange called the Human Stock Exchange, where every human being was a human stock ticker, and if you liked the performance of your colleagues you would buy their human stock so their human stock price would go up. You could sell short the poorly performing colleagues on your team...its a pretty toxic concept, if you think through it.

Ofcourse, since its such a toxic idea, given the extremely virtuous nature of our benign species, this toxic idea must already exist & thrive. See for instance Will Smith's stock taking a beating after what happened yesterday - https://www.hsx.com/security/view/WSMIT

I sell this commodity on the market, to whom? Business owners, I guess. And this is a weird one: I actually have to sell this commodity on the market, if I want to eat and live and all. So does almost everyone else. But the buyers have other options, so I guess everyone on the sell side basically has to undercut each other til there's no more profit left on our side. What does it mean if I'm not profiting, I sell my labor at the cost of production? Best I can hope for is find an inefficiency and hope to eke out a little bit myself until I can afford to be a buyer? Maybe the whole thing doesn't quite work.

Yeah, I'd say internalizing the, uh, implications of this setup is pretty much a requirement for being a grown adult.

When you truly internalise that last fact is when you truly internalize capitalism. Congratulations. There will be no prize.

1: "Companies maximize profits. Humans maximize utility. Profits != utility"

2: "Profits are absolute. Utility is perceived."

Utility is an under-defined combination of components on Maslow's pyramid. Even more vexing, is the realization that these components vary from concrete (health, food, shelter) to hedonistically moving targets (social acclaim, money, material wants) to merely perceived (self-actualization). The term: "under-defined combination" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Because some utilities are uncomparable. 'Time spent with your children' cannot be quantified in corresponding wealth or social acclaim. Till date, I am yet to find a better compact representation (meme) of the human condition than Maslow's pyramid.

However, to a more technical audience I prefer the 'RL agent' analogy. A human is an RL agent in a weakly observed universe. The utility function it weakly defined, expected outcomes vary from true outcomes and you can only control your action space. As any RL researcher will tell you; an agent tries to maximize their utility. However, they must periodically update the utility function itself and the manner in which the world is observed. This directly applies to humans. Every once in a while, use previous experiences to re-evaluate your perception of the world. Reflect on the very foundational drivers of your goals with this new perception in mind. Find new goals. In between these iterations, a person focuses on reaching whatever their current perception of the goal is, until the next iteration.

This RL model is incredibly effective. If each iteration leads to massive changes in goals, then 'regularize' or use 'RMSE' on your utility function. If each iteration sees too little change and your utility isn't good enough; then you're stuck in a local minima. Increase your learning rate and lean more on exploration (try something new) instead of exploitation (staying your course).

Nitpick, but companies have limited liability, natural persons do not. It's for that reason that I would probably never get hired if I actually was an employee of a "company of one" (formed me for example). Companies would obviously prefer to contract with me directly, not my company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability

If you reach Senior level ranks and continue to suffer from these feelings though…

This is great, and very wise too. Great for you and great for everyone around you. People who generate peaceful relations and harmonious cohesion within a team (or society) are like force multipliers for the quality of that team or society. I work on a team where this is somewhat the case and where I try to embody this (imperfectly... but I try!) and it makes for a productive team, harmonious and strong communication and general happiness.

So long as I have just as many 60% days as I do 100%, and average out near the benchmark of 80%, then I have fulfilled the expectations that have been set, and I can be comfortable shutting the lid of my laptop at 1700 sharp.

I'm currently working in downtime(which I expect to continue for some more time), and have been spending my time trying to build something for internal use that also counts for my self-education goals. There's definitely a temptation to goof off and read, play games, or watch movies, but I'd rather be 5% efficient at figuring out how to get Azure to cooperate than 'opt out' and take unofficial personal time. I want to be able to show that I can independently produce value, and increase the value of my 80% for when raises come around.

> Slack. The absence of binding constraints on behavior.

> Poor is the person without Slack. Lack of Slack compounds and traps. > Slack means margin for error. You can relax. > Slack allows pursuing opportunities. You can explore. You can trade. > Slack prevents desperation. You can avoid bad trades and wait for better spots. You can be efficient. > Slack permits planning for the long term. You can invest. > Slack enables doing things for your own amusement. You can play games. You can have fun.

http://reactionwheel.net/2019/01/schumpeter-on-strategy.html

So essentially your employer is fucking you and any other attitude other than to treat the situation for what it is, is delusional.

Don't call us 'people'. You're the one that doesn't get it.

Now I'm not saying you need to freeload. But I do what I'm paid to do because this is a business transaction that favors the employer. After I'm paid, I fuck off, because I just got shafted by my employer and I owe him nothing until he can pay me again. My work is only good to the point where my employer is willing to continue paying me.

Even if you are delivering as much or more than others, you also have to be liked.

Any source on that? I agree with the assessment about engineers (althought it's a generalization), but I always thought it was because their "focused work" is what they actually like doing. In my experience work was most stressful when it strayed the most from focused work.

But the problem was, I never considered my own growth. It never felt like a good use of time to take on more challenging projects because I wouldn't get the same sense of accomplishment. It would be hard, I wouldn't have much to show for myself for a few weeks, and so on.

Obviously this is all subconscious, you don't realize you're choosing things you're good at, or an expert on. Expertise feels nice! And, to be fair, not everyone's employers give them the freedom to choose/learn/grow that many of us enjoy.

It is useful for their argument to split 'work' and 'not work' along these lines because they are trying to reach readers that honestly do believe that any time not actively writing code for a jira ticket isn't work.