while i agree with you that we are overanalyzing things and are "optimizing" things that are not worth optimizing I believe the bigger point still stands: a collective strategy that would yield better results for everyone is not selected. instead a sub-optimal strategy is selected that attempts to maximize the outcome without relying on what others do.
I would also go ahead and say that the "tragedy of the commons" is an even better way of looking at this (i think that's basically a N-player prisoner's dilemma)
Virtually the entire point of middle management, in any industry, across the world, is to over optimise. It also isn’t about who is doing the optimising, in the real world, but who is affected by it. Your 99% figure is a little off.
It’s not a conscious optimization. It’s just having to compete with others. Same as needing a college degree for so many jobs, not because it’s going to teach you what you need, but because enough of the other applicants have one and it’s a tiny tiny signal.
Imagine a world where you can get enough pay to eat and go out and pay rent in four hours of work per week. Your landlord can rent to you or to the person who decides to work eight hours per week, so he raises the rent and rents to the other guy who is willing to work more and needs housing as much as you do. So now you have to work more too. Everyone works more because everyone else works more, just like you have to not cooperate on a prisoners dilemma because you know the other guy won’t cooperate either (because he knows the same thing you do).
It's not that clear cut though, because as rents rise up, people are incentivized to build new, smaller homes. (Until we ran out of space, but we're very far from this happening.)
Yep, work in a bank is really stress free, especially in Europe.
No one does anything, the hierarchical structure is so meaningless hundreds do nothing at all. People get stressed out when they are expected to work a little.
Everyone is chatting on meetings about which button is the best.
Yep, it’s a career suicide and leaves you with no future prospects but it’s pretty stable.
Some play the politics to get higher paychecks, some squeeze the newcomers that actually do the work but things stabilize pretty quickly.
This is false in the Nordics. Of my friends in finance 100% are working overtime on weekends as we speak.
Banks are a heavily competitive field, try governments and unions instead.
Which country and which kind of work? I might relocate when I get older so it’s good to know... ;)
Working overtime is a madman's choice. It's possible to work overtime but it's completely irrelevant. It's done mostly for politics. For example, you have small chances of a raise or a promotion if your overtime hours are small.
Collecting overtime gives opportunity for under-performers to make progress in the company.
I've been to more than 5 banks in Croatia and Austria (Most of the banks in Croatia are subsidiaries of Italian and Austrian banks). The contracts make overtime mandatory but one can negotiate to remove overtime completely.
Most people that tell their wives and friends that they work overtime either do not work during the overtime hours, are unnecessarily inefficient for the purpose of collecting hours (unpaid) or have periods of struggle because most of the time they do not work and have no idea what's going on (so when they have to catch up, the stress and the lack of knowledge forces overtime).
Some cases I encountered of people who complain about working too much in a bank are those that prefer the company of their coworkers more than that of their spouses.
Occams razor, it’s just a very competitive field with salaries that reflect it. Heavy responsibility and slinging Petabytes of data.
PhDs, suits and fpga developers in the same room. Insanely great mix in my humble opinion.
Well, most EU banks do not care about FPGA or PhDs, especially in subsidiaries. They're just building "apps" in Qlik, PowerBI or similar, using a workforce of a thousand people to interact with that.
> Author’s Note: I’ve recently partnered with Project DigInThere, an online project to help people get more out of the articles they read. Project DigInThere enables authors (in this case, me) to create 3-4 question “quests” that readers (in this case, you) can review prior to reading an article. Doing so primes you with what to look for in the article, and then you can take the quest at the end of the article to test your recall. If you’re interested, you can review the quest I’ve built by clicking here, then take it after reading the article and see how you do.
I liked it because it made me really read the article rather than just scan it and move on. That said, I took the quiz and got 5/9 - but I didn't want to sign up so I don't know what I didn't comprehend/retain.
I actually see this as a slowing mechanism rather than an optimization mechanism, too (thinking about when I first joined reddit and read every single submission and now I simply doomscroll, hmm).
This was my number one motivation for reading "How to Read a Book" (an HN recommendation, I might add). I can plow through texts without even trying (no effort to increase speed), but what's the point if I don't retain anything?
I haven't read Newport's "Deep Work" yet, but I suspect the themes are what I'm aiming for; I like to be a jack of many trades, but mastery of a few (or even serial mastery) is my ultimate goal.
Zander attributes burnout (at root, excessive, sustained stress) to optimising our lives. There is some truth in that. But to write an article in late 2020 about excessive stress while ignoring the major stressor of COVID-19 is naive at best.
Even in New Zealand where we're not in lockdown and life is pretty normal, there's still that "what if we get a big outbreak" sitting in the back of your head constantly.
Modern life comes with a range of stressors and competing in the labour market is just one. There are loads more that we as individuals can do little about. Limited progress on climate change is another big one.
I've been banging this drum for years. Oh we can now get by with only X employees whom now have 95% of their work day spoken for.
What happens when something goes wrong, what happens when someone quits or is sick? What happens when business needs to change/pivot/innovate? This idea that optimized time is somehow 100% wasted is killing a lot of people.
Limited opportunities and disasters are both hard real time events and should be strongly weighted when considering true staffing levels. The performance capacity in the worst case setting often matters. (Though I've seen too many places where the answer is to put everyone on a death march level of overtime / crunch to cover that.)
The disasters often become the baseline and the job becomes firefighting/deathmarches. But everyone tricks themselves thinking it’s temporary and will pass as soon as we deliver X. Then X is delivered but when we deliver Y is when it will really get better. Rinse and repeat.
My wife’s grandma was married to Nils Bohlin, the inventor of the seatbelt. Sadly, I didn’t get to meet him but my wife’s grandmother told me a lot of stories about him.
One thing that stuck out was that at Volvo in the sixties they overstuffed engineers by up to 40% to have a buffer in something happened.
There are likely lots of second-order effects here, so it's hard to tell.
The engineers may have been better rested and thus able to deliver more quickly and reliably thanks to a sense that they had an effective peer support group.
The eventual product quality may have been higher thanks to the additional oversight, review and input - leading to increased market demand.
The support, stability and resulting confidence offered to employees may have spread via word-of-mouth to their familities, friends and extended networks, increasing marketplace faith in the company and trust in the product.
And, perhaps the simplest albeit least thought-provoking explanation: perhaps the additional 40% engineering salary overhead did not have a significant impact on the company finances.
Sell sturdy vehicles with compelling features, like standard front three-point seatbelts in 1959? Volvo did go through the financial wringer into the 1970s, with a rocky launch of the 200-series and the heavy vehicle division being separated from Volvo Cars, but the 700-series was enough to bring them back into solid financial standing.
I don’t think it’s either/or. In my organization people pride themselves of being 150% occupied. But it means they’re doing a half assed job at everything, kicking cans down the road just to keep afloat, and are juggling multiple projects at the same time. The bottom line isn’t much better than if they were 50 or 75% busy because the work quality is so low. We have to redo things all the time as a result. A colleague/close friend of mine is smarter and works at 50 to 75% capacity. Her output is very similar to overworked colleagues because he doesn’t have to redo things several times but a he’s far less tired and makes better decisions. The difference with her is that she doesn’t have a mortgage and her financial commitments are far lower than her income. She doesn’t fear being let go.
This is a trope we see repeated: back in "the day", they couldn't run the numbers, so for safety margins, they just overengineered. It's usually applied to civil engineering, but I could see how it could be applied to staffing too.
I don't bemoan having a clearer picture of costs or margins of safety. What this speaks to is re-examining our values and perhaps directing our priorities to something other than maximizing ROI at all costs.
"they couldn't run the numbers, so for safety margins, they just overengineered."
That was definitely the case in the Ancient World and may be the reason why some Roman buildings are still standing.
(Roman concrete was awesome, BTW. Rebar is a major source of eventual concrete failure and Romans did not use any. On the other hand, they used volcanic ash in their concrete. Some Roman concrete piers are still standing, 2000 years of waves beating on them made them harder!)
This is so true. Highly efficient systems can be fragile. If one part breaks down, the whole is affected. The system needs a bit of slack to be able to handle the unexpected. It's been a while since I read it, but I think the book Slack by Tom DeMarco argues this.
My job role in middle-management forces me to have these conversations frequently, resource planning and such.
I am often asking questions of my senior leaders about the volume of organizational change that is a constant in the company and what I can do to act as a “shock absorber” for my direct reports and subordinate leaders.
