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Fetishizing hard work is a purely American phenomenon. Like many other parts of American culture, it has to do with the country's Puritan roots.

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.)

Actually I think that's entirely backwards. The celebration (calling it "fetishization" is a little loaded for my tastes) of leisure time across a whole workforce is a very recent phenomenon, and it's limited almost exclusively to post-war western Europe. Everyone else is still cheering for elbow grease.

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.

A counterpoint: "Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.' Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment." -Bertran Russel in 1932

see http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html it is a good read

Are you sure about it? I think that before the industrialization people had only very vague concepts of work efficiency. Before the pocket watch was introduced, people could have had only a very vague idea of the time, especially when not in hearing-range of the church bells. Units produced per worker per minute? Not happening on a farm.

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.

If people liked work so much, why would they conceptualize heaven as a place where you can just lay about doing nothing? :)

Fetishizing hard work is a purely American phenomenon

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).

I do have some experience with Germans, and I don't think so. Germans are pros. They expect you to be professionals, the expect you to be prepared, on time, and do a good work, and they expect you not to waste anyone's time.

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 agree. German work culture is about efficiency whereas American work culture is about long hours.

I have worked with a lot of Germans, and they do value long hours - as well as efficiency.

Nothing you said contradicts the previous poster though. Germans do value hard work. You are inexplicably interpreting "hard work" to mean "long hours". Hard work is working hard, it is entirely orthogonal to how long you spend working.

It's not really about nationality, it's about the company you run or work for. Sure some nationalities generally stick to shorter hours, but the reaction you get from coworkers or the boss if you keep a strict 8 - 16 day is company culture.

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".

It's not really about nationality

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.

There's theology behind it as well.

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.

To add a bit to this, the Puritans believed that earthly success was a sign of one being predestined to eternal salvation. So they worked hard for success.

Little known fact: The Puritans invented the concept of "p-value", and like every one else doing statistics since, they misinterpreted its meaning, assuming that "P implies Q with probability 95%" means that "Q implies P with probability 95%"

That is a rough approximation of Max Weber's theory from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which is an amazing and surprisingly readable little book.

Yeah, I left the theology part out since it can potentially devolve into a religious debate. :)

Yes, If you are rich then you are blessed by god.

I'm pretty sure asian cultures also fetishize hard work. At least that's the impression I get from my Chinese, Koren, and Japanese co-workers.

We don't fetishize hard work nearly as much as we stigmatize failure. Subtle difference.

I was under the assumption that the entire idea of the "protestant work ethic" had it's roots in calvanism and predestination not farming. The idea was that because everything was already predetermined by God, working hard and making lots of money was your just reward and signaled to others you were righteous.

Its a world wide phenomenon actually.

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.

> When I worked at a large corporation, I nearly automated all of my work and I was called lazy. I'd do about an hour work a day, customize an existing script to process new data, then read for the remaining 6 hours. Co-workers called me a lazy nerd and proceeded to copy paste words into excel for 8 hours.

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.

When I moved across the country to Boston back in late 2000, all I could find was a data entry temp job. They were using a Perl program to automatically build QuarkXPress pages based on an XML feed. But the Perl program was introducing dozens of typos per page, in a 1200-page catalog (mostly extra spaces, plus some Unicode issues). Six other temps and I had to go through each page and fix the typos.

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.

The likely real reason you got such a frosty reception from your manager is because your automation directly threatens his position by making redundant his headcount.

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).

Time to go over your manager and show it to his boss. Low level line managers are often defined by the specific tasks his team is doing. If your script automates most of those tasks, the mission of the team has been eliminated and so is your manager's job. High level managers would love the productivity boost and the elimination of an entire team. And your work will be recognized.

It's time to leave that company. They don't deserve you.

Or time to talk with the boss' boss and remind him that time is money, and you can save him money. The incompetence of the people around you isn't your moral responsibility.

That'd be the president of the company (we're a small mechanical engineering firm), and he's even worse. He vetoed the request from my boss to upgrade to MS Office 2013. We're on a mix of XP/2003 right now, and Excel+Word are the lifeblood of our work.

So your manager just suggested that you upgrade all your machines from XP to windows 7, and upgrade office from 2003 to 2013? That's not necessarily kneejerk stupidity - did your manager include a list of benefits from upgrading, against a cost analysis, and allow for a test run of trying to run all your existing spreadsheets (presumably more complex than just a few numbers!) on the new system, or just say 'hey we should get a new version of everything we use, it won't cause any downtime' and the boss said like hell it won't? I think upgrading is probably a good idea, but it's definitely not a no-brainer 'ok do it tomorrow' idea.

Sounds like he'd be better. Especially if the veto was done with concern over cost. He'd likely appreciate how much cost this automation could save him.

People don't care. I've tried. They want job security and nothing more. We have an $88 million dollar budget for a shitty mobile app at a bank. Yes. That's right. You read that. 88 MILLION for a mobile banking app. You know why?

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.

Sounds like a terrible place to work. I work at a big corp and one of my jobs is to find people doing silly things like this and eliminate (the tasks) through automation.

My advice - quit and find another job at a more enlightened place.

I believe the correct play for this scenario is to automate the work and never tell anyone. Though I can imagine that not revealing it could be just a little bit tricky to pull off.

That sounds like a horrible environment!! If you live within 500 km of me, I'll buy the first round...

