This saying embodies all the pretentions of the cult of overwork. Only the people who are "successful" (measured by monetary wealth and/or fame) are "somebodies". The rest are nobodies. They're invisible.
I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but you don't need to work endless hours to "be somebody", maybe to be a successful entrepreneur but then you have a very specific idea about what defines someone's value.
The definition of being "somebody" is missing here.
Anyways, it's not exclusively true that work-life balance has to be sacrificed. I met a very successful business owner (millionaire, to quantify) a while ago who didn't do meetings before midday. Hated it, and would prefer to meet late afternoon. If being "somebody" includes financial success, they illustrated that it's not necessarily incompatible with a happy work-life balance.
Tbh, I'm not interested in being that kind of somebody. I'd rather be a good friend, good at my job, and doing the work my God has set out for me to do.
If I can nail those I think I'm doing pretty well. Dare I say I might even be satisfied.
During lockdown I was feeling pretty burnt out myself which got me thinking: why are basically all jobs 9-5, 5 days per week? Why is there no variation on this model?
It annoyed me so much that I decided to create https://4dayweek.io/ - Software Engineering jobs with a better work / life balance
Cheers mate - really appreciate it! More jobs (e.g ML) getting added soon, just need to convince more companies to consider applications for a 4 day week
How do these companies scale down the workload for 4 day a week employees? Estimates in the software field are based on intuition. I could easily see this becoming, "get 5 days of work done in 4 days and get paid less for it" if the people involved aren't used to estimating based on 4 day work weeks.
Can you elaborate on your context maybe? Asking because to me this intuitively doesn't make sense but my context is agile software development with sprint and story points. Since story points are a relative complexity measure they don't care about how long the work week is. The velocity measured over each sprint in these points also doesn't. Velocity is just an average number of observed story points delivered per time period. How many days were 'work days' and which, doesn't really matter.
The company I work for runs almost in the same way, the difference is that we have a 40h/week working hours as a "reference", which is pure BS since everyone end up working easily 45+ hours/week.
Do you intend for the site to be mobile friendly? Couldn't see hardly anything except a menu and there's a little "agree" button that makes me think that the cookie notification is getting hidden by the menu
I've been asking this for decades, because I hate rush hour. It's now more obvious it used to be a huge problem with an easy solution... employers need to give employees more options as to when to work. Synchronizing 9-5 is incredibly short-sighted and puts so much strain on the system for no reason. Many roles don't need that window of time and could easily open things up for those that really need those times. I really hope 9-5 goes away and people just "show up" to work for meetings and maybe agreed office hours of some kind.
It’s just the socially accepted pseudo standard. Shorthand to avoid complexity.
Where I’m at 10am to 4pm are the core hours and the rest is flexible. Overtime can be recouped in half days or full days off if you’ve organised appropriately with the team.
My suspicion is that it’s simply easier to make disgruntled noises generally about 9-5 than actually negotiating seriously at the smaller end of the scale on behalf of you or your team.
How much do these ultra successful types actually over-work and how much is just posturing to trick the underlings to over-work?
In American Psycho Patrick Bateman has it pretty chill, spending all his working hours on watching TV, reading magazines and talking trash with his peers. I used to think it was just another example of how unhinged he was, but maybe it’s a comment on some kind of double standard on workload vs. compensation in the corporate life.
That is a great take on it! My take was the higher up you go, the more meaningless the work is. As in paper pusher vs innovator. Though I imagine near to and at C level it may be different.
It's all posturing. Why wouldn't it be? Leadership is all about "leveraging great people" right? So it makes sense to keep up the appearance if it means an extra X% output.
And that's not even considering the management of expectations to prevent complaints about income inequality. I mean, you didn't work 80+ hour weeks, so, who are you to complain?
> is just posturing to trick the underlings to over-work?
This. There's nothing bad in wanting to do a great job but most often you're not the one to benefit from that. Especially software devs, some of them can work miracles almost for free, just to get some recognition (but not too much, we don't want them to think they provide something extraordinary )
I am sure there are instances. I can't really speak for everyone and generalize for an entire management class, but in our company, it does not appear to be just posturing for managers and middle managers. Getting someone for 15 to 30 minute window can sometimes be rather hard. I see my manager in and out of meetings all day ( some are pointless so he can do some of his actual work ), some are a shit show where he needs to actively participate just to keep things afloat, some are something in between. I do not know if he is an exception, but buddy that just got promoted said she is having the same issue. Metric ton of stuff to do and no time do it in. Doing more after 6 or w/e your 'end time' is seems common here.
And I had a taste of something similar myself. Project dropped out of the sky on my plate with due date a little too close for comfort. So what do you do? If you want to deliver, something has got to give..
> Project dropped out of the sky on my plate with due date a little too close for comfort. So what do you do?
Obviously, this project wasn't important enough to be given to you with enough time to get it done. Deadlines are often artificial, and this is probably what it was. In the absence of any specifics, I'd say push back on the deadline, negotiate for what you need to deliver something acceptable within a reasonable time, and don't kill yourself for it. If you do kill yourself for this one project, that just sets an expectation for next time that you don't want to have set.
I've worked with a lot of environments before where these deadlines aren't artificial. Usually these are projects dictated and agreed to by non-technical staff, then handed to technical staff to figure out. I assumed they were artificial, then I look at official signed contracts with deliverables and dates and die a bit inside.
"We said we'd give them X, Y, Z by A for $N. Let's see how close we can get to it." Is not abnormal from my experience with major clients as well. I work in R&D so there is usually an expectation of delays and failures but in this world, the client has an idea of what they want and an upper budget if what they'll spend. People try and feel this out to get as close to their budget as possible and as little as the client with agree to for that budget. Actual budgeting based on requirements and planning doesn't happen, you simply grab the opportunity and run with it. Yes, much of R&D is complete shit show.
Sure, there are such a thing as real deadlines. Regulatory deadlines are one example. Contractual deadlines with penalty clauses can be another.
But, the type of deadline you point out (we said we'd give them $STUFF by $DATE for $PRICE) is often flexible, if not artificial. For instance, maybe you can work out a schedule where by $DATE, you deliver $SUBSET_OF_STUFF for $LOWER_PRICE, while continuing to build out features to satisfy the original request, ending up delivering $STUFF for $PRICE.
Admittedly, this can be tricky. But, it can be done. I've done it before. Once a client has already agreed to a deal, they're generally inclined to stay with you, provided you're working in good faith with them. This can be somewhat of a sunk cost mentality, but it doesn't really matter as long as you're not taking advantage of that to soak them for cash.
I guess the moral of the story is that any contract is amendable and re-negotiable, if you approach it right. If it's not possible to deliver by $DATE without killing yourself and your team, then it's time to consider re-negotiating. And, as you said, in the real world, delays happen; clients may be willing to accept some small delays.
Even regulatory deadlines can sometimes be a little flexible, but that's a whole higher level of negotiation, and government agencies sometimes don't have the discretion to delay enforcement of new regulations, or the incentive to work with you to get you into compliance. In that case, the choice comes down to either a one-time push to deliver what's needed (and, you should be explicit that it is a one-time push), or temporarily eating the fines while delivering on a realistic schedule. I've never been in this type of situation, but I have dealt with government agencies before, and it can be a pain.
Genuinely curious: What do you think would be the outcome of this reply?
In my previous team, it would have been "yeah I'm sorry, but there is a fire, this customer is paying us XYZ and threating to take their bussiness elsewhere, ...". Saying "no" would at best give you some additional resources.
(Note that I did say "previous" team and the reason this kept happening is precisely why that team is no longer my current one)
If there really is a fire, they should be paying "put out fire in a hurry" -rates. Especially if the hurry was caused by someone else up the chain not doing their job properly.
If a problem needs solved by end of week and it takes at least 3 weeks to do properly, you document what you can do within normal office hours by the deadline and ask if that's enough.
If not, then they either need to approve overtime or extra resources. There's exactly zero chance I'm going to be using my free time to fix someone else's fuckup without proper compensation.
I see the same thing. Granted as an individual contributor I'm only privy to a small fraction of meetings, so it may be not be representative. But they usually start with higher-ups arriving late, groaning about back-to-back meetings, and if we manage to settle the matter before the allotted time, they usually pad the rest of the session with more speculative discussions not on the agenda, ensuring it will be back-to-back with the next one as well.
Who would be afraid of having to sit and twiddle their thumbs for half an hour waiting for the next meeting, if not someone desperate to uphold an image of being an over-worker?
I've noticed a lot of americans actually are posturing about work hours. I was very surprised, me a French supposed to do 35 hours, to see american colleagues leave around 5pm
It is basically a status and class indicator in American society, particularly for the upper middle class and the upper class.
If you read "The Meritocracy Myth" by Yale University law professor Stephen McNamee, you will understand the game being played here quite well. There are upper class Americans in particular who basically work extremely long hours (80-105 hour work weeks) to game the system, with no net productivity gains whatsoever compared to the middle and upper middle class who typically work 40-60 hour work weeks at maximum. In fact, the productivity gains generally wane off at about 32 hours per week, and we really do not need longer work hours in modern society, unless it is for the upper class to "protect" their status. Just like sleep is critical, rest is critical too, for recharging, so you can do a good job at work. The health effects of working extremely long hours, even if it affords you things and experiences others do not have, are just simply not worth it.
My father, who grew up as a very indignant American youth, who literally paid for all of his clothes starting by age 12, knew how to play this game very well. He was able to transcend the poor, working, and middle classes, and was comfortably in the upper middle class as senior level management, in the private sector, in finance, as a certified public accountant by training, by the time I was born. At my grandmother's funeral (his mother's funeral) people wished they were industrious as he was in his youth! The sad part about it is he died before he turned 60, and before his mother. It comes at a huge price.
> There are upper class Americans in particular who basically work extremely long hours (80-105 hour work weeks) to game the system, with no net productivity gains whatsoever compared to the middle and upper middle class who typically work 40-60 hour work weeks at maximum. In fact, the productivity gains generally wane off at about 32 hours per week, and we really do not need longer work hours in modern society
There is some confused language being used here. If you're saying the marginal productivity of the 81st hour worked in a week is 0, then that is almost certainly wrong.
If you're saying that the marginal productivity of the 81st hour in a week is less than that of the 32nd hour, that may well be true, but if so, nothing else of what you said follows from that.
> There is some confused language being used here. If you're saying the marginal productivity of the 81st hour worked in a week is 0, then that is almost certainly wrong.
No, I am correct here, and there is no "confused language" in my writing. This has been studied by prominent economists at Stanford University, which is ironically one of the worst Universities in the US for encouraging "working nonstop".
Once you work over 55 hours per week, your productivity at that point effectively becomes zero [1]. You effectively cannot accomplish anything more, productively, as a human, past 55 hours of work per week.
I suggest that you become more aware of human limitations, along with becoming more aware of human behavior, especially human tribalistic behaviors. Then you would not fall for these kinds of falsehoods. It would help you play "the game" more successfully, which you seem to take interest in.
[1] The Productivity of Working Hours (Stanford University study by economist John Pencavel): http://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf
Is it that the 56th hour you don't do anything, or that the 56th hour makes the other hours 1/55th less productive, therefore making it seem like you are getting something with the extra hour?
Yes, exactly this, obviously in the 56th hour next week if you want to you can 'do something'; the point must surely be (to mean anything at all) that if you attempt to sustain that, the 'first 55' suffer more than the 56th rewards.
As another commentor says, it simply can't be that marginal productivity drops to zero. At least, if you're trying to produce, there's some external motivation, then it'd take something really serious (starvation, massive sleep deprivation, etc.) to make it actually zero; more than just 'a long week'.
It's like if you're super motivated and work all-night on something exciting: if you were rational for a second, you'd realise you'd probably accomplish more on it with a few hours' break to sleep. But that doesn't mean the alternative is doing nothing in the last x hours.
> As another commentor says, it simply can't be that marginal productivity drops to zero.
It can even fall below zero. Imagine the totally overworked surgeon killing his patient because of fatigue and total exhaustion. His net productivity has fallen, reducing the outcome of the last 12 hours.
No, that's 'just' a bad outcome of his productivity.
His contribution to 'product' is providing the service of surgery; he has done that.
But yes, overworked and tired surgeons are more likely to kill patients; killing patients bad; overworking surgeons bad. (It's just not a 'productivity' issue.)
Once you work over 55 hours per week, your productivity at that point effectively becomes zero [1]. You effectively cannot accomplish anything more, productively, as a human, past 55 hours of work per week.
This is just false but I suppose it’s all a matter of what you call “work”. For some people, going to client dinners and golf outings is “work”. I agree coding for 55+ a week is difficult but there are plenty of folks that have this ability to sit down and grind.
The idea that some economist at Stanford discovered a secret 55 hour breaking point for productivity that generalizes to every human on earth is beyond preposterous.
I suspect like many economist papers this does not replicate and is simply a means for generating headlines to help this person get tenure or funding for their work.
I just imagine a guy who spends 10 hours a day cracking rocks with a sledge hammer, 6 days a week. It's too bad those last 5 hours worth of rocks just don't count....
Obviously, the last rocks don't unsmash themselves. However, if someone plans to work 60 hours a week, they might work 9% slower--perhaps even unconsciously--thereby causing their output to be be the same as if they were only supposed to work 55 hours.
Figures 1 and 2 (page 2060 and 2061) show that, across four cohorts doing different tasks, output plateaus at about 48 hours/week. Indeed, output from 70 hour week (10 hr/day x 7 days) was slightly lower than a 48 hour week (8 hr/day, with Sunday off). These workers were pretty motivated by the circumstances and doing skilled but not particularly creative work, so I suspect this is likely an upper bound.
There's lots of interesting data about working conditions from the the Health of Munition Workers Committee.
This oversimplfies things a bit. Law firm associates generally receive a salary and a bonus. The bonus can be substantial (six figures) if they hit various performance targets. These targets are largely based on the number of hours billed, although work quality is also relevant.
Law firm partners also don't generally make the same money on their 80th hour. Partnerships will split up the profit at the end of the year, and the number of hours billed and size of the partner's "book of business" factor in heavily here. The size of the book of business depends on the number of hours the partner bills (overseeing associates and paralegals, as well as doing independent work), so working more will increase a partner's share of the annual profits.
Also, a partner whose time is in high demand can raise rates (sometimes done by reducing discounts or charging clients a "NY rate"). So a partner who has plenty of work and doesn't mind not having more work can simply raise rates and make the 80th hour more expensive for clients.
you should point to a specific part of your link to the 55 hours. searching for 55 doesn't get a productivity graph, and figure 10 has some interesting notes below it.
I think you need to be a lot more specific citing 'evidence'.
I definitely want to check the book out because I love playing the game but I think there is a certain amount of nuance to account for.
I work a full time job and contract for at least 25hrs/week.
In my full time job I’m paid for 40hrs but not all 40 of those are productive. I take an hour lunch, we have a bunch of meetings and social things, etc.
If you ask, I work 65+ hours per week. If we’re being honest I probably only work 40 or less between lunch, catching up with coworkers sitting in meetings not doing anything, etc.
