Stop Glorifying Hard Work and Long Hours
alexstechthoughts.com
alexstechthoughts.com
Tweeting != Work
TalkingAboutWork != Work
Blogging != Work
DoingSomethingInYourIDE does not necessarily = Work
DoingSomethingInGithub does not necessarily = Work
ThinkingButAppearingToBeDoingNothing may = Work
Meetings != Work
CodeReview may = Work
Testing usually = Work
DeliveringBuiltSoftware(AndItsPrerequisites) = Work
HackerNews definitely != Work School != Work
Learning new language != Work
Testing new lang/framework != Work
And so,
Learning new things on HackerNews = Work
Blogging to reinforce your understanding and help co-workers = Work
Setting up Github to speed compilations and testing = Work
Meetings to discuss new features instead of re-doing the same
feature incorrectly 5 times = WorkThis is an interesting distinction and depends on the exact definition of "work". However work is clearly not the same thing as learning.
sharpening axe != chopping wood
The problem is that "sharpening axe" is not so clearly defined. Many people spend time sitting around comparing axes with the rationalization that they're learning more about axes and the art of sharpening axes and 8 easy steps to improve your swing...
that includes me, I guess. Gotta go.
However, in this article the author seemingly seems to want to say "Shipping Code", which is clearly just a small subset of work/being productive.
And no, there isn't someone in the sky recording how many minutes you looked away from coding and deciding if you're an acceptable person or not. ;) The "work" vs "not work" is all in your head.
Sure, there are exceptions. I'm young and single so I have the luxury of putting in a few hours at home in the evenings if I need to when meeting a deadline. But I don't subtract 5 minutes from my "time spent working" when I check Hacker News while my code is compiling. Am I being productive? No. Am I working? Yes.
I would count reading HN as inspirational and thus inclined to lead to better/more productivity/idea's etc. I can count numerous things on HN that lead me to being a better dev. I also used at a lot of interesting tools/tech that came up on HN and that would later fit/solve certain business requirements. So this surely did make me more productive. I would say though this depends on your ability to filter, scan and retain information derived from articles that are often tl;dr.
Also this article in itself is misleading, so reading an article posted on HN on how to be more productive is not considered productive?
You can build the best damn software in the world, but it won't matter if no one knows.
I used to try to "become more productive" by cutting down on some of these things to do more actual coding. But I found that my actual productivity "metrics" didn't increase. I might write more code, but I also introduce more bugs.
Developers don't give enough credit to the cerebral aspects of development. Modern dev is such that you have to do design while you're coding, you don't separate them anymore. Design requires an exceptionally fresh mind. Doing random things to decompress throughout the day keeps you in this productive state of mind and lets you proceed with fewer of the sorts of bugs that necessitate ugly rewrites/redesigns.
Another thing not taken seriously enough by devs is refactoring. It's part of the project, just because your non-technical boss/clients might not quite get why refactoring is important, doesn't mean you can just let them tell you not to. Grow a pair and spend the time and do it right.
I clearly am not making as many productive hours. This of course has to do a lot with all the things involving starting your own business. Also being mechanically confined to a 5 year old windows laptop, looking into buying new hardware, actually setting it up, and then setting up all your dev needs sure amounts to a lot of time. *I would definitely call it work, but not production. Your "reading HN" clause will absolutely hold.
HN is ~10% work (this comment is not work)
Blogging is 90% work
Tweeting is 90% work
More than once now I had a problem to solve and found the solution on HN's front page.
Only if you run bad meetings. Don't call one without an agenda. Stick to that agenda (have a chair). Arrive and leave on time. Send minutes (even notes) within the hour after the meeting.
Meetings take discipline on the part of the attendees and it's just a structured communication method. It's not fair to blame the tool because most people are too lazy to use it well.
Meeting can be useful, but I've worked at companies where meetings are (reasonably) well-run (minutes, chairs, time-capped, etc), but ultimately unnecessary in the first place. People leave with action items but feel as if the whole exercise could have been accomplished in half the time with only half the people in the room.
Or a quick email from one person to another.
In my trailing days at Amazon we had a project that was falling behind due to unforeseen team attrition. The more it fell behind the more meetings were called - one by each stakeholder - to discuss why the project was behind and what can be done to solve it. Ultimately this just meant more engineers in a room explaining things to a lineup of PMs rather than writing some damned code. A few months of this and I decided it was time for me to attrition out.
Before worrying about whether or not your meeting has an agenda, a chair, and set times, figure out if you need the meeting at all.
Which tool? The tool who called the meeting? Har-har... I'm here all week.
But seriously, I think you make a good point. There's an equally good counterpoint, which is that most people can't do this well. Would training help? Or are some people congenitally boring and disorganized (the two are related, I think)?
I wish the MBAs would figure out a way to minimize formal "meetings" by encouraging better informal communication. Not all situations need meetings, maybe things are better solved by a simple "walk over to Jill's desk and hash it out there". Just my opinion though, I don't have formal training in management!
And if you are wasting time in meetings, then you are wasting time in meetings.
> meeting requests
Did you ever reject the request? I'm honestly curious to know what would happen?
Did you ever speak up to your manager about this? His manager?
I guess the real question is, what did you do to fix this?
A lot of the time people who are booking meetings will request attendance from anyone and everyone who may have a remote link to the agenda, they don't put any thought into whether the meeting will actually be useful to everyone they invite. Another problem is that people, usually project managers, will book meetings at the drop of a hat when a quick two minute chat at someone's desk would suffice - a lot of middle-managers have nothing to do other than attend meetings and they suck everyone else in with them.
