When Work Didn’t Follow You Home
calnewport.com
calnewport.com
Life before cellphones: The after-work activities of young people in 2002 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36402076 - June 2023 (138 comments)
1. Work out of a separate office, ideally with a door. Don’t go in that room except when you’re working. If you work from a laptop, (mostly) never take it out of that room. Obviously some don’t have this luxury, but if you do and you’re not doing this, I highly suggest trying it.
2. Remove work communications from your phone. If you have a separate email account for work (highly likely), remove it from your phone. If you have Slack or some other chat app installed for work, remove it or remove your work account. If your company truly cares about a healthy work-life balance, this shouldn’t be an issue. If you need it for oncall, only install it then, then remove it.
3. Stick to a schedule. Log on and off about the same time each day. Don't jump on work for an hour or two here and there throughout the whole day. Log on, put your time in, log off. Don't work on weekends. There are times when you may need to put in extra and/or odd hours, but this should be the exception, not the norm.
With these three things in place, I am — quite successfully — able to get the pre-smartphone feel of disconnecting from work while working from home.
One note I'd like to add is pay attention to your lighting, have a special "work-mode" set of lights that you turn on when you work and then turn off when you are no longer working.
I use the same work desk for non work stuff, but I turn off my "office lights" and it's a completely different vibe.
Everyone's tastes will be different but as for me, these are my preferences:
- Office lighting: at least 20k lumens of 5000K light with high CRI. For me I like to approximate the brightness of daylight. It's especially useful during the cloudy days of winter. My office is in a basement so the cheapest way to do that is string lights (like for outdoor patios), but with high quality LED bulbs.
- Personal lighting mode: regular house lighting, 3000K (so skewing towards a more yellowish, incandescent-like light). I still enjoy high CRI because I can't stand things looking bland but that's less important. More spot lights, less ambient light.
E.g. there are times that I do break the rule (very rarely) and get on my work computer (e.g. download work documents for tax prep), and part of me feels like I'm back at work.
If you've not tried it before, it may be hard to relate or recognize the difference.
Work to me is like going to the bathroom. I go, do my business, then leave and it's back to my normal day. With WFH, that's even more the case.
I don't have any problem disconnecting from work, but it probably helps that I have a different computer for work that goes in a drawer at the end of the day.
I do follow points 2 and 3 though and I think those are essential.
Me, my work-desk and pc-gaming-desk are one and the same, but I have different keyboards (PC vs Mac) for the one or the other. It's not ideal though, I'd love to have a dedicated office space and time with e.g. an own kitchenette so I don't have to dart in and out of the shared space of the kitchen multiple times a day.
I'd say that's my main issue; my workspace is separate, but everything else isn't. And it disrupts my family members' days as well. I should go to the office more often.
Many people spend a small fortune on light fixtures and then use the cheapest bulbs in them. I prefer the opposite.
Also: when I am on vacation I am gone and won’t work. My team has my phone number for extreme emergencies but that never happened so far.
If you're already doing #1 (don't take your laptop out of the office) and #2 above, then this is automatic. But yes, those should especially be followed when you're on PTO.
I’ve found that writing a log or a daily summary, a core dump, if you will, helps me disengage. But not always.
But honestly, this doesn't feel any different than it always did. Pre-smartphones, I still would sometimes drive home and think about what I was working on on the way home, or "bring work home" with me.
I think the brain thing is (mostly) independent of the WFH/WFO thing -- as long as you're doing the other three things above. Otherwise, the brain thing is compounded.
being able to decompress walking around a leafy park is much better than trying to decompress stuck in a busy train with no seats.
The best thing I've found is Logseq. Any other note taking app would probably do, but the important thing is that it's a "daily journal" style where I brain dump relevant things into bullet points. This has come in really handy for many other reasons as well.
I dont.
Instead, I substitute MY OWN projects and goals and things INSTEAD OF work's goals. So instead of killing my innate curiosity and problem solving, I change its focus to serve me.
I would also add
1. disable notifications, if you can't get rid of work-connected devices: perhaps your work computer is your only computer, and you want to watch a movie on it, just configure chat/mail whatever to only work in _pull_ mode rather than _push_. Don't worry, if something is really important it will reach you.
2. enforce time boundaries through routine. E.g. go to the gym at 17:30 every day so logging off means physically detaching yourself. Or pick up your kids, or take the dog for a walk. Make yourself accountable to non-work.
