Hacker News Reader

How do you know that people are lazy by nature and not because their job sucks?

Of course they have zero incentive to get anything done, they get paid regardless of how well the project gets done.

Maybe if they had the guts to leave a paycheck for browsing Reddit and started their own business they would have success too.

When I work on my projects I have way more stamina than when I'm doing client work. I kind of have to resist the urge to kill myself all the time instead of doing that boring job and I keep reminding me I'll be able to build a villa with the money.

I don't think it's laziness or lack of accountability, I think it's the 20 years of indoctrination in the school system - which are just factories churning out employees afraid of stepping out of line.

> How do you know that people are lazy by nature and not because their job sucks?

The two aren't mutually exclusive. I personally wouldn't say humans are lazy, but simply: people avoid doing things they find unenjoyable, but if they must do something unenjoyable they'll find ways to minimize their time spent doing it.

> Of course they have zero incentive to get anything done, they get paid regardless of how well the project gets done.

This makes it sound like freelancers get more work done, not because it's more enjoyable, but because they must to get paid.

> Maybe if they had the guts to leave a paycheck for browsing Reddit and started their own business they would have success too.

For some people, getting paid to browse reddit is one definition of success.

> When I work on my projects I have way more stamina than when I'm doing client work. I kind of have to resist the urge to kill myself all the time instead of doing that boring job and I keep reminding me I'll be able to build a villa with the money.

Huh... After reading this I need to rethink what you are even arguing. I assumed it was that freelancers put in more hours because the nature of their work is more fulfilling. But you're really just saying, yeah humans are lazy to the point of wanting death over client work, but at least with freelance I can frontload the actual number of miserable hours worked, instead of spreading them over 30 years.

As someone who takes pride in their work and who tries to always work the hours I'm paid for (and often regrettably more, but trying to cut back on that ...) It can be surprising to find out that a lot of people, really are, very lazy.

If you've been lucky enough not to encounter them in your day to day, then that's really good, because when you have to work with one of them, boy does it suck.

That being said, I've only encountered this a few times in over 10 years working as a software developer. Most people really do want to do a good job. Even if some of them get distracted easily and need more structure.

I like to think I am pretty engaged and self-propelled, but it doesn't surprise me that most people aren't interested in working. It would be a miracle if all work required for society just so happened to line up with all the passions of the workers.

That's why we get paid after all. I really enjoy my job and I'm effective, but if I didn't need money, it's not so fun that I wouldn't drop it to do other stuff I find more rewarding.

We aren't built for this either, especially not thought work. Society compells it, which is what it is, but we are not evolved for an 8 hour day of thinking at a desk.

Some people are good at it, but we are asking far more than some people to do it, and you have to do -something- to survive, and the outcome is obvious from thay lens in my opinion.

The last two sections is mostly what I want to address. I feel the same way of more stamina doing my projects then what I do at work, but I feel like the blame, at least for me, can't be attributed to school. Here is the reality, at least for me. I got into software engineering because I like to build really cool shit. The problem is, when people hire me, it usually isn't for really cool shit. Its a business application, often with insane requirements because the client has no clue what they want or even why they really need it. When it does get figured out, its often just some boring business application with nothing really challenging to it or interesting. I'll code it out, but there is nothing interesting about. But when I go home, I just do whatever I want. Want to build my own internet protocol built at a lower layer than TCP? Sure, sounds fun! But no one wants to pay me to do that, or the jobs that would pay me to do that are so far and few between.

If anything, school set me up with higher expectations. Here I am in college, doing interesting math problems and programming projects and such. I get out to the real world and boss man is just like, "client just needs an application/feature to do X," and the solution is just fetching the data, putting it in a list, and doing a for loop over it. If anything, College had me expecting to do a lot cooler shit.

There is simple fact. You will never be a master of your time a truly free in matter of choice what to do if you have a boss above you. Either you let grow others by money that you able to make for them or you let grow yourself by beeing boss to self.

> It doesn’t work for many people whose idea of a workday is to put in 1-2 hours of focus and then browse the internet all day, which is a larger portion of the developer population than I would have guessed before becoming a manager

Yeah, but not necessarily for any malicious reason. It may not matter to you. My impression is that these people are burnt out from high school and college. But they fit a superficially, stereotypically identical profile to like, the one person you know putting in 80 hour weeks, so they keep getting hired. This is not a fringe idea, it's common enough to be made fun of in movies.

My point is that there are a dozen commenters litigating all sorts of irrelevant issues, when the explanation for how people who want to work 1-2h weeks keep getting $200k/yr+ jobs seems obvious to many non-industry laypeople.

> Other people can’t help but wander through tasks, get distracted by rewrites or new frameworks, needlessly refactor working code, or otherwise do a lot of activity without producing a lot of work. Both of these fault modes benefit greatly from the pacing and structure of management.

These are all problems that stem from management, not employees.

> If you’re paying someone 50th percentile compensation and demanding a 90th percentile work pace and output from them, you’re just going to have endless turnover as you burn people out.

Only if they're a 50th percentile person.

Burnout does not work like that.

I don't think burnout would have been any easier on me if I'd been taking home a 90th percentile salary instead of a ~mean one.

Burnout is also not only a function of workload. Other factors can contribute too.