I found it hilarious because (thankfully) that part of the meeting was nothing to do with me.
I'm now a contractor. I do the tech stuff and I do it well, and nobody involves me in meetings because I'm not part of the company and I don't have to care!
Its one thing if you're a founder and want to spend all your waking hours pursing your dream, but a hiring strategy of "I will only hire people who want to work slave hours on my project for 1/50000th of my equity", is just no.
Agree 100%.
At my company I'm constantly being told I must work overtime, weekends, be on-call with a company cell phone etc. When I say no, people all over the company start directly telling me I'm not committed enough to the company, and I'm not "opening doors" for myself.
I work my butt off for 35-40 hours per week, and get tons done. That's more than enough.
This is a straw man. The point is that if you worked 50 vs 35 hours at the same job, you'd simply get more done - even considering diminishing returns.
There's a reason many hugely successful people are notorious workaholics - see Elon Musk, Oprah, Marissa Meyer, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, etc. One of the simplest advantages that you can get is to just put in more hours than the next guy. No new-age "find-yourself" touchy-feely work-life balance talk will change that.
But I've also seen people put in 50-60 hours at a job where others put in 40 and get paid basically the same salary, without any increased possibility of promotion either. They were basically workaholics for the sake of it, or for appearances, not for any concrete benefit. I think what they got was a feeling of moral superiority for working the hardest (even though they didn't necessarily get more actual work done), as well as a sense of security that they wouldn't be the first on the chopping block when the next round of layoffs came (not necessarily true).
It's not a straw man, I know people who do this in real life. I think of it as cargo culting for career success.
I was referring to cases where it isn't necessarily the norm of the organization to stay late every day, but a few people do it anyway, for their own reasons.
Another possibility--their home life sucks and they would rather be at the office anyway. Sad, but sometimes true.
(And sometimes I wonder: Are all of these top-tier people workaholics? Or is that a myth that's sometimes created to both justify the amount of compensation they receive and to promote workaholism in their employees? Also: Is it easier to seem like a workaholic if you've got huge piles of cash to pay other people to actualize your visions for you?)
Not to be a cynic, but except in the case of Bill Gates, it's not clear these people were not cases of being in the right place at the right time more than any specific brilliance.
(I can't stand daytime television, but I think her position was won through a lot more than being at the right place at the right time.)
May Bill need to work harder because he dropped out? Without any context the "work harder" does automatically mean that you'll succeed, nor that it's worth the effort.
David Heinemeier had a beautiful talk about being happy with a million dollars, rather aiming for the billion. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY
Not to the best of my knowledge. It is worth remembering that the 40 hour workweek was introduced by Henry Ford in 1926 not because he was a bleeding heart liberal, but in order to increase productivity. More hours don't necessarily equal more work done. [1]
For modern non-mechanical jobs, the maximum productivity threshold may be even lower. For some types of jobs, productivity can even decrease: after a certain point, programmers will write sloppier code with more defects; the additional LOCs don't help because you're now creating additional work to remove these defects.
That doesn't mean that there aren't exceptions; just like there are people who have a natural talent to identify prime numbers, there are people who can sustain a high level of productivity over a large number of hours worked.
I also note that corporate leaders operate under different constraints: for them, availability may matter more than personal productivity.
Unrelated to productivity is the health issue: Consistently working long hours is bad for your health in a number of ways [2,3].
[1] http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_...
[2] http://edition.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/04/04/long.work.hours.hea...
[3] http://edition.cnn.com/2012/01/25/health/working-overtime-do...
Individually, you get the same shake every free man has had since the beginning. You climb the mountain until you don't feel like climbing anymore. Maybe you're hurt, maybe you're tired, maybe you've found a nice plateau with a wonderful view.
Meanwhile around you, above you and below you - others scamper up the same mountain.
'Twas ever thus.
I disagree with this. There is simply less work to be done than there used to be, what with automated factories and powerful computers. We've somehow turned this into an "unemployment crisis", when by rights it ought to be a huge boon that means everyone can work less.
That's contract to every hacker ethic I know.
Choosing to spend more of your time to a task will generally return a better results. Now choose your own adventure and determine where you want those results, friends/startup/employer/family/fitness or whatever else you value.
Of all of the people in this country who overwork themselves, the percentage who became billionaire titans-of-industry is, for all intents and purposes, zero.
Millions (or tens-of-millions) of Americans overwork. There's one Bill Gates.
I'd imagine that part of the reason they can be workaholics is that they are hugely successful people. The type of work you do plays a huge rule in how much work you can do.
Especially when you consider this:
> The point is that if you worked 50 vs 35 hours at the same job, you'd simply get more done
Is not something you can bank on.
So Fucking What?
This, you, are the problem OP is talking about. Productivity and "work" are not even close to what should be societal priorities.
For example were you to program for 50-60+ hours a week consistently, your total output would be lower than a guy who worked only 40 hours, and by quite a big margin too. It's counter intuitive, but it's rather well documented and I think a lot of hardworking folks will recognize it from own experience.
Another downside is it's easy to neglect strategic outlook, when you are overworked and thus have your tunnel vision set on operations.
But isn't that, in many ways, the point? We need to optimize every hour of our life, because life (and in particular youth) really is short.
If I choose to spend my life cutting grass with a pair of nail clippers, I can absolutely get more done spending 60 hours versus 35 hours. But you know, I'd rather pull out the driving lawn mower. That should be all of our goals.
There's a reason many hugely successful people are notorious workaholics - see Elon Musk, Oprah, Marissa Meyer, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, etc.
