The only alternative is to work harder | Hacker News Reader

The only alternative is to work harder

paraschopra.com

16 pointssiddhant23 comments

No offence, but this is something that I see every day from my Indian colleagues at work -- instead of stopping for a moment and finding a right way to go, they just keep pushing harder in some unoptimal direction. Yes, this might fill you with a sense of righteousness, but no way the carpenter (see comments to the blog post) who works 10 hours a day is better off than the one who does only 5 hours of _right_ work.

The dynamics at work in a typical IT shop are different.

Indian IT industry does not depend on "programming geniuses". getting their shit done by the day it was promised is more important for them, because the client will not pay for "indian outsourced guy" for having a moment of programming epiphany.

Of course, this is not just to blame the customer.. Most Indian IT Managers still believe in Taylor's "scientific" management methods.. So, whoever is "seen" working 10 hours to solve a problem will earn a brownie point.

note: Edited for clarity

Actually, that was my conclusion also.

There are at least three alternatives to working harder: automate the work, outsource it, and elect not to do it at all. These are often better choices, since not all work adds equal amount of value (and much work subtracts value).

I'm working on a blog post about this subject, as "longer hours is a proxy for productivity" is the most pathological thing I have seen in my career as a Japanese salaryman.

These are not alternatives to working harder. These are strategies to make your efforts more efficient. If you outsource some work, there is other work you can be doing. Presumably your competition will be automating, outsourcing, and avoiding unnecessary work as well.

People can reach many types of goals with ease. This guy is talking about goals which require beating competition to achieve. If your goal is to compete in low latency market trading, and you aren't already extremely wealthy, you aren't going to be able to be competitive and live a life of leisure at the same time.

I'm reminded of the advice of Thomas Jefferson to his daughter: "It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing," from this HN post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=675308

It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing

... and have a team of slaves or servants doing everything else.

I'm not picking on Jefferson. It's worth remembering that most such famously productive historical figures were of a class that never had to cook anything, clean anything, plant anything, etc., and didn't even raise their own children. That's got to free up some time.

Somehow I don't really buy it. Seems to me it is more a management problem. Looking at sports, I suspect simply running 10 hours more every week than the competition won't automatically make you the winner. Rather, there is a system to getting the best effect from training (when to take breaks, what muscles to train when, what to eat, ...).

If you are stressing out with working harder and harder, perhaps you lose the time for having inspirations and seeing the important things to work on.

Working harder does not mean being stupid. I don't understand why people keep pretending working harder is somehow how inversely related to the quality of your decisions. Your IQ stays the same, you just work harder.

Let's take your example. Working harder doesn't mean naively running 10 hours more a week. It means doing research on training systems, consulting with coaches, monitoring your diets, revising workout plans, etc. Having been involved with sports all my life, I can tell you that this stuff matters, you can always do more of it, and it's work.

Sure, I am not against working harder, just against the simplistic "work harder". Also I still think it is a management problem and breaks are important.

To sum up what this article says along with the insightful amendments in these comments: Perhaps it is best to work smarter and harder.

He was talking about factors under your control. So I guess you have to decide whether you think you can get significantly smarter, which I don't. You can learn more, but that takes time and should be considered part of working, of course. Even if you can get smarter, that would also presumably take work and the more of it you did the smarter you'd get. What we know for sure is that you can't just wake up today and say, hey, I'm going to make decisions that are twice as good as yesterday.

And if working smarter means things like automating tasks, that also doesn't quite make sense. Of course you should automate tasks. Working harder doesn't mean being stupid. It means you should spend more of your brain time working toward your goals. If you free up time by automating some stuff, that gives you more time to be working on (including automating) something else.

Yeah, I was borrowing from the old expression "work smarter, not harder".

Smarter in this context means bringing our intelligence to bear on the issue of workflow and how we go about doing our work. I wasn't meaning to imply that it means we need to literally become smarter.

"What do you do if you feel you are born unlucky? What do you do if you feel that the whole world is conspiring against you to make you not succeed? And, what do you do if you feel you have less intellect, less resources and less everything to succeed?"

Just a word of warning: There are many people who will default to feeling this way, whether it's true or not. Don't rule out mental illness or anxiety.

Turning yourself into a workaholic is not the solution if what you really need is to talk to a therapist. I've known several people who learned this the hard way.

Before diving head-first into work, do a quick reality check and ask yourself whether your feelings are reasonable, and be honest with yourself about what you're giving up in order to get those extra few hours of productivity.

So many people have undiscovered personality disorders or neuroses that they think are just "how life is." I wish that there was a "mental health check-up" that everyone, whether thinking themselves healthy or not, was encouraged to attend at long-but-regular intervals, similar to a dental- or eye-exam.

In the spirit of providing equal and opposite cheap advice:

Except for the alternative of taking a break and thinking about your life, and perhaps choosing to focus on something where your hard work is more likely to pay off or where working harder comes more natural because you love what you're doing.

I agree -- my point is that everything else being equal working harder pays off. Once you have determined what to do and if it is what you like to do, putting in more hours will do harm to no one but probably increase your chances of success.

Honestly, I don't know where to begin, but suffice it to say, everything else is NEVER equal in the real world.

1. You're assuming "success" is zero-sum-game. 2. There's no opportunity cost for working towards a different goal. 3. There is some sort of equitable measure of "success" across all participants in "the game". 4. The effort/reward curve is averages positive for your given set of stratagems. 5. You are the ONLY vested participant in the game (e.g. no ancillary costs for increased efforts to other parties (e.g. family, friends, partners, investors etc.).

It's only hard to know where to begin because you're seriously expanding the topic. Let's take point 5:

"You are the ONLY vested participant in the game [...]"

The point of the post was that working harder is one of the few resources under your control for working toward a goal for which there is competition. Whether there are other vested participants is irrelevant to that point. Whether there are costs to your family is a quality-of-life choice and a moral choice, but doesn't say a single thing about whether working harder makes you more likely to achieve your goal.

Sorry, dude, I don't know why you're getting all the defensive responses in this forum. Your advice is obviously inarguably correct.

If you want to achieve goals that normally are only available to smarter and richer people, working harder is a factor that's always under your control.

Another factor under your control, and a little different, is focus. Commitment to a well-defined goal and persistence can take you a long way. Most people, even hard workers, get distracted and take detours.

I would amend this to "Work Harder on the Right Thing".

What's the right thing? That's something you'll just have to figure out for yourself. Sometimes finding the right thing is harder work than actually working on it.

Obviously, working on the right thing is the best choice. The problem is that knowing the right thing is probably a function of mental abilities of one sort or another, and you may be deficient in that area with respect to your competition, which is the point of the post. You can't control whether you're good at knowing what the right things to work on are (although you can get better at it, maybe).

This is not right. Work in a manner that the work you are doing can be spun off and will continue to work on its own, leaving you free to do something new that will build on top of that.

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