Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

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A bigger problem is making people think that 60 hour weeks is normal, or honourable, and that a 40 hour week is lazy or disloyal or unproductive or harmful to the company. That's not true, and it's possibly leading to early death of some people. It's certainly making some people miserable.

I like working a lot, making great stuff. Some people don't. But that's not my problem.

Asking me not to work, just because some body else doesn't want to, is injustice.

I have faced this situation in the past. I used to get a lot of work done in my last company(I was productive and used to push crazy hours) and by that definition I was learning, making and getting a lot of recognition.

Soon a bunch of girls went and complained to the manager its becoming a one sided game. And the suggestion they gave to solve their problem was to stop me from putting those extra works. Now here is my problems, for whatever reason if you can't/don't want to do something big in life. I doesn't mean everyone should do the same to make you feel good.

This is more or less like socialism. You force the rich to become poor just because the poor don't want to be rich.

EDIT: C'mon guys why would you downvote this? Choice to choose a worklife style is upto to the individual. Stopping Individual from achieving their goals is in direct contradiction to freedom to pursuit of happiness.

HN is becoming like reddit, things get up/downvoted on mood not on merit.

"Choice to choose a worklife style is upto to the individual. Stopping Individual from achieving their goals is in direct contradiction to freedom to pursuit of happiness."

Some might have goals similar to you. Others might aspire to work a 40-a-week job, be there for their spouse and children and not feel burnt out every day. Yes, there are people like you who might enjoy working crazy hours and being super productive. However, the person who is truly most productive in a 40-a-week job should also be able to achieve their goals without this cultural stigma around working a normal amount of time.

Please note the person who works 8 hours a day sincerely is getting what he is supposed to get.

Also the person who works for 8 hrs + x hrs is getting what he is supposed to get.

If you are saying despite working for ( 8 + x ) hrs he must not get anything extra or he and the guy who works for 8 hrs must both get the same, defeats the very laws of karma.

Besides, The 8 hrs guy has a problem only if gets into comparisons with the ( 8 + x ) hours guy.

The expectation that one must get paid the same but do little work compared to somebody else generally makes a classic case when the individual blames others for merely being lucky for the comparative success.

The 8hour worker is getting what they're supposed to get.

The 8 + x hours worker is getting less than they're supposed to. Often they're doing x hours for free.

There can be several problems with that. Sometimes the company gets a lot of value from the x hours, and sells lots of product for lots of money, but doesn't give any money to the worker.

Or sometimes the worker is doing poor quality work, but getting personal value from the x hours (perhaps seen by managers as being more productive) and the other workers have to fix the errors, but are not seen as productive.

> The expectation that one must get paid the same but do little work compared to somebody else

Quite often overtime is unpaid, or is paid at low rates.

I didn't down vote, and agree that people should be able to work as much as they want.

However, when I read sloppily written comments with poor grammar and syntax, I always wonder if the author also writes code in a similar manner. I kind of take it as an insult when author's don't do their best to make their work easily understood by others.

I am from India, and English is not my mother tongue.

Sometime I make mistakes, but I correct them often when some one points out.

I don't think its a big issue, I don't see this as a problem while coding, interaction or even while writing documentation.

Sometimes I make a mistake because of my mother tongue influence over English.

Wouldn't applying some of your extra productivity to an open-source project be more beneficial to more people? Instead of having a difficult work environment with your co-workers you would have learned, created great stuff and been recognized by peers.

Yes this is true, and you would be definitely helping a lot of people.

One of my long term goals is contribute to a open source community.

I didn't downvote, but you might want to consider comments like

> Soon a bunch of girls went

Which appears to be fantastically sexist. (Although that's another huge thread.)

How is that sexist?

I was careful to use the word "appears" - it's sexist because there's no need to mention the sex. "A bunch of people" works just as well, and avoids the "macho == works hard" / "girls == wimps" imagery that is problematic.

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