This is cargo culting. These people are often "workaholics" because they are highly successful. And in many cases it's hard to even attribute whether it's work or pleasure, because many business heads "put in the hours" that they do because it essentially becomes their recreation: I doubt any of them lie in bed dreading going to "work".
And ultimately that is the dream of all of us, isn't it? To eventually be in a place where we are effectively choosing everything we do, and where our work is completely rewarding and self-satisfying? In no universe can you compare that to putting in more time at a job you don't enjoy.
That's a bit of a straw man there. Yes, you can get more done using a riding lawnmower compared to the folks using clippers. However, once you're using a riding lawnmower you can get more done by putting more hours in.
Putting more hours in just to put more hours in isn't a good thing (otherwise doing it with clippers would be an optimal solution). Putting in more hours because it lets you accomplish more is, in many cases, a good thing.
It isn't a strawman, though you may be interpreting the comment in a different manner: Proudly boasting about excessive work if you haven't optimized your efforts is not something to consider an accomplishment. Yet it is absolutely common throughout the Western world.
I've always been a "slacker" in the sense that I like to live a varied life. That means when I work I accomplish the most with the least. Many, many people make no such attempt: Thinking back to coworkers back when I was an employee sort, the sorts that did the heroic hours and had the endless late nights by and large accomplished very little, because the metric that they were rewarded on -- at least in their own self-evaluation -- was effort.
So the guy cutting the grass might boast about clipping his yard with nail clippers, just as the developer talking about their 90 hour work weeks spends 88 of them surfing Reddit. This is endemic, and the result is very low productivity because the results aren't measured, the perceived effort is.
You pull your own hyperbole as well.
Being successful does not make you a workaholic, and being a workaholic does not make your successful. I know more than enough workaholics who are because that is exactly what they enjoy. They work sixty hours because it keeps them occupied. It fulfills them.
The blog fails for the same reason your failing, your comparing yourself to others instead of your own goals. Your goals and your ability to meet or exceed them are what matters. How someone else does that does not, never has and never will. Some do it to push themselves, far too many do it to feel superior. Both are wrong.
As far as I'm concerned, if I have to work more than 40 hours to earn my keep, that means the work is of marginal importance and we should really be discussing either (a) hiring more people to handle this glut of grunt work, or (b) not doing it, focusing instead on higher-yield stuff. A programmer's salary is low enough in comparison to value-add that 15 hours per week is break-even, unless the work being assigned is of unusually low importance. So a 60-hour mandate is a sign that we're making up for a lack of strategy through sheer effort, and that never works out in the long run.
On the other hand, working twice as hard to learn twice as fast (or to have twice as good an insight into what it worth working on) is a different story. That can be worth it, because it often ends up making huge differences. If you think of a skill set as an asset, the difference between 10% per year and 5% per year, taken out over 30 years, is that one portfolio does 4.32x and the other does 17.45x-- massive difference. Also, knowledge's time value is such that one might have to work hard (at least in spurts) to get and use the high-yield knowledge.
he's rich too, you've just never heard of him because he didn't work so hard as to become famous
I like to imagine the whole of life as a not-for-profit business; where if you can cover your (living) costs, you've won, and you don't need to work any harder. If you can cover those costs in 2 days per week, great; three days for "side" projects and fun, and two days for relaxing. If you need to save up for a new toy, just work an extra day for a month.
This especially makes sense for programmers, who have well-paid telecommutable desk jobs and are in a position to request pro-rata work - "You want to give me a 20% pay rise? great, I'll keep the same salary and work 4 days, thanks."
Not only that, but I like when I see other people who "#hustle" because it motivates me. I like to know my friends or people I respect are working hard to achieve a goal they're excited about. Also "Working hard vs working smart is something you don't learn till you burn out a few times." What? That is just untrue. I agree after you do something the first time you'll definitely become more efficient at executing it, but if you approach problems practically you can almost always break them down and work them "smart". This post just annoys me.
And your life occurs where in that process?
Sounds like a path to being a droid.
Big Ben, Big Bus Tours, Big Red and ...? After Googling, it seems like the Big Four are audit firms, two of which are headquartered in UK. I guess there's a few people who don't know that.
And I also think the comment about the truck driver is extremely snobby. Truck drivers provide an essential service and they have to work long hard hours away from their families. I don't care if you make twice as much and work half the hours. Don't be a dick.
can't agree on the #hustle comment though. That stuff makes me cringe the f out.
And, as far as "successful" people who talk about the hard work they're doing, I guess that also depends on what you define as successful, I know people who have day jobs and are doing incredible things on the side and they are happy and motivated doing what they love. I personally count that as success.
I found that high-performers want to run hard. Additionally, I found the folks back at HQ were more than willing to load them up with even more work than their 40 hours per week. I kept having to tell the noobs, "Pace yourself. This is a marathon, not a sprint. I want you just as fresh and energetic a year from now as you are today"
So I am firmly on the author's side here. But I also think you can go too far. I see a lot of these articles, and I wonder if they're not just telling people what they already want to hear.
"Shouldn’t we stop pretending spending 50+ hours a week at the office or jobsite to be a good thing and recognize that real genius is finding a way to streamline the process and get that same job done in 25?"
He's creating a false dichotomy: work smart or work long hours. In fact, in many cases it's possible to be the smartest-working person in the shop and still have a lot of work to do. Being smarter doesn't give you a get-out-of-long-hours card. In fact, the drive and dedication that got many people to learn a lot is the exact same drive that will keep them there until late at night. In fact, many of the most valuable things we can do in life need exceptionally smart people working as hard as they can to pull off.