3. corollary to 2: start work when work start, not before. Do not work in pajamas, do not check your email during breakfast. Do your own things, then start working.
I have not been 100% good at doing all of these, but even doing this a bit has had massive positive effects to not doing it.
A small-apartment version of this is to have a work laptop at home (or carry it home from in-office), but to keep it in a drawer when not in use. Same with a work smartphone.
For people who have to be reachable in emergencies, a real radio pager (best privacy, still company-issued, and it could maybe also go in the drawer), or their preferred automated emergency contact method to their personal smartphone (SMS, email, app). Optionally with a de jure on-call human in the loop. Or just a work-issued smartphone or tablet that can be configured in software to only alert on emergencies.
When emergency contacting personally-owned devices, to minimize taint with business information, the only information conveyed is to check work laptop within X minutes. (The company should also have be a rock-solid log of each such contact, for various reasons.)
(One early startup, where I was leading engineering and had bespoke MVP appliances as part of a factory production line halfway around the globe, and I hadn't yet set up a better alerting method, I just used an iPad for this. The iPad had 2 purposes, about the only things it could do: (1) compartmentalize the sketchy videoconferencing app we used, away from the Linux laptop that was early-startup powerful; (2) be a fairly discreet "picture frame" display in the evening, so that I'd notice emails from factory management or our alert system. With more time this could've been polished to be better for my nerves, but it was still definitely better than having the work laptop visible 24/7.)
I'm much better at contextually driven focus than I am at working mentally to keep things separate. Which I've come to be ok with, in that a lot of my creativity comes from divergent thinking, from jumbling and sorting out things. But that flexibility is a pain when I want to really focus. Different devices help me be clear about what I'm choosing, raise a barrier to distraction, and make it way easier to notice when I'm off task.
E.g., I only use HN from what I think of as my distraction laptop. Social media, fun Slacks, and HN only work on this device. Which is old, so its battery doesn't last, and which is plugged in and kept in a hidden niche next to a not-super-comfortable couch. Taking this approach let me turn off the noprocrast setting here while keeping my fuck-around-on-the-internet time in check.
It's nice and fine if you never get bored of it.
When people bring their laptop in the kitchen or closet, or go to coffee shops, libraries etc. it's often not because they haven't found a perfected routine, but because they don't want to sit/stand in the same exact spot in the same posture 8h a day every weekday for decades.
Point number 2 also has caveats: with a family it can be easier to allow semi-random interruptions a few times a day and work a bit after everyone's asleep than sticking to an ironclad schedule and being absolutely unavailable when your kid's having tea time or needs a quick help.
But I believe it's the flexibility that make it hard for people to mentally disconnect -- it blurs the lines between work and life.
And, to your point, that's totally fine if that's your preference. I think what we're both saying is that the three points I make above are, in a way, sacrificing some flexibility in order to maintain that separation.
For me, I'm completely fine giving up some of that flexibility so that I can maintain the mental separation. But, to me, I have the best of both worlds in that I still have the option of flexibility in cases where I really need it. But I only try to exercise it when I really need it.
2b - have a separate work phone If people choose to send emails outside business hours it's their choice, but you don't have to answer. If you do, as part of your contract... Well, you saw the contract before you agreed right?
2c - Set clear boundaries between when you're off work, off, but on call and at work. How? Personally I don't mind being "on call" for <25% of a time, but I absolutely positively have to have extra money every single hour I'm on call(lets say 10~20% of normal hourly rate), and 150~200% rate for incident response time. That's the only way I can do it. But what if your employer pays you double the hourly rate all the time and "implies" it's a 24/7 on call commitment? Isn't that even better financially? Well, yes, but it's definitely not better for my peace of mind. Somehow I don't mind being on call when I see a tally for it at the end of each month, if it "just happens" (and frequently) I quickly start hating it.
It took me 6 months to adjust to it and I can't even think about going to an office anymore nowadays.
Once upon a time, maybe a hundred years ago, people worked “days”. This was a product of the available technology at the time. The average labourer didn’t have a pocket watch to know exactly what hour it was to clock in and out. If someone worked Tuesday, they worked from sun up to sun down. They got paid “a day’s wage”.
As time-keeping technology became more prevalent, people started working hours, not days. People started to work “8 a.m. to 5 p.m.” In this period, the constraint was now commuting. The average person lives approximately 30 minutes travel from their work and this has held roughly true for most of history. If you need to travel to work, you’d better earn enough hours’ wage to make it worth it.