A major customer facing outage resulted in an RCA compiled by yours truly. I found that a critical engineer had quit months before-never backfilled. Work got reassigned to other people. A second event and second RCA, similarly created by me. Same story: an Ops person had left the company last year, never backfilled. A third. Each time I pointed to workloads and capacities. Not because it’s my job to do these things specifically or by expectations of my director but because no one else in the 400 person organization is yet no one else knows how to go looking for this info so it’s sort of become my duty just because I have enough of a damn to start doing it. These aren’t even MY teams, shit just rolls down hill and my team is at the bottom of the shit pipe. Which is something I hoped bringing these results would get action on. They barely have.
What I’ve come to conclude is that my leaders are NOT thinking about these things until someone or something catastrophic forces them to.
If I had the balls I would straight up ask my senior leaders “what would you say it is you do here if it’s taken such severe consequences to start looking at what we’re asking our people to do?”
What’s most saddening: it’s becoming alarmingly common from job to job. It’s forced me to rethink drastically how I’m vetting companies because they do a GREAT job disguising this during interviews.
> What I’ve come to conclude is that my leaders are NOT thinking about these things until someone or something catastrophic forces them to.
No one gets paid for preventing problems. They get paid for increasing profit, either by increasing revenue and/or reducing costs. I would bet your leaders are consciously trying to skate by and reap the short term rewards and hoping someone like you fills in the gaps. As long as the problem can’t be pinned on them, or they can bounce before it causes sufficient disruption to the business to affect compensation, their goals are met.
Probably. Maybe. I have no clue. I only recently found out there have been three people in this middle management role before me; not a single one of them stayed around for two years. I’m on month 14 and started working on the resume this morning. :/
Certain middle management positions are setup to be “fall guy” positions. Technically, everyone is a fall guy for the person above them, but some more than others.
For example, the budget gets decided a few levels up, but the the immediate manager knows they aren’t being given the resources to succeed. Then their strategy, if they have the ability, might be to hire someone who they can point a finger to when it inevitably fails.
That may be true now but it seems like a recipe for disaster (check 3-4 ongoing disasters outside my window, yep). I assume in earlier eras society prepared for disasters, paid people to prevent disasters and so-forth. Has something changed?
> No one gets paid for preventing problems. They get paid for increasing profit
This is not a law of nature. Different cultural norms yields different business priorities.
The fact of the matter is that money is only a surrogate for value, it is not the actual thing. Current business teaching has ideologically put the money hoarders in charge where increasing their profits is the only appropriate moral behavior. This yields a legitimacy and incentive for shortermist thinking.
Equating money with value builds a distorted view of what humans actually value. Money is not ideal in representing the value of stability, fairness or compassion. these are very basic human values which are shared by most of us, yet money cannot encode these faithfully.
We shouldn't accept the side effects of our choice to use money as surrogate for value as some form of natural law.
I would consume like Thanksgiving turkey any recommended reading on asking difficult questions in job interviews without immediately getting dismissed as “not a culture fit”.
Had that happen once. Friend in one department made a referral for me to join another, I ask pointed and direct questions in the interview-which was otherwise light hearted and engaging, the response was filibustering, platitudinous non-answers about “shared sacrifices” and “we all jump in” and “take the flank” and “no man left behind” (please do NOT get me started on the amount of militarized battle-speak that has rooted itself into corporate America like a tick). So I tactfully and delicately but firmly try to bring the conversation back on track.
Friend tells me a few days later “they disqualified you as not being a good culture fit. What did you say??”
Definitely don't have the experience asking these questions, but I think this would be much better served as a question to the hiring manager and as follow-up questions post-interview, as opposed to "confrontations" during the interview? Usually after they've extended the offer, before you've accepted, you can have more "real" talks with your supposed manager, which might be a more appropriate time (since you'll eventually have real 1:1s with them anyways).
I think this would be much better served as a question to the hiring manager and as follow-up questions post-interview, as opposed to "confrontations" during the interview?
That's the kicker: experience has taught me that if I don't ask specific (but tactful) questions about things that have caused excess anxiety and stress in the job, and how the company interviewing me handles them (or fails to handle them) early enough, I find out in the worst ways after taking the job and starting.
This is no attempt at setting myself up for malingering down the road, I am not that kind of a person; but I have also grasped how important it is to interview the company as much as the company is interviewing me. If they get to be stringent about how good we would "fit", then so should job candidates.
And ironically given the thread we're in about 'over optimization', it's just not worth the time to me to wait until getting an offer to find out the engineering culture believes in 'drinking from the firehose'. I want to know that early, so as to self-select out.
> What’s most saddening: it’s becoming alarmingly common from job to job. It’s forced me to rethink drastically how I’m vetting companies because they do a GREAT job disguising this during interviews.
Any flashes of inspiration on this?
I’m always searching for the perfect set of little questions to help uncover the real culture of a company, rather than the platitudinous corporate-buzzword answers about culture you otherwise get.
I think the market is taking care of it. That is why there are a million SAAS companies that seem redundant. Also why there are a million micro brands for simple things. I think this is a backlash exactly from this 100% efficiency thinking.
Software and manufacturing are both highly susceptible to misery from this efficiency BS. If you are gonna work to death might as well start your own company.
Was looking at your username while reading, trying figure out which person from my org you are though we're in different industries. The similarities are uncanny; company size, leadership issues, ops person leaving, which of course is disturbing but makes me feel less crazy.
I feel like a lot of this is attributable to the push towards devops.
In my junior role I did the development and the ops guys did the deployments and we both knew at least some of what the other person did. It helped knowledge transfer of hot new framework from me to the elder ops people and sage unix wisdom from them down to me.
We had a "read-only" Friday where deployments were forbidden to help prevent outages over the weekend.
The software changed slowly and employee churn was minimal.
Now (much later) I'm elsewhere, expected to do the dev, the ops, the deployment itself, the documentation, training a junior all the while; there are effectively half as many people keeping the ship afloat.
The most bizarre part of all is my daily rate is almost 3x what it was then, as the market dictates for such drudgery.
Relevant to the article it's obviously strategic for me to accept that, but if the rates weren't so absurd and you could get a dev and an ops for 0.5x the devops rate each the company would get twice as many man-hours, not to mention the added safety of doubling the system's bus factor, cutting workloads in half and vastly improving employee quality of life.
Companies offering a devops role for 1.5x a single developer's rate 10 years ago to ostensibly save themselves 0.5 of a salary, are now collectively getting 0.333x as much value out of their hires (and then losing them completely when they burn out and being thrust into chaos).
Depends how time critical the work is. Its likely cheaper to have a group of devs at close to full capacity and if something comes up then you just push the over capacity work in to the future and plan to hire more developers. How much of the stuff that normally goes on in the business can't wait a month.
There’s a reason why companies like google jumped on the covid thing earlier than most. Imagine an SRE group that got hit by a covid cluster. Now imagine that group handles... oh I dunno YouTube. Or search.
Even for mild cases of covid, the recovery can look like the flu. That means 1-2 weeks off work. And reduced ability for weeks after that. Now half of your team gets it at once.
Efficiency and resiliency are in opposite tension.
Google and basically all tech companies will still exist after this. Its probably preferable to take a hit once in a disaster situation than to be constantly paying to avoid it. Its the same with large companies not having insurance because its cheaper to not pay it and then if one building burns down they take the hit but they still saved more in the times where nothing went wrong.
I run a support department for a SaaS product and we’re lean. Everything is fine unless someone is sick or wants to take vacation. Of course hiring another person is never the answer according to the budget gods.
I left a scene like that, and people I love dearly to avoid burnout.
Ended up with some. Am healing. Will be OK.
A decade ago many asked, "where is the new blood?" Could see it coming. Right now, people aging and burning out are super expensive to replace. In some ways they can't be.
I consider failure to manage this kind of debt severe. When it comes due, it is brutal.
Support does not (directly) make money, so it is doomed to be seen as a drain. I’ve fought the same battle at every company I’ve worked at, and I’m starting to think it is hopeless.
There is a pretty good book on this issue, which I think is something you should take seriously if you are running an organization that over optimizes:
"Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency"
That, and globalization. Mainly globalization. We got access to workforces which just were far less or not at all available 20-30 years ago. Remember the time when everything said "Made in Japan"? Remember the time when everything said "Made in Taiwan"? Now its all "Made in China", with "Support in India". Even Eastern Europe, much more local for Western Europe than Asia (plus the benefit of intra-EU), has a hard time competing with that.