Remember, I'm on the author's side! But I also think that there's nothing wrong simply enjoying a project that calls for a lot of work -- as long as you don't do it to excess. I enjoy projects with the occasional crunch time every few months where folks work late and push through something fun. I like hiking up mountains, even though smart people just drive their cars up or look at photos on Facebook. Hard, difficult work to achieve a worthwhile goal is a good thing! Hard work all the time simply because it's expected or because you confuse hours with value is not.
Work life balance is important, but we need to be clear that certain parts of life actually require a lot of hard work. The guys studying to be brain surgeons don't sit around talking about how they should take more time out to go fishing. Simply because you make a choice to bust your ass doing something tough doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. It's your choice. Whatever your choice is, it just has to be sustainable and fit your values.
If you don't feel like going over to Alex's campfire, holding hands and singing Kumbaya - let me invite you over to the other fire for an inspirational moment before getting back to work:
"Americans love to fight. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league ball players and the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time." ~ George S. Patton's speech to the Third Army, just before the Normandy landings.
I understand your naive enthusiasm but work is more of a marathon. Even doing the most glamorous part, founding a company, is an Iron Man race with many stages. Sprinting to the finish line with goofy motivational speeches when you are still 100 miles away is just bad strategy.
Real Americans apparently love the sting and clash of battle, which is why you have most of the rest of the world pissed-off at you.
As an American, if I am in love with battle, then it would be the sort of battle where the guy makes a big blustery show, charges toward me, and trips over my foot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Killing:_The_Psychological_C...
And this is what I hate about corporate work.
More importantly, what was the VP's long-term response?
Jason Kincaid, formerly of TC, had a great tweet about four years ago- "The amount of fun you’re having at a party is inversely proportional to the number of times you’ve tweeted about it.”
Some joke and call it Kincaid's Law.
I think there is a new wrinkle to it:
"The amount of hard/smart work you are doing is inversely proportional to the number of times you’ve tweeted about it.”
I am going to create a startup soon and we're going to work out of my beachfront 2-bedroom FIOS-equipped apt for starters. The schedule will be:
9am-noon: 5 minute standup to spec work for the day, then code.
Noon-2pm: Lunch but also surf, bike, boogieboard, suntan, volleyball, just do something fucking outside that involves physical activity.
2-5pm: Code. If you finish early, you get to leave.
Basically 2 3-hour spurts of hard work a day. If you finish what you intended to do that day early, you go.
I've noticed that I only get 1-2 solid things done a day, anyway, and the rest of the time is mostly wasted (or reading, etc.) Just fitting a healthy schedule to that.
Is success or contribution measured by your salary? This is only fair if we can all stop drinking beverages delivered to our offices.
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/05/why_men_work_so_many_hours.h...
The takeaway:
'Not only is work devotion a "class act" - a way of enacting class status--it's also a certain way of being a "real" man. Working long hours is seen as a "heroic activity," noted Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and her co-authors in their 1999 study of lawyers. Marianne Cooper's study of engineers in Silicon Valley closely observes how working long hours turns pencil pushing or computer keyboarding into a manly test of physical endurance. "There's a kind of machismo culture that you don't sleep," one father told her. "Successful enactment of this masculinity," Cooper concludes, "involves displaying one's exhaustion, physically and verbally, in order to convey the depth of one's commitment, stamina, and virility."'
The above shows that in many cases Long Hours Are Not About Working, but about signaling dedication and toughness (maybe Robert Hanson could write a post about this one.)
With that said: as someone who has worked many, many of those long weeks (and still does so on occasion) I do see some truth in there, but it's of course more nuanced. I've seen people work long hours because other things in their lives are going wrong (and they were escaping it), because of management pressure (this was in the lull between the previous boom and the current one), or simply because it was "crunch/launch time" (for real - which is a completely valid reason for a long week.)
Anyone ever notice how sometimes your most productive days are when you know you have to cut out early for some important event? "Can't mess around today as I have to leave early" 3pm comes around and you're kind of shocked by how much you got done.
The key to working a normal work-day is to develop a thick skin - to understand that there are things that are possibly important, but just aren't going to get done because you don't have the time to do them. And things might blow up because of these things that don't get done, and that's OK, you're just going to have to live with it.
This is not easy and I'm still very bad at it, but I'm working on it.
Work is what you do in your life every day to create value for yourself and for the people you care about. Your work should make you happy and help you to feel fulfilled. Your work could take 5 hours a week or it could take 60 hours a week. It could make you a ton of money, it could be where you spend your money. Your work could be a volunteer gig at an animal shelter that you do around your 9-5 day job, it could be the all-night code sessions you do as a hobby, it could even be what you do every day as a high-functioning cog in your office cube. It's up to you to find your own glory.
(Sort of like http://blog.workisnotajob.com/) (*Sometimes there is value in helping society be society.)
I agree narrowly with not "glorifying" hard work. There's no need to make a spectacle.
But I believe in what I do, and I believe in its importance. When I automate something, I use the time that I've cleared up to automate something else, improve the automation I've already written, or improve myself.
Granted, I'm not talking 100 hour weeks, but 8-10 hour days, then logging in at night after taking the evening for myself and weekends as necessary when there is a legit need.
I guess it's a question about how driven one is. It's sad this is on HN, I would probably not hire anyone that was content to automate their work and then phone it in for paycheck.
Then again, I have largely stayed out of the large corporate environment, too. YMMV.
Condemning hard work and long hours without any such considerations, is not constructive. Personally, I don't see a value in working as little as possible just to waste more time watching TV or drinking beer, but if that is what you really want to do, fine ...
That's an entirely separate issue, isn't it?