This notion is absurd on its face. When I was a young man, I helped my grandfather build a house one summer. We worked from sunup to sundown, with breaks for meals, and Sunday off, which comes out to much longer than 55 hours in a week.
After the 55th hour, there was certainly productive work being accomplished. Less productive than the 1st hour I am sure, but the amount of valuable work being done was more than zero. It was observably evident.
You don’t need negative marginal productivity after the 55th hour to see a negative impact of more than 55 worked hours a week. Things like exhaustion will affect you all the time and decrease overall productivity. So sure, you might still do some useful work after 55, but over the course of the week you’d do still less than if you worked 40 hours. There are caveats and exceptions as usual, but it is not as ridiculous as you make it sound.
The point here is that if you know you're stuck at the worksite "until it's done", you'll work at a more manageable pace.
BUT if you know your workday is exactly 8 hours with a 30 minute lunch in the middle, you'll pace yourself differently.
The difference between two equal people doing the same thing, one working until they drop and the other working 8 hours and leaving, isn't big enough to warrant the longer hours worked in the long run.
The one working longer hours might get more work done for a day, maybe a week or two. But after months of work the first person is burned out and the second one is still going strong.
The 81st hour's productivity might not be 0, but if you worked 81 hours last week, that will impact your productivity in the current week, including reducing your productivity in the much more important first 32 hours.
IDK about even 32 for my self, with wfh lately work feels so streamlined, a day of work is only like 4 hours of focused work. The rest of the day is just being available, so i can help other people with their 4 hours i guess lol
It is the exact same story for me. I don't know how people are able to stare at code, walking through those complex patterns, for 6 hours a day, let alone the entire 9-5 time or the overwork hours the tech industry seems to love.
I love technology and I enjoy my work, but it doesn't define me as a human being. There are opportunities I've had to do some work at what people would consider "prestigious" companies but I've turned it down in order to have better work life balance.
I've had various issues with unrealistic requests and timelines from those to whom I report, and it feels as if I need to, somehow, "work harder" (whatever that means) to prove that I'm trying to execute their impossible plan.
When I get home, however, the mere presence of my wife and kids, and even pet(s), remind me of how I actually define myself, WHO I AM.
I like art. Be it paintings, music, film, TV shows. That's where I find "myself". I'm good at things I do for work, but I don't care about it the way I care about the meanings of life I can find staring into a painting, or listening to a song (anywhere from Mr. Bungle to Debussy) or watching a TV show (anywhere from Adventure Time to For All Mankind).
I'm privileged enough, and have planned ahead enough, that I could significantly downgrade my already not-very-prestigious, but quite demanding job, and live well.
My job doesn't come close to defining me, to myself anyway. That's probably the other "thing" - how people want to be able to define themselves to others. I'm relatively unaffected by that particular neuroticism.
I like coding. The thinking, the problem solving, the expressiveness, the chiselling out of a solid block of emptiness. It is my art.
I made it my trade. It's a double-edged sword, with which I badly stabbed myself a couple of times. I tried to drop out, but can't help but come back to it.
The job's not me alright, the coding is a big part of me for sure.
I don't know how people are able to stare at code, walking through those complex patterns, for 6 hours a day, let alone the entire 9-5 time
By not coding for 8 hours. There are many more aspects to being a developer than writing code - documentation, code review, testing, planning, mentoring, etc. Even if you're quite junior and don't get involved in things like planning you can being doing "low mental workload" tasks like writing lots of repetitive-but-necessary tests or manually QAing your own tasks before pushing them to a PR. Your day absolutely should not be 8 hours of extremely focused dev work except on rare occasions when it's needed.
This I tried, took me a long while to realise I should not have, because "low load" is still load, and what I really needed was rest because I had myself throughly mentally exerted.
On top of that "low load" doesn't mean the task is of less importance. Mistakes come by easier when one's already exerted.
I don't think the parent meant it that way but suggesting that solution can come out as demeaning for people that already are on the edge of exhaustion and internally questioning themselves.
> able to stare at code, walking through those complex patterns, for 6 hours a day, let alone the entire 9-5 time or the overwork hours
I can do that kind of deep focus, I just can't do it two days in a rows and expect any efficiency the second one, let alone a full week.
Truth be told, I somewhat have to do that due to some sort of mild attention disorder (I can't imagine what life must be like for those with a more serious condition).
Thankfully over the years intentional practice of a great deal of sports taught me that long term consistency is what matters, doesn't matter if I do things in bursts as long as I don't overexert and rest appropriately (and especially don't bash myself for it).
But that requires full agency over my work time, something that I took a decade to unlock via being remote: in a 9-5 office people can't help but wonder why you're slacking all day and dragging your feet in order not to straight up not turning up for work.
The feeling of wasting time and the judgemental attitude (both from others and myself) just made me feel miserable, even though overall I was outputting the work and then some.
I don't care about prestige, I just care about my well being, and not being disparaged.
>There are upper class Americans in particular who basically work extremely long hours (80-105 hour work weeks)
People in the upper class don't need to work because they're able to live off of, and build wealth from, their assets.
The lower and middle classes are defined by their economic precarity that hinges on their ability to sell their labor. If someone needs to work to "protect their status", they're upper middle class at best.
The aristocratic class in America is mostly gone, with a few notable exceptions. This is where the Meritocracy Myth comes into play, where wealth is "created based on merit" (when people are just gaming things to the extreme). Meritocracy is used as an argument for keeping things status quo, where working non-stop (and other practices) is justified. At least the aristocratic life allowed for a leisure lifestyle for the upper class. Now, it does not.
I agree with most of that but I would think there are probably more, per capita, aristocrats, socialites, celebrities, and otherwise idle wealthy people today than at any point in history.
I think in American Psycho Bateman and his friends are already super rich before even going into work, having been born into wealth as "trust fund kids". I am pretty sure, unless I remember incorrectly, that Pearce & Pearce, the firm they all work for, is part-owned by Bateman's father, or he at least had the connections to get him the job there? They all have a Vice President title too, so it seems like in that instance they are all just given cushy jobs with nepotism.
"The roots of this phenomenon can be traced back to the 'Protestant work ethic' in the 16th Century - a worldview held by white Protestants in Europe that made hard work and the quest for profit seem virtuous. Sally Maitlis, professor of organisational behaviour and leadership at the University of Oxford, says that "later, the drive for efficiency that arose out of the Industrial Revolution", as well as the way we prize productivity, have "further embedded the value of consistent hard work, often at the cost of personal wellbeing".
The roots of the valorization of work may well have been religious, and maybe Christian (though I very much doubt it's exclusively Christian in its origin), but it's definitely spread throughout much of the world, even among the non-religious and even atheist population.
I can't count the number of times I've heard people praise others as "hard working"... in all sorts of contexts, in many different parts of the world, native or immigrant, hard work is praised to the heavens and one of the best things you can say about a person is that they're hard working.
I almost never hear the value of working hard being questioned, except when the subject turns to burnout. Then everybody nods sagely and agrees that overwork is bad.. the next day they go back to praising hard workers.
The Protestant/Calvinist work-ethic is definitely a factor especially, IMHO, in technology work. It stretches over to Asian non-Christian cultures too, but I suspect that's because it's an export which they've accepted as their own because it happens to jive with the strict authoritarian hierarchies which are common in Asian countries.
You can see it in Stackoverflow as well. The gamification encourages people to prove they are "worthy" of even deigning to ask a question by showing they've done "the work". Those who haven't are subject to humiliation and dismissal, regardless of need or authenticity.
> You can see it in Stackoverflow as well. The gamification encourages people to prove they are "worthy" of even deigning to ask a question by showing they've done "the work". Those who haven't are subject to humiliation and dismissal, regardless of need or authenticity.
I don't see how stackexchange's policy is related to the article, or "Protestant/Calvinist work-ethic".
They are banning low-effort questions (e.g "File couldn't be opened" when the person just has a typo in a file path) because they devalue the platform, waste time that could have instead been spent on useful questions.
> I suspect that's because it's an export which they've accepted as their own because it happens to jive with the strict authoritarian hierarchies which are common in Asian countries.
Or they independently developed a glorification of hard-work from other sources. It's nothing new. All the Abrahamic religions do, and the same is true for secular ideologies such as communism.
You can see the ultimate expression of Calvinism/Protestantism in Bitcoin too, where authority over what counts as money is granted to machines that can prove that they have done ‘work’. This proof is not judged by a human, but rather by the laws of mathematics and physics - I.e. the creations of God, thus Bitcoin is a money whose purity is sanctified by an offering of work done for its own sake.
It is self-evident that BTC was invented specifically in rejection of and in opposition to being judged by humans. One could easily compare this to the importance of purity in religious contexts but it would be foolish to assume there is any connection.
That view implies and required the acceptance of a God, though - it's like saying that gravity itself is the ultimate expression of protestantism (not sure if your post is supposed to be a /s).
No, not necessarily. You can be psychologically influenced by a society imbued with religious moral undertones to the point where you unwittingly want to "prove yourself" to "some omnipotent other." I think it's fairly common, actually.
I've always viewed the Calvinism theory as a kind of anti-American theory that violates Ockham's razor. The desire to prove one's self by overworking strikes me as an innate adolescent approach to competition. Whether it's to impress your peers at a casual sport or at your job. If some cultures achieve progress in a more healthy way, then that's the interesting and unnatural situation which needs investigating.
Most values that exist in religious doctrine and culture end up spreading to secular culture.
Issues like sexual shame, circumcision, censored language, etc. are all commonplace in America because they are actively promoted by religious conservatives and (for the most part) passively ignored by critics.
It's difficult to be critical of values that religious institutions have without being generally dismissed as overly antagonistic.
The Japanese working culture might be the only one worse than the American one.
In Japan you need to be at the office before your boss and can't leave before they do. And this goes all the way up, meaning that the lowest employees practically live at the office.
Combine this with a culture that doesn't really allow questioning your superiors makes for a really stressful work life.
One anecdote I heard was that a company had a one hour meeting with the Big Boss, who told what he wanted people to do. After that they had a two-hour meeting where they figured out what the boss meant. It was not proper to ask questions directly from the big boss.
Americans on the other hand glorify working two or three jobs, suffering 80-100 hour work weeks is a badge of honour. And they still just barely manage to get a living wage.
> One anecdote I heard was that a company had a one hour meeting with the Big Boss, who told what he wanted people to do. After that they had a two-hour meeting where they figured out what the boss meant. It was not proper to ask questions directly from the big boss.
Totally believe that. I worked at a Japanese company for 27 years, and attended a lot of meetings. Japanese managers pretty much spend their entire career in conference rooms.
The Chinese, however, have the concept of "996," which means "9AM to 9PM, six days a week." The Japanese also do that, but it's not quite as explicit.
I think the real point of the protestant work ethic is that when you have a post-Christian society that replaces church with work, you end up with people effectively going to work-monasteries.
But if you look at the Middle Ages, you'll find something like 100 days off a year, tons of feast days and days off, limited working hours in the remaining days, and not at all a culture that valorized work even thought it was much more deeply Christian than modern Europe. It's all about what you worship.
The vast majority people in the Middle Ages lived off subsistence farming, which doesn't really have "days off". Yes, farming has busier and quieter periods, but many types of work like spinning and weaving were essentially continuous (the amount of work required to clothe a family was ridiculous), and even the quietest "off day" still included things like feeding and milking the animals. Feast days were often also designed around communal events like harvesting or barn-raising, when the entire community got together and basically took turns working at tasks that needed more labor than a single household can provide.
> The vast majority people in the Middle Ages lived off subsistence farming, which doesn't really have "days off".
I think you have an incorrect view of subsistence farming. It does not require constant work, and you do not see constant work in traditional societies. You do see many days off. Now during harvest time there is lots of work, but that is a small period of the year, say 7 weeks out of the year. Other times the farmer has the option of when to plant and how much, when to weed and how much, when to work on processing food and how much. And these fall into familiar patterns from which things like feast days emerge as the interstitial times when the above does not need to happen. The idea of constant backbreaking labor all year long may be appropriate for something like a large Jamaican plantation, but not a small farm in Europe. Of course if it was an American farmer, they would enlarge their farm, bring in more livestock or auxiliary sources of income to fill up whatever daylight was available, and keep adding work until they and all their hired hands were busy all the time. Then they would take the earnings and use it to buy more land and hire more people and expand the work even further. But traditional societies did not organize themselves this way, nor is this something required of farmers.
"The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official -- that is, church -- holidays included not only long "vacations" at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints' andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking. In addition to official celebrations, there were often weeks' worth of ales -- to mark important life events (bride ales or wake ales) as well as less momentous occasions (scot ale, lamb ale, and hock ale). All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.[5]
The peasant's free time extended beyond officially sanctioned holidays. There is considerable evidence of what economists call the backward-bending supply curve of labor -- the idea that when wages rise, workers supply less labor. During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work "by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day." And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year."
That article equates "work" with farming alone, which is a common but fallacious trope. A subsistence farming household has to manufacture virtually everything they need, and in your "small farm in Europe" setting, spinning and weaving alone consume essentially all the working hours of one person in a family:
Put into working terms, the basic clothing of our six person farming family requires 7.35 labor hours per day, every day of the year. Our ‘comfort’ level requires 22.05 hours (obviously not done by one person).
The main difference between the subsistence farmer and the wage worker -- and ACOUP goes into this in detail -- is that the subsistence farmer has to optimize for security over productivity, meaning that the marginal returns for working harder/longer hours are much less. Working twice as hard to till twice the fields won't help when a summer frost nukes the whole crop.
I'm not sure why exactly subsistence farming households would have to manufacture everything -- farmer can sell produce on the market and buy stuff.
You quote quite a long article - yet you do not give the full data. 7.35 labor hours per day whole year is to produce 21 sq meters of cloth, using estimates about ancient world, not pre-modern Europe.
20 sq meters of cloth using a bit more modern (Middle ages) estimate would give you 3 hours per day whole year by one person. Also keep in mind that those farmer households would not change their clothes every year (and that's an understatement)
> I'm not sure why exactly subsistence farming households would have to manufacture everything -- farmer can sell produce on the market and buy stuff
That doesn't lower the total amount of labor required. Someone still has to make the garments. Garments were also very expensive, and most farmers wouldn't have had enough surplus crops to purchase them.
> more modern (Middle ages) estimate would give you 3 hours per day whole year by one person
That's after the invention of the spinning wheel, which didn't exist for ~90% of the Middle Ages. The second estimate from just before the invention of the spinning wheel (1300s) is close to the ancient estimate.
> Also keep in mind that those farmer households would not change their clothes every year (and that's an understatement)
One garment per year. That doesn't mean they throw away the old garment. They might keep it as a spare or repurpose it for other uses. He also justifies this estimate based on historical data for people who were issued garments by their employers (slaves and soldiers). Cato the Elder recommended issuing slaves one garment every two years, and was infamous for being cruel and parsimonious towards his slaves, so that is probably about the bare minimum for subsistence. Soldiers in the Roman Republic were issued two garments per year.
Assuming that subsistence farmers aimed for a standard of living above that of the most poorly treated slaves seems like a reasonable assumption.