You could call it competition. I call it race to the bottom. Cause a lot gets sacrificed in the name of lower price. Repairability, source code, QA, tech support, environment -- all too often they're the losers.
I could be reading too much into it, but I thought that was literally the author's central point.
> Hyper-rational individuals making hyper-rational decisions on how to spend their time by launching into an inescapable arms race of productivity. Burnout is inevitable.
"I must be super productive so that I can maximize my wealth"
rather than,
"I must be super productive to just to remain competitive".
To me it seems like the author assumes people are optimizing because they're driven to squeeze every drop of value out of their time, rather than just trying to remain competitive in the market.
Or there’s a lot of subcultures that think there’s more competition and then proceed to cause the problem they’re reacting to.
I’ve moved around enough to see just how wildly it varies. It’s tied to cities and industries and sometimes just specific companies, but I’m not so sure it’s tied to any intrinsic economic reality.
The reason for much increased competition is the slow population growth rate. If government policy dictated that population should be increased, then we could have good times. They wont come until then, and the path forward is space colonization for good times again.
When the population doesn't increase as fast or starts shrinking, there is going to be emotional unhappiness. I know why, but the subject is sensitive to be discussed openly.
The other option for increasing happiness is manipulation of the birth rates/ratios with mandatory genetic modification/engineering. Then people will be more satisfied, while having a shrinking population across the world.
Growth in populations masks many problems therefore results in happiness. A decline in population increases unhappiness and exaggerates a problem.
But the problem is that a larger and larger percentage of population isn't going to get their needs met when the population starts shrinking across the world. There needs to be a mandatory global order for genetic modification.
> because it's generally considered that overpopulation leads to competition.
It's not that straight forward.
But an over simplified answer would be the population pyramid. Tax base shrinks, more tax burden on working class people.
Then the other problem is that the global birth sex ratios. The natural sex ratio at birth is 105 men for 100 women. When a population is growing, this isn't much of a problem in monogamous societies, and everyone finds a partner (men marry younger women on average).
When the population is under decline, there is extreme pressure on men and in a perfectly monogamous society, 10% of men are definitely going to be left behind.
If we can some how genetically modify humans so that the sex ratios come near 1/1 or 0.95 men to 1 woman, it'll be easier to survive a decline in population and men wont be impacted as much. A growing population favors almost no one, not men, not women. A declining population means that men are the unfavored sex.
The end result could be large male foeticide instead of female foeticide 50 years down the line. I myself plan to not have sons but daughters because daughters are almost guaranteed to reproduce in future and abortion is a human right.
Therefore the right way to sustain a decline in population would be an engineering of birth ratios across the world so that a decline in population isn't too harsh on some people.
The goal of money is power (supporting causes you favor etc) and access to better mates. When there aren't enough mates to go by, people will get exhausted and start giving up. It's going to be a permanent burnout as more people become aware of what the future holds.
There's a way that even during a declining global population to sustainable levels, people remain happy. It might be unpopular, but it needs to be done. A new order.
I think the author’s analysis ignores an important facet of this problem - namely, the tremendous opportunity cost of burnout. In my time in this industry, I have seen burnout result in lost employment, failed startups, years-long mental health crises, and even total career switches. Even if the locally optimal solution is to prioritize work over leisure, most people who have been exposed to the idea of “burnout” at all seem to recognize that regularly trading leisure for productivity can result in significantly _less_ productivity over a five year period, even if seems optimal in the current month.
Indeed. AFAIK the psychological definition of burnout is something that you never bounce back from (to the same level).
Something that you bounce back from is 'just' exhaustion – and burnout is something that happens when you're exhausted but still keep pushing.
It's interesting how the author first uses sleep as an example of leisure, then something as akin to 'work' (before play), because undersleeping is pretty much the typical example of the kind of short-time 'benefit' thing that leads to very high long-term costs. But I guess that the first mention of 'sleep' might have meant "staying lazily in bed when you have already woken up" ?
> The escalators I take to work are filled with the same desperate faces and vacant eyes I feel staring through me on the subway, except instead of standing still, they’re bounding up it, subconsciously aware that below their feet is yet another opportunity to optimize on an existing convenience.
This is a super pessimistic take on what the author is seeing. I the last five years I have worked between two cities in my country, one where the federal government is the major employer, one the financial center. Getting off the train downtown in the financial core, I see engaged, enthusiastic, and hungry people heading to work to make something of themselves. They bound up the escalator because they have energy and drive and want to improve theirs and their family's lives.
In the government town, I see lots of people with unfulfilling, boring, and secure jobs, and the whole vibe of the town is defeat.
For many people, competition and pressure are essential to enjoying life, and we want to optimize what we do to support that. Without the pressure we atrophy. There are lots of places (like a lot of government work) where you dont have to work hard and can enjoy other parts of life. But what I've seen is that usually it doesnt work that way.
You're challenging an anecdote? Please keep the HN Guidelines in mind:
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I may have witnessed something similar. Pre-covid, I used to walk to work for several years. The shortest route took me through a parking lot for a large state office building. In the mornings, I would often see people sitting in their cars--reading, smoking, listening to the radio, whatever--but pointedly not going inside the building, at least not yet. And it was like this every day, not just occasionally. Some people were very consistent and I would see them nearly every day.
I've worked in various places, all private sector, and I couldn't remember ever seeing anything like this before. It finally occurred to me that perhaps they were deliberately waiting until the exact time when they were expected to be present to actually enter the building. The implication being that they'd prefer to sit in their cars rather than start their work day even a few minutes early.
Edit: Which, to be clear, is perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned--I just had never seen or done anything like that before, and I've also never worked directly for a government agency.
Or they were told that if they logged in early then they would automatically get OT and that's not allowed. That happened to a friend who works for the state.
Practically speaking, when I worked for the state this was because only a few managers actually had the keys to the office, so if you showed up early you would be sitting in the hallway.
> The implication being that they'd prefer to sit in their cars rather than start their work day even a few minutes early.
If you're supposed to work from 9 to 5, why would you start earlier if it doesn't benefit you to do so? If your work starts with a team meeting, why enter at 8.45? You could, but my experience is people want you to socialize then. For me (I am autistic) that's draining, not energizing. When I worked for Dutch equiv. to IRS, we had to be logged in at 9, not enter the building at 9. With Windows NT and everyone logging in at the same time this meant you had to start your computer at 8.50 or you'd be too late. I only hike quick, so I was logged in on time (even had time for a cig). Either way, they'd mainly look at the performance reports.
>If you're supposed to work from 9 to 5, why would you start earlier if it doesn't benefit you to do so?
This goes to the GP. A government worker doesn't see any benefit. They're career is basically seniority driven if there's any advancement at all. A private sector employee would be noted for their extra effort and see a bigger bonus/be promoted.
It could be that they have left for work early to avoid the traffic. ie if their start time is 9am then they could leave at 8am and take an hour, or leave at 7:30am, take 30 minutes and then spend an hour in their car reading.
Plenty of firms have fixed hours so you gain nothing by starting early. The office might not even be open for employees to come in early.
I've found myself doing this about 10 or so years ago. Very literally sitting in my car, staring out the window at the office front door, gathering the will to get out and go inside. Not in government work either, this was a private sector SaaS company. Started about 6 months after my employer adopted Agile development. Came to realize it was the signal that I was sick of what my job had become, sick of the ceremonial routines, sick of feeling like a generic cog in a machine, and that I needed to start looking at alternatives.
Probably the bit where you need to justify your existence every morning in front of your peers and management. “I spent the day learning” doesn’t go down well, there is pressure to be seen to be busy all the time.
Programmers think Agile is for them, but it’s for the benefit of management, always was.
There's a plausible alternative interpretation.. many many people in public sector enjoy not being pressured, not because they're lazy or sad, but because they'd rather respect themselves first. In the private sector, your job is on the line, the burden is on you and you'll have to bend over to avoid being fired.. it may not necessarily be sane motivation driving people to enter the building.
>For many people, competition and pressure are essential to enjoying life, and we want to optimize what we do to support that.
This is a good example of finding a middle ground aka finding a local maxima. Either extreme isn't well suited, but the grass is most likely greener in between the two extremes.
