This is an emotional topic, the discussion of which is nearly always evidence-free. How could one study it objectively?
We were faced by constant pressure to develop customer stuff faster, and the team were doing regular 60+ hour weeks. I put in some new rules on hours, including:
- no dev worked more than 40 hours on scheduled projects. Overtime was for disaster recovery or slippage repair to meet a deadline
- if the salesperson agreed to a new deadline, then we went over their other tasks and worked out what needed to shift to make room. If they insisted on overtime, then we insisted on lieu time to pay it back, from their scheduled project time.
- if someone came in to fix a disaster, we gave them time of in lieu. If we really couldn't do the time off, we paid them overtime for the time.
It took a few months for this to settle in, and I got to test the productivity changes (by measuring project estimates vs actuals). Productivity improved as the hours worked decreased.
The productivity gains came mostly from more realistic project estimates, but a significant part from increased dev productivity... they just wrote better code that needed less correction, faster.
I would post the data, but it's commercially sensitive and about ten years old now.
I found that a week of working long hours was about my max, and after that I started making mistakes to the point that the extra hours actually became counter productive.
If you are salaried and you work overtime, you are working for free. If you're on an hourly wage and you don't get any sort of overtime pay, you're working for free.
If pay is one's only reason, long hours for no extra pay are certainly objectionable. But that's a circular argument.
I like working long hours when it's work that I want to be doing. If people are working at something they don't want to do, maybe that is the real problem. For menial jobs that no one enjoys, there may be no easy way to fix the situation, but in an industry like tech there is little excuse for accepting it.
Also, people act to maximize their utility, not necessarily compensation. The act of working hard and hitting deadlines is a form of compensation in itself.
Finally, lots of people work a lazy 8 hours (with lots of time spent on the phone, Facebook, personal email) and need the extra hours to accomplish 8 hours worth of real work.
No thanks, unless I can take your company stock and flip it the same day, I'll take cash.
Here's a fix, and it comes from within: Give up the ideal of objectivity. Objectivity doesn't exist.
I see this fallacy all the time from hackers. We are not merely rational creatures we are also feeling creatures. Embrace it.
I am aware of phenomenology and I've read some Merleau-Ponty. To my taste, however, the situation where an objective/"objective" scientific truth makes consistent predictions about my sensory experiences that suggest a physical outside world and another where that truth makes consistent predictions about the outside world itself, which in turn causes the sensory experiences, don't seem different in a meaningful way. Why make that distinction?
My point is simply that just because the scientific method leads to useful predictions that doesn't make it objective truth nor does it invalidate the importance of subjective experience.
Okay, I think I understand your position now. (Though I'm not sure if the lack of belief in objective truth is as common as you claim.) Sorry be so persistent but I have to ask: suppose you do care about the nature of existence; how do you tell if it's one or the other or which one is more likely?
BTW, I have found Yudkowsky's "The Simple Truth" an effective argument against those claim that objective truth doesn't exist. If you walk in the way of a speeding train, you will die irrespective of your beliefs. Beliefs don't alter the reality. http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth/
http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm
How would you convince a Solipsist that there is an objective truth?
I can't. But let me quote Bertrand Russell from "An Outline of Philosophy":
Solipsism (the theory that I alone exist) is a view which is hard to refute but still harder to believe. Solipsism is not really believed even by those who think they are convinced of its truth.
A solipsist would have no objection to jumping from a cliff, would he? But he won't actually do it.
Just because you believe reality doesn't exist outside your own mind doesn't mean you can't die.
All solipsism says is that you can't be sure reality exists outside of your own mind. You can question whether or not you would be dead outside of your own experience, but you'd still be dead in your internal world.
Except the solipsist is also unsure he exists outside of his own mind too, so why would he believe he is the sole exception to everything he's observed in the only reality he can be sure of?
I mean if you're unsure there is a reality outside of your own mind, wouldn't that make you more risk adverse? Your death could potentially mean that everyone you've ever known/loved would cease to exist, even if they are a product of your unconscious mind...