> farmer can sell produce on the market and buy stuff
They used to produce most of stuff by themselves, because functional market requires good roads and a lot of people. And if course, if you are buing it, you need to produce a lot more food, so that you can sell it or exchange it.
>> They used to produce most of stuff by themselves, because functional market requires good roads and a lot of people
Do you have any data that supports it?
I think it is fair to say that at least in Europe both Western and Eastern from onset of Middle Ages people living in villages were actually able to travel to the adjacent towns and to yearly market fairs. That wasn't a daily trip of course but I do not see an issue of farmer exchanging some bags of flour for some clothes once in two years.
>> And if course, if you are buing it, you need to produce a lot more food, so that you can sell it or exchange it.
Well, yeah, that's generally an intention when you are a farmer :) Also farmers were serfs often and had to give up some part of what they gathered.
The article equates the holiday with "doing nothing". Just on top of head, animals still needed daily care. They needed food, milking, being taken outside, made mess that that day as much as normally. You would still have to take eggs away of chickens. And that is just stuff I vaguely remember my grandma talking about. The holiday, including Christmas, was not "do nothing whole day" affair.
People still needed food during holidays, which means food preparation that day also more work before holidays. Holidays themselves had to be prepared. The special holiday cloth had to be decorated and sewn. All that is work. Work/leisure trade off for organizing "bride ales" and such is an additional work. Just like the Christmas today are basically a lot of work, cleaning, cooking, gifts shopping and stress before celebration in exchange of two days of rest.
It is also odd to equate The ancien règime in France with like a lot of leisure, since it led to quite a lot of social issues - poverty, famine and such.
Hired-hands? Sorry but in America we had a majority of the population in the south as chattel slaves. I assumed at first you were talking about recent memory but then you went back to Medieval times, so I should clarify.
My grand-parents were Eastern-European peasants and they certainly had "days off", you were not allowed to go to the field during a religious holiday (and one was not allowed to do it on Sundays, either).
25 years since I last helped my paternal grand-parents to collect hay I can still remember those religious holidays when we'd just sit around the house, not going to the field: July 20th (Saint Elijah), August 15th (Assumption of Mary), August 6th (Transfiguration) and I think also June 29th (Saint Peter and Paul).
Work is not replacing church. In the Middle Ages, there was farm work performed by peasants. As far as 100 days off, if we take 52 weekends a year, we're a little over that same amount for those who don't work weekends (which is the majority of single job holders). Broadcast media replaced the church as a moral arbiter and now we are sort of in a phase where some are attempting to rebuild that church of television with the internet.
>I can't count the number of times I've heard people praise others as "hard working"... in all sorts of contexts, in many different parts of the world, native or immigrant, hard work is praised to the heavens and one of the best things you can say about a person is that they're hard working.
this reminds me of how, in the US at least, society has settled into the pattern of saying "thank you" to the "heroes" who fight our wars, protect us from fire and keep our for-profit prisons full. it's because the rest of us have no interest in doing any of those things, so we blow smoke up their proverbial *. fuck the protestant work ethic, and fuck being guilted into wage slavery, for at least, you know, the period of your life that lasts from the time your young and healthy until you die.
The problem is not about being hard working or not hard working. It is about the constraints around that hard work; or lack thereof. In late modern labor society the normativity is to achieve in itself, without any philosophical or ethical constraints that grounds achievement in real meaning. It is a pick-and-choose buffet of values and priorities, that is individually curated - rather than also being synchronized with others, the past and the future - and there is only one rule, that you have to achieve.
The grammar of achievement is performance and excess. Everything is possible, and you must exploit yourself while trying to exhaust the possibilities. Except you can't and therefore it is a slow burn spiritual suicide, until you burnout, get into depression, have autoimmune problems etc and hopefully get a wakeup call. Except your therapist is not going to tell you to take it easy either, because they can't come up with any answer to lack of meaning other than work (and maybe to get a family) either.
Not that there is any evil conspiring forces that have set this up, but it also happens having people exploit themselves in the name of achievement yields more than being exploited by someone else directly; to be told what and what not to do all the time is unnecessary when people are equally capable of auto-exploitation. Everyone carries little walking labor camps in themselves.
Interesting that you mention autoimmune problems alongside burnout and depression, I hadn’t heard of that possible link before. Do you have any anecdotes on this that you would share?
> The problem is not about being hard working or not hard working. It is about the constraints around that hard work; or lack thereof. In late modern labor society the normativity is to achieve in itself, without any philosophical or ethical constraints that grounds achievement in real meaning. It is a pick-and-choose buffet of values and priorities, that is individually curated - rather than also being synchronized with others, the past and the future - and there is only one rule, that you have to achieve.
That is of course not true. Individually curated means synchronized with others as no individual exists in a vacuum; it feeds on others, on the environment, on history, and others feed on the individual, and the environment is modified by the individual, and history written by it. That it is free to evaluate its own future path is not the same as not being also part of something else, much less not take into account the something else.
Achievement in itself is, unparadoxically, and achievement. That you don't agree with it says more about your synchronicity with the rest of society than the opposite.
> That is of course not true. Individually curated means synchronized with others as no individual exists in a vacuum ... That it is free to evaluate its own future path
You misunderstand. The question is whether individual value structures converge/approximate to a superstructure outside every individual, not whether individuals can use environment, history, each other etc as an inspiration for their custom tailored lives. The sense of the former was destroyed with the end of modernism. Everything dissolved in an acid vat of infinite relativism. Every normativity other than growth in the market got destroyed/crumbled. And individual achievement is merely the projection of that at the atomized level.
> Achievement in itself is, unparadoxically, and achievement. That you don't agree with it says more about your synchronicity with the rest of society than the opposite.
I take that as a compliment because one of the things I aspire to is to not get dissolved in the blind allegiance to achievement and excess positivity. It usually gets unnoticed but when people excessively project themselves to achievements and future growth; they turn into massive narcissists. And I am not using that in the pejorative sense; they lose a grounded sense of themselves. The freedom from "improving", being able to have leisurely, contemplative time, enjoying "returnless" social encounters for their own sake, having a sense of limits etc counter that. I wish they were valued more.
> You misunderstand. The question is whether individual value structures converge/approximate to a superstructure outside every individual, not whether individuals can use environment, history, each other etc as an inspiration for their custom tailored lives.
You misunderstand. They of course converge, there is no other alternative but for society to be a reflection of their individuals. You don't like the answer so you pretend what they converge into is not worthy somehow because it doesn't adhere to some high societal morality standard which by the way just so happen to be the morality you ascribe to, which is of course nonsense.
> I take that as a compliment because one of the things I aspire to is to not get dissolved in the blind allegiance to achievement and excess positivity.
> It usually gets unnoticed but when people excessively project themselves to achievements and future growth; they turn into massive narcissists. And I am not using that in the pejorative sense; they lose a grounded sense of themselves.
If you don't have a counter-argument that is not an ad-hominem attack, strawmanning someone's position or shallow namecalling, you don't have to participate. This is not the forum for that.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Incidentally, this is a good example to the value superstructure I was talking about. It is not a passive culmination of individual preferences, it is an aspirational guidepost sitting outside of us as a reference point. It allows selecting what behavior belongs to what extent and what doesn't. It tells us we can do better and what that better looks like.
Again, that you don’t consider what I wrote a counter argument and are trying to dismiss it as ad-hominem to not have to actually generate a rebuttal or accept it says more about you than the opposite.
Society decides its morals, not I, certainly not you.
> and there is only one rule, that you have to achieve.... achievement is performance and excess.
and yet, this is what led to most, if not all human achievements and progress. The modern quality of life that most people have come to enjoy is off the backs of people who _are_ doing their utmost to achieve performance and excess (aka, earn more than their spending).
If everyone lived an idyllic, and idle life, we'd have much less modern life amenities and conveniences; stuff would be more expensive, and less wealth all round.
I am reminded of a commend I read on HN a few years ago.
"Here lies marvin, who valiantly sacrificed his life in the name of progress.
Thanks to his heroic efforts, the trees in GTA 7 look very good."
I'd love to read a proper study on how people experience different types of hard work. I've worked overtime myself, and it's been a memorable experience when it's been for just a few weeks or months, and in pursuit of something that meaningfully advances the world.
But it would not be fun if it was only a peripheral advance, or it happened regularly. For me, it only works if it's something exceptional, to be done a few times.
That's a very narrow view of "human achievements and progress". Did Mozart achieve because he was forced by peer-pressure to work around the clock? Picasso? Miles Davis?
It's pretty sad if we consider Facebook, Google or Apple as the pinnacles of human achievement. Sure it's useful to have a phone in my pocket that can tell me at any time of the day what's the weather in Hong Kong or how to cook Pork Hock. Sure it's nice that I can connect to relatives in Spain or Brazil through Facebook or search for the number of current Covid cases in South Africa. But I could live with those "achievements" having come later if that had not meant a work culture that forces me into burnout.
Same for space rockets bringing robots to Mars, electric cars for the upper class and drilling tunnels under some Bay Area city.
And for those claiming the climate catastrophe is here and we need to act now .. yeah, let's think for a moment how we got here and whether overachieving and overworking have something to do with it.
If Mozart had to spend more, or most, of his time gathering food and tending to his basic needs would he have had time to make music? What about the musicians who played it?
Wealth is the ability to do more with less effort. Some of that free labor goes to arts, science, or philosophy and advances humanity. Maybe too much goes toward building even more wealth or a fancier house/things but you would not have the former without the ability to get later.
I'm not saying we should all be artists and drop any work on improving science or technology. To the contrary, some people really thrive doing that, and who am I to outlaw it.
But this is about working 80+ hours a week to achieve that. Changing the world is possible in 40 hours a week. Or 30, or 20. It may happen more slowly, but it won't leave so many train wrecks of burnout in its path.
(Apart from overall total productivity not necessarily being lower with a 30 hour week than a 50 hour week as the increased energy and motivation can often times easily offset the fewer hours.)
Confucianism has a work ethic that while not exactly the same as the Western/Christian one, has a lot of similarities. Although Confucius was Chinese, these ideas spread into other East Asian countries that were under historical Chinese influence like Japan, Korea, and Vietnam
Yes, that's a major point in Weber's original formulation of the Protestant work ethic—the secularization of those values and practices. In other words, the puritans wanted to live this way; we have to.
If the phenomenon seems like it's global now—even appearing in parts of the world that Protestantism never touched—then that's because, well, capitalism is global.
I bet they're not making their own thread, cloth, clothes, and a lot of the other things provided by an industrialized world. Doing those things the old way is very, very labor intensive.
The opposite of "hard working" is not "good work-life balance", but "slacking off".
And that's one of the roots of this cult. You don't want to be perceived as slacking off, so you sacrifice work-life balance and work overtime. That's such an enormous misconception. You can be very focused 9-to-5, and then you go home and don't look back until next morning at 9 am when you again are as hard-working as the day before. Somebody who is 12 hours a day at the office but spends half the time chit-chatting at the water cooler and browsing facebook is not "hard working".
Hard-working and work-life balance are not opposites. That's something people really need to understand.
I’ll add that working hard doesn’t mean being effective or productive. I can go dig holes in my backyard 24x7 which is very hard work but does nothing. Some people can be very effective 9 to 5 and push progress much further than many others working 14 hr days doing the digital equivalent of digging holes.
> The roots of the valorization of work may well have been religious, and maybe Christian (though I very much doubt it's exclusively Christian in its origin), but it's definitely spread throughout much of the world, even among the non-religious and even atheist population.
The article is referencing "The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", which is a seminal work on the history and structure of labour. It does not, in any way, imply that this is a religious phenomenon any more than capitalism itself.
> even among the non-religious and even atheist population
Just because one proclaims to not believe in God doesn't free them from the values that were drilled in their head during childhood. So many people proclaim to be "atheists" but otherwise strongly believe in and defend Christian values (Bill Gates is a prominent example).
It's not just childhood, it's social pressure. It's extremely hard to publicly hold values that go contrary to the group, even more so when those contrarian values don't bring success and therefore don't have much to show for themselves.
Hard workers should be praised. It is hard and it works. It is the only lever we actually have some control over to move forward in life.
On the other hand there is nothing admirable about taking it easy. Anyone can do it and it does not lead to any achievement.
Of course some people care about achievement and some do not, that is fine, but lets not pretend hard work is not necessary for it.
The article paints a picture of this as a universal but it's not really true I think. From my experience, in the German Mittelstand, overwork is not seen as a positive. There are a lot of very productive firms, and there's a huge focus on working 9-5, doing your work well, not being distracted, and then going home and having a life. Staying at work till midnight would be seen as not managing time correctly, neglecting family, being overworked, not in good shape, making mistakes and so on.
I don't even think it's necessarily that popular in American culture any more after the sort of financial excesses of the late aughts. The stereotypical banker who is coked up and accidentally destroys the economy isn't really as cool anymore as he was in the 80s
> Staying at work till midnight would be seen as not managing time correctly, neglecting family, being overworked, not in good shape, making mistakes and so on.
How is it seen if someone is at work by 7am? Or even 6am? Genuine question.
In my anecdotal experience, seemingly not noticed, as people assume that you came in just a few minutes before.
For a couple of reasons, I spent a period of time going into work at 6AM. Most came at 8 or 9. Far more people commented when I stayed until 6PM one day.
A former co-worker of mine used to do this as well. I didn’t notice for weeks and only because I logged in very early one day.
At my old job I was routinely praised for being a hard worker because people kept seeing me stay to 7pm. I usually heard comments like, "don't work too hard" and "make sure you don't stay too late".
What no one seemed to notice was I was coming in at 11. I never felt the need to correct anyone.
It’s also a great tip to work on your body language that says “I’m very busy with important things” even if you totally aren’t. For example, when you go to the break room or to sit on the toilet or to have a smoke break make sure you move very fast and purposefully from your desk so people think you’re just running back and forth to talk to people.
I'm always skeptical of coworkers who say they get in early. Some really do and are ultraproductive while others would say that but whenever I came in early they weren't there until much later. No surprise though: the former people were clearly productive and the latter ones were not. The hours aren't what really mattered.
In my anecdotal experience, arriving at work around 7 or earlier and leaving before 16:00 is absolutely not a problem. Arriving around 10 is also possible for those who prefer starting late.
People try to group the important meetings in the middle of the day to accommodate everyone. Working overtime when needed happens but those hours can be grouped to take a few days off.
I don't know if it is generalized but it's the case in the two companies I worked for in Germany.
"The stereotypical banker who is coked up and accidentally destroys the economy isn't really as cool anymore as he was in the 80s"
Even in finance, the phenomenon of working crazy hours didn't end with the 80s. I'd be shocked if it wasn't still the norm there.
In the medical field, it's quite typical for doctors and nurses to work insanely long shifts and get by on very little sleep... this was the case even before the pandemic hit, but as everyone knows it's gotten even worse since as doctors and nurses started getting sick, dying, and quitting, leaving more work for the rest.
It's long been common in the tech field.. especially in startups, but even among established firms working long hours is quite common.
All sorts of people living paycheck to paycheck and undocumented workers are routinely exploited, and working long hours is common there too.
In many parts of the world it is the fortunate minority who can afford to have a healthy work-life balance and get enough sleep.