I've noticed something similar but to align it with the post's optimization theme, here's how I previously thought about it:
We, as humans, naturally try to optimize for the lowest energy output. Most people, when strictly externally motivated, will take the easiest path. People prefer to sit rather than stand, prefer to watch TV rather than do yard work etc. For those without ample job security, competition creates a bulwark against this by forcing people to try harder in order to get a reasonable level of security. Those who already have that job security (in government positions, for example) revert to that "lowest level of acceptable effort", which tends to be a bit lower without the added job security pressure.
Of course, there's always those few who are intrinsically motivated and highly conscientious that try hard no matter the circumstances.
In general, I think so. I like yard work too, but that’s largely because I’ve deliberately chose a small, low maintenance yard so it never really seems like “work”. Those I know with acres of land lament the upkeep but have no problem watching hours of tv. There’s a reason why landscapers and gardeners exist while we don’t hire people to watch tv and give us a summary.
Maybe yard work is a bad analogy, but if you watch tv seated rather than standing, it’s because we have a preference for lower energy states most of the time
I appreciate that you qualified the generalization as "a lot of" government work. I wanted to take this moment to mention that I've often seen tech circles to sound dismissive of government work altogether, as somehow less valuable/meritorious than industry, and I think that's unfortunate.
For someone who moved back to industry (from an amazing small team, working on positive federal programs), and thinking startups were probably the way to go for impact and being able to wield many skills, two of the barriers during the search were:
* It was hard to find startups with missions that I felt good about working on. Like many people, I work very hard, bring a lot of capabilities and potential, and want more than a paycheck and a lottery ticket. Scrolling angel.co blurbs was disheartening ("like Uber for embedding marketing insight electrodes into babies' brains, now with blockchain ICO").
* I heard some dismissive comments of some accomplishments simply because it was in the context of gov't, and some other times strongly suspected those dismissive sentiments (when I'm pretty sure the same accomplishments at a random startup would've been seen as very impressive)... and then I'd see comments on HN seeming to express the same prejudice. I don't know how prevalent that prejudice is, and it's far from the worst prejudice in the world right now, but it seemed to be a barrier.
Although I did eventually get offers from three startups working on good things, the process of finding them was so miserable, that I think next time I'll instead start by looking at 2-3 of the FAANGs and some other large organizations. Maybe the larger orgs, having institutional experience with much larger numbers of employees, might be less susceptible to prejudices of interviewers than at the average startup? (Well, that might be wishful thinking, but prejudices can take generations to erode, so, in the interim, doesn't hurt to mix up the approach, as a possible workaround.)
Yes, there was a time when government work attracted the best and brightest.
It is a shame we have lost so much of that. Because we all want the government to deliver us certain services, and I think most of us would like these services delivered by competent and motivated people.
[of course there is disagreement over what those services should be]
Well, even that comment could be an example of ideas, which people read and think, that can lead one to prejudices against everyone who does government work (as well as aversion to getting into that work oneself).
It seems ordinary for people to have prejudices about groups of people. Some prejudices, we're generally more sensitized that they're unfair to individuals, and harmful, and mentioning them is taboo. Other prejudices, we aren't as aware of, and still voice openly, even though we could see that reinforces/perpetuates prejudice that unfairly affects individuals.
Again, prejudice against people doing gov't work isn't the worst injustice in the world, but it's unfair to individuals, and also would seem to discourage many people from going into gov't work that affects society as a whole, and so this prejudice seems a problem to address.
Agreed, this matches my own experience with burnout and pressure. I've worked two different jobs with totally different amounts of pressure (one lower pressure and one higher pressure) but I've experienced burnout in both. It's not the level of pressure & optimization that leads to burnout, in fact the best periods of my career were at my high pressure job working pretty hard.
FWIW there's a comment quote that I think really nails burnout perfectly [1]:
> Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It's the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.
> My suggested remedy would be to reassociate work with success by doing routine things such as debugging or code testing that will restore the act of working with the little "pops" of endorphins.
> That is not to say that having a healthy life schedule makes burnout less likely (I think it does; and one should have a healthy lifestyle for its own sake) but I don't think it addresses the main issue.
My 2c is that if you're interested in working out & solving your own burnout, this is how you need to understand burnout. There are so many bad and weirdly political interpretations on burnout that basically sell "the solution is to work less" or "the solution is for society to work less". I want to save you the trouble of discovering that working less doesn't actually help you feel more fulfilled and will probably make you even more miserable if you have even a little bit of passion & curiosity & ambition.
This fits my experience. It doesn't even need to be 'failure' per se. I got burned out as a post-doc because I found the publication process really draining & ultimately being published didn't feel very rewarding/meaningful. So, it was technically success, but it felt like a waste.
I can never understand why these are the only two sides of the triangle.
Instead of competing against each others or not competing and rotting .. you can also compete to make everybody joyful, sharp, skilled. Competing to make the smoothest organization and choreography.
In both private and public sector I've seen enough inefficiencies one human needs to see.
I had an ok, low life once. Today I work 80h to catch up with capital gains of those who sell me food or own my place. The essence of capitalism is embodied in private equity today - a company is not there to make shoes or build a car - a company exists to make money.
Everything else is rather accidental, which is my take on the uber-exhaustion of the western world. I work hard to catch up with capital gains, which I know I cannot.
edit: What keeps me sane is that I basically reduced my life as much as I can. I life and work in a small room, have no car, I have clothing for a week, that's it. The flat I life in is about 70 years old and has hardly be modernized. I buy food and cook myself. I do not fly, my phone is old, I do not stream anything, I ad-block (otherwise I could not use the internet) and I support some core sites of the (old) internet with a bit of money.
I do not crave any of the "niceties" of today's world (I use dish washer and washing machine, do not get me wrong), let alone the tech world. No social media, except HN and a few very specific sites. Basically a modern day recluse, as it is the only way I can implement sufficient distance to this world.
I really liked this article, but I think it misses a couple things: the reality of the economy for millennials. Notes about how we might consider wage stagnation aside, cost of living and education skyrocketed for us. We also witnessed several significant economic events: the .com bubble's burst and the 2008 recession / depression -- a time when many millenials were looking for their first job post-college or at least a time when we were considering what to do post-college. Personally, I changed my plans entirely based on the 2008 depression (I'm in Michigan, where it was really bad).
The psychology of frugality can extend to time, not just money.
Amen to that. One life, live it well. To me that doesn't mean 80 hour weeks, 40 years of working and dropping dead of exhaustion the day I retire. I'm alright for that, thanks. Would rather be slightly poorer financially (some might say "less optimised") and richer for time. Time I can spend with my kids, looking at the sea, making music, reading. I'm ok for optimisation.
If there's anything covid should teach us, it's that optimisation to the max leaves us collectively and individually extremely fragile. We all need time and space and quiet and contingency, not "optimisation" and "growth", not all the time, anyway.
The irony here is that you're still optimizing, we're just arguing about heuristics. I find it to be a very difficult thought experiment to consciously avoid optimization. Maybe the key might be to stop thinking and/or live without intention...?
This is true and a problem a lot of people who are trying to be mindful deal with.
Many have "goals" to get "better at" meditating. This is due to our conditioning - we're convinced everywhere that we aren't good enough, in everything we do, from ads, to our boss, to our internal voice.
Sometimes I find just saying "you're doing fine, whatever it is" can be really helpful.
Such a great point and one I had when I started seriously meditating a couple of years ago. It's only now really that I'm starting to be able to just sit, without a goal, without some sense of "am I enlightened yet" as a thought somewhere at the end of the tunnel. Of course, in sitting I am (as per above) optimising - optimising stillness and inaction but yes, optimising.
But then as per reply below, the piece was specifically about wealth and working time which is a different beast.
We are optimizing for the wrong things. Instead of optimizing for happiness, health, learning, or anything else like that, we are optimizing for GDP and killing ourselves to make abstract numbers go up.
No, it is just casual word choice. The audience here, being mostly compsci oriented, likely consider metrics like happiness or fulfillment incalculable, when it is more precise to label them as latent as opposed to observable variables.
> Instead of optimizing for happiness, health, learning, or anything else like that
Humans didn't evolve optimizing for those things. We evolved hunting and scrapping for food and shelter, and looking for opportunities to have more. So that's what we're prone to do.
Any individual would agree with you and herein lies the crux: who is "we"?
If "we" is not "the entire earth population" those that optimize for "happiness, health, learning, or anything else like that" lose to those, for whatever reasons or circumstances, optimize on price alone (arguably to the detriment of their happiness, health, etc).