Now we’re seeing something new as commuting evaporates. People are working on the order of minutes. E.g., “I have a 30-minute meeting at 2 p.m., then I’m making lunch for the kids. After that, I’ll put 60 minutes into project X before the repair guy comes by to fix the oven.”
To get the same work done, people are starting to distribute it across a full waking day (even if subconsciously). Our systems and ideas haven’t caught up to this new world yet. We aren’t earning “a minute’s wage”. But it’s hard to not see the progression now that I’ve noticed it.
On reflection, the separation of home and work was so natural that everyone took it for granted. Time moved more slowly. You felt more free because you could just disappear for an hour by going for a drive or a walk.
We don’t realize what we have lost.
It also meant that, when I was "in the office," I pretty much needed to be IN THE OFFICE. I couldn't really disappear during the workday on a regular workday by going for a walk or being available at home for this that or the other thing without making specific arrangements. I had the flexibility to do that from time to time but it wasn't a casual I'll be in my home office while the contractor is doing stuff.
It's a tradeoff but, for me, not a bad one overall. No one expects me to jump into action at 9 at night but if I'm watching the TV and can solve someone's problem in 5 minutes I can do so--if I feel like it.
Well, we're getting back to that anyway... they're pretty much demanding that we all drive 45 minutes to sit at a hoteling spot that we reserved ahead of time in a noisy open office so that we can get on zoom calls with our remote coworkers all day (and be asked to "please mute because your background noise is very distracting") - and then drive home and still be available "after hours".
Glad I spent years of my life getting an advanced degree for this, I guess.
Would love to have 5-8 weeks per year, that would let me take at least 1 week's worth of time per quarter to recharge from the constant 24/7 rush.
Out of curiosity, how many of your coworkers have kids?
I have 3, and I've always found it a bit ominous that even when I'm on large teams (8+) I'm typically still the only person with kids. So far:
1. job 1, team of 8, only 1 other IC had kids
2. job 2, team of 10, nobody else had kids
3. current job, team of 8, nobody else has kids. If you expand it to the suborganization we're in, you get ~16 people and only one other person has kids.
And it's not like these teams are mostly college new grads or anything, it's usually people like me in their 30's.
I always wonder how much of a disadvantage it is that other people get to clock out of work, enjoy an evening, sleep through the night, and then wake up and go to work. Whereas a parent is going to clock out of work and clock in to parenting, and then when it's kid bedtime, you finally get 2-3 hours to fit in personal time that's usually still not "you" time but is you spending time with your partner.
I'd never trade my kids for my career, and I find the time I spend with them incredibly fulfilling, but it's definitely extra load. And I do depend on being good at my job to help feed them and stuff. And I did opt into this, so it's hard to say it's "unfair". But I feel like our society doesn't need more reasons not to have kids given fertility is already below replacement rate.
You find it hard to say it's unfair but you seem to hint to it. I don't think it is in the slightest. Also you sound like a software developer from the US so you likely can afford to work say 80% and "recoup" some of that free time.
Well of course I feel it's unfair at some level! That is indeed why I made the comment.
Assuming we want society to continue, someone has to have kids. And while of course we don't want to force individual people to have kids, we should (again assuming we do want humanity to continue) probably try to achieve some kind of balance to where large swathes of people don't self-select out of having kids due to economic/career reasons.
And if the working spouse tries to shed home responsibilities to help them focus on their career, this simply promotes inequity, both sex-wise (since more women are stay-at-home spouses than men) and class-wise (wealthier people will be able to hire additional help, while poorer people will not).
But it's so worth it. My oldest is old enough to be playing with legos, and teaching him how to follow the instructions, and then seeing him both follow the instructions and then also deviate from them sometimes with his own creativity without compromising the rest of the build (well, usually) is just amazing to see happen. And then take this sentiment ^ and apply it to practically every facet of life. Having kids is about finding magic and bonding in both everyday things, like watering the garden together, and in the once-in-a-lifetime things like going on a vacation to someplace.
But of course it's not for everyone! It is really hard work and it takes a certain maturity and disposition for selflessness to be good at it. So I of course respect people who want to opt-out.
But - setting magic aside - so much of our economy is literally predicated on populations either continuously growing or at the very least not shrinking that we need to be careful about fertility rates. I think we can look to Japan to see what happens when you make your society too much of an economic rat race: people either solely focus on it or drop out of it, and both will cause fertility rates to drop.