Sadly, most employers see Time = Money. The fact is that that isn't the case at all when people are working 9-5 5 days a week.
Other than for the sheer technical joy of it, I thought we were in this game because we can get paid enough to enjoy the other parts of life?
I actually just published a tangential blog post, mainly focusing on whether more people should work less while focusing on other things in life that matter. http://blog.kirigin.com/10x
Also - it seems to be magnified in the highly transient NYC/SF environments. Recently relocated young people without families just may not have that much to do outside of work.
I found some people perform MUCH better at their own schedule, while some just have it in their DNA and enjoy working hard and long hours. Should we, however, abuse that? Absolutely NOT! They are the rare gems I admire.
But on the separate implied point that working 50+ hours a week is mutually exclusive with working smartly, I disagree. That is naive and simplistic. When you have a finite runway (which decreases in length whether you are or are not working) there's a very strong case to be made for sacrificing a degree of your free time in order to maximize the utility of that runway. Separately, one should carefully balance the multitude of competing development concerns to be working as smartly as possible, i.e. YAGNI, refactoring, testing and CI, tight customer feedback loop, etc.
Conflating smart work with the need to work long hours betrays the likelihood that the author has never even considered the reality of bootstrapped startups.
Yeah, lots of people waste their free time. I don't think that working 60 hours a week is any less of a waste for those people.
The elitism you're all basking in is embodied by this sentence.
Better than athletes, getting hammered, drugs, 'balling', and Britney Spears.
I work fewer hours than most of my peers and I get more done. The reason is not that I am exceptionally smart (I am not), but that I stay relaxed and avoid being burned out.
Glorify efficient results. And then, going out there and having a life, even if it's sitting home alone drinking tea and ready mystery novels.
Now I get to wake up at 12, smoke a joint, have a beer, take a shower, go for a walk with my dog, and then work on whatever the hell interests me that particular day. I dictate my own hours, rates, and clients. Meanwhile my friends in law firms and other similar disciplines talk about how much and how hard they work. I don't get it. Congrats busting your ass for a year doing 60 hour work weeks for $20/hr? They haven't gone out in weeks. They have nearly no friends beyond their immediate work circle. No interests. Nothing.
I think somewhere down the line we got lost, or fucked by the previous generation, probably a combination of both. Work has consumed life. I don't know too many people with external interests beyond work. You get the odd hardcore cyclist, the casual musician, the nerd etc, but most people just go home, crack open a beer and watch some TV.
Work should be about providing a means for you to live your life. The moment I finished my work, it left my head entirely. The way it should be.
My goal has always been to leave the office as early as humanly possible while still completing the work I had to do that day.
We've grown into a culture where the following happens: do decently in highschool -> pick a degree that you hope will pay out but don't really care about -> office life. It's saddening.
Our lives are WAY too goddamn short to be spending 1/3rd of it sleeping, and another 2/3rds working with the occasional weekend.
Back in England, the Puritans were entirely city people. Even those who lived on the countryside were not farmers. So when they came to America, they had to work extra hard to learn farming and adopt that lifestyle, which was made even more difficult by the fact that the soil in the Massachusetts area was hard, rocky and not very fertile.
What is interesting however was that they refused to pick up the farming habits, tools and techniques developed by the settlers who had arrived earlier. Puritans would often complain about the inexplicable justice of "heathen" Americans who were seemingly lazy and were laying around all day, doing maybe a little bit of work here and a little bit there, while still managing to bring in bountiful harvests. Meanwhile, Puritans were breaking their backs from sunrise to sunset working the land and had little to show for it. This behavior came to be known as the "Puritan work-ethic" but in reality it had nothing to do with ethic and everything to do with necessity combined with pure ignorance (i.e. refusing to use more efficient farming techniques).
The history is actually very interesting and has many parallels to your story. You, too, were using superior techniques (i.e. automation) while your coworkers, out of ignorance, shunned it and instead stubbornly continued to do their work manually.
(Another thing that is fascinating was that Puritans were responsible for the banning of many celebrations and holidays, presumably because they themselves had no time to celebrate or take days off from their inefficient work.)
Hard labor has been the norm in our society since before it was a society. For thousands of years, people who worked harder got more done and were less likely to, y'know, starve.
see http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html it is a good read
You literally worked for the MAN, a servant, and lived much more in a collective as we could stomach today. Individually going out and "making it"? Not realistic.
Things were slow. Harvest would happen in a few months, your market was local and expanding a business unrealistic in many cases. Travel was super slow and dangerous. Society was restricted in many ways. Wars, fires, famines could happen anytime and destroy everything you had.
Work was usually physically hard, and food might be scarce, and you better not get ill or injured, right? Are you sure putting in 150% would be wise under these circumstances?
But I'm curious if you've some other aspects I am missing, particularly anything authentic from literature describing the ambitious, hard working people you have in mind.
True, if by "American" you mean "American, German, Swiss, Austrian, Swedish, Japanese, Victorian British, and Protestant". (I'm sure I left out a few, actually).
This, in the end, makes for a every different business culture than I remember from US -- the meetings are as short as possible. The managers actually listen to their engineers, because their expertise is what they are paying them for, and I have yet to meet a German Pointy Haired Boss, while experience both mine and of my friends with US or US-run corporations is that more than half managers are PHBes. They also don't care what you wear, don't care what you do after work, and the don't want unnecessarily long hours. They are efficient an serious about what they do, but they don't worship work the way USians and Japanese do, for example.
(I don't have experience with working with other cultures. Also, I'm not German.)
EDIT: But in no way would Germans require you to do more hours just for the sake of more hours. You owe the company you work for your best, professional effort. But you owe them 40 hours, not more.
