The value of time, or not | Hacker News Reader

The value of time, or not

swombat.com

32 pointsjack789017 comments

I'm curious as to whether this general trend is a new one or if I'm just getting old:

1) user creates semi-controversial post (see: PHP sucks, nosql sucks, node sucks, semi-colons suck, time-is-money, ideas are worth nothing etc)

2) debated ad-nauseum with good points on both sides

3) within 24 hours, blog posts turn up which say almost the opposite of whatever was said in a) PHP works for me, time is worth nothing, nodejs/mysql is webscale, ideas are everything.

I can't help but feel that - much like this comment - it doesn't add much that hasn't already been said better elsewhere and is purely for linkbait purposes.

There are two things at play here:

First, it is far easier to reply to an existing conversation than it is to start a conversation. Expanding on or contradicting an existing idea is easier than having an original idea.

The second is that you are more likely to notice a conversation that has multiple replies so it appears most topics take that form. This is a form of survivorship bias, in that you rarely see the topics that don't start the threads.

While I'm sure there are some responses of this nature that are true linkbait, I think the vast majority are not. Most of them are just people wanting to give their opinion, especially if they think somebody else is wrong.

You forgot the obligatory "9 reasons why your time is worth nothing." link-bait headline.

And then the follow up "Studies show time is worth less for women than men."

I completely agree. What's worse is that the article doesn't even really present the opposite view, instead just agreeing with the general point of the original and stating it's attention instead of time, essentially arguing semantics. This is pretty aggravating.

I disagree, it's not semantics. It's nuance. Which is important. I think he is saying its about focus. I often take the financially non optimum choice because I know what truly needs my attention. It's essentially opportunity cost.

Is it worth a blog post? No answer to this question is meaningful as I'm sure is a matter of preference.

Also, so what? Unless its your favorite blog author and you thought he wasted time with this one as a content consumer you don't lose anything.

Heh, I think you're just getting old. This is the new normal of public discussion in the blogosphere. I think it's a drastic improvement over the walled-garden editorials in major periodicals.

I found this article in particular insightful, even if the "hook" feels a little cheap.

It does seem like that is happening more lately. I'm sure the original post inspired the present author as soon as they read it, but it does take a little while to put together a blog post, vs a reply on HN.

What I personally don't like so much is the blog posts that seem to be targeting HN. I'm not sure why it bothers me...I guess it just seems cloistered and almost incestuous.

I'm also not a fan of blog posts critiquing other blog posts. The blow-by-blow he-said/she-said format doesn't appeal to me at all. It seems to me the author in this case could have formulated his opinion into a post that didn't rely someone else's post at all.

Actually, it took about half an hour from the point where I finished reading Jack's post to when I posted this up.

Swombat.com started partly as a place to aggregate my commentary on articles that I think worthy of extra attention and comments.

Worth noting that I didn't submit this to HN. Others did, and they upvoted it, so clearly some people are disagreeing with your view. If you don't like it, just read something else and don't upvote.

As for formulating it without mentioning Jack's article, sure, I could have done that, but that would have been dishonest and lame, since the article was indeed inspired by Jack's writings.

This is HN. It's grown massively over the past few years and it's increasingly getting targeted with more linkbait content. To your point, I spend a lot less time on here now.

I#m not that long around HN, but yes, that#s something that started a couple of weeks ago with quite some regularity. I don't like it neither.

But if people enough time to do that. Maybe I#m just gonna ignore them, easy since they so conviently give away themselves in the title! :-)

This is swombat, one of the biggest tech bloggers in the UK, not some random linkbaiter trying to build his Klout score.

He's been around for years, and his blog has always been a repository for interesting links he finds online, along with his own commentary. IIRC he started it because he realised he spent way too much time reading content without remembering any of it; by taking the time to write about the good stuff, it stuck with him.

"Once upon a time. The end."

The laptop example used by Jack and echoed here is fair, but the most realistic one I can think of, as a bona fide non-rockstar and non-founder, is in-flight WiFi.

Prices have gone down quite a bit over the past year, but I remember being locked in an inner struggle with myself to spend $50 for two hours of WiFi.

The first line of thinking is: well, can I generate $50 in those two hours if I have WiFi? Chances are, yeah, you can -- but will you? I don't know if you've ever tried to get work done on an airplane, but I'm miserable at it; its cramped, loud, and just generally unpleasant. I might end up staring at a blank terminal for two hours.

But lets say we decide that we're going to be uber-productive and we'd spend those two hours coding away diligently. We value our productivity here at $50/hour, so buy spending $50 on wifi we gain $100 of productivity. The next question is: how productive would we be without wifi? Economic decisions aren't made in a vaccuum: a programmer can do an awful lot without WiFi -- and its up to your heuristics to decide if the bump in productivity is worth the $50.

This is an interesting counterpoint to the original time post; it's better to think about the amount of energy and focus you're putting into something, because in the end these resources are much more finite and variable than time.

Time is a known quantity, and at any one time you know how much time you or your employees have available (more or less). You can burn through energy and focus at very different rates depending on how you spend it. It's also not as measurable as time, which is why people like to just equate time to effort/focus, and then just measure effort based on time spent.

In reality, some people are better at spending their effort in short sharp bursts over a longer period of time, while other people prefer to spend it all once until a task is done or they run out of energy, and there's all sorts of people in between. This also highlights the importance of taking time to recharge, and making sure you have a reasonably balanced life.

I think this is the big reason for the success of some implementations of hammock driven development and paid company holidays in increasing the value generated by employees. In the end it's important not only to consider time spent, but also to consider productivity. A focus purely on time spent is what gives us 40-hour work weeks chained to a desk. Because logically the more time you spend at your desk, the more work you'll get done, right? We all know the fallacy of this type of thinking.

As Greg Brown sang, "time ain't money when all you got is time."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-xWWFNJFJQ

The opportunity cost of wages not earned is not the proper tool with which to measure the amount of benefit your time provides to yourself and other humans.

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