A good step in the right direction here is that it's probably in the interest of us all that people who want to have kids are enabled to do so. (And indeed we have some policies like this already - public schools, child tax credits, etc).
And note that my concern about none of my coworkers having kids is mostly in this vein ^: it seems to me like it's a bad sign if a bunch of people with ample means are all still deciding not to have kids despite nominally having the funding to bankroll it.
I think it's easier to be selfless about it if you don't have any ambition outside of your typical 9 to 5 career. For a lot of people genetic propagation is the summit of their existence, and there's nothing wrong with that.
It worked alright for about 1.5 years, but ... I need to get more PTO to sustain this type of work load.
As an EU person, the existence of places where people never stop working is mind boggling.
There are plenty of jobs where people almost never start working. I have friends who've worked corporate jobs doing little-to-nothing for years at a time, collecting 6 figure salaries until the move on to the next gig.
Fortunately, I’ve seen within same org, teams which are always on vacation or are collecting pay with 4h coffee breaks and 2h morning breakfast, but sadly I never managed to land into one of those teams.
The “non-stop” kind is majority in EU, but somehow we like to tout the “wow must be US thing”. At this point, I believe these comments are coming from some minority group from a very specific country in EU.
At least 1 week of vacation per quarter (in addition to normal holiday time) has been fairly standard for every senior-level tech job I’ve had in a long time.
I had one job with a generous vacation policy that resulted in some people taking 8-10 weeks of vacation or more per year, in addition to normal holidays. They had a great time, but honestly it started to become a burden for everyone else to work around them.
Toward the end it was getting bad enough that some projects were basically stalled because you could never get everyone on the project to be available at the same time. We’d push the project forward as much as we could, then wait a week for another round of people to come back to work, then push it forward as much as we could while working around the rest of the people on vacation this week, then repeat.
It would have been okay if it was a lifestyle business where delivering quickly didn’t really matter much, but it was a less established business where we were slowly running out money. They tried hiring more people but that only increased the burn rate.
The end game was that they clamped down hard on vacation time. A lot of the people who were only there for the lax vacation schedules left. Ironically, it was more relaxed to actually do work there after it became more predictable and you could depend on people actually being available to work.
There’s probably a good middle ground but it’s not as easy as just letting everyone take a lot of vacation all the time.
This was our second year doing the "Week of Rest". It was an experiment we ran last year.
It ended up being a good idea and works well.
This is especially true when you are young and single. Some people have families and they do not have the time to drag out their tasks until the late hours of the night because of the severe consequences of neglecting their other responsibilities. Young people are also often under the delusion that only the moment exists, and that they will live forever and stay young forever. Nope, you only ever get older and you will be old sooner than you realize. And then you'll be leaving annoying comments like this one in the comment section.
But even single people should be able to appreciate how stretching things out means you can do less with your time. It's not like you fill those in-between moments with valuable activity. You usually procrastinate doing worthless things. Besides, task switching isn't free. You have to build up context which allows sustained deep work to take place.
We've lost the culture of maturity and seriousness. FOMO is a symptom of that. Self-promotion and social media are a symptom of that. We prefer engaging in shallow put-ons instead of being adults.
My practical advice:
- Do not put Slack / work e-mail / any comms to do with work on your personal phone. When they ask "why don't you have X on your phone", the answer is that you have a security policy to keep your personal accounts safe, but if they'd like to buy you a work phone, and pay for the contract, you'd consider carrying it. Which leads me to ...
- Establish whether you are being paid for on-call. If not, then you are not on-call
- "I sent you a message", isn't the same as "I spoke with you and made sure you understood the message I relayed outside of work hours"
I realise that these things are easier here in Europe than in the U.S.A. where labour laws are a little less fleshed out, but well, I can't help there :P
"Look at photos of businessmen on the streets of New York in the late 1890s. Then compare them to photos of people today.
One of the first things you'll notice is how little they are carrying e.g. no briefcase, laptop bag etc. This is because in those days if you left the office there was no expectation of doing work. Everything you would need to be productive only existed in your office. Plus, you were completely unreachable once you stepped outside so why bring anything work related?"
Now, sure, a messenger could be sent to find you at lunch and you could argue that a business lunch is still 'work' but I've always like the idea of "out of the office, out of touch".
Keep to a standard schedule.
If I need email comms for an important document regarding to something super tight. I can't just wait till tomorrow.
Information can be crucial at times and emails can cause break down in communications.
