Working shorter hours may also be good for your health
economist.com
economist.com
how can people accept that it's right that we get taught in a certain mental pattern for almost 20 years and then we are to work for 40 years in that pattern so that we can spend the last 15 years of our life in peace anyway?
i spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to get great at things - you know, human nature.
but the times i spent in traditional work structures i actually got lazy and stupid, because they encourage you to create things that are just good enough at a slow pace, because if you actually perform too well you become a liability.
It's when someone else owns it and has given you no incentive to perform well (99% of startups) that you become a liability.
Correction, it depends on where you was born and where you have lived.
But I agree it's not the only factor.
All the significant money I've made in the valley (and technically I could retire today if I were willing to move to Portland or Seattle) has been working for post-IPO companies with 1,000+ employees. When I get offers from startups, it's for chickenfeed equity (0.1 to 0.5%) for a series A or series B company with a senior liquidation preference they won't discuss with me. I have yet to see a company I've turned down do anything but die.
The only downside I have seen to my strategy is sour grapes from ex-CEOs of failed startups at which I once worked during the dotcom boom insisting that I'm a bad hire because I left them once I realized they were doomed.
So how does the following data update your worldview?
http://www.businessinsider.com/a-google-programmer-blew-off-...
Probably not at all I expect. I suspect we really see things differently.
But assuming your title is not a TLA with single to double-digit equity, would you rather take a 1% chance at making a one-time hit of 5x to 6x a typical engineering salary E(X)= $10,000 to $50,000 or a guaranteed hit of $50,000 to $100,000 assuming you stay exactly where you are at a company with a decent growth rate?
This assumes you flee the stinkers as fast as you possibly can with no tolerance for solos on the world's tiniest violin from the CEO/CTO/etc who has 20x-100x more equity than you and therefore a completely different set of incentives.
Since most startups aren't facebook or google, I eventually learned to choose the latter and slowly accumulate wealth with occasional liquidity events(tm) rather than chase the rainbow of brogrammers and script kiddies.
What do you mean?
so if you start optimizing so that a single person can do the job of 5 people in less time you not only threaten their job security, you also question the manager, and you become trouble for accounting. therefore you become a liability.
you could argue that, wait a minute, by freeing up their time, and yours we can make more money and more other things, and in theory you would be right, but in practice that's not how it works. there's a certain budget, and you as an individual won't make more that that budget.
also for the institution it's better to keep that budget split up for those 5 people. that way they can charge 5 people on that budget, and accounting won't have to cheat. if you don't, then suddenly you'll have to find other jobs for those other 4 people otherwise they're kinda cashflow negative on their salary.
Most workaholics I know neglect their health, they stop exercising, and they are generally miserable.
I used to be all three. These days, I prioritize the first two points, but I'm still occasionally miserable when the work is tedious. If the work is engrossing, it's hard to pull me away from it because it feels more like I'm exploring than working. I've gone to great lengths to make sure my work is interesting. My longevity will hopefully provide a useful data point.
For the last time "work" and the amount of work doesn't mean the same thing to everyone to begin with.
It depends on what you do, how much you like doing it, why you need to do it and a host of other pressures and things that you deal with every day.
I work everyday and enjoy what I do. Other people can't wait to get out at 5 and take the train home. (When I was in high school it was that way for me because of the type of jobs that I had when I wasn't doing my own thing which I typically did (side businesses)).
I have a shore place. I get bored on the beach. You know what I do? I get off the beach and go answer emails and "check in". I enjoy doing that better than sitting on the beach. I do the same when I am on vacation. Some people like what they do and it's not work. It's actually relaxing.
That said this idea that you need to find something that you enjoy to earn a living is not true either. Because sometimes you can't it's not that easy. I had to do many jobs that I didn't like to get to the point of doing a job that I do like and enjoy to do.
Yesterday I had to review a legal contract and truly despised doing so. So I'm glad I'm not an attorney because if I was the stress of that job would certainly make it hard for me to "work all the time". But if I have to I do that work and just make sure that I reward myself with doing things that I need to do that I enjoy (like writing a shell script..)
Everyone is different.
That's lovely for you, but please understand that you are atypical as humans go. For most people, most of the time, work causes stress and stress reduces health/lifespan. Outliers are definitely worth considering, but they don't disprove the accuracy of the average data.
I'd like to follow you, are you on Twitter, or G+?
Frank at winesecretary.com
1. https://garrickvanburen.com/archive/no-client-work-before-lu...
For people where they are more 'at risk' at work than they are not at work (say 'deployed soldier') working less is statistically safer, for folks who have the reverse (say submariners) the reverse is true.
The discussion usually comes around how do you narrow the claim to make it either provable or disprovable. Is it true for all programmers? how about for 'all java programmers' or 'all java programmers in the bay area'. See the challenge?
It is just so wearying that there are people actually arguing with this.
But wait, we've got an R2 of 0.2! Let's keep in mind that at best, high hours of work are not the dominating factor that killed you.
This is pure speculation but I don't believe anyone who is at the frontier of human knowledge will ever expand it by working less hours than usual.
Parallel working, not serialised :D
For an average annual hours of 2000, how can we know if that person works 40 hours a week during 50 weeks or 66 hours during 30 weeks ?
Also what jobs are represented here ? For instance for firemen or soliders it seems logic that statistically the more hours you work the more premature mortality will happen.
But many of the most dangerous jobs, say fighter pilot and Alaskan crab fisherman, are actually very short bursts of intense work. The pilot might log several hundred hours in a good year and the fisherman works in seasons that are only several weeks long.
Trouble here is the mononumerosis, aka the need to boil a whole range of values down into a single number.
Maybe poorer countries have lower life expectancies, (or whatever PYLL measures is higher), and work longer hours.
I would like to see this graph broken down by quantiles of national GDP.
20% of all the variation in premature death in developed countries is explained by this one variable, without controlling for anything else. That's enormously significant.
Far more likely an explanation is an inverse correlation between work hours and wealth, intelligence, and education, as those are shown correlated to health and life expectancy with better and more plausible mechanisms for causation than those waved around for work hours.
1) Find item/activity that creates stress 2) Graph that vs. life expectancy to see how stress = death
The chart they cite in the first place seems to have a few different trends existing where they take on a polynomial curve upwards (one just passed 1800, one ~2300) and I would personally be more interested in seeing if there's any correlation there.
The article does mention that "the outlying figures to the right are those for South Korea". If I'm interpreting that correctly, it's the neat little chain to the right hand side which shows South Korea's working hours rapidly declining and potential years of life lost also falling over time; but if working hours decline you'd expect a spurious correlation to appear even if there was no causal link since healthcare standards also steadily improve over time. To the extent there is a causal link between the two in South Korea - as opposed to coincidental secular trends over time - it's probably more down to economic development than stress.
I'd expect a publication called the Economist to know how to handle panel data...
I might expect some sort of parabola, e.g. people who work very few hours tend to be less wealthy, and people who work too many hours tend to be less wealthy, but people who work at the "sweet spot" in between are the most wealthy. But an actual negative linear correlation? I wouldn't expect that.