Doctors and Nurses actually have somewhat of a good reason, though I do think they are pushed too far (especially of late). Handoffs during shift changes mean opportunities for information to be miscommunicated or lost, which negatively affect patient outcomes.
In principle though, handoff errors can be reduced with better procedures, training, and technology.
Making tired people less stupid would require a fundamental breakthrough in neuroscience---and it's not for want of trying that no one has found a way to do so yet.
It's unfortunate though that medical professionals have a deep misstrust/hatred for new technology due to bad experiences from poorly run it contracting.
My mum worked for the NHS and I'd regularly hear her complaining for weeks/months on end about new IT systems that either didn't work, were hard to use or were months or even years behind schedule. All while knowing how much these projects cost (it's all public info here) and that the people working on it where getting paid in a day what she would be lucky to make in a week.
The way the medical profession treats sleep, in a field where mistakes cost lives, has always seemed absolutely batshit crazy.
There's, I suppose, a weird societal level "getting your money's worth" from their compensation - since their actual hourly rate would plummet on the basis of working 30 hour shifts non-stop and the like.
Not to mention that the institution as a whole has enormous difficulty actually properly handing off care between different providers, yet we would only see benefits from being effective at doing so - not to mention minimizing the impact of bad doctors.
The medical field could really use an overall authority that can force them to adopt safe practices. We treat truckers getting enough sleep as a higher priority, as a society, than surgeons.
Another thing is hospitals adopting air industry style checklists, which doctors fought tooth and nail as 'insulting'. Despite every ounce of evidence massively pointing toward this saving lives.
The US medical residency was mostly created by William Halsted, a very influential surgeon. He was partly responsible for this culture of sleep deprivation, insisting that residents be on-call 24/7.
He also was a serious cocaine addict who injected it every day. It's of course an oversimplified historical narrative, but at least part of the reason medicine does things this way is the traditions were set up by someone out of his mind on coke.
The studies that justify it are absolutely bonkers too.
One study compares the ACGME limits (max 24 hour shifts) against a "flexible" system with 28 hour ones. Unsurprisingly, there's no effect--since both groups are totally zonked at the end. Meanwhile, data from lab experiments and virtually every other field (trucking, aviation, etc) shows that performance craters well before that.
The rationale for long shifts (other than money) is "handoff": when a new doctor takes over, details about the patient's condition and treatment plan get lost in the shuffle. In some cases, they might not ever have been recorded (e.g., a subliminal impression of a patient's color or breathing). Many people are weirdly nihilistic about improving this, but it seems like it almost has to be the lower-hanging fruit since solving it doesn't require butting up against fundamental limits of human physiology.
I remember reading that the reason for long shifts at hospitals, for doctors or nurses, is that most mistakes are made during hand-over. The thing had a study cited, I'm sorry I cannot find the source, so the hospitals optimize for minimal hand-over. I would think they also did a control study on mistakes made during the last few hours of shifts when care providers feel the strongest effect of sleep deprivation, but I don't remember that being compared.
Indeed. As a European, my time in academia very well illustrated this cultural divide. The first conference I ever went to as a completely fresh PhD student was in the US. The conference was naturally dominated by American PhD students. They were very nice and all, but the amount of effort they spent just to out-do each other in stories of amount of time worked was shocking to me. Of course, academic research is hard, and sometimes requires putting in late evenings, especially close to deadlines. But these young students were falling over themselves out-doing each other with tales of their regular graveyard sessions and soul-crushing lives.
I felt dismayed and sad. Was this life in academia? Luckily, only a short while later I went to another conference, this one dominated by European PhD students. More chill discussions over a beer at five o'clock, more talk about people's hobbies and free time. Still, hard work, but also life. I was relieved.
I have not been exposed to the work life of "ordinary" Americans, but all the stories seem to indicate that this attitude is pervasive. It's sad, I think. And certainly unhealthy. And it must also make work culture unbearable for Americans that do value a healthier work-life balance.
I don't. And none of the companies I've ever worked for do either. I guess I'm fortunate. Sure, I've needed to work a little overtime, but I've never had any problem maintaining my work/life balance, and have a pretty good career.
With you there. I don't mind doing more on one day over another. It's actually great because you can finish something while in context instead of arbitrarily dropping the pencil at 5.
I make very sure to balance it out though and if my company doesn't do or require time tracking, I will do it myself.
What I do though is to be 100% there during work hours. Meaning in the office it's work not play or personal time. Reading HN is not for work hours for example. Same now with the WFH. Work time is work time and I get everything I want to done in the regular hours and fingers crossed so far nobody has ever complained to me about it.
I am very allergic to deadlines dropped on me because someone else didn't plan ahead properly as well. HR, C-level and marketing come to mind.
Not the OP here and I agree with you (that's why I never say that) but can you honestly say that you never _thought_ it when they complain? I know I do most of the time. There are the workoholic exceptions that just can't help themselves.
I agree with other commenters that it might not be the best thing to say if you want to keep your friendships.
It's a very true sentiment though. Another one that often comes to my mind when people brag about amount of hours work is something along the lines of: "Do you know that you're effectively being paid at near minimum wage?" (obviously not true for everyone, but some people's salary goes from 'decent' to 'minimum wage' per hour worked)
But it's even worse than just being paid less per hour worked:
For each hour you work, you lose an hour of 'life'. Working 10 hour days instead of 8 hour days means that you lose 10 hours of 'life' a week.
I think a better response would be "why are you proud of having less free time than me?" I remember in school people would often brag about how little sleep they got and when they said that to me I'd say "why are you proud of how unhealthy your life is?" I would NOT say "sucks for you that you're too dumb to study enough and get to bed by 11". That would be a dick move.
I’m not proud of it, just so happens that 20% of the employees on the team do most of the work and work more and the other 80% talk about how they have such a great life outside of work.
This presumes that the amount of work you can do, or money you need to earn, is capped, such as producing x widgets per day, or earning y dollars per day.
Others have already pointed out what an asshole thing this is to say, but I think a more important thing to note about it is that it's simply incorrect. If your income/wealth is directly related to total output, and your capacity isn't capped, then regardless of how good you are at it, doing it 2x as much means 2x the value produced.
I'm good enough at what I do that I never have to work again if I don't want to, but I still work 10+ hours every day because it's fun and I like it, and maybe it would be nice to have a boat one day.
So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.
Richard Feynman
It sounds like giving up on "working" can sometimes be the first step to high output for some people. I know I've had that experience.
That’s funny, we must’ve read that chapter completely differently. It’s what made me think of him as an example.
I see it as a rediscovery of how Feynman’ work was his true calling after all and how he chose to do more physics, instead of more reading, for pleasure.
>When somebody brags to you about how much they work, answer with “Maybe if you were better at it, you wouldn’t need to work so much”
Sadly here in the US that's seen as bad or unproductive. The whole chasing the productivity numbers has become a fetish in this country where we can't imagine that productivity is better measured in how little we waste our time versus how much more profit we make. If it takes an hour to make the same profit versus last year that should be celebrated and rewarded but it seems the latter part, the reward, is always withheld. Even if it's something silly like pizza for lunch or a gift card. There's just more of the "well work more" attitude which is just nonsense to me. The whole "line must go up" cult needs to be expunged from the human species, I swear.
My company is really good about work life balance. But there are plenty of people, myself included, who log in on the weekends or at 2AM and write code or review stuff. Coding is fun!
There are people out there who do for pay something very similar to what they would do if they had millions of dollars.
Actually working long hours as a developer in my 20s got me a ton of extra equity and skills which set me up very comfortably professionally and financially.
I'm not recommending flipping burgers for free overtime, but it's ludicrous to claim that working hard doesn't pay dividends in professional high-skill fields for fair employers.
That's fine, but again... Why do work that makes money for someone else for free? You can achieve the same thing by working on your own stuff.
I'm also a well paid software developer, but I spent my 20s recording albums, learning to garden, staying fit, and generally not spending my time making money for someone else for free.
Just be aware of all the blood that has been spilled in labor struggles around the world in the past and present (as we speak people are dying at the hands of the Colombian state authorities for this struggle).
People fought hard for our rights to free time. People died for this right. If your work makes your company more money, they should pay you. They shouldn’t reward your hard work with something vague like job prospects and opportunities, no they should pay you overtime with money. If you work more then 40 hours a week, you should get your extra hours payed in overtime (not less then 90% of your base wage). If they don’t want to give you that, you are being exploited by your bosses.
Do know that you can practice your skills and get your fair share for your work. Don’t let anyone exploit your work. You’re worth more than that. Solidarity.
My entire argument is don't work for free. Your experience (if equity was involved, also a lot of luck) does not represent reality for the vast majority of devs who work lots of overtime and are never compensated for it... Some voluntarily, like yourself, and others who now have to row to the unnecessary pace they set.
I’m sorry, I meant no disrespect. If I made you feel patronized it must be because of my bad writing skills. All I wanted was for you—and workers like you—to realize that your work is worth more then to give it away for free to your bosses. I don’t do this out of the goodness of my heart, but for our solidarity as a fellow worker.
You see the more workers that do work for free the less value all our work is. And hundreds of years of labor struggle will all be for nought.
In the past I've been told "Well, [name] did it that way, why can't you?". Which is also a form of management deflection, where they don't want to find more resources or admit the process is broken, so they deflect the burden back onto the employee.
Not applicable. You are conflating a bottom-up problem with a top-down problem.
The labor struggle is one that is fought bottom-up. Unless we stand united, the bosses hold all the cards. A single worker has no power to fix their companies culture, but a united workforce does. This is not applicable to the tall poppy syndrome at all.
In fact if you want to find a silly analogy, call it the weak link problem. An almost united workforce will get exploited through the few that aren’t.
And here is the issue with US labor unions. In the name of solidarity you will not: 1) do more work, 2) work more hours, 3) make your job more efficient, etc.
I don’t know where you get (3) no more efficient jobs, but (1) and (2) is actually a good thing.
If more work and more hours make your bosses more money, they should pay you more, if they don’t, this work is wasted on making your bosses more money and cheapens the value of the work for the rest of us. If you realize this and stop working overtime, that is also a good thing. More time with your family, at your local chess club, the pub, or in your personal code repos.
I think the myth of (3) unions stagnate job efficiency is a result of bad union practices (I don’t know of examples but I’m sure there are plenty) then of solidarity. There is nothing inherent about a union that will make job efficiency stagnate.
By this logic, the union should have all workers slow down. Or at least do the bare minimum to not get fired (oh wait, they won’t get fired because the union won’t allow it). You’re actually helping your fellow workers by making your labor more expensive!
This is what folks who worked at GM in Detroit told me. Guys would punch in, then head to the bar. I remember seeing local new coverage with undercover video of these guys being at strip clubs while on the clock. Was going on for years.
That's fine but why do it for free? Flexible time arrangements are great. But log your 2-3am coding session and do an hour less on Friday afternoon. Early beer with like minded friends.
If your company was “good about work life balance”, it wouldn’t support weekend and 2 am logins/commits/code reviews. The optics and what is communicated to the team are the opposite of what you’re stating. Very similar to “unlimited PTO” where everyone competes to take the least amount possible (explicitly or implicitly).
> In France, if you’re a company of 50 employees or more, you cannot email an employee after typical work hours. The labor law amendment has come about because studies show that in the digital age, it’s increasingly difficult for people to distance themselves from the workplace during their off hours. This new provision allows people to get the full advantage of their time off.
> “All the studies show there is far more work-related stress today than there used to be, and that the stress is constant,” Benoit Hamon of the French National Assembly told the BBC. “Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash — like a dog. The texts, the messages, the emails — they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down.”
We have the unlimited PTO as well, so maybe it is that kind of company.
I admit that it might just work well for me as I don't actually need work life balance or really use the time off. What I mean is that I have never experienced any pressure to work beyond regular hours. I am not sure that the weekend/2AM logins/commits are supported. I have never heard much comment on them at all really.
My goal is not to rain on your parade, nor to take from your passion, but to communicate to be mindful of the signals work behavior emits to those you collaborate with.
I do not agree with all of your points but I certainly agree with this one.
Setting the example for the rest of the team when you are explicitly/implicitly recognized as the leader is very important. I had to learn this lesson recently.
For example, I signaled to the team last Friday that I was not going to be working at all this weekend. Checked my email just now and neither did anyone else. If I put something up for code review on Saturday afternoon, someone else on the team is likely to pop in for review and then likely do some work tasks themselves. Its not that this is bad, but you have to be aware that it is happening and moderate it accordingly.
> In France, if you’re a company of 50 employees or more, you cannot email an employee after typical work hours.
That's ridiculous. The protection should be to protect the employee who sets their phone/computer not to check email during off hours, not a prohibition on the sender uploading a message to their mail server's queue.
I email my staff at 2am constantly. I don't expect replies until they're "at work" (wherever and whenever that may be).
You can always have the mail system queue the mail from a sender, but not deliver to the recipient until business hours. That meets your requirements while regulation still protects workers from those not operating in good faith.
The things we do are within our control; the ways others respond are not.
If someone wishes to volunteer to work 24/7, it isn't my job to stop them. It's insane of them, though, and I might contemplate firing someone who felt pressured to act/respond at 2am (for being dumb and unreasonable).
Good thing we have laws to prevent this then. Same with minimum wage, minimum wage, work place safety and so on.
Just because you think there is no pressure to reply, doesn't mean there isn't a societal/workplace culture that pushes people to do so when their superiors ask for something. Same reason you can tell a co-work something is dumb, but you would say 'lets look it from another angle' to a manager or ceo.
> The protection should be to protect the employee who sets their phone/computer not to check email during off hours, not a prohibition on the sender uploading a message to their mail server's queue.
That's usually the case, the above source didn't explain it correctly.
The law actually only obligates the company to agree a set of rules with the staff elected representatives (usually from a union). In almost all cases, those rules are simply that employees cannot be obligated to connect outside their paid work hours, and not suffer any consequence for not connecting.
Right, but your e-mail timestamps are still at 2am right? Your team can’t help but notice. IMHO you lead by example, and you set the example here that it’s normal to work at 2am. This is bound to increase the stress for your team. There might also be less impressionable team members, but here you run another risk—they’ll judge your time management skills. If you can’t help but write e-mails at 2:00, I’d be compassionate with your team and send them the next morning (or use some kind of ‘send later’ widget)…
> IMHO you lead by example, and you set the example here that it’s normal to work at 2am.
It is normal to work at 2am if you work the way I and most of my associates work.
I think it's fairly common for hackers and other deep-thinking types to work very intensely for 2-5 minutes at a bunch of different times all throughout the day.
Sometimes I do, but other times I stumble upon a clever way to solve a particular problem that I am having. So what I want to code is something very particular that I just thought up.
That is fine. Just go back to sleep and commit it in the morning. Or if the solution is keeping you awake (it happens to the best of us) code it down for an hour (or however long it takes) and take the following morning off.
If your company doesn’t allow taking the following morning off. Don’t do this. They don’t deserve your extra work. Find a technique that takes your mind off you work (personally I like to count up the American Presidents since Lincoln; or the states admitted in order since Vermont; takes me right to sleep before I reach Oregon [although my company allows me to take the following morning off, most of the time I feel like sleeping rather then working]).