Spreadsheets need to be spread and PowerPoints need to be pointed.
Work yes, you can step back from, communication you can't just shut off.
Its more talking to the VPs of other department's.
I'm not a developer nor a manager. The team responsibilities; we are one of the most efficient. Our teams cross over the globe: Hong Kong, China, Japan, America's,
My manager is spot on. The team are fine, it's just the nature of work.
You are in Asia and it's 10am HKT/10pm ET. You are facing a problem/issue that you are 90% sure someone in the US knows the answer to.
You are faced with: - being blocked all day till US business hours
- trial and erroring your way through the problem
My view as the manager was always "I trust you to send me a message up till 10:30pm if you need something and I will respond. Don't abuse that but I'd rather be contacted late once in a while vs you being blocked all day."
Working as a software engineer in the early 00s, when you had no chance of continuing labor at home, you'd stay at the office way later and potentially miss the last train home.
I'm sure there were better and less demanding companies, but the picture depicted in the article is IMO way too rosy. In several companies I've had months where my extra hours' pay litteraly doubled my base salary as we stuck in the office to meet crazy tight deadlines.
I have heard these horror stories for years but never experienced any of it.
Everyone who would be sending me email wants to be off work as much as I do. They’re not working after hours so neither am I. Even when I worked for an agency earlier in my career I can count on two hands the number of times I was contacted after hours, and it was usually an emergency like some clients database imploded.
If I need to relay something important and where email could cause broken communication, I need to work after hours.
East Coast in five hours behind of me. West Coast is eight.
If we have the regulators chasing us upon an urgent thing you need to be have the information ready for the next day.
Unfortunately the whole "don't email after work" can only be applied to roles where staff are all within the reasonable timezone.
We have people on the east and west coast but I'm at most 2 hours off from them.
Unless I've got serious equity the regulators are chasing you, make it worth my while to solve your problem.
Three letter agencies, something something war, trading, cyberattacks and more stuff.
This is probably unfair because I'm self employed but:
My customers are on Slack so I don't have much mails going on with them. I have Slack on my laptop and my tablet but I didn't install it on my phone. They know that if I'm offline on Slack they can whatsapp me or call me. That rarely happens, especially the phone call. Not every year.
I check my mail a few times per day. It's a very long time since I disabled push notifications of new mail message. Nearly all of them would be for automatic notifications of events.
This means that when I'm not easily reachable if I'm not working unless my customers really want to contact me. Apparently this doesn't bother them. I've been going on like this for at least 10 years. I wonder what we used before slack, maybe Skype: I remember many more Skype chats and calls. Meet and Slack replaced nearly all of them. Actually Skype screen sharing is better than theirs: it can be zoomed and gets closer to be full screen.
Finally, I don't have anybody to compete with inside my company, because my company it's me.
- Ability to disconnect after work - Explicit pay for any after hours work (no more salary workers being forced to work 24/7) - Limits to hours worked per week - Meal breaks (no being forced to eat lunch while on videoconference ) - Safe work environments with minimum distance between workers and air flow / filtering requirements
Bottom line is that if you are very much invested in tech or work, it can be exhausting, even without any direct line to work.
I dreamt about being connected to the internet wirelessly and roaming. As soon as that came in our pocket, it became handy (you can look up anything at any time) but also addictive.
What i want to say... It's not the tech itself that supposedly made things worse, it is the habits that you make from them.
If you tell your boss that you will not respond after hours or won't work late hours, that would take courage but today that is still plausible.
Work/life balance should be a personally checked boundary, it takes practice and patience to get it right, no matter of whic era of tech.
This is, of course, troubling in retrospect and warrants mulling.
My father did his bachelor's degree an NYU while working full time. He's told me how hard that was.
My GF got her law degree as a single mom with two young kids at home. She win's for hardest.
I have a separate work phone that stays on my desk unless I'm going to be away from my desk during work hours - then I take it with me.
It's not nostalgia to me. Except when working on my own businesses or a real emergency, my work ends at the end of the workday. It always has, and that has never changed.
Working outside of work hours is a choice, and one that I mostly choose not to do for other people.
My father had on-call in his job for decades in the last century, that did not mean he was constantly thinking about his job, it meant he could be reached to go if anything bad happened.
Being reachable via phone is not really the same as checking slack notifications every ten minutes.
