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Incidentally: in your essays (which I enjoy), you often imply that founders should work long hours. If founders working long hours actually decreases the likelihood of a startup succeeding, then you've been giving bad advice for many years now. (And I'm sure that people have been taking it.) That's something that you should think seriously about.

It takes certain skills to be an effective "intermediate software developer." (Here I use the word skills very generically, so in particular it includes the things that you call experience.) If a hiring manager has found that many people have those skills after 3 years of work, it is probably true that some people have those skills after 2 years of work.

Therefore: the OP might have the skills to be effective at the job he wants. So for God's sake can somebody just give a good-faith answer to his question? The amount of condescension he's getting is ridiculous.

As I understand it, Henry Ford chose a 40-hour work week because he found that it maximized the total output of his employees. Computer programming is (minute-for-minute) considerably more demanding than working an assembly line. Maybe an average programmer maximizes her total output when she works substantially less than 40 hours a week. In fact I'd be surprised if that weren't the case.

And of course you could still run the service if you guys worked four-day weeks. Just make sure somebody's working on any given day.

Now, it's reasonable to point out that skilled laborers are basically fully employed right now, so the proposal would marginally reduce the supply of skilled labor hours -- and could thereby reduce skilled output.

But FWIW I don't think that's a very good point. Skilled labor is not really hour-limited in the same way that unskilled labor is -- that is, the output of a salaried full-time knowledge-worker employee is unlikely to change much (certainly not by 12.5%) if the standard workweek drops from 40 hours to 35. That's not how knowledge jobs work and that's not how salaried positions work. Whereas productivity in unskilled positions really would drop by somewhere close to 12.5% under the proposal. (Which is good; it opens up more of these "job" things that are so crucial to wealth distribution in the modern world.)

At any rate, if shorter work weeks for skilled workers bothers you that much, there's an easy solution: just say that you can only pay the minimum wage for the first 35 hours of the week, after which you have to pay at least 1.5 * minimum wage. Leave everything else the same. (Well, I like the parent's minimum wage hike too.) Now we're only cutting the output of near-minimum-wage workers.

I'm not at all sure that this idea wouldn't be disastrous, but I can't think of any good reasons that it might be. I feel like it's the most obvious way out of the current economic situation.

You don't have to call it genius but the man certainly had something.

You're saying:

Golf is mostly mental. That certainly isn't a problem: you can train mentality. In fact what you've just argued is that golf is well-suited to be conquered purely through training (among sports). Dan would have a much harder time becoming effective in basketball, where normal-size people are at a huge disadvantage off the bat.

Golf requires feel. Where do you think feel comes from? (Training!) Again, you've actually argued that golf is well-suited to Dan's approach, not the opposite.

You've seen this before. No you haven't. Come on.

Golf is hard. That's tautological. Anything that can reasonably be called an endeavor is in some sense infinitely hard. (Also: how do you know that shaving off those last few strokes is impossible once you've achieved your potential? Did you dedicate your life to golf?)

Sometimes you'll have a day of training that won't contribute to your progress. Anybody trying to learn anything will experience days like that.

This is a cool and ballsy experiment and you're being a bit of a hater. Do I think Dan will become a PGA golfer? No, but I'm looking forward to seeing him try.

I'm pretty sure that on the whole that would be a very good thing. Downvote visibility would certainly discourage dissent, which sucks. But I think the kinds of posts it would most strongly discourage are, in order, mean comments, stupid comments, and contentless (e.g. snide) comments -- which are exactly the things that have been dangerously proliferating recently.

And I don't even think it would much reduce the expression of minority opinion; there's a certain pride that comes with dissenting that makes it tolerable or even enjoyable when other people disagree with you. Whereas when you make a cheap joke, being able to see all the people who found it stupid or crass is a major buzzkill.

(I'm not gonna talk about parents; I've never been one and it seems pretty all-consuming to me. But there are an awful lot of parents out there who will happily tell you how insane being a parent is, so they're probably not a good example for your argument.)

Give me a break. Desire for recognition is, if not universal, at least common enough that you don't need to infer ridiculous bullshit about Harvard's entire undergrad population to explain a couple instances of it.

It certainly has seemed to me that the important part of meditation is the relaxation that it lets you achieve. I think it's literally impossible for me (at least) to get as relaxed as I am after a typical hour of meditation by any nonmeditative means. (If you interpret "relaxation" as having low blood levels of e.g. cortisol this is actually measurable.) And I know that I have days when I don't sufficiently relax myself when I sit, and I usually don't see the same benefits that I do from "good" sits. 'Course, a lot of this could be confirmation bias.

Also, anecdotally, I maintain substantial concentration for 30+ minutes a day because that's what studying is, and the short- and long-term effects of that concentration don't seem to be anything like the effects of meditation.

At the end of this past summer I took a meditation course with dhamma.org, and three weeks ago I started meditating again. (I went on the retreat for unrelated reasons -- mostly I was thinking, "Ten days doing absolutely nothing, that's crazy, maybe something really amazing will happen to my brain" -- and when I finished it I was, at first, mildly disappointed with the results, so I didn't keep meditating.)

Anyway, meditation has had a really pronounced effect on my overall level of mental energy. I only have three weeks of data so I can't say decisively what it can and can't do, but an hour of meditation seems to cancel out a day or two of accumulated burnout. I'm starting to think that meditation could be literally life-changing on a large scale for me. (Incidentally, it's also unbelievably effective at eliminating stress. I'm actually much more certain of its efficacy as stress-reducer than as energy-replenisher.)

I definitely think you should try out a meditation course next time you have ten days free -- it could really do you some good.