Now I sleep with a notebook by my bed. When this happens, I write down enough of the solution to convince my brain I won't forget it. Then getting back to sleep is easy.
Offloading brain-stuff to external storage is a great stress reliever.
Either a digital todo-list or a physical notebook both work for me.
As long as you can convince your mind that the task is stored in a safe place so it's OK to stop thinking about it - you can get back to it any time you need to.
Please don’t undersell the value of your work. It is worth something, and don’t let other people make money out of your overtime without compensation. In many countries it is even illegal to work more hours without compensation. The reason is that even if you personally enjoy it, there are more of us that would prefer to spend more time with our families, playing minecraft, practicing fencing, programming our own Arduino, or at the pub. People have literally died fighting for our rights for free time. If you work overtime without compensation—even if you enjoy it—it cheapens the work for the rest of us. And the rest of us don’t have millions of dollars to spear when our compensations get taken away from us, all we have is our work and solidarity with our common workers.
Please consider that before you clock in at 2AM to write code so that your bosses can make more money. Your work, your body, and our solidarity is worth more then that.
Can’t your solidarity just pay him/her (a higher wage) to do nothing instead of working for the bosses? If your own math checks out, that should be a win-win.
I’m not sure how you’ve arrived at this conclusion from my post. Perhaps you have been reading other posts and just left your comment here as a catch all answer to all of them, or perhaps you’ve misunderstood my point.
I’ll start by clarifying: I’ve never said GP can just stop doing work. What I’m iterating on is that their work is worth something, and their overtime work is worth more. They should not be doing overtime work unless they get fair compensation.
Now that that is cleared, I’m gonna assume you are answering some of my other posts where I talk repeatedly about solidarity. My call for solidarity is a plead to not work overtime without compensation because it cheapens the work for the rest of us. I’m asking GP (and others on this thread) to not give their bosses free labor because I don’t want my bosses to demand free labor from me. You see solidarity is needed because if most workers our industry gives free labor, then I can’t be expected not to, I’ll just get fired.
There is no win-win in a class struggle. For us workers to win, our bosses must loose. Past labor activists have fought hard to give us our benefits which include paid overtime. If we don’t use it, we will loose it. 1-0 for our bosses. However if we use it, and get paid overtime: 0-1 for us and the struggle continues.
To worker W it is worth $10 extra to work overtime. But to the solidarity S, this cheapens the labor by $100. Therefore the solidarity S can pay W $11 to not work, and it’s a win win.
So much this. I have worked places where the work was boring and everybody is just phoning it in 9-5, and places where people work weekends because they're truly engaged in their work.
In theory, the former has great work/life balance but every hour at work felt like a drag, I wasn't engaged, I wasn't growing. And worse still, I didn't even really understand this when it was happening. I just thought work was awful like this and even started looking at other careers to get out.
Then I worked at a couple places in that latter category. It was night and day. I was still able to live my life, but I was more engaged, getting amazing opportunities and growing a LOT more.
I've always tried to be careful about the message I send by working weekends or nights. I don't brag when I do it. Try to keep it low profile by not communicating with coworkers (unless it's an outage or something). If my manager asks me to more than on rare occasions, it's also not acceptable.
As someone who managed people like you: it's good to not work some times.
I've had to physically take away a "coding is fun" -person's laptop, disabled all their logins and their office keyfob and force them to take their mandatory vacation.
Without this they would've worked during vacation and committed a bunch of stuff on their first day back to not get caught working during holidays...
Even then they replicated the Java stack they were working on with Rust, from memory, at home during the vacation. Just for fun.
When you love your job, maybe a bit too much, it becomes really hard to see when you've burned out. Sometimes dreaming about code is a good thing, your subconscious is working on a problem. Other times it's a sign of burnout.
I've been there and now I know how to not end up there - and I try my best to not have people who work with me burn out either.
I wonder if there have been done long term studies on work enthusiasm and burn out. Given the cost good quality long term studies I kind of doubt it.
In psychology it quite often arises that something we perceive as a good trait but is generally kind of vague (like say self esteem) turns out to be correlated with what we consider bad more tangible traits (like narcissism, and criminal behavior). I wouldn’t be surprised if work enthusiasm is similar and correlates way more with stress, burnout, and high turnover rates, then with the popularly believed successful career.
I did a quick scan on search results for "work enthusiasm" google scholar and the research seems mixed. There are a lot of studies that correlate work enthusiasm (or worker’s zest) with good outcome, but a few in between that correlated it with burnout. This was also the case before the self-esteem camp was brought down with quality research.
If you are enthusiastic there is one more thing that might burn out. I am usually quite enthusiastic when at a new job, but as soon as I start to despise the process or are forced to do a half assed job it the enthusiasm fades.
It got way less stressful for me when I stopped to care that much about the end result and worked less hard (I never worked overtime, I mean per hour) since I figured that I did not have the authority anyway to change most stuff. I guess that is some form of burn out of spirit.
In the beginning of my career I though I was way better then my colleges, but I realized that they had mostly just "burned out" before me and did the bare minimum.
> It got way less stressful for me when I stopped to care that much about the end result and worked less hard (I never worked overtime, I mean per hour) since I figured that I did not have the authority anyway to change most stuff. I guess that is some form of burn out of spirit.
I spent my early career doing stuff way too fast and thoroughly. After the fifth time a spec changed midway and invalidated most of my work I slowed down to the proper level and started getting praise for being so fast =)
As time goes on it feels more and more like the developer community is here for the money and not the challenge/fun/etc. And that is totally cool. I just worry about the higher order consequences of technology employees principally motivated by money and not the inherent correctness or value of a technology solution. Accusatory phrases like "NIH Syndrome" seem to be used less frequently by those who enjoy programming regardless of the money. Perhaps there is the risk of leaving some innovation on the table if your entire team is full of people like this. But maybe it makes perfect sense for your business model (i.e. just vendor everything out).
Also, working 60 hour weeks on a regular basis is not viewed as "healthy" by some, but I feel fucking incredible doing what I am doing right now. If I had not pushed through some painful adventures, I probably would not have the level of experience & autonomy that I get to enjoy today.
I do recognize that there are a lot of work environments in which certain virtuous cycles are not allowed to iterate properly. I did have to change jobs 6+ times before I found something that fit me. The notions presented throughout HN regarding "toxic" interactions/teammates/et. al. are certainly the most adverse force I have encountered in my career. Nothing is more devastating to innovation and career advancement than some salty crab pulling the rest of the crabs back down into the bucket. If you love technology but cant stand the work for whatever reason, maybe pop in for a few interviews elsewhere.
I was on the Tesla hiring webinar last Friday for the application development vertical and on more than one occasion they alluded to their overwork culture. I asked some hardball questions that they either did not see or refused to answer. Most of the webinar was non-engineering related discussion and more of just a “woke culture” advertisement. Like they say, never meet your heroes. It was really quite a bummer because I have been stoked about being a Tesla customer and potential employee candidate. We own two Tesla’s in my household so I am all in at this point. Because I am a father of two and moderately conservative I feel like I wouldn’t be a good culture fit. I’ll do my 8 hours a day and some occasional unpaid overtime is fair but I got the vibe that they work more than 40 hours a week fairly regularly. I would love to be wrong about this so someone please prove me wrong.
Unpaid overtime is never OK if you ask me. That said I favour flexible time arrangements instead of what I gather is mostly understood by 'overtime'. Thus averaging out to 8h (preferably 7h) per day.
They definitely work more and things like parental are also not really a thing.
You're not "all in". You can sell a car and replace it at any time. It's just a possession. I don't get how that's related to whether or not you want to work there?
Everything I know about Tesla would lead me to believe that it would be a high pressure/high output environment; seems like there's more than enough publicity about this out there.
I know very few people in salaried positions whose overtime isn't at least somewhat related to their inability to a) manage their time properly or b) stand up for themselves.
Because the alternative, namely the conscientious abstention from overwork, will often earn you a reputation as a "bare-minimum worker", a "clock-watcher", and "not a team-player".
This is basic accepted business principles as far as this dropout can see.
First, reduce labor costs. One way to lower wages is to get salaried people to work as many hours for their check as you can convince them to do. This is one place where sociopaths shine.
Second, the ideal labor cost is $0, aka the ideal state of capitalism. When humans are involved, this means slavery. "Ideal" means the same as above: reduce labor costs wherever possible.
Convincing people to overwork is a sales job, and bending everybody around you to your preferred activities is practice for when you're going for funding or acquisition. Is there any MBA who wants to help build a company that doesn't get acquired? Gonna need those persuasion skills.
Working 80hrs a week? Congratulations, you've cut your own salary in half.
Adam Smith argued that free workers are superior to slaves because they have greater incentive to want to better themselves for their own benefit and to innovate their processes to show they are worth more wages. Slaves, by contrast, he argues will perform the bare minimum work to avoid repercussions. They are also far from free, they cost money to purchase and there is a cost to providing them with necessities of life as they don't have the means of providing for themselves.
Just like there are rule for overtime pay, there should be well documented rules for comp-time and on-call. Companies handle these all sorts of ways, but people should not be expected to give away tons of time.
Theory: overwork culture is a 'race to the bottom' when workers feel more pressure to (1) compete against each other instead of (2) organizing together to promote mutual interests.
Put this way, 'overwork culture' would be a collective action problem in the context of an economic system where owners have more leverage than workers.
So what about tech, where workers seem to have high leverage? Why do they still overwork? One factor that may be overlooked is this: workers are not only competing against their contemporaries but also future workers (which may be more numerous and perceived as less expensive).
> So what about tech, where workers seem to have high leverage?
Do they?
In my experience, most software engineers do experience a better work/life balance, especially at startups where they have more leverage. Even so, we can do better.
There's also no tech union. And even though many tech workers are at the top of the working class bubble, it's still working class. You have more in common with someone working minimum wage than the executive who writes himself a bonus and hoards equity.
1. Efficiency wages. Highly motivated and skilled programmers are so much better at their jobs than unmotivated and unskilled replacements that it's best to "overpay" above the market-clearing price, giving employers meaningful choice in applicants and regain some of the negotiating power in the relationship.
2. Tournament theory of compensation. Quantifying performance of engineers is difficult, but rank-ordering them (especially without an explicit stack-ranking) is relatively easy. So an efficient solution is to overpay the best-performing "winners" and underpay the rest, getting the same incentive effects as piece work without the cost of quantifying work output.
I've been working for 30 years, at a dozen companies. There is a difference in the intensity of the workers that roughly correlates to the size of the company. The larger the company, the lower the intensity overall. But in all cases, I seldom if ever saw employees who weren't actually working a full day's work or more. These were all technology companies, ranging from 5 - 3,000 employees, and it was a fact that if people didn't pull their weight overall, the company wouldn't last long.
I am certain the apocryphal slacker is out there, otherwise we'd not have the parody. From my perspective at least, people had to produce, regardless of what they were expected to deliver. If they didn't, they eventually got moved out.
My brother tells a story of a rail maintenance company where the margins were fat enough that lazy employees could survive. One lazy guy, having been busted sleeping at his desk, went looking for somewhere he could get away with it. In a basement, he found a large laundry hamper of some sort, which worked well for a few days until one day he went to get in for a nap and discovered someone else was already sleeping in there!
A simple answer with strong explanatory power: because we are competing for status (increasing subjective marginal returns) instead of working for money (decreasing subjective marginal returns).
I think it's easy to buy in the idea of "hard work pays off", because believing in "luck" instead for a measure of success isn't as satisfying. We like to think our effort pays off, that we've got agency, and that those who made it better than us must have done so because they worked harder and so deserve it, and can be an inspiration and model for us to do the same one day. As opposed to thinking they just lucked out more.
Look at the people who believe that the people who achieved more than them got 'lucky'. Usually they spend their time complaining about how they're not lucky, as apposed to applying themselves and getting what they want.
edit: My point is that believing hard work pays off is a much more effective framework for achieving literally anything.
It's not entirely so black and white, and it's definitely no XOR. You can work hard and fail due to being unlucky - as far as I understand it, that's most people who start their first business. You can be lucky and fail upwards, see Trump, who botched more projects than he didn't. And you can be lucky and apply yourself, see Elon Musk or Bill Gates.
It's important to realise that both play a role, because you don't want to self sabotage when your business fails due to extraneous circumstance. Perhaps you should try again, preparing better for things you can't control. Perhaps it really just was a bad time to get promoted and you should stick with the company longer.
It's also important to realise that someone who got a couple mill as an inheritance or "boost" for their business will always have a leg up - if you're measuring success in monetary terms. The same goes for challenging entrenched competition in your sector. Perhaps you should re-target to businesses that will be amenable to your agility and tailor-made solutions, because that kind of service might not be offered by well-established competitors.
Equally important is realising that there is a basic truth to the biblical parable of the talents: no matter what you get, you won't get anywhere without applying yourself, whatever that means to you.
"Luck" tends to happen to people that work really really hard though. So it's a question as to whether buying into that lottery is worth it to you, or not.
Workaholism is only one of the many addictions people trap themselves into. The pursuit of a reward is part of the mammalian makeup. Then there is the need to escape due to the "fight or flight" response. There are many good techniques to address these core issues in our makeup.
>But millions of us overwork because somehow we think it’s exciting – a status symbol that puts us on the path to success, whether we define that by wealth or an Instagram post that makes it seem like we're living a dream life with a dream job.
Work _IS_ exciting if it fits with one's target. I think the key takeaway is that one _CAN_ love his work, or at least part of it, which results in overwork, which is normal and even should be encouraged. But none should be forced to overwork in the ideal world.
>"We glorify the lifestyle, and the lifestyle is: you breathe something, you sleep with something, you wake up and work on it all day long, then you go to sleep," says Anat Lechner, clinical associate professor of management at New York University. "Again and again and again."
IMO this is actually indeed the ideal way to live. You burn your life for something you love. You live with it, expose your soul to it and you bet all your awaken time on it. Gekko, regardless whether his actions were legal or not, indeed worked the job he loved and as a fund manager he had his way in the fund. This is perfect for anyone.
On my side, let's just say that work, albeit that 80% of it is boring, is still a lot more interesting than non-work, that includes changing diapers, cooking meals and others. Plus it pays the bills.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadI disagree for most salaried positions though - soft skills, politics and luck play a huge role
Anyways, it's not exclusively true that work-life balance has to be sacrificed. I met a very successful business owner (millionaire, to quantify) a while ago who didn't do meetings before midday. Hated it, and would prefer to meet late afternoon. If being "somebody" includes financial success, they illustrated that it's not necessarily incompatible with a happy work-life balance.
Tbh, I'm not interested in being that kind of somebody. I'd rather be a good friend, good at my job, and doing the work my God has set out for me to do.
If I can nail those I think I'm doing pretty well. Dare I say I might even be satisfied.
It annoyed me so much that I decided to create https://4dayweek.io/ - Software Engineering jobs with a better work / life balance
Where I’m at 10am to 4pm are the core hours and the rest is flexible. Overtime can be recouped in half days or full days off if you’ve organised appropriately with the team.