If you tell that "you break it, you fix it", I say "agree, but during working hours"
> which is not to sit at a desk for a few hours a day, but to deliver a product
Please, let's be professionals. You work is whatever your contract says (which yes, it usually says "to deliver a product" but it also says "40h/week"... at least mine says so)
If employees are being paid to stay after 5 or be on call, then their shift isn't over. If they aren't being paid for their time, they absolutely should go home. If the product cannot afford to go down, the company is responsible for keeping paid staff on hand. Expecting people to work beyond the agreed amount and punishing those that don't by removing opportunities for advancement is reproachable. It may be the norm, but it shouldn't be.
If the product is expected to be up 24/7, and there is nobody scheduled after you, it's on management and not you to solve that.
I work as a SWE and when I'm done, I'm done.
Except one week a month when I have my OOH shift, which is on a voluntary basis in the company I work for. If something breaks during time out of office hours, then it is my responsibility to take care of it. I do, however, get paid quite a nice extra sum just for being on-call.
You seem to be under the impression that there is no level of effort between "sit at a desk for a few hours a day" and "be on call 24 hours a day". I can't imagine why.
Keep that forked tongue in your mouth!
More people than you think don’t, especially if the other party is less powerful and the jackal thinks they can get away with it.
If you need to be available outside of regulars hours, you must be paid. If something must be up 24/7h, hire more people and set proper work shifts so it's covered.
Raises and promotions should come if you do good work, not if you work longer hours. Which will probably lead to burnout or depression.
When I go to a restaurant and order a hamburger, I don't expect to get a sirloin.
So, when this happens, the employer is offering more money if the employee continues working? The employer is asking them to do that, and employees are saying "no, thanks" to the extra money?
The way you wrote your whole post really reads like you aren't talking about paid overtime.
Again: are these workers being offered overtime pay, and refusing it?
I guess you meant "if you produce more then you should get paid more", right? If so, yes I agree. But if you imply that just by working 25% more hours peer week than my peers I should get paid more, well, that's idiotic (maybe I'm working more because I cannot be as good as others who need less time to do the same?).
At least in IT, working more doesn't necessarily mean to produce (things of value) more.
Yes but the habit of working overtime in companies often leads to others feeling like their are "just doing the bare minimum" as you say. Working 8 hours and being productive throughout the week is not the "bare minimum". Companies that encourage people to work overtime are usually toxic places to work on that see jobs as a privilege instead of a partnership. In my workplace we strive to make sure that people don't over do it, regardless of being paid. You can't be on-call forever, and you can't work overtime forever. That's just not healthy and sets bad examples to juniors.
Thanks for the book recommendation, although that's missing the point.
You may disagree with them and that's fine. There is a sort of generation gap obviously and our opinions would differ from theirs. That's fine too.
But what is really unacceptable to me is how you dismiss their viewpoint because they are a 2nd-year CS student! What if they were not a 2nd-year CS student and still believed the same things?
Please be better than this. Comments like yours make these threads a terrible reading experience!
Also http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
> Saying that an author lacks the authority to write about a topic is a variant of ad hominem—and a particularly useless sort, because good ideas often come from outsiders. The question is whether the author is correct or not. If his lack of authority caused him to make mistakes, point those out. And if it didn't, it's not a problem.
Yes, there is no truth, and no one's reality is less "real" than others -- but children are known to talk confidently (dare I say arrogantly) about things which they know not, when they think there are no consequences. Therefore, I would like to be able to easily filter out their opinions, so as to improve my reading experience, and that of others.
If they were not a 2nd-year CS student, they would either be: very early into their career and lucky, willfully naive or privileged, or simply a malicious and adversarial person. Atleast a child can be taught to act properly.
I strongly disagree.
> So just like in real life, I could easily dismiss the strong opinions of others who do not have the experience necessary to form any educated opinions on which they speak.
And this is why. In evaluating an opinion, it doesn't really matter what the person's background is. Experts can have wrong or crazy opinions and laypeople can have correct ones.
What matters is how solid their arguments for their positions are.
Advice carries accountability, and if you don't have the necessary experience to carry advice, it is much better to shut your trap than to reveal your ignorance. The type of inclusive coddling you are doing does not improve the world, it makes everything worse and socially penalizes people for speaking the truth. /You/ are the person who should re-consider your comments.
If their point is incorrect or wrong, why can't they be discussed on its own? Why is it necessary to discuss the person?
May I suggest reading DH1 of http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html?