You need to run the scripts under the radar. Once you are discovered you are fucked. No manager will pat you on the back for automating your work.

Programming is a tool in your toolbelt that should be used with stealth.

Listen to this advice. There was a guy on Reddit sometime ago who automated lots of his work, and his co-workers hated him for it. Wish I could find the thread.

I remember that.

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...

How does this rule apply if you're a full time UI developer?

:(

See, I think there's an ideal that lies in between "work the bare minimum to support yourself" and "work your entire life to the exclusion of other activities."

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?

The work I did does not even remotely tie into what I am doing now nor did it warrant a second thought beyond the office. It was a contractor position. I had to import data sets into excel from other documents. All I did was export the previous doc into a CSV file and write a script to import it into excel. It was piss easy. Then I shipped off that data set to whatever team needed it. That's all I did. It was menial.

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.

> Last night I worked all day on an isolated beach

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'd find stories about this interesting too.

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.

Wow, your situation sounds amazingly similar to mine.

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.

I'm honestly fascinated by that kind of work -- not that its interesting, but the fact that it exists is just strange to me.

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!

From the viewpoint of someone who has seen the inside of BigCo, that sounds pretty naive. I'd guess most "software" jobs are not too far from spreadsheet automation.

After working in IT consulting, I second that. I often found myself wondering how most of what I did was a waste of my skills. I had learned a lot of cool stuff in college, like distributed systems, that was completely useless to what I did. The problem was, when I transitioned to management, all my proactivity and passion for strategy were also almost useless; you were expected to do as everyone else, or else. So I quit :)

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.

Nah I'm not making any money at all. I'm using the money from the job I just finished to fund 2 years of development time, rent, and food. I don't spend much so I get to live a fairly risk free lifestyle. I just work and read whatever is interesting that day/week/month.

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.

In my view, the hacker mentality is always about finding a way to automate your way out of tedium and do something more interesting with that time instead.

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.

There's a difference between an obsession, your life's work, and something you do to make a living. It can be nice if they cross paths, but as you say, far too many people confuse working long hours with being "productive" or "responsible" or "hard-working".

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.

So every twenty-two year old I've ever met has told me how boring their entry-level corporate job was and how they just want to get out. Fine. But recognize that your job is boring because entry-level jobs are boring. They just exist to see if you're sane and you'll do work; once you prove yourself you get more interesting jobs.

But most twenty-two year olds check out long before that happens.

My job at age twenty-two wasn't boring. My entry-level job at age seventeen wasn't boring. Granted that I got lucky, it still disproves the notion that this is a cosmic necessity.

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.

your mention of lawyers reminds me of the Kia Motors outside counsel technology audit[1]. Many lawyers waste ridiculous amounts of time doing busywork. In my day job, I spend many hours visiting customers and spend much of that time adding automation for them, simple bash scripts that allow them to do things much more quickly. Yesterday, I taught someone the rename command[2]. Previously, they had been spending an doing it manually with the mv command. I am constantly reminded about the amount of low-hanging fruit there is out there for automation that is currently handled extremely manually, sometimes by some very well-paid people.

[1] http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?i... [2] http://linux.die.net/man/1/rename

> I am constantly reminded about the amount of low-hanging fruit there is out there for automation that is currently handled extremely manually, sometimes by some very well-paid people.

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.

Try this rename script if you really want to profit:

http://plasmasturm.org/code/rename/

The -z flag is phenomenal. The only thing I wish it had was a -R for recursive.

A few of my friends who are aspiring lawyers are terribly depressed because of their current work. They honestly thought they were going to walk straight into 100,000k/year jobs. Now they're pushing paperwork all day for a third of that salary :\

Amen Brutha! My last job I had coworkers who would complain to me that they got bored over the week we had off for Christmas vacation. I'm so much happier now that I'm away from that culture and am working with people who love what they do and love doing other things as well.

Same here. How could you possibly be bored with a week off? When I had a weekend off I basically planned all the fun shit by the hour that I was going to do. Shows, beers with friends, trips, bike riding, tons of stuff to do!

I have this problem, usually on weekends and not weeks off, but not because I live to work. It's because I have a lot I would like to do, and many of these 'little projects' would take more then the time I have on a weekend. So I end up with a backlog of things I'd like to do but don't have the time to do them in. I get bored with lots of things to do but not enough time to start them in. I then curse the need to go to work.

Thank god I don't have friends, bastards would be stealing even more of my time.

Exactly. Just need 2-5 close friends and thats all.

Have you ever read Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh? Sounds very similar to your story, he automated his work using a script, I think he even stopped going into the office

Great book. Highly recommend reading it.

I have not but I'll add it to my reading list. Funny you should say that. The way it worked at my place, is we had a few managers on each floor. Each floor has over 300 people. A lot of people had no idea who they report to, what they're supposed to do, they just kind of asked random people for work.

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.

Wow,how does that the even happen? And how could that contractor in good conscience bill your company for his own personal work.

I think some of this stems from our feeling the need to compete early on in high school to get acceptance into a "good" college. Later on in life this is merely repeated in different forms at work. E.g.,

"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."

And also fear of getting blamed when something goes wrong.

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 somewhere down the line we got lost, or fucked by the previous generation, probably a combination of both.

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/...

> Work should be about providing a means for you to live your life.

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.