I work for a small company, where the owner work long hour, 12 - 16 hours a day. My desire to stay at home in my hammock in the garden doesn't really fit their view of working. However if I did my jobs a developer to perfection, then they wouldn't know the different between me sleeping in the hammock or sitting behind the desk. It can be hard to explain, because it quickly become "time we could be spending on other projects".
In my experience nationality (or, to put it another way, the culture that you share with the people in your region) does matter. I'm certainly not saying that a nation's work ethic is shared by every single citizen - generalizations naturally don't apply to everyone. I'm also not saying that all companies in a country behave the same - there are going to be variations. But overall, the way you look at work varies greatly from country to country.
Puritans believe in Calvinist predestination. In a nutshell, God has known you for eternity. God knows what's going to happen and what you're going to do. God decided whether you will be saved or not before you were born. Your salvation/damnation happens through God's grace, not through your good works.
This presents a dilemma: Why be a good, hard-working citizen if you can't affect the final outcome? The answer is they came up with is clever and I'm going to greatly oversimplify it.
Basically, the Puritans believed that there are clues as to whether you are going to be saved. If you look at a guy and he's a hardworking, serious fellow, he's probably going to be saved. If the guy is lazy and frivolous he's probably damned.
Thus your immortal soul depends on working as hard as possible even though it's God's grace that saves you and not your works.
Besides its still better to teach your kids to work hard than the 'work life balance' thing. From your kids perspective, the 'work life balance' thing is going to be synonymous with laziness.
And in nearly all cases the problem is not with working hard, its working hard in the right direction.
Oh my god, I'm dealing with this now. I made a Python program that automated a lot of our Excel work. It reduced hours of tedium to seconds. Showing it to my manager, the reception was chilly at best. There was some disbelief that a program could parse dozens of slightly inconsistent worksheets (that made it a bit harder, but recognizing the patterns wasn't complex) but mostly deep annoyance at taking on a project he would have never approved. He seemed to think the program needed more vetting even after I'd fed huge amounts of our past analysis into it and verified it reproduces the correct results. He didn't want to see the proof that it worked, he just insisted that the spreadsheets were too complex and that some of the numbering schemes we use were too subjective to define by logic (they weren't).
This is at a workplace where a coworker likes to type in hundreds of sums from a hand calculator into Excel instead of dragging a row. I might have to wait a decade or two for them to retire if anything is to improve.
I looked at the Perl program, found the regex that was causing the space problem, and saw how to fix it. I mentioned that to my manager, and fortunately he had a better response. He made me write a proposal (can't really blame him), and sent that to the app's developer. I think the proposal was three pages, describing the problem, the cost, and the solution (to remove two spaces!). A few days later they offered me a job in the programming department.
Maybe I was just lucky? But I'd hope most places are not so WTF that if you're willing to earn some trust you can't introduce improvements.
My default advice (because I've seen this more than just a few times) in situations like these is to wait 2-3 weeks, then go back to the manager and say, "Hey Boss, remember that automation I showed you the other week? Your experience proved you right; after our meeting I went back and tested some more because you were so cautious about the idea, and indeed found edge cases it didn't catch, and man it's a pain to work through them all so I tossed the code. Boy, am I glad you advised me to tread carefully there with all your years of hard-won experience!". Unless you can get at an actual-owner who would see the obvious direct benefits, slash the workforce, and protect you from the backlash, you are not going to progress anywhere by continuing to threaten your manager the way you are now. Getting demoted or even laid off is a real possibility for you with a reaction like that to automation. The management level to sell this to is the one that will benefit from decreased headcount while holding productivity at the same level (or some variation thereof).
In the meantime, keep your automation on the down-low, use it to free up your time, maybe share with a very close friend at work (if you know for absolutely certain they won't blab, as a reveal is exceedingly likely unless they are a fellow coder and see the logic in my advice above, and maybe not even then), then allocate the slack time to other activities that will boost your marketability on your own equipment (learn new stuff, write more code, etc.). When the time is right, find a better job and jet, and leave them never the wiser about the possibility of automation (unless you want to come back and sell your automation to an owner or high-level manager, for the estimated savings on 3-5 years of automated-away fully-burdened labor expenses, which will look good on their budget...just make sure you do a new/improved from-scratch rewrite with better error checking/etc. on your own time and sell that and not the code you wrote while they employed you).
Team of manager salaries. They employee salaries. Contractor salaries.
There over 500 people working on this thing.
I suggested in a meeting "Why not hire an agency that will do this at a fraction of the cost?" I got a lot of angry glares. Why not? Because half our building worth of employees would be pointless.
My advice - quit and find another job at a more enlightened place.
Programming is a tool in your toolbelt that should be used with stealth.
Original thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/reddit_my_f...
Follow-up: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/vomtn/update_my_f...
:(
If I was in your position, I would have tried to get a raise instead of lingering in my mainly automated position -- ideally into another position I can automate. I don't want work to vanish from my head as soon as I leave my office, because that means it didn't particularly affect me in any way.
I don't think this is a particularly 'right' way to handle this. Some people want different things out of their work, and I think that's normal. You mentioned you're freelancing now -- are you doing stuff based off of what you were working on earlier, or did you switch paths?
Right now I'm doing iOS development. I get to take my laptop to the park, or anywhere outside and it's goddamn amazing. Last night I worked all day on an isolated beach on an island right across from my city. Possibly the most fun I've had in months to be honest.
Freelancer is the new bohemian.
In all honesty though, that job instilled severe depression in me. Did about 6 months there and literally almost killed myself until I seeked help and my contract was up.