> Saying that an author lacks the authority to write about a topic is a variant of ad hominem—and a particularly useless sort, because good ideas often come from outsiders.
There are many others who are engaging with the arguments this young person made without bringing their age or professional status into question. That's a healthy debate. What is happening in this subthread is not!
In this case, the post already was pretty poor, on its own merits, as has been pretty well covered all over this thread. The added info took it from poor, to poor and risible, and also probably worth ignoring or quickly dismissing with a post (for onlookers) then not continuing to engage, even for those who might otherwise be inclined to start a back-and-forth conversation about it. Like, one is unlikely to dig up some well of hard-won wisdom on this specific topic that might change one's mind, from this poster, by engaging with them, given that background info.
Who's speaking (or writing) matters. It may not matter for determining whether they're right or wrong, but it matters for how (and whether) one responds.
> Saying that an author lacks the authority to write about a topic is a variant of ad hominem
This is not really about authority. An outsider can have good ideas. A person who has no experience and no knowledge of the subject will usually spout nonsense as seen on this thread.
If someone was talking about how child birth doesn't need any sort of pain medication because the experience isn't that painful, wouldn't you want to know if they had actually given birth at least once?
Concretely, reading what a person who has never worked a full time job (much less had to juggle having a family and a full time job), has to say about work-life balance is pointless.
Reading their thoughts on how not working overtime precludes raises and promotions is a waste of time.
Watching as they finish their rant by appealing to a sense of duty that every software engineer must have because "if Google or AWS goes down, it breaks everything" when the people responsible for these systems are a tiny minority of all software engineers...
Come on. If OP was not a 2nd year CS student, I would have been surprised.
You are literally providing an example of ad hominem attack and yet you are claiming that it is not ad hominem?
Their argument is wrong of course. So you and me are in agreement there. And their argument is wrong on its own merits. That they are a second year CS student is besides the point. Their argument would be very much wrong even if they were a 20 year experienced professional.
When the work week ended, my photography week began. Work was on its own computer and I never included any work communications in any of my personal devices. When we hit lockdown, everything was done from home. That said, they gave us iPhones for our regular telephone communications.
My time is mine. I earned raises and promotions, and had benefits based on my desires. I worked my schedule. If someone scheduled a meeting during a time when I was off, I would discuss that with the person. If I was needed, I'd attend; otherwise, it was my time off.
Yes we had Outlook, Teams, Slack for communications. I would stay connected during the work week, but when I was off, it was my time. My supervisors had ways to contact me in an emergency, and I let them know it was okay to do so in an emergency.
The fashion work ended, but it was one heck of an adventure! It was my time.
Obviously, there are people who work 10h/day and produce high value as well, but it's not a requirement and most sane tech companies out there do not expect that from you.
The way you get promotions is through networking. You are better off spending time on the golf course. The next level isn't about working harder throughout the night. That's code monkey thinking. It's about being able to understand and communicate big picture while fitting in personally. The midnight jolt cola sessions leave you tired, sicker looking and sounding crazy to the suits above. Show them you can do the new job don't show them you can do the job of two of you.
It's something a lot of people don't realize, but many technical roles are exempt from overtime, even when hourly, /by federal law/ in the US. Most roles are also salaried. You gain no direct benefit from working more hours, and it has many fringe downsides and no upsides. Working unpaid overtime skews capacity planning and budget cycles, and leads to teams which are consistently understaffed and under-resourced without reduced expectations. Being "a hero" is actually bad for yourself, your team, and your company. Now that I'm involved in budget processes, resource allocation, and prioritization much more heavily than I was in the past as an IC engineer, I can see exactly how damaging this behavior is.
In /reasonable/ companies, capacity planning is usually based on trend analysis of past completed story points and sizing, averaged against headcount. Being "a hero" fucks up the average and messes up capacity planning. In unreasonable companies, ignorant managers will happily work you to burnout if it helps them drive a sale and take credit for it without any care for your health and wellbeing. Burn out isn't something you can fix by taking a vacation, it's a serious serious problem that can have life-altering repercussions. I have so many acquaintances over the year in tech that developed substance abuse problems, serious mental health conditions, and in many cases had their lives fall apart because they inappropriately managed their work/life balance and burned out.
You should really reconsider sharing advice when you have never actually had any experience. I realize in your 20s you think you know everything and you're invincible, but I'd posit you consider an alternative, which is that you don't know shit and you too one day will get old and die. Perhaps you should re-prioritize before you pay the toll.