A solipsist isn't "unsure", he definitely believes reality doesn't exist outside of his own mind. That alone sets him apart from everyone and everything else in the universe, because a solipsist believes he is the only one who actually exists.
But we've strayed pretty far from my original point, which was that you can't disregard centuries of philosophical thought with a story that doesn't address any of the arguments of the ontological frameworks it's trying to refute. I'm not personally a solipsist, but solipsism is by definition not falsifiable, so I'm a little confused about where this conversation is supposed to go...
"I refute you!"
Joking aside, I feel Solipsism is immature. Do you know which demographic also comprises Solipsists? Two year olds. "Mommy doesn't exist when I close my eyes." This gives Solipsists an excuse to stop thinking critically about things like ethics, et al. So in this sense, Solipsism's just a cop-out which justifies laziness. When someone says "objective reality doesn't exist", what I really hear is "everybody's equal; you all get a trophy; we all have a right to our opinions". You might recognize this as the Red Herring Fallacy. I think Solipsism is a subtle version of this same fallacy.
Paul Graham says something similar about the subjectivity of aesthetics * : "Your mother at this point is not trying to teach you important truths about aesthetics. She's trying to get the two of you to stop bickering." I think this applies to Moral Relativism, Solipsism, and generally most philosophies which deny the existence of objectivity.
* http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html
Post Modernism is often said to have been a reaction to Modernism. But I think it's even more important to realize that Post Modernism is a reaction to World War I and II. After WWII, I imagine people realized "Science and objectivity gave us cars and electricity, but it also gave us mustard gas and nuclear weapons. Maybe this whole Modernism gig isn't so great after all..."
According to Literary Post Modernism, there's lots of conflicting narratives rather than a single objective perspective. During the chaos of World Wars I and II, I imagine war-stories naturally contradicted one another. I like the conflicting POV aspect because it can encourage the reader to question the author's reliability, like in Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. Unfortunately, Post Modernism can also have the opposite effect: encouraging readers to quit thinking too hard and to accept the text as it is since "it's all equally valid". This negative aspect fits really well with the self-esteem movement, which (I'll say again) I think is a cop out for thinking critically.
You may notice I'm not refuting Solipsism per se, but ulterior motives for believing Solipsism is valid. This is because going down the road of "formal proofs" probably won't yield anything convincing. We'd simply talk past each other, and in circles, and bicker over definitions. But at the end of the day, it's pretty difficult to disprove abstractions and ideologies sin finding an inherent contradiction. And I'll even admit, maybe Solipsism actually is true. Who knows? I won't claim outright that Solipsism is false. But in my own experience, I find it very unlikely that Solipsism is true * . And I do want to acknowledge a possible bias for believing "Solipsism is true" due to it's convenience.
* http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes
p.s. I do find the Harry Potter fan-fic kinda weird...
"Unfortunately, Post Modernism can also have the opposite effect: encouraging readers to quit thinking too hard and to accept the text as it is since 'it's all equally valid'"
Isn't deconstructionism sort of a core component of Postmodernism? Doesn't the deconstructionist view say that you shouldn't accept the text as it is?
>We are not merely rational creatures we are also feeling creatures
and a thought-terminating cliche like
>Objectivity doesn't exist.
The latter doesn't seem like a helpful response to someone who is apparently asking for scientific evidence for long working hours and/or overtime doing harm to you. If anything, knowing what science says on the matter is emotionally important as it could either (if the possibility of permanent harm is limited) provide some relief to or (otherwise) justify the indignation of a person currently doing overtime and unhappy about it (and hopefully lead to action on their part). Both scenarios seem desirable to me.
Edit: Could you explain the downvotes? In case it sounded dismissive I changed "thought-stopper" to the more formal "thought-terminating cliche" above and added the ellipses for clarity.
I was also apparently too sleepy to call parentheses by their name.