Case in point: outsourcing: 10 devs in the west cost more than 10 devs elsewhere in the world, meaning a global market for dev skills will move elsewhere, where those devs are cheaper for a reason (quality of life, living standards, infrastructure, are not spent on, so labour is cheaper).
Of course globalists will argue that this ultimately will "level", look at incomes going up where we outsource-to for example, but I think this misses the point. We will just keep optimizing, pointing the needle so to speak to the next cheapest place, which might in the future be a country that used to be "more expensive" but now, forced to compete, lowers its standards to accomodate the market.
We're stuck in a Malthusian Trap. Thinking we can simply escape it by not playing the game is missing the point: the question we need to solve is: "how do we stop competing for resources as individuals or arbitrary groups (neighbourhoord/cities/countries/continents), and start having a real shared understanding of our habits, genetic behaviour and use of resources".
> Any individual would agree with you and herein lies the crux: who is "we"?
"We" is a complex system. It is nobody and everyone.
I really don't think humans are actually intelligent. I think we are extremely clever, but a truly intelligent species would learn to countermand the emergent properties of the systems in which it embeds itself and take charge of its own history.
We are not intelligent enough to do that. Clever means we can understand one-cause-one-effect or few-causes-one-effect, and you can see that this is how all our engineered systems are built. They are very sophisticated versions of "hit thing with rock." Our machines are full of single parts with single functions.
Living systems on the other hand are all-causes-cause-all-effects fully concurrent feedback loops. Every part has every function with varying weights, like the weights in a neural network. That's totally beyond our intelligence to understand. We can barely do parallel programming with a few threads... this is like parallel programming where every instruction executes at once.
So far what look like attempts to control our destiny, like communism and fascism, are nothing but resentment driven tribal purges thinly veiled in complex language. They've done more harm than good. Right now just leaving things alone is possibly the best we can do.
BTW I think this is also why the promised dividends from sequencing the human genome and understanding genetics have not materialized. Genomes and the living phenotypes they help form are complex all-causes-all emergent systems much like our societies and economies. We are not cognitively capable of understanding them. Studying biology is like studying alien technology from a civilization a billion years beyond ours.
We have a tension between the best of ourselves and the worst of ourselves. When someone chooses to focus on the worst of ourselves, their pessimistic perspective, generally speaking, doesn't bring out the best in ourselves.
I do appreciate how they concluded:
> When given the choice, we optimize.
>
> Then we work.
Yes. Please focus on this. Our humanity is mostly best suited to receive positivity. Accept the negativity (read: unideal outcomes) but move forward with the positivity on building a better world. On building a world that understands more. On building a world that expresses abundance and joy.
The author seems to equate that work is somehow inherently evil. I'd say this is only true if it's a zero sum game but if it's an infinitely unbounded game then I'd say it's profitable to everyone.
This is the core of my own development: seeing the world and life in this world (or even beyond) as an unbounded game rather than a zero-sum game. A lot of times it's the perspective that matters. Maybe at times when we are overly focused on the "how" of optimization and lose sight of the "why," the human mind/body/soul becomes unable to metabolize it, and flips out.
>when we are overly focused on the "how" of optimization and lose sight of the "why,"
I have full agreement with you except the quoted statement above. I would actually rephrase this to say: when we are overly focused on our own solution then we lose sight of other coherent variables/solutions that we didn't take into account. Some call this myopic, among many other terms. All our decisions don't exist in a vacuum, no matter how convincingly the perspective is.
Curious what would change for better or worse if computer professionals were reclassified as non-exempt. How would the change in dynamics affect the burnout economics?
Edit(follow up):
The history behind exemption stems from an amendment[1] to S.2930 - A bill to eliminate "substantial documentary evidence" requirement for minimum wage determination for American Samoa[2] (1990) of which there was no debate or objection.
They would be told that they are not required to work overtime, while every signal and clue would tell them that they are. Overtime abuse keeps the wage and hour divisions in most states working overtime.
This was a great piece, covering a really good topic. It's worth considering that work today is probably defined differently than before—and comes with different meanings and expectations to different generations. Would be good to pair it with this one: https://www.economist.com/1843/2016/03/02/why-do-we-work-so-...
Secondly, what do we lose at the expense of increased productivity/work output? What were the unseen fruits of chilling and leisure?
Optimisation isn't the problem, optimisation is always a good thing. Deciding what the objective is on the other hand, that's the tricky part. Right now we're optimising to an incomplete or incorrect objective function.
Of course it's not that simple, no doubt someone will be along to mention Goodhart's Law or the inherent problem with essentially quantifying the meaning of life. Still, I don't think people applying logic to their daily lives can be a problem on its own.
In all our mathematical experience, the answer turns out to be that we can only ever define an approximate objective function, and we almost always need some kind of “regularization” to constrain our optimization strategy. And in many cases, an effective regularization practically (which results in better “generalization” technically) might be “early stopping” I.e. not optimizing as hard!
But if the definition of "optimisation" is achieving the best solution for the problem, then regularization isn't constraining optimisation, it's part of getting to the best solution and so becomes a part of the better optimiser.
I agree, any sufficiently complex problem is beyond what we can define as a concrete objective function and any of the solutions we have. So instead the best we can hope for is that today is closer to being optimal than yesterday, and tomorrow will be better still.
Regularization might give better solutions, but it’s no more optimizing the stated objective, and often runs counter. In some cases, regularization is explicit and by choice, but it’s also often implicit and not under control.
The article mentions that if all seven billion individuals could communicate efficiently and agree to use extra time-saving services to rest, the rat race may be prevented. But I think it is incomplete: we may still need to rush in order to be technologically advanced in time to defend ourselves against an unknown future threat: an incoming asteroid, or an invading alien species. So it seems agreeing to slow down Earth-wide would still be insufficient.
In theory, the same burnout problem may be affecting an independent alien life form far away, making this outcome an emergent property of any intelligent life form.
People get burned out because they don't have options.
If you were rich and worked a job for the social parts, would you ever burn out? Doubtful, if you get fired, you're rich. If your asked to work extra hard, you don't, because you're rich.
If you're not rich, you can't get fired: you'd lose your income, foreclosure, difficulty feeding your family, no retirement savings, can't afford to fix your car, lose your healthcare, etc. You can't say no.
Debt is the primary driver of the economy in this country and the major reason why people are unhappy. They buy things they can't afford with money they don't have because of marketing and then are trapped in their jobs and treated like garbage.
The constant appeal to the prisoner's dilemma feels off. Especially since it is more transactional, in action.
That is, the confession to betray to get a reduced sentence had to be offered before it is taken. Neither has incentive to confess before being offered the chance to get a reduced sentence, unless they think they have no chance of completing a lie.
Slightly tangential, I wonder if social networks will be looked at like the tobacco companies once the increased dopamine needs they cause and certain brain diseases are linked...
This reminds me of Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch". It describes the same sort of competition where players sacrifice a value to remain competitive. After a while, the value is gone but the competitive advantage vanished, and everyone is worse off.
I dunno, I saw those numbers on the prisoners dilemma and I immediately felt that I should lie just based on the off chance that the other prisoner does too. The difference between 8 and 10 years in prison is not enough to matter. But 1 is pretty good, and maximum utility for both of us.
Of course they’ll probably end up confessing, but that’s no more than I expect anyway.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadMaybe some tech people are over optimizing, but 99% of people in the real world do not.
This article reminds me of some friends in tech who sit down and over analyze shit and never get anything done.
I would also go ahead and say that the "tragedy of the commons" is an even better way of looking at this (i think that's basically a N-player prisoner's dilemma)
Imagine a world where you can get enough pay to eat and go out and pay rent in four hours of work per week. Your landlord can rent to you or to the person who decides to work eight hours per week, so he raises the rent and rents to the other guy who is willing to work more and needs housing as much as you do. So now you have to work more too. Everyone works more because everyone else works more, just like you have to not cooperate on a prisoners dilemma because you know the other guy won’t cooperate either (because he knows the same thing you do).
No one does anything, the hierarchical structure is so meaningless hundreds do nothing at all. People get stressed out when they are expected to work a little.
Everyone is chatting on meetings about which button is the best.
Yep, it’s a career suicide and leaves you with no future prospects but it’s pretty stable.
Some play the politics to get higher paychecks, some squeeze the newcomers that actually do the work but things stabilize pretty quickly.