My suspicion is that it’s simply easier to make disgruntled noises generally about 9-5 than actually negotiating seriously at the smaller end of the scale on behalf of you or your team.
In American Psycho Patrick Bateman has it pretty chill, spending all his working hours on watching TV, reading magazines and talking trash with his peers. I used to think it was just another example of how unhinged he was, but maybe it’s a comment on some kind of double standard on workload vs. compensation in the corporate life.
And that's not even considering the management of expectations to prevent complaints about income inequality. I mean, you didn't work 80+ hour weeks, so, who are you to complain?
Hang with people who are one trait and you tend to become that trait. Hang with people who are not, and you'll tend not to be either.
If you want to "chill", hang with those people. If you want to "work hard", hang with those people.
I'm not judging, I'm just saying. Choose your circle of friends wisely.
But I know mine is a minority opinion on these types of boards.
This. There's nothing bad in wanting to do a great job but most often you're not the one to benefit from that. Especially software devs, some of them can work miracles almost for free, just to get some recognition (but not too much, we don't want them to think they provide something extraordinary )
And I had a taste of something similar myself. Project dropped out of the sky on my plate with due date a little too close for comfort. So what do you do? If you want to deliver, something has got to give..
Obviously, this project wasn't important enough to be given to you with enough time to get it done. Deadlines are often artificial, and this is probably what it was. In the absence of any specifics, I'd say push back on the deadline, negotiate for what you need to deliver something acceptable within a reasonable time, and don't kill yourself for it. If you do kill yourself for this one project, that just sets an expectation for next time that you don't want to have set.
"We said we'd give them X, Y, Z by A for $N. Let's see how close we can get to it." Is not abnormal from my experience with major clients as well. I work in R&D so there is usually an expectation of delays and failures but in this world, the client has an idea of what they want and an upper budget if what they'll spend. People try and feel this out to get as close to their budget as possible and as little as the client with agree to for that budget. Actual budgeting based on requirements and planning doesn't happen, you simply grab the opportunity and run with it. Yes, much of R&D is complete shit show.
if dates can't be changed, you push back and ask for more resources to be hired.
As an analogy, a house can be painted by 1 guy over 10 days or 10 guys in 1-2 days.
You cannot always just slap more resources on a task to get it done on time. Something that a lot of management does not seem to understand.
But, the type of deadline you point out (we said we'd give them $STUFF by $DATE for $PRICE) is often flexible, if not artificial. For instance, maybe you can work out a schedule where by $DATE, you deliver $SUBSET_OF_STUFF for $LOWER_PRICE, while continuing to build out features to satisfy the original request, ending up delivering $STUFF for $PRICE.
Admittedly, this can be tricky. But, it can be done. I've done it before. Once a client has already agreed to a deal, they're generally inclined to stay with you, provided you're working in good faith with them. This can be somewhat of a sunk cost mentality, but it doesn't really matter as long as you're not taking advantage of that to soak them for cash.
I guess the moral of the story is that any contract is amendable and re-negotiable, if you approach it right. If it's not possible to deliver by $DATE without killing yourself and your team, then it's time to consider re-negotiating. And, as you said, in the real world, delays happen; clients may be willing to accept some small delays.
Even regulatory deadlines can sometimes be a little flexible, but that's a whole higher level of negotiation, and government agencies sometimes don't have the discretion to delay enforcement of new regulations, or the incentive to work with you to get you into compliance. In that case, the choice comes down to either a one-time push to deliver what's needed (and, you should be explicit that it is a one-time push), or temporarily eating the fines while delivering on a realistic schedule. I've never been in this type of situation, but I have dealt with government agencies before, and it can be a pain.
Reply with this: “Poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine.” ― Bob Carter
In my previous team, it would have been "yeah I'm sorry, but there is a fire, this customer is paying us XYZ and threating to take their bussiness elsewhere, ...". Saying "no" would at best give you some additional resources.
(Note that I did say "previous" team and the reason this kept happening is precisely why that team is no longer my current one)
If a problem needs solved by end of week and it takes at least 3 weeks to do properly, you document what you can do within normal office hours by the deadline and ask if that's enough.
If not, then they either need to approve overtime or extra resources. There's exactly zero chance I'm going to be using my free time to fix someone else's fuckup without proper compensation.
Who would be afraid of having to sit and twiddle their thumbs for half an hour waiting for the next meeting, if not someone desperate to uphold an image of being an over-worker?
If you read "The Meritocracy Myth" by Yale University law professor Stephen McNamee, you will understand the game being played here quite well. There are upper class Americans in particular who basically work extremely long hours (80-105 hour work weeks) to game the system, with no net productivity gains whatsoever compared to the middle and upper middle class who typically work 40-60 hour work weeks at maximum. In fact, the productivity gains generally wane off at about 32 hours per week, and we really do not need longer work hours in modern society, unless it is for the upper class to "protect" their status. Just like sleep is critical, rest is critical too, for recharging, so you can do a good job at work. The health effects of working extremely long hours, even if it affords you things and experiences others do not have, are just simply not worth it.
My father, who grew up as a very indignant American youth, who literally paid for all of his clothes starting by age 12, knew how to play this game very well. He was able to transcend the poor, working, and middle classes, and was comfortably in the upper middle class as senior level management, in the private sector, in finance, as a certified public accountant by training, by the time I was born. At my grandmother's funeral (his mother's funeral) people wished they were industrious as he was in his youth! The sad part about it is he died before he turned 60, and before his mother. It comes at a huge price.
There is some confused language being used here. If you're saying the marginal productivity of the 81st hour worked in a week is 0, then that is almost certainly wrong. If you're saying that the marginal productivity of the 81st hour in a week is less than that of the 32nd hour, that may well be true, but if so, nothing else of what you said follows from that.
No, I am correct here, and there is no "confused language" in my writing. This has been studied by prominent economists at Stanford University, which is ironically one of the worst Universities in the US for encouraging "working nonstop".
Once you work over 55 hours per week, your productivity at that point effectively becomes zero [1]. You effectively cannot accomplish anything more, productively, as a human, past 55 hours of work per week.
I suggest that you become more aware of human limitations, along with becoming more aware of human behavior, especially human tribalistic behaviors. Then you would not fall for these kinds of falsehoods. It would help you play "the game" more successfully, which you seem to take interest in.
[1] The Productivity of Working Hours (Stanford University study by economist John Pencavel): http://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf
As another commentor says, it simply can't be that marginal productivity drops to zero. At least, if you're trying to produce, there's some external motivation, then it'd take something really serious (starvation, massive sleep deprivation, etc.) to make it actually zero; more than just 'a long week'.
It's like if you're super motivated and work all-night on something exciting: if you were rational for a second, you'd realise you'd probably accomplish more on it with a few hours' break to sleep. But that doesn't mean the alternative is doing nothing in the last x hours.
It can even fall below zero. Imagine the totally overworked surgeon killing his patient because of fatigue and total exhaustion. His net productivity has fallen, reducing the outcome of the last 12 hours.
His contribution to 'product' is providing the service of surgery; he has done that.
But yes, overworked and tired surgeons are more likely to kill patients; killing patients bad; overworking surgeons bad. (It's just not a 'productivity' issue.)
This is just false but I suppose it’s all a matter of what you call “work”. For some people, going to client dinners and golf outings is “work”. I agree coding for 55+ a week is difficult but there are plenty of folks that have this ability to sit down and grind.
The idea that some economist at Stanford discovered a secret 55 hour breaking point for productivity that generalizes to every human on earth is beyond preposterous.
I suspect like many economist papers this does not replicate and is simply a means for generating headlines to help this person get tenure or funding for their work.
This is borne out in data from a British bomb factory during WWI. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ecoj.12166
Figures 1 and 2 (page 2060 and 2061) show that, across four cohorts doing different tasks, output plateaus at about 48 hours/week. Indeed, output from 70 hour week (10 hr/day x 7 days) was slightly lower than a 48 hour week (8 hr/day, with Sunday off). These workers were pretty motivated by the circumstances and doing skilled but not particularly creative work, so I suspect this is likely an upper bound.
There's lots of interesting data about working conditions from the the Health of Munition Workers Committee.
Law firm partners also don't generally make the same money on their 80th hour. Partnerships will split up the profit at the end of the year, and the number of hours billed and size of the partner's "book of business" factor in heavily here. The size of the book of business depends on the number of hours the partner bills (overseeing associates and paralegals, as well as doing independent work), so working more will increase a partner's share of the annual profits.
Also, a partner whose time is in high demand can raise rates (sometimes done by reducing discounts or charging clients a "NY rate"). So a partner who has plenty of work and doesn't mind not having more work can simply raise rates and make the 80th hour more expensive for clients.
I think you need to be a lot more specific citing 'evidence'.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ecoj.12166
I work a full time job and contract for at least 25hrs/week.
In my full time job I’m paid for 40hrs but not all 40 of those are productive. I take an hour lunch, we have a bunch of meetings and social things, etc.
If you ask, I work 65+ hours per week. If we’re being honest I probably only work 40 or less between lunch, catching up with coworkers sitting in meetings not doing anything, etc.
After the 55th hour, there was certainly productive work being accomplished. Less productive than the 1st hour I am sure, but the amount of valuable work being done was more than zero. It was observably evident.
BUT if you know your workday is exactly 8 hours with a 30 minute lunch in the middle, you'll pace yourself differently.
The difference between two equal people doing the same thing, one working until they drop and the other working 8 hours and leaving, isn't big enough to warrant the longer hours worked in the long run.
The one working longer hours might get more work done for a day, maybe a week or two. But after months of work the first person is burned out and the second one is still going strong.
I love technology and I enjoy my work, but it doesn't define me as a human being. There are opportunities I've had to do some work at what people would consider "prestigious" companies but I've turned it down in order to have better work life balance.
This is it.
I've had various issues with unrealistic requests and timelines from those to whom I report, and it feels as if I need to, somehow, "work harder" (whatever that means) to prove that I'm trying to execute their impossible plan.
When I get home, however, the mere presence of my wife and kids, and even pet(s), remind me of how I actually define myself, WHO I AM.
I like art. Be it paintings, music, film, TV shows. That's where I find "myself". I'm good at things I do for work, but I don't care about it the way I care about the meanings of life I can find staring into a painting, or listening to a song (anywhere from Mr. Bungle to Debussy) or watching a TV show (anywhere from Adventure Time to For All Mankind).
I'm privileged enough, and have planned ahead enough, that I could significantly downgrade my already not-very-prestigious, but quite demanding job, and live well.
My job doesn't come close to defining me, to myself anyway. That's probably the other "thing" - how people want to be able to define themselves to others. I'm relatively unaffected by that particular neuroticism.
I like coding. The thinking, the problem solving, the expressiveness, the chiselling out of a solid block of emptiness. It is my art.
I made it my trade. It's a double-edged sword, with which I badly stabbed myself a couple of times. I tried to drop out, but can't help but come back to it.
The job's not me alright, the coding is a big part of me for sure.
> The thinking, the problem solving, the expressiveness, the chiselling out of a solid block of emptiness
Beautifully illustrated. I like a blank whiteboard; it represents potential.
By not coding for 8 hours. There are many more aspects to being a developer than writing code - documentation, code review, testing, planning, mentoring, etc. Even if you're quite junior and don't get involved in things like planning you can being doing "low mental workload" tasks like writing lots of repetitive-but-necessary tests or manually QAing your own tasks before pushing them to a PR. Your day absolutely should not be 8 hours of extremely focused dev work except on rare occasions when it's needed.
This I tried, took me a long while to realise I should not have, because "low load" is still load, and what I really needed was rest because I had myself throughly mentally exerted.
On top of that "low load" doesn't mean the task is of less importance. Mistakes come by easier when one's already exerted.
I don't think the parent meant it that way but suggesting that solution can come out as demeaning for people that already are on the edge of exhaustion and internally questioning themselves.
I can do that kind of deep focus, I just can't do it two days in a rows and expect any efficiency the second one, let alone a full week.
Truth be told, I somewhat have to do that due to some sort of mild attention disorder (I can't imagine what life must be like for those with a more serious condition).
Thankfully over the years intentional practice of a great deal of sports taught me that long term consistency is what matters, doesn't matter if I do things in bursts as long as I don't overexert and rest appropriately (and especially don't bash myself for it).
But that requires full agency over my work time, something that I took a decade to unlock via being remote: in a 9-5 office people can't help but wonder why you're slacking all day and dragging your feet in order not to straight up not turning up for work.
The feeling of wasting time and the judgemental attitude (both from others and myself) just made me feel miserable, even though overall I was outputting the work and then some.
I don't care about prestige, I just care about my well being, and not being disparaged.
I sometimes enter "the zone" in which I lose track of time and work just flows. But not every day.
People in the upper class don't need to work because they're able to live off of, and build wealth from, their assets.
The lower and middle classes are defined by their economic precarity that hinges on their ability to sell their labor. If someone needs to work to "protect their status", they're upper middle class at best.
I think this is a pretty clever meta comment, but for those who don’t know, it’s a quite graphic book. I never had the stomach for it.
The roots of the valorization of work may well have been religious, and maybe Christian (though I very much doubt it's exclusively Christian in its origin), but it's definitely spread throughout much of the world, even among the non-religious and even atheist population.
I can't count the number of times I've heard people praise others as "hard working"... in all sorts of contexts, in many different parts of the world, native or immigrant, hard work is praised to the heavens and one of the best things you can say about a person is that they're hard working.
I almost never hear the value of working hard being questioned, except when the subject turns to burnout. Then everybody nods sagely and agrees that overwork is bad.. the next day they go back to praising hard workers.
You can see it in Stackoverflow as well. The gamification encourages people to prove they are "worthy" of even deigning to ask a question by showing they've done "the work". Those who haven't are subject to humiliation and dismissal, regardless of need or authenticity.
I don't see how stackexchange's policy is related to the article, or "Protestant/Calvinist work-ethic". They are banning low-effort questions (e.g "File couldn't be opened" when the person just has a typo in a file path) because they devalue the platform, waste time that could have instead been spent on useful questions.
> I suspect that's because it's an export which they've accepted as their own because it happens to jive with the strict authoritarian hierarchies which are common in Asian countries.
Or they independently developed a glorification of hard-work from other sources. It's nothing new. All the Abrahamic religions do, and the same is true for secular ideologies such as communism.
Given the history of human ideas, it would be equally foolish to assume there was not.
Atheists do a lot of things religious people do because they are still part of a tradition even if they don’t ‘believe’.
Issues like sexual shame, circumcision, censored language, etc. are all commonplace in America because they are actively promoted by religious conservatives and (for the most part) passively ignored by critics.
It's difficult to be critical of values that religious institutions have without being generally dismissed as overly antagonistic.
[n] https://medium.com/incerto/religion-violence-tolerance-progr...
You should see the Japanese go at it. I hear the Chinese are every bit as bad (996). Not many Christians, there.
The Japanese take a certain pride in it. I feel that their efficiency suffers, and burnout is a big problem, there.
In Japan you need to be at the office before your boss and can't leave before they do. And this goes all the way up, meaning that the lowest employees practically live at the office.
