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Comment by ttoinou | Hacker News Reader

In which world do you live where employees work 8 hours per day ? They clock 8 hours per day maybe, but they don't work that time

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I had a friend who was CEO of a startup tell me that he typically only “worked” an hour a day, not because he was lazy but just because there was so much nonsense in his schedule. He told me he was trying to get it to two hours per day.

How successful did he turn out to be? As a CEO your days should be jam packed with brutal "chewing glass and gazing into the abyss". Is he running a lifestyle type company?

Tangential, but all companies are lifestyle companies, in the sense that they serve their owner's lifestyle choices.

It's just that lots of owners want a company that pulls them away from all other areas of life.

This reads like compensation theatrics.

Quite successful. Tech company.

I agree with you.

I am on Dutch subreddits a lot, to get a local pulse and not to be too HN minded.

A lot of them would have vilified you by now. Some even would have even questioned your morality.

Again, I agree with you. But clearly not everyone has this view.

Generally, when people say they are working 8h/day, they don't literally mean it. Even "work" is basically impossible to define for a SWE.

In theory, ofc. But that doesn't matter. If you were doing something that took 2 days in average, but you were doing it in half the time, then that was fine pre LLMs. Nowadays your manager knows that with LLMs you need to deliver faster no matter what, and then it's more difficult to "hide" and to slack.

Yeah. So, good things. We ack know that people are mostly slacking at work

Some companies force you to actually work 8 hours a day. It’s hell.

Which country and which companies ?

E.g. factory work

Oh yeah its not the same, we were discussing Agentic AI

I worked at a software company that made screenshot of your screen every minute. I also worked a non-software white collar job where you were expected to work non-stop for 8 hours, except for an unpaid lunch break.

How did you accept such jobs ? I would never be able to pull this off as an employer

Because nobody is hiring so if I got an offer I had to accept it.

People are still hiring, it's just very competitive - reframe rejection as learning opportunities returning wisdom.

In retrospect, many companies you get turned down from are likely companies you don't want to work for anyway hence the incompatibility.

It may be hard, but positive mindset will go very far towards enhancing your outcomes - you need to bring others up around you as well. Pause on this and think about the first thing that comes to mind when you respond to these words.

I saw a comment on HN a while ago. I don't remember exactly how it was worded, but roughly it was something like: if you are self-taught (which I am), you will have to do many shitty jobs before you get a good one. That is how I think of my situation. I am still doing shitty jobs, but I think that the shittiest ones are already behind, and if I had not taken them, I would not be where I am now.

> you need to bring others up around you as well

I am not 100% sure what you mean here, but I don't think that I have the authority or reputation to "bring up others." I find that telling other people what to do is futile, and the best I can do is leave them alone and let them learn from their experiences, or else you might be labelled a "rock star," which is coincidentally being discussed on lobste.rs right now:

https://lobste.rs/s/uvwcdo/cleaning_up_after_ai_rockstar_dev...

The problem is that there are people willing to accept these conditions. Think higher of your self worth in future please.

Here’s my hot take as an elder millennial. Boomers are the absolute worst at being unable to make the distinction between time at work and time doing work. They may show up an hour before everyone else but spend the first two or three hours a day, reading the news and getting coffee and making small talk and accomplishing literally nothing. Then crow about their work ethic.

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