Which country and which kind of work? I might relocate when I get older so it’s good to know... ;)
Collecting overtime gives opportunity for under-performers to make progress in the company.
I've been to more than 5 banks in Croatia and Austria (Most of the banks in Croatia are subsidiaries of Italian and Austrian banks). The contracts make overtime mandatory but one can negotiate to remove overtime completely.
Most people that tell their wives and friends that they work overtime either do not work during the overtime hours, are unnecessarily inefficient for the purpose of collecting hours (unpaid) or have periods of struggle because most of the time they do not work and have no idea what's going on (so when they have to catch up, the stress and the lack of knowledge forces overtime).
Some cases I encountered of people who complain about working too much in a bank are those that prefer the company of their coworkers more than that of their spouses.
I hope you find an area that you like.
Optimizing much? :-)
I actually see this as a slowing mechanism rather than an optimization mechanism, too (thinking about when I first joined reddit and read every single submission and now I simply doomscroll, hmm).
I haven't read Newport's "Deep Work" yet, but I suspect the themes are what I'm aiming for; I like to be a jack of many trades, but mastery of a few (or even serial mastery) is my ultimate goal.
Even in New Zealand where we're not in lockdown and life is pretty normal, there's still that "what if we get a big outbreak" sitting in the back of your head constantly.
Modern life comes with a range of stressors and competing in the labour market is just one. There are loads more that we as individuals can do little about. Limited progress on climate change is another big one.
What happens when something goes wrong, what happens when someone quits or is sick? What happens when business needs to change/pivot/innovate? This idea that optimized time is somehow 100% wasted is killing a lot of people.
One thing that stuck out was that at Volvo in the sixties they overstuffed engineers by up to 40% to have a buffer in something happened.
The engineers may have been better rested and thus able to deliver more quickly and reliably thanks to a sense that they had an effective peer support group.
The eventual product quality may have been higher thanks to the additional oversight, review and input - leading to increased market demand.
The support, stability and resulting confidence offered to employees may have spread via word-of-mouth to their familities, friends and extended networks, increasing marketplace faith in the company and trust in the product.
And, perhaps the simplest albeit least thought-provoking explanation: perhaps the additional 40% engineering salary overhead did not have a significant impact on the company finances.
[1] http://paulgraham.com/re.html
I don't bemoan having a clearer picture of costs or margins of safety. What this speaks to is re-examining our values and perhaps directing our priorities to something other than maximizing ROI at all costs.
Our entire system is built upon maximizing ROI at all costs. Dealing with these values is extremely difficult.
I may have miscommunicated; perhaps I should have phrased it as re-evaluating what "return" we want to maximize.
That was definitely the case in the Ancient World and may be the reason why some Roman buildings are still standing.
(Roman concrete was awesome, BTW. Rebar is a major source of eventual concrete failure and Romans did not use any. On the other hand, they used volcanic ash in their concrete. Some Roman concrete piers are still standing, 2000 years of waves beating on them made them harder!)
I am often asking questions of my senior leaders about the volume of organizational change that is a constant in the company and what I can do to act as a “shock absorber” for my direct reports and subordinate leaders.
A major customer facing outage resulted in an RCA compiled by yours truly. I found that a critical engineer had quit months before-never backfilled. Work got reassigned to other people. A second event and second RCA, similarly created by me. Same story: an Ops person had left the company last year, never backfilled. A third. Each time I pointed to workloads and capacities. Not because it’s my job to do these things specifically or by expectations of my director but because no one else in the 400 person organization is yet no one else knows how to go looking for this info so it’s sort of become my duty just because I have enough of a damn to start doing it. These aren’t even MY teams, shit just rolls down hill and my team is at the bottom of the shit pipe. Which is something I hoped bringing these results would get action on. They barely have.
What I’ve come to conclude is that my leaders are NOT thinking about these things until someone or something catastrophic forces them to.
If I had the balls I would straight up ask my senior leaders “what would you say it is you do here if it’s taken such severe consequences to start looking at what we’re asking our people to do?”
What’s most saddening: it’s becoming alarmingly common from job to job. It’s forced me to rethink drastically how I’m vetting companies because they do a GREAT job disguising this during interviews.
No one gets paid for preventing problems. They get paid for increasing profit, either by increasing revenue and/or reducing costs. I would bet your leaders are consciously trying to skate by and reap the short term rewards and hoping someone like you fills in the gaps. As long as the problem can’t be pinned on them, or they can bounce before it causes sufficient disruption to the business to affect compensation, their goals are met.
For example, the budget gets decided a few levels up, but the the immediate manager knows they aren’t being given the resources to succeed. Then their strategy, if they have the ability, might be to hire someone who they can point a finger to when it inevitably fails.
The morale of the story is that it takes a year to figure out that organization-person fit is bad?
That may be true now but it seems like a recipe for disaster (check 3-4 ongoing disasters outside my window, yep). I assume in earlier eras society prepared for disasters, paid people to prevent disasters and so-forth. Has something changed?
This is not a law of nature. Different cultural norms yields different business priorities. The fact of the matter is that money is only a surrogate for value, it is not the actual thing. Current business teaching has ideologically put the money hoarders in charge where increasing their profits is the only appropriate moral behavior. This yields a legitimacy and incentive for shortermist thinking.
Equating money with value builds a distorted view of what humans actually value. Money is not ideal in representing the value of stability, fairness or compassion. these are very basic human values which are shared by most of us, yet money cannot encode these faithfully.
We shouldn't accept the side effects of our choice to use money as surrogate for value as some form of natural law.
Re: vetting companies, it’s so true. You probably have a lot of wisdom already, but it’s quite the learning process.
Had that happen once. Friend in one department made a referral for me to join another, I ask pointed and direct questions in the interview-which was otherwise light hearted and engaging, the response was filibustering, platitudinous non-answers about “shared sacrifices” and “we all jump in” and “take the flank” and “no man left behind” (please do NOT get me started on the amount of militarized battle-speak that has rooted itself into corporate America like a tick). So I tactfully and delicately but firmly try to bring the conversation back on track.
Friend tells me a few days later “they disqualified you as not being a good culture fit. What did you say??”
“I asked what the on-call schedule was like”
That's the kicker: experience has taught me that if I don't ask specific (but tactful) questions about things that have caused excess anxiety and stress in the job, and how the company interviewing me handles them (or fails to handle them) early enough, I find out in the worst ways after taking the job and starting.
This is no attempt at setting myself up for malingering down the road, I am not that kind of a person; but I have also grasped how important it is to interview the company as much as the company is interviewing me. If they get to be stringent about how good we would "fit", then so should job candidates.
And ironically given the thread we're in about 'over optimization', it's just not worth the time to me to wait until getting an offer to find out the engineering culture believes in 'drinking from the firehose'. I want to know that early, so as to self-select out.
Any flashes of inspiration on this?
I’m always searching for the perfect set of little questions to help uncover the real culture of a company, rather than the platitudinous corporate-buzzword answers about culture you otherwise get.
Software and manufacturing are both highly susceptible to misery from this efficiency BS. If you are gonna work to death might as well start your own company.
You are me.
?
In my junior role I did the development and the ops guys did the deployments and we both knew at least some of what the other person did. It helped knowledge transfer of hot new framework from me to the elder ops people and sage unix wisdom from them down to me. We had a "read-only" Friday where deployments were forbidden to help prevent outages over the weekend. The software changed slowly and employee churn was minimal.
Now (much later) I'm elsewhere, expected to do the dev, the ops, the deployment itself, the documentation, training a junior all the while; there are effectively half as many people keeping the ship afloat.
The most bizarre part of all is my daily rate is almost 3x what it was then, as the market dictates for such drudgery. Relevant to the article it's obviously strategic for me to accept that, but if the rates weren't so absurd and you could get a dev and an ops for 0.5x the devops rate each the company would get twice as many man-hours, not to mention the added safety of doubling the system's bus factor, cutting workloads in half and vastly improving employee quality of life. Companies offering a devops role for 1.5x a single developer's rate 10 years ago to ostensibly save themselves 0.5 of a salary, are now collectively getting 0.333x as much value out of their hires (and then losing them completely when they burn out and being thrust into chaos).
What then?
Hard to spool people up quick enough to avoid a real hit, and second order impact.
Even for mild cases of covid, the recovery can look like the flu. That means 1-2 weeks off work. And reduced ability for weeks after that. Now half of your team gets it at once.
Efficiency and resiliency are in opposite tension.