Do you typically get a lot done working like this? I'd like to give it a shot, but I'm worried that it's not productive at all.
How'd you work all day on battery power? Did you have an internet connection? Did the sunlight make your screen unreadable? Did you have a good and comfortable work posture? Did sand get in your devices?
I took a couple of weeks to camp by a lake and attempt to learn kitesurfing, while working in the evenings. In the test run with my solar panel at home, everything worked well - charge batteries during the day, work at night with a dim screen.
In the wild I soon found that mobile internet power usage goes up dramatically if you're a long way away from the mobile tower, it's hard to work without a decent seat (I took my motorcycle, so didn't have a car to sit in), and the light was just too bright in the days/evenings.
Next time I'm going to try with a van =D.
Also, to answer a couple of the other questions:
- Sand wasn't generally a problem for me, except I blew up my fancy 240/12V laptop power adaptor when some wet grit got into the connectors. - Sunlight was only really a problem in regards to battery power; screen brightness is a big contribution to power usage, so there's a trade off.
I do database integration for a large corporation -- moving data from other files and databases into one central database. Not the least bit challenging -- like you, I feel I can do the work in a fraction of the time, yet I'm required to be at my desk 40 hours a week.
Instead of getting depressed, though, I decided to make the necessary changes -- I'd start a freelancing business, and once it's successful I plan to quit this job.
I can't understand how people are like that you said -- "do decently in highschool -> pick a degree that you hope will pay out but don't really care about -> office life." I would be immensely depressed if I had to do this for 40 years with no way out. I have family members, friends, and an ex-girlfriend who think I'm being stupid or lazy. I just want more out of life than the drudgery of an office job.
But congratulations on what sounds like great success, and here's to me doing the same.
Right now I'm doing iOS development. I get to take my laptop to the park, or anywhere outside and it's goddamn amazing. Last night I worked all day on an isolated beach on an island right across from my city. Possibly the most fun I've had in months to be honest.
Sounds like you're living the dream. Good luck with your continued success!
Right now, working on my startup, I get ticked off for a lot of menial work that it involves, but despite being tired and broke, I'm way happier. And this simply because I'm using my skills to work on meaningful stuff.
The chinese have an interesting saying: "All you need to be happy is something to do, someone to love and something to hope for". I think this clearly states the need for balance.
Worst case scenario: I get a stupid amount of experience and land a sweet job at a startup once my time is up. Loving it.
My minimum goal is to become an awesome full stack engineer. My max goal is to live lavishly as a freelancer/consultant.
Thanks, I hope I succeed as well.
We're all mortal. Even computers have a finite number of ticks on this earth. Time should not be jail-time, where you try to make it pass quickly, which feels like being dead already. It should be child-time, where you look forward to each second and are spent and saddened when it's over.
I think a big test is: how do you feel after a day of work? If you just feel like vegging in front of the TV, you might want to reconsider how you spent the day.
But most twenty-two year olds check out long before that happens.
That having been said, the relevant concept isn't boring, it's inefficient. Cleaning toilets is boring but someone has to do it anyway. What people are complaining about here isn't that they were doing boring but necessary grunt work, it's that they were doing unnecessary grunt work that could have been automated, that their time was being wasted.
If your job can be automated, automate it. If your manager reacts negatively (and not by pointing out problems you weren't aware of), that means he's incompetent, dishonest or both. In that case, start looking for another job. Life is too short to work for incompetent, dishonest people.
[1] http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?i... [2] http://linux.die.net/man/1/rename
On the other hand, they have job security that way.
I've seen the same thing, and encountered huge amounts of pushback from the same people.
If I automate, they no longer have 80 hours of work to do every week. How are they gonna get promoted then? By being competent or something?
That, like, never happens.
http://plasmasturm.org/code/rename/
The -z flag is phenomenal. The only thing I wish it had was a -R for recursive.
Thank god I don't have friends, bastards would be stealing even more of my time.
One of the contractors was hired shortly before the hiring manager quit. He had an office. He came in every day, opened his macbook and worked on his own projects for three months before somebody finally asked him who he was. Nobody questioned him because nobody had an idea who to even talk to about such issues, nor did they care.
We have armies of developers that essentially do nothing.
"I want to get ahead and get that VP spot, I need to outsmart or outwork everyone else."
"Crap someone just stepped into our space and is eating our lunch, we need to move our roadmap up by 3 months."
If something goes wrong and you were working 80-hour weeks, you can say, "We did everything possible and still the ship sank."
If you were out having fun most of the time and the ship sank, most of the people standing around are going to blame you for laziness and inattention.
I think this book, light as it is, provides a lot of clues to that:
http://www.amazon.com/Back-Our-Future-Now-Our-Everything/dp/...
I have a problem with the often-used word "recreation": it can be interpreted to mean that your job is your life, and anything you do to rest or unwind from work is just a way to come back to work more refreshed and productive.
People in managerial positions don't just want to be rewarded for their work. They want prestige and the root of almost all forms of prestige is nostalgia.
Nostalgia (and its attendant fallacies) leads to this long-hours glorification, because people who suffer a lot to push something through, after it succeeds (regardless of whether the suffering contributed) end up remembering the "glory days" of energy drinks and double-all-nighters as if those moments were better than they actually were. Those weren't fun at the time. That's a happy-ending reinterpretation because scary things that end well are often remembered positively.
What's missed is that (1) those crunches aren't sustainable, (2) they're only "glory days" for people who get major, career-improving and permanent benefits from the work-- otherwise it's just managerial abuse, and (3) most of those crunch-driven efforts fail and just become miserable death marches that make people really bitter, and the career damage of that can last years.