Combine this with a culture that doesn't really allow questioning your superiors makes for a really stressful work life.
One anecdote I heard was that a company had a one hour meeting with the Big Boss, who told what he wanted people to do. After that they had a two-hour meeting where they figured out what the boss meant. It was not proper to ask questions directly from the big boss.
Americans on the other hand glorify working two or three jobs, suffering 80-100 hour work weeks is a badge of honour. And they still just barely manage to get a living wage.
Don't know if that list is exhaustive; it might be.
Totally believe that. I worked at a Japanese company for 27 years, and attended a lot of meetings. Japanese managers pretty much spend their entire career in conference rooms.
The Chinese, however, have the concept of "996," which means "9AM to 9PM, six days a week." The Japanese also do that, but it's not quite as explicit.
But if you look at the Middle Ages, you'll find something like 100 days off a year, tons of feast days and days off, limited working hours in the remaining days, and not at all a culture that valorized work even thought it was much more deeply Christian than modern Europe. It's all about what you worship.
I think you have an incorrect view of subsistence farming. It does not require constant work, and you do not see constant work in traditional societies. You do see many days off. Now during harvest time there is lots of work, but that is a small period of the year, say 7 weeks out of the year. Other times the farmer has the option of when to plant and how much, when to weed and how much, when to work on processing food and how much. And these fall into familiar patterns from which things like feast days emerge as the interstitial times when the above does not need to happen. The idea of constant backbreaking labor all year long may be appropriate for something like a large Jamaican plantation, but not a small farm in Europe. Of course if it was an American farmer, they would enlarge their farm, bring in more livestock or auxiliary sources of income to fill up whatever daylight was available, and keep adding work until they and all their hired hands were busy all the time. Then they would take the earnings and use it to buy more land and hire more people and expand the work even further. But traditional societies did not organize themselves this way, nor is this something required of farmers.
Here is some data: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...
"The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official -- that is, church -- holidays included not only long "vacations" at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints' andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking. In addition to official celebrations, there were often weeks' worth of ales -- to mark important life events (bride ales or wake ales) as well as less momentous occasions (scot ale, lamb ale, and hock ale). All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.[5]
The peasant's free time extended beyond officially sanctioned holidays. There is considerable evidence of what economists call the backward-bending supply curve of labor -- the idea that when wages rise, workers supply less labor. During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work "by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day." And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year."
Put into working terms, the basic clothing of our six person farming family requires 7.35 labor hours per day, every day of the year. Our ‘comfort’ level requires 22.05 hours (obviously not done by one person).
https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t...
The main difference between the subsistence farmer and the wage worker -- and ACOUP goes into this in detail -- is that the subsistence farmer has to optimize for security over productivity, meaning that the marginal returns for working harder/longer hours are much less. Working twice as hard to till twice the fields won't help when a summer frost nukes the whole crop.
You quote quite a long article - yet you do not give the full data. 7.35 labor hours per day whole year is to produce 21 sq meters of cloth, using estimates about ancient world, not pre-modern Europe.
20 sq meters of cloth using a bit more modern (Middle ages) estimate would give you 3 hours per day whole year by one person. Also keep in mind that those farmer households would not change their clothes every year (and that's an understatement)
That doesn't lower the total amount of labor required. Someone still has to make the garments. Garments were also very expensive, and most farmers wouldn't have had enough surplus crops to purchase them.
> more modern (Middle ages) estimate would give you 3 hours per day whole year by one person
That's after the invention of the spinning wheel, which didn't exist for ~90% of the Middle Ages. The second estimate from just before the invention of the spinning wheel (1300s) is close to the ancient estimate.
> Also keep in mind that those farmer households would not change their clothes every year (and that's an understatement)
One garment per year. That doesn't mean they throw away the old garment. They might keep it as a spare or repurpose it for other uses. He also justifies this estimate based on historical data for people who were issued garments by their employers (slaves and soldiers). Cato the Elder recommended issuing slaves one garment every two years, and was infamous for being cruel and parsimonious towards his slaves, so that is probably about the bare minimum for subsistence. Soldiers in the Roman Republic were issued two garments per year.
Assuming that subsistence farmers aimed for a standard of living above that of the most poorly treated slaves seems like a reasonable assumption.
They used to produce most of stuff by themselves, because functional market requires good roads and a lot of people. And if course, if you are buing it, you need to produce a lot more food, so that you can sell it or exchange it.
Do you have any data that supports it?
I think it is fair to say that at least in Europe both Western and Eastern from onset of Middle Ages people living in villages were actually able to travel to the adjacent towns and to yearly market fairs. That wasn't a daily trip of course but I do not see an issue of farmer exchanging some bags of flour for some clothes once in two years.
>> And if course, if you are buing it, you need to produce a lot more food, so that you can sell it or exchange it.
Well, yeah, that's generally an intention when you are a farmer :) Also farmers were serfs often and had to give up some part of what they gathered.
People still needed food during holidays, which means food preparation that day also more work before holidays. Holidays themselves had to be prepared. The special holiday cloth had to be decorated and sewn. All that is work. Work/leisure trade off for organizing "bride ales" and such is an additional work. Just like the Christmas today are basically a lot of work, cleaning, cooking, gifts shopping and stress before celebration in exchange of two days of rest.
It is also odd to equate The ancien règime in France with like a lot of leisure, since it led to quite a lot of social issues - poverty, famine and such.
My grand-parents were Eastern-European peasants and they certainly had "days off", you were not allowed to go to the field during a religious holiday (and one was not allowed to do it on Sundays, either).
25 years since I last helped my paternal grand-parents to collect hay I can still remember those religious holidays when we'd just sit around the house, not going to the field: July 20th (Saint Elijah), August 15th (Assumption of Mary), August 6th (Transfiguration) and I think also June 29th (Saint Peter and Paul).
this reminds me of how, in the US at least, society has settled into the pattern of saying "thank you" to the "heroes" who fight our wars, protect us from fire and keep our for-profit prisons full. it's because the rest of us have no interest in doing any of those things, so we blow smoke up their proverbial *. fuck the protestant work ethic, and fuck being guilted into wage slavery, for at least, you know, the period of your life that lasts from the time your young and healthy until you die.
The grammar of achievement is performance and excess. Everything is possible, and you must exploit yourself while trying to exhaust the possibilities. Except you can't and therefore it is a slow burn spiritual suicide, until you burnout, get into depression, have autoimmune problems etc and hopefully get a wakeup call. Except your therapist is not going to tell you to take it easy either, because they can't come up with any answer to lack of meaning other than work (and maybe to get a family) either.
Not that there is any evil conspiring forces that have set this up, but it also happens having people exploit themselves in the name of achievement yields more than being exploited by someone else directly; to be told what and what not to do all the time is unnecessary when people are equally capable of auto-exploitation. Everyone carries little walking labor camps in themselves.
[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/inflammation
That is of course not true. Individually curated means synchronized with others as no individual exists in a vacuum; it feeds on others, on the environment, on history, and others feed on the individual, and the environment is modified by the individual, and history written by it. That it is free to evaluate its own future path is not the same as not being also part of something else, much less not take into account the something else.
Achievement in itself is, unparadoxically, and achievement. That you don't agree with it says more about your synchronicity with the rest of society than the opposite.
You misunderstand. The question is whether individual value structures converge/approximate to a superstructure outside every individual, not whether individuals can use environment, history, each other etc as an inspiration for their custom tailored lives. The sense of the former was destroyed with the end of modernism. Everything dissolved in an acid vat of infinite relativism. Every normativity other than growth in the market got destroyed/crumbled. And individual achievement is merely the projection of that at the atomized level.
> Achievement in itself is, unparadoxically, and achievement. That you don't agree with it says more about your synchronicity with the rest of society than the opposite.
I take that as a compliment because one of the things I aspire to is to not get dissolved in the blind allegiance to achievement and excess positivity. It usually gets unnoticed but when people excessively project themselves to achievements and future growth; they turn into massive narcissists. And I am not using that in the pejorative sense; they lose a grounded sense of themselves. The freedom from "improving", being able to have leisurely, contemplative time, enjoying "returnless" social encounters for their own sake, having a sense of limits etc counter that. I wish they were valued more.
You misunderstand. They of course converge, there is no other alternative but for society to be a reflection of their individuals. You don't like the answer so you pretend what they converge into is not worthy somehow because it doesn't adhere to some high societal morality standard which by the way just so happen to be the morality you ascribe to, which is of course nonsense.
> I take that as a compliment because one of the things I aspire to is to not get dissolved in the blind allegiance to achievement and excess positivity.
> It usually gets unnoticed but when people excessively project themselves to achievements and future growth; they turn into massive narcissists. And I am not using that in the pejorative sense; they lose a grounded sense of themselves.
Oh the irony.
If you don't have a counter-argument that is not an ad-hominem attack, strawmanning someone's position or shallow namecalling, you don't have to participate. This is not the forum for that.
Here is HN Guidelines for your reference. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In particular;
> Be kind. Don't be snarky.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Incidentally, this is a good example to the value superstructure I was talking about. It is not a passive culmination of individual preferences, it is an aspirational guidepost sitting outside of us as a reference point. It allows selecting what behavior belongs to what extent and what doesn't. It tells us we can do better and what that better looks like.
Society decides its morals, not I, certainly not you.
and yet, this is what led to most, if not all human achievements and progress. The modern quality of life that most people have come to enjoy is off the backs of people who _are_ doing their utmost to achieve performance and excess (aka, earn more than their spending).
If everyone lived an idyllic, and idle life, we'd have much less modern life amenities and conveniences; stuff would be more expensive, and less wealth all round.
Stuff like creative output suffers greatly if you push yourself to the limit, for instance.
"Here lies marvin, who valiantly sacrificed his life in the name of progress.
Thanks to his heroic efforts, the trees in GTA 7 look very good."
I'd love to read a proper study on how people experience different types of hard work. I've worked overtime myself, and it's been a memorable experience when it's been for just a few weeks or months, and in pursuit of something that meaningfully advances the world.
But it would not be fun if it was only a peripheral advance, or it happened regularly. For me, it only works if it's something exceptional, to be done a few times.
It's pretty sad if we consider Facebook, Google or Apple as the pinnacles of human achievement. Sure it's useful to have a phone in my pocket that can tell me at any time of the day what's the weather in Hong Kong or how to cook Pork Hock. Sure it's nice that I can connect to relatives in Spain or Brazil through Facebook or search for the number of current Covid cases in South Africa. But I could live with those "achievements" having come later if that had not meant a work culture that forces me into burnout.
Same for space rockets bringing robots to Mars, electric cars for the upper class and drilling tunnels under some Bay Area city.
And for those claiming the climate catastrophe is here and we need to act now .. yeah, let's think for a moment how we got here and whether overachieving and overworking have something to do with it.
Wealth is the ability to do more with less effort. Some of that free labor goes to arts, science, or philosophy and advances humanity. Maybe too much goes toward building even more wealth or a fancier house/things but you would not have the former without the ability to get later.
But this is about working 80+ hours a week to achieve that. Changing the world is possible in 40 hours a week. Or 30, or 20. It may happen more slowly, but it won't leave so many train wrecks of burnout in its path.
(Apart from overall total productivity not necessarily being lower with a 30 hour week than a 50 hour week as the increased energy and motivation can often times easily offset the fewer hours.)
If the phenomenon seems like it's global now—even appearing in parts of the world that Protestantism never touched—then that's because, well, capitalism is global.
I have a strong suspicion you work nowhere near as hard or long as the Puritans did.
Subsistence farming is no picnic.
The majority of traditional cultures practicing subsistence farming often work much less than 40h/w, still today.
During the middle ages it was common in many cultures to have less than 200 working days per year.
And that's one of the roots of this cult. You don't want to be perceived as slacking off, so you sacrifice work-life balance and work overtime. That's such an enormous misconception. You can be very focused 9-to-5, and then you go home and don't look back until next morning at 9 am when you again are as hard-working as the day before. Somebody who is 12 hours a day at the office but spends half the time chit-chatting at the water cooler and browsing facebook is not "hard working".
Hard-working and work-life balance are not opposites. That's something people really need to understand.
The article is referencing "The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", which is a seminal work on the history and structure of labour. It does not, in any way, imply that this is a religious phenomenon any more than capitalism itself.
Just because one proclaims to not believe in God doesn't free them from the values that were drilled in their head during childhood. So many people proclaim to be "atheists" but otherwise strongly believe in and defend Christian values (Bill Gates is a prominent example).
It's not just childhood, it's social pressure. It's extremely hard to publicly hold values that go contrary to the group, even more so when those contrarian values don't bring success and therefore don't have much to show for themselves.
Diogenes was a true hero.
On the other hand there is nothing admirable about taking it easy. Anyone can do it and it does not lead to any achievement. Of course some people care about achievement and some do not, that is fine, but lets not pretend hard work is not necessary for it.
I don't even think it's necessarily that popular in American culture any more after the sort of financial excesses of the late aughts. The stereotypical banker who is coked up and accidentally destroys the economy isn't really as cool anymore as he was in the 80s
How is it seen if someone is at work by 7am? Or even 6am? Genuine question.
For a couple of reasons, I spent a period of time going into work at 6AM. Most came at 8 or 9. Far more people commented when I stayed until 6PM one day.
A former co-worker of mine used to do this as well. I didn’t notice for weeks and only because I logged in very early one day.
What no one seemed to notice was I was coming in at 11. I never felt the need to correct anyone.
Even in finance, the phenomenon of working crazy hours didn't end with the 80s. I'd be shocked if it wasn't still the norm there.
In the medical field, it's quite typical for doctors and nurses to work insanely long shifts and get by on very little sleep... this was the case even before the pandemic hit, but as everyone knows it's gotten even worse since as doctors and nurses started getting sick, dying, and quitting, leaving more work for the rest.
It's long been common in the tech field.. especially in startups, but even among established firms working long hours is quite common.
All sorts of people living paycheck to paycheck and undocumented workers are routinely exploited, and working long hours is common there too.
In many parts of the world it is the fortunate minority who can afford to have a healthy work-life balance and get enough sleep.
Making tired people less stupid would require a fundamental breakthrough in neuroscience---and it's not for want of trying that no one has found a way to do so yet.
My mum worked for the NHS and I'd regularly hear her complaining for weeks/months on end about new IT systems that either didn't work, were hard to use or were months or even years behind schedule. All while knowing how much these projects cost (it's all public info here) and that the people working on it where getting paid in a day what she would be lucky to make in a week.
There's, I suppose, a weird societal level "getting your money's worth" from their compensation - since their actual hourly rate would plummet on the basis of working 30 hour shifts non-stop and the like.
Not to mention that the institution as a whole has enormous difficulty actually properly handing off care between different providers, yet we would only see benefits from being effective at doing so - not to mention minimizing the impact of bad doctors.
Another thing is hospitals adopting air industry style checklists, which doctors fought tooth and nail as 'insulting'. Despite every ounce of evidence massively pointing toward this saving lives.
He also was a serious cocaine addict who injected it every day. It's of course an oversimplified historical narrative, but at least part of the reason medicine does things this way is the traditions were set up by someone out of his mind on coke.