Short story?
Was down hard for a few weeks. Still struggling with a general lack of energy that has slowly been improving.
Brain fog is a thing. Better now, but during and for the few weeks after Covid? Rough. Would walk into a room only to realize I had no idea why.
Again, all improving, but for some of us Covid has a longer term impact beyond possibly losing a month being sick.
Very true.
Valuing this risk properly seems to be the major disconnect.
With it valued reasonably, the extra head count makes perfect sense!
I wonder why people don't just work in the opposite direction? Rather than run too lean, run properly, risks managed as they should be.
Then be opportunistic!
Every so often, when things are favorable, take work that matters an nail it for a nice payback!
Works about the same over a longer period, and the big costs are totally off the table.
Ended up with some. Am healing. Will be OK.
A decade ago many asked, "where is the new blood?" Could see it coming. Right now, people aging and burning out are super expensive to replace. In some ways they can't be.
I consider failure to manage this kind of debt severe. When it comes due, it is brutal.
That doesn't sound "fine" to me. People get sick. Vacations are necessities.
"Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SOVC2Y/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
It seems to me like over the last ~20 years the world has become increasingly more competitive.
So it seems likely that many people choose the path of optimization not out of want for wealth, but out of necessity to continue advancing somewhat.
In a highly competitive environment I doubt both players will ever choose to relax, unless they are already comfortable.
You could call it competition. I call it race to the bottom. Cause a lot gets sacrificed in the name of lower price. Repairability, source code, QA, tech support, environment -- all too often they're the losers.
> Hyper-rational individuals making hyper-rational decisions on how to spend their time by launching into an inescapable arms race of productivity. Burnout is inevitable.
"I must be super productive so that I can maximize my wealth"
rather than,
"I must be super productive to just to remain competitive".
To me it seems like the author assumes people are optimizing because they're driven to squeeze every drop of value out of their time, rather than just trying to remain competitive in the market.
I’ve moved around enough to see just how wildly it varies. It’s tied to cities and industries and sometimes just specific companies, but I’m not so sure it’s tied to any intrinsic economic reality.
When the population doesn't increase as fast or starts shrinking, there is going to be emotional unhappiness. I know why, but the subject is sensitive to be discussed openly.
The other option for increasing happiness is manipulation of the birth rates/ratios with mandatory genetic modification/engineering. Then people will be more satisfied, while having a shrinking population across the world.
Growth in populations masks many problems therefore results in happiness. A decline in population increases unhappiness and exaggerates a problem.
But the problem is that a larger and larger percentage of population isn't going to get their needs met when the population starts shrinking across the world. There needs to be a mandatory global order for genetic modification.
Please explain why, because it's generally considered that overpopulation leads to competition.
It's not that straight forward.
But an over simplified answer would be the population pyramid. Tax base shrinks, more tax burden on working class people.
Then the other problem is that the global birth sex ratios. The natural sex ratio at birth is 105 men for 100 women. When a population is growing, this isn't much of a problem in monogamous societies, and everyone finds a partner (men marry younger women on average).
When the population is under decline, there is extreme pressure on men and in a perfectly monogamous society, 10% of men are definitely going to be left behind.
If we can some how genetically modify humans so that the sex ratios come near 1/1 or 0.95 men to 1 woman, it'll be easier to survive a decline in population and men wont be impacted as much. A growing population favors almost no one, not men, not women. A declining population means that men are the unfavored sex.
The end result could be large male foeticide instead of female foeticide 50 years down the line. I myself plan to not have sons but daughters because daughters are almost guaranteed to reproduce in future and abortion is a human right.
Therefore the right way to sustain a decline in population would be an engineering of birth ratios across the world so that a decline in population isn't too harsh on some people.
The goal of money is power (supporting causes you favor etc) and access to better mates. When there aren't enough mates to go by, people will get exhausted and start giving up. It's going to be a permanent burnout as more people become aware of what the future holds.
There's a way that even during a declining global population to sustainable levels, people remain happy. It might be unpopular, but it needs to be done. A new order.
Something that you bounce back from is 'just' exhaustion – and burnout is something that happens when you're exhausted but still keep pushing.
It's interesting how the author first uses sleep as an example of leisure, then something as akin to 'work' (before play), because undersleeping is pretty much the typical example of the kind of short-time 'benefit' thing that leads to very high long-term costs. But I guess that the first mention of 'sleep' might have meant "staying lazily in bed when you have already woken up" ?
This is a super pessimistic take on what the author is seeing. I the last five years I have worked between two cities in my country, one where the federal government is the major employer, one the financial center. Getting off the train downtown in the financial core, I see engaged, enthusiastic, and hungry people heading to work to make something of themselves. They bound up the escalator because they have energy and drive and want to improve theirs and their family's lives.
In the government town, I see lots of people with unfulfilling, boring, and secure jobs, and the whole vibe of the town is defeat.
For many people, competition and pressure are essential to enjoying life, and we want to optimize what we do to support that. Without the pressure we atrophy. There are lots of places (like a lot of government work) where you dont have to work hard and can enjoy other parts of life. But what I've seen is that usually it doesnt work that way.
>"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
>"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
I've worked in various places, all private sector, and I couldn't remember ever seeing anything like this before. It finally occurred to me that perhaps they were deliberately waiting until the exact time when they were expected to be present to actually enter the building. The implication being that they'd prefer to sit in their cars rather than start their work day even a few minutes early.
Edit: Which, to be clear, is perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned--I just had never seen or done anything like that before, and I've also never worked directly for a government agency.
If you're supposed to work from 9 to 5, why would you start earlier if it doesn't benefit you to do so? If your work starts with a team meeting, why enter at 8.45? You could, but my experience is people want you to socialize then. For me (I am autistic) that's draining, not energizing. When I worked for Dutch equiv. to IRS, we had to be logged in at 9, not enter the building at 9. With Windows NT and everyone logging in at the same time this meant you had to start your computer at 8.50 or you'd be too late. I only hike quick, so I was logged in on time (even had time for a cig). Either way, they'd mainly look at the performance reports.
This goes to the GP. A government worker doesn't see any benefit. They're career is basically seniority driven if there's any advancement at all. A private sector employee would be noted for their extra effort and see a bigger bonus/be promoted.
Plenty of firms have fixed hours so you gain nothing by starting early. The office might not even be open for employees to come in early.
Probably the bit where you need to justify your existence every morning in front of your peers and management. “I spent the day learning” doesn’t go down well, there is pressure to be seen to be busy all the time.
Programmers think Agile is for them, but it’s for the benefit of management, always was.
This is a good example of finding a middle ground aka finding a local maxima. Either extreme isn't well suited, but the grass is most likely greener in between the two extremes.
We, as humans, naturally try to optimize for the lowest energy output. Most people, when strictly externally motivated, will take the easiest path. People prefer to sit rather than stand, prefer to watch TV rather than do yard work etc. For those without ample job security, competition creates a bulwark against this by forcing people to try harder in order to get a reasonable level of security. Those who already have that job security (in government positions, for example) revert to that "lowest level of acceptable effort", which tends to be a bit lower without the added job security pressure.
Of course, there's always those few who are intrinsically motivated and highly conscientious that try hard no matter the circumstances.
Maybe yard work is a bad analogy, but if you watch tv seated rather than standing, it’s because we have a preference for lower energy states most of the time
For someone who moved back to industry (from an amazing small team, working on positive federal programs), and thinking startups were probably the way to go for impact and being able to wield many skills, two of the barriers during the search were:
* It was hard to find startups with missions that I felt good about working on. Like many people, I work very hard, bring a lot of capabilities and potential, and want more than a paycheck and a lottery ticket. Scrolling angel.co blurbs was disheartening ("like Uber for embedding marketing insight electrodes into babies' brains, now with blockchain ICO").
* I heard some dismissive comments of some accomplishments simply because it was in the context of gov't, and some other times strongly suspected those dismissive sentiments (when I'm pretty sure the same accomplishments at a random startup would've been seen as very impressive)... and then I'd see comments on HN seeming to express the same prejudice. I don't know how prevalent that prejudice is, and it's far from the worst prejudice in the world right now, but it seemed to be a barrier.
Although I did eventually get offers from three startups working on good things, the process of finding them was so miserable, that I think next time I'll instead start by looking at 2-3 of the FAANGs and some other large organizations. Maybe the larger orgs, having institutional experience with much larger numbers of employees, might be less susceptible to prejudices of interviewers than at the average startup? (Well, that might be wishful thinking, but prejudices can take generations to erode, so, in the interim, doesn't hurt to mix up the approach, as a possible workaround.)