If people actually leave at 5:00, they recover better from those death-march episodes because they haven't let their health and network go to shit.
> They want prestige and the root of almost all forms of prestige is nostalgia.
There's something of the hazing cycle in this too. They suffered, so they glorify the suffering, and share it with others.
> (2) they're only "glory days" for people who get major, career-improving and permanent benefits from the work-- otherwise it's just managerial abuse
In other words, for most people, this is nothing but slavery.
Interesting.
I'm not a hacker because I love programming and it's my purpose in life and the reason I live. I program because it's a relatively good career and an efficient way to make money so that one day I won't have to (and while I do, I still get 30+ hours a week to pursue the things that do bring fulfillment). Sure I'd rather be a programmer than a plumber, truck driver, accountant or even another highly paid profession like corporate lawyer, but I'd rather be an independently wealthy intellectual seeker, family man, world traveler, explorer and pleasure-seeker than a programmer...
Could it possibly be that people work at different paces, have different work ethic, and have different aspirations, but that they can't be compared at face value purely on the hours worked? Just because you work less hours, doesn't necessarily imply you're doing the work "smarter," it probably just means that you are only doing the required the work. It is possible that I work much "smarter" than you do and still work 50-60 hours work weeks because I am doing twice the required work. This isn't that bizarre if you are really trying to cover a large amount of the material that exists in CS beyond making cool, hip web-apps and mobile sites. In that case, you might NEED to put in extra work since you are possibly taking on two jobs: one as an employee and one as a student.
That being said, I recall a lot of people making this argument to me as I progressed through school and every activity I've done. They claimed the exact same thing about being the "real geniuses" (please don't fool yourself here) because they learned how to work "smarter"; which usually came down to putting in ONLY the minimally required hours, constantly calculating their grade to make sure it was high enough for them to fail the tests and still pass with a C, and overall cutting corners. You want to know what I saw happen to those people? Failure. These are the same people who were high school dropouts or got kicked out of college for not doing the work. Here's the thing, in a world where the job market is extremely competitive, your stubbornness to work "unreasonable" hours is purely a weakness and hardly a strength. You can have all of knowledge in the world and truly be a "real genius," but if your boss can't confirm your work ethic, you still don't have a job. Oh, and good luck starting/running a business with your 35 hours work weeks.
Finally, you should probably apologize to those of us who are hard workers out there for being purely insulting. As if CEOs and CTOs and great hackers all over the world worked somehow less "smart" than you did because they worked hard hours and slept underneath their desks. Sometimes to excel and to surpass yourself, you have to sacrifice and change the pace of things. Do you really think Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Steve Jobs, etc, got where they were by saying "well, I've done 35 hours of 'smart' work now, I need to stop an meditate?" Well, maybe, but they definitely didn't start like that. And god forbid you have to take care of a family and multiple children. Do you think your spouse is going to be happy with "Oh, I already did my 35 hours of 'smartly' raising the kids and providing for the family, I'm done now."
There are reasons that people "glorify" the hard work and long hours they put into things; they are proud of their work. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out. If your twitter friends are "humble brag"-ers, get new friends. But don't pretend everyone who loves to share their hard work is trying to shame you or brag about it.
Like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and every hacker known to humanity?
> Could it possibly be that people work at different paces
People who are less efficient at a certain job may be in the wrong career... and we shouldn't hold others back because some are slower.
I've gone through periods of intense workaholisms, and I've gone through periods of laid-back socializing. I found that my work performance - as measured by promotions, salary, being put on important projects, and getting good jobs - actually improved when I let go and didn't focus so hard on work. Why? Because I came across as more confident and easier to work with. Because all the time spent hanging out with friends, going to parties (which I'm not sure I really enjoyed - I'm an introvert by nature), getting coffee with random strangers, etc. translated into improved social skills, which translated into better work performance. Because I had time to be curious and let my mind run wild, which is the birthplace of creativity.
There are certain intangibles that you miss when you're heads-down toward a goal, and you don't realize you've missed them until you've been working hard for 10 years and then seen people seemingly inexplicably pass you by with far less effort or technical skills. I know a lot of older scientists & technologists that are really bitter about this, forever complaining about how idiots rule the world, but I chose to accept that this is the reality and figure out why idiots rule the world, and what I was missing that prevented me from ruling the world too.
'Do you really think Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Steve Jobs, etc, got where they were by saying "well, I've done 35 hours of 'smart' work now, I need to stop an meditate?"'
Steve Jobs said pretty much exactly that: "I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger." -- On Bill Gates as quoted in "Creating Jobs" in The New York Times (12 January 1997)
Also, the Steve Jobs quote is cute, but doesn't really address what I'm saying. Steve Jobs is purely saying that Bill Gates should have probably enjoyed his life more, but that doesn't mean he couldn't also work hard. There are actually 168 hours in a week. You can work for 60 hours and still drop acid, it turns out. You don't have to call it quits at 35 hours because you're supposedly working 'smarter' and Steve Jobs definitely didn't.
Work != life in most cases , you can't stop life but you can stop working so your family analogy doesn't hold up
Now, they could do what the author says and call it quits after 35 hours (what a fucking low # btw) of taking care of the children and running their organization. They should be proud of the amount of work they do to keep their family together and improve themselves. And you shouldn't be whining if they happen to make a twitter post about it. It's not your business.
I don't consider family interactions work , it can be hard but it is not my definition of work. You can stretch definition to suit your justification of your lifestyle but I am happy with my 133 hours/week left for me after I call quits :-)
YMMW