It is a shame we have lost so much of that. Because we all want the government to deliver us certain services, and I think most of us would like these services delivered by competent and motivated people.
[of course there is disagreement over what those services should be]
It seems ordinary for people to have prejudices about groups of people. Some prejudices, we're generally more sensitized that they're unfair to individuals, and harmful, and mentioning them is taboo. Other prejudices, we aren't as aware of, and still voice openly, even though we could see that reinforces/perpetuates prejudice that unfairly affects individuals.
Again, prejudice against people doing gov't work isn't the worst injustice in the world, but it's unfair to individuals, and also would seem to discourage many people from going into gov't work that affects society as a whole, and so this prejudice seems a problem to address.
FWIW there's a comment quote that I think really nails burnout perfectly [1]:
> Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It's the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.
> My suggested remedy would be to reassociate work with success by doing routine things such as debugging or code testing that will restore the act of working with the little "pops" of endorphins.
> That is not to say that having a healthy life schedule makes burnout less likely (I think it does; and one should have a healthy lifestyle for its own sake) but I don't think it addresses the main issue.
My 2c is that if you're interested in working out & solving your own burnout, this is how you need to understand burnout. There are so many bad and weirdly political interpretations on burnout that basically sell "the solution is to work less" or "the solution is for society to work less". I want to save you the trouble of discovering that working less doesn't actually help you feel more fulfilled and will probably make you even more miserable if you have even a little bit of passion & curiosity & ambition.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630618
Instead of competing against each others or not competing and rotting .. you can also compete to make everybody joyful, sharp, skilled. Competing to make the smoothest organization and choreography.
In both private and public sector I've seen enough inefficiencies one human needs to see.
Everything else is rather accidental, which is my take on the uber-exhaustion of the western world. I work hard to catch up with capital gains, which I know I cannot.
edit: What keeps me sane is that I basically reduced my life as much as I can. I life and work in a small room, have no car, I have clothing for a week, that's it. The flat I life in is about 70 years old and has hardly be modernized. I buy food and cook myself. I do not fly, my phone is old, I do not stream anything, I ad-block (otherwise I could not use the internet) and I support some core sites of the (old) internet with a bit of money.
I do not crave any of the "niceties" of today's world (I use dish washer and washing machine, do not get me wrong), let alone the tech world. No social media, except HN and a few very specific sites. Basically a modern day recluse, as it is the only way I can implement sufficient distance to this world.
The psychology of frugality can extend to time, not just money.
If there's anything covid should teach us, it's that optimisation to the max leaves us collectively and individually extremely fragile. We all need time and space and quiet and contingency, not "optimisation" and "growth", not all the time, anyway.
Many have "goals" to get "better at" meditating. This is due to our conditioning - we're convinced everywhere that we aren't good enough, in everything we do, from ads, to our boss, to our internal voice.
Sometimes I find just saying "you're doing fine, whatever it is" can be really helpful.
But then as per reply below, the piece was specifically about wealth and working time which is a different beast.
Man, interesting stuff :-)
Humans didn't evolve optimizing for those things. We evolved hunting and scrapping for food and shelter, and looking for opportunities to have more. So that's what we're prone to do.
If "we" is not "the entire earth population" those that optimize for "happiness, health, learning, or anything else like that" lose to those, for whatever reasons or circumstances, optimize on price alone (arguably to the detriment of their happiness, health, etc).
Case in point: outsourcing: 10 devs in the west cost more than 10 devs elsewhere in the world, meaning a global market for dev skills will move elsewhere, where those devs are cheaper for a reason (quality of life, living standards, infrastructure, are not spent on, so labour is cheaper).
Of course globalists will argue that this ultimately will "level", look at incomes going up where we outsource-to for example, but I think this misses the point. We will just keep optimizing, pointing the needle so to speak to the next cheapest place, which might in the future be a country that used to be "more expensive" but now, forced to compete, lowers its standards to accomodate the market.
We're stuck in a Malthusian Trap. Thinking we can simply escape it by not playing the game is missing the point: the question we need to solve is: "how do we stop competing for resources as individuals or arbitrary groups (neighbourhoord/cities/countries/continents), and start having a real shared understanding of our habits, genetic behaviour and use of resources".
"We" is a complex system. It is nobody and everyone.
I really don't think humans are actually intelligent. I think we are extremely clever, but a truly intelligent species would learn to countermand the emergent properties of the systems in which it embeds itself and take charge of its own history.
We are not intelligent enough to do that. Clever means we can understand one-cause-one-effect or few-causes-one-effect, and you can see that this is how all our engineered systems are built. They are very sophisticated versions of "hit thing with rock." Our machines are full of single parts with single functions.
Living systems on the other hand are all-causes-cause-all-effects fully concurrent feedback loops. Every part has every function with varying weights, like the weights in a neural network. That's totally beyond our intelligence to understand. We can barely do parallel programming with a few threads... this is like parallel programming where every instruction executes at once.
So far what look like attempts to control our destiny, like communism and fascism, are nothing but resentment driven tribal purges thinly veiled in complex language. They've done more harm than good. Right now just leaving things alone is possibly the best we can do.
BTW I think this is also why the promised dividends from sequencing the human genome and understanding genetics have not materialized. Genomes and the living phenotypes they help form are complex all-causes-all emergent systems much like our societies and economies. We are not cognitively capable of understanding them. Studying biology is like studying alien technology from a civilization a billion years beyond ours.
I do appreciate how they concluded:
> When given the choice, we optimize.
>
> Then we work.
Yes. Please focus on this. Our humanity is mostly best suited to receive positivity. Accept the negativity (read: unideal outcomes) but move forward with the positivity on building a better world. On building a world that understands more. On building a world that expresses abundance and joy.
The author seems to equate that work is somehow inherently evil. I'd say this is only true if it's a zero sum game but if it's an infinitely unbounded game then I'd say it's profitable to everyone.
I have full agreement with you except the quoted statement above. I would actually rephrase this to say: when we are overly focused on our own solution then we lose sight of other coherent variables/solutions that we didn't take into account. Some call this myopic, among many other terms. All our decisions don't exist in a vacuum, no matter how convincingly the perspective is.
Edit(follow up): The history behind exemption stems from an amendment[1] to S.2930 - A bill to eliminate "substantial documentary evidence" requirement for minimum wage determination for American Samoa[2] (1990) of which there was no debate or objection.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/amendment/101st-congress/house-amen...
[2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/101st-congress/senate-bill/293...
Secondly, what do we lose at the expense of increased productivity/work output? What were the unseen fruits of chilling and leisure?
Of course it's not that simple, no doubt someone will be along to mention Goodhart's Law or the inherent problem with essentially quantifying the meaning of life. Still, I don't think people applying logic to their daily lives can be a problem on its own.
In all our mathematical experience, the answer turns out to be that we can only ever define an approximate objective function, and we almost always need some kind of “regularization” to constrain our optimization strategy. And in many cases, an effective regularization practically (which results in better “generalization” technically) might be “early stopping” I.e. not optimizing as hard!
I agree, any sufficiently complex problem is beyond what we can define as a concrete objective function and any of the solutions we have. So instead the best we can hope for is that today is closer to being optimal than yesterday, and tomorrow will be better still.
You say that it gets a "better" solution, so the against some indescribable original objective there's a difference.
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-ha...
In theory, the same burnout problem may be affecting an independent alien life form far away, making this outcome an emergent property of any intelligent life form.
If you were rich and worked a job for the social parts, would you ever burn out? Doubtful, if you get fired, you're rich. If your asked to work extra hard, you don't, because you're rich.
If you're not rich, you can't get fired: you'd lose your income, foreclosure, difficulty feeding your family, no retirement savings, can't afford to fix your car, lose your healthcare, etc. You can't say no.
Debt is the primary driver of the economy in this country and the major reason why people are unhappy. They buy things they can't afford with money they don't have because of marketing and then are trapped in their jobs and treated like garbage.
That is, the confession to betray to get a reduced sentence had to be offered before it is taken. Neither has incentive to confess before being offered the chance to get a reduced sentence, unless they think they have no chance of completing a lie.
Right? What am I missing?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Of course they’ll probably end up confessing, but that’s no more than I expect anyway.
Interesting how context is so important.