One study compares the ACGME limits (max 24 hour shifts) against a "flexible" system with 28 hour ones. Unsurprisingly, there's no effect--since both groups are totally zonked at the end. Meanwhile, data from lab experiments and virtually every other field (trucking, aviation, etc) shows that performance craters well before that.
The rationale for long shifts (other than money) is "handoff": when a new doctor takes over, details about the patient's condition and treatment plan get lost in the shuffle. In some cases, they might not ever have been recorded (e.g., a subliminal impression of a patient's color or breathing). Many people are weirdly nihilistic about improving this, but it seems like it almost has to be the lower-hanging fruit since solving it doesn't require butting up against fundamental limits of human physiology.
I felt dismayed and sad. Was this life in academia? Luckily, only a short while later I went to another conference, this one dominated by European PhD students. More chill discussions over a beer at five o'clock, more talk about people's hobbies and free time. Still, hard work, but also life. I was relieved.
I have not been exposed to the work life of "ordinary" Americans, but all the stories seem to indicate that this attitude is pervasive. It's sad, I think. And certainly unhealthy. And it must also make work culture unbearable for Americans that do value a healthier work-life balance.
I make very sure to balance it out though and if my company doesn't do or require time tracking, I will do it myself.
What I do though is to be 100% there during work hours. Meaning in the office it's work not play or personal time. Reading HN is not for work hours for example. Same now with the WFH. Work time is work time and I get everything I want to done in the regular hours and fingers crossed so far nobody has ever complained to me about it.
I am very allergic to deadlines dropped on me because someone else didn't plan ahead properly as well. HR, C-level and marketing come to mind.
Watch their jaw drop
edit: use responsibly, social intelligence required (like don’t say it to your boss, but as a jab at a good friend)
It's a very true sentiment though. Another one that often comes to my mind when people brag about amount of hours work is something along the lines of: "Do you know that you're effectively being paid at near minimum wage?" (obviously not true for everyone, but some people's salary goes from 'decent' to 'minimum wage' per hour worked)
But it's even worse than just being paid less per hour worked:
For each hour you work, you lose an hour of 'life'. Working 10 hour days instead of 8 hour days means that you lose 10 hours of 'life' a week.
I think a better response would be "why are you proud of having less free time than me?" I remember in school people would often brag about how little sleep they got and when they said that to me I'd say "why are you proud of how unhealthy your life is?" I would NOT say "sucks for you that you're too dumb to study enough and get to bed by 11". That would be a dick move.
Yeah, people tend to be surprised when someone says something intentionally hurtful
Others have already pointed out what an asshole thing this is to say, but I think a more important thing to note about it is that it's simply incorrect. If your income/wealth is directly related to total output, and your capacity isn't capped, then regardless of how good you are at it, doing it 2x as much means 2x the value produced.
I'm good enough at what I do that I never have to work again if I don't want to, but I still work 10+ hours every day because it's fun and I like it, and maybe it would be nice to have a boat one day.
"Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration." -- Edison
"Had Edison thought out his work and spent more time in preparation, he would not sweat so much." -- Tesla
Is this “cult” about daring to spend less of your life watching TV? I’m missing some central perspective judging my the comment thread.
Richard Feynman
It sounds like giving up on "working" can sometimes be the first step to high output for some people. I know I've had that experience.
I see it as a rediscovery of how Feynman’ work was his true calling after all and how he chose to do more physics, instead of more reading, for pleasure.
Sadly here in the US that's seen as bad or unproductive. The whole chasing the productivity numbers has become a fetish in this country where we can't imagine that productivity is better measured in how little we waste our time versus how much more profit we make. If it takes an hour to make the same profit versus last year that should be celebrated and rewarded but it seems the latter part, the reward, is always withheld. Even if it's something silly like pizza for lunch or a gift card. There's just more of the "well work more" attitude which is just nonsense to me. The whole "line must go up" cult needs to be expunged from the human species, I swear.
Somehow everyone’s always busy with things to work on, even the guy I see watching YouTube videos after standup.
My company is really good about work life balance. But there are plenty of people, myself included, who log in on the weekends or at 2AM and write code or review stuff. Coding is fun!
There are people out there who do for pay something very similar to what they would do if they had millions of dollars.
I'm not recommending flipping burgers for free overtime, but it's ludicrous to claim that working hard doesn't pay dividends in professional high-skill fields for fair employers.
I'm also a well paid software developer, but I spent my 20s recording albums, learning to garden, staying fit, and generally not spending my time making money for someone else for free.
(obviously you need to work for a startup which reciprocates. but most do).
People fought hard for our rights to free time. People died for this right. If your work makes your company more money, they should pay you. They shouldn’t reward your hard work with something vague like job prospects and opportunities, no they should pay you overtime with money. If you work more then 40 hours a week, you should get your extra hours payed in overtime (not less then 90% of your base wage). If they don’t want to give you that, you are being exploited by your bosses.
Do know that you can practice your skills and get your fair share for your work. Don’t let anyone exploit your work. You’re worth more than that. Solidarity.
I don't need your patronization or protection.
It would be more effective than going around trying to convince software engineers they are chumps for working hard.
You see the more workers that do work for free the less value all our work is. And hundreds of years of labor struggle will all be for nought.
Cut down the tall ones because they create problems for the shorter ones.
Maybe fix your company culture to create norms? If some exceeds those norms so what?
The labor struggle is one that is fought bottom-up. Unless we stand united, the bosses hold all the cards. A single worker has no power to fix their companies culture, but a united workforce does. This is not applicable to the tall poppy syndrome at all.
In fact if you want to find a silly analogy, call it the weak link problem. An almost united workforce will get exploited through the few that aren’t.
If more work and more hours make your bosses more money, they should pay you more, if they don’t, this work is wasted on making your bosses more money and cheapens the value of the work for the rest of us. If you realize this and stop working overtime, that is also a good thing. More time with your family, at your local chess club, the pub, or in your personal code repos.
I think the myth of (3) unions stagnate job efficiency is a result of bad union practices (I don’t know of examples but I’m sure there are plenty) then of solidarity. There is nothing inherent about a union that will make job efficiency stagnate.
This is what folks who worked at GM in Detroit told me. Guys would punch in, then head to the bar. I remember seeing local new coverage with undercover video of these guys being at strip clubs while on the clock. Was going on for years.
Here is a more recent example...
https://www.autoblog.com/2012/12/10/chrysler-workers-fired-f...
Culture matters.
https://www.good.is/money/france-lets-you-disconnect
> In France, if you’re a company of 50 employees or more, you cannot email an employee after typical work hours. The labor law amendment has come about because studies show that in the digital age, it’s increasingly difficult for people to distance themselves from the workplace during their off hours. This new provision allows people to get the full advantage of their time off.
> “All the studies show there is far more work-related stress today than there used to be, and that the stress is constant,” Benoit Hamon of the French National Assembly told the BBC. “Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash — like a dog. The texts, the messages, the emails — they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down.”
I admit that it might just work well for me as I don't actually need work life balance or really use the time off. What I mean is that I have never experienced any pressure to work beyond regular hours. I am not sure that the weekend/2AM logins/commits are supported. I have never heard much comment on them at all really.
Setting the example for the rest of the team when you are explicitly/implicitly recognized as the leader is very important. I had to learn this lesson recently.
For example, I signaled to the team last Friday that I was not going to be working at all this weekend. Checked my email just now and neither did anyone else. If I put something up for code review on Saturday afternoon, someone else on the team is likely to pop in for review and then likely do some work tasks themselves. Its not that this is bad, but you have to be aware that it is happening and moderate it accordingly.
That's ridiculous. The protection should be to protect the employee who sets their phone/computer not to check email during off hours, not a prohibition on the sender uploading a message to their mail server's queue.
I email my staff at 2am constantly. I don't expect replies until they're "at work" (wherever and whenever that may be).
If someone wishes to volunteer to work 24/7, it isn't my job to stop them. It's insane of them, though, and I might contemplate firing someone who felt pressured to act/respond at 2am (for being dumb and unreasonable).
Just because you think there is no pressure to reply, doesn't mean there isn't a societal/workplace culture that pushes people to do so when their superiors ask for something. Same reason you can tell a co-work something is dumb, but you would say 'lets look it from another angle' to a manager or ceo.
That's usually the case, the above source didn't explain it correctly.
The law actually only obligates the company to agree a set of rules with the staff elected representatives (usually from a union). In almost all cases, those rules are simply that employees cannot be obligated to connect outside their paid work hours, and not suffer any consequence for not connecting.
Gaslighting your team could backfire in any number of ways.
It is normal to work at 2am if you work the way I and most of my associates work.
I think it's fairly common for hackers and other deep-thinking types to work very intensely for 2-5 minutes at a bunch of different times all throughout the day.
But why not work on a fun personal project instead of giving your labour away for free? (I am assuming you are not the majority owner of your company)
If your company doesn’t allow taking the following morning off. Don’t do this. They don’t deserve your extra work. Find a technique that takes your mind off you work (personally I like to count up the American Presidents since Lincoln; or the states admitted in order since Vermont; takes me right to sleep before I reach Oregon [although my company allows me to take the following morning off, most of the time I feel like sleeping rather then working]).
Now I sleep with a notebook by my bed. When this happens, I write down enough of the solution to convince my brain I won't forget it. Then getting back to sleep is easy.
Either a digital todo-list or a physical notebook both work for me.
As long as you can convince your mind that the task is stored in a safe place so it's OK to stop thinking about it - you can get back to it any time you need to.
Please consider that before you clock in at 2AM to write code so that your bosses can make more money. Your work, your body, and our solidarity is worth more then that.
I’ll start by clarifying: I’ve never said GP can just stop doing work. What I’m iterating on is that their work is worth something, and their overtime work is worth more. They should not be doing overtime work unless they get fair compensation.
Now that that is cleared, I’m gonna assume you are answering some of my other posts where I talk repeatedly about solidarity. My call for solidarity is a plead to not work overtime without compensation because it cheapens the work for the rest of us. I’m asking GP (and others on this thread) to not give their bosses free labor because I don’t want my bosses to demand free labor from me. You see solidarity is needed because if most workers our industry gives free labor, then I can’t be expected not to, I’ll just get fired.
There is no win-win in a class struggle. For us workers to win, our bosses must loose. Past labor activists have fought hard to give us our benefits which include paid overtime. If we don’t use it, we will loose it. 1-0 for our bosses. However if we use it, and get paid overtime: 0-1 for us and the struggle continues.
I’ve worked with people who have dedicated their lives to their work. They like it. They’ll work weekends and evenings. Nobody is making them do it.
So much this. I have worked places where the work was boring and everybody is just phoning it in 9-5, and places where people work weekends because they're truly engaged in their work.
In theory, the former has great work/life balance but every hour at work felt like a drag, I wasn't engaged, I wasn't growing. And worse still, I didn't even really understand this when it was happening. I just thought work was awful like this and even started looking at other careers to get out.
Then I worked at a couple places in that latter category. It was night and day. I was still able to live my life, but I was more engaged, getting amazing opportunities and growing a LOT more.
I've always tried to be careful about the message I send by working weekends or nights. I don't brag when I do it. Try to keep it low profile by not communicating with coworkers (unless it's an outage or something). If my manager asks me to more than on rare occasions, it's also not acceptable.
I've had to physically take away a "coding is fun" -person's laptop, disabled all their logins and their office keyfob and force them to take their mandatory vacation.
Without this they would've worked during vacation and committed a bunch of stuff on their first day back to not get caught working during holidays...
Even then they replicated the Java stack they were working on with Rust, from memory, at home during the vacation. Just for fun.
When you love your job, maybe a bit too much, it becomes really hard to see when you've burned out. Sometimes dreaming about code is a good thing, your subconscious is working on a problem. Other times it's a sign of burnout.
I've been there and now I know how to not end up there - and I try my best to not have people who work with me burn out either.
In psychology it quite often arises that something we perceive as a good trait but is generally kind of vague (like say self esteem) turns out to be correlated with what we consider bad more tangible traits (like narcissism, and criminal behavior). I wouldn’t be surprised if work enthusiasm is similar and correlates way more with stress, burnout, and high turnover rates, then with the popularly believed successful career.
I did a quick scan on search results for "work enthusiasm" google scholar and the research seems mixed. There are a lot of studies that correlate work enthusiasm (or worker’s zest) with good outcome, but a few in between that correlated it with burnout. This was also the case before the self-esteem camp was brought down with quality research.
If you are enthusiastic there is one more thing that might burn out. I am usually quite enthusiastic when at a new job, but as soon as I start to despise the process or are forced to do a half assed job it the enthusiasm fades.
It got way less stressful for me when I stopped to care that much about the end result and worked less hard (I never worked overtime, I mean per hour) since I figured that I did not have the authority anyway to change most stuff. I guess that is some form of burn out of spirit.
In the beginning of my career I though I was way better then my colleges, but I realized that they had mostly just "burned out" before me and did the bare minimum.
I spent my early career doing stuff way too fast and thoroughly. After the fifth time a spec changed midway and invalidated most of my work I slowed down to the proper level and started getting praise for being so fast =)
As time goes on it feels more and more like the developer community is here for the money and not the challenge/fun/etc. And that is totally cool. I just worry about the higher order consequences of technology employees principally motivated by money and not the inherent correctness or value of a technology solution. Accusatory phrases like "NIH Syndrome" seem to be used less frequently by those who enjoy programming regardless of the money. Perhaps there is the risk of leaving some innovation on the table if your entire team is full of people like this. But maybe it makes perfect sense for your business model (i.e. just vendor everything out).
Also, working 60 hour weeks on a regular basis is not viewed as "healthy" by some, but I feel fucking incredible doing what I am doing right now. If I had not pushed through some painful adventures, I probably would not have the level of experience & autonomy that I get to enjoy today.
I do recognize that there are a lot of work environments in which certain virtuous cycles are not allowed to iterate properly. I did have to change jobs 6+ times before I found something that fit me. The notions presented throughout HN regarding "toxic" interactions/teammates/et. al. are certainly the most adverse force I have encountered in my career. Nothing is more devastating to innovation and career advancement than some salty crab pulling the rest of the crabs back down into the bucket. If you love technology but cant stand the work for whatever reason, maybe pop in for a few interviews elsewhere.
They definitely work more and things like parental are also not really a thing.
Source: a friend of mine works there now.
Everything I know about Tesla would lead me to believe that it would be a high pressure/high output environment; seems like there's more than enough publicity about this out there.
First, reduce labor costs. One way to lower wages is to get salaried people to work as many hours for their check as you can convince them to do. This is one place where sociopaths shine.
Second, the ideal labor cost is $0, aka the ideal state of capitalism. When humans are involved, this means slavery. "Ideal" means the same as above: reduce labor costs wherever possible.
Convincing people to overwork is a sales job, and bending everybody around you to your preferred activities is practice for when you're going for funding or acquisition. Is there any MBA who wants to help build a company that doesn't get acquired? Gonna need those persuasion skills.
Working 80hrs a week? Congratulations, you've cut your own salary in half.
The labor participants are engaging in capitalism as well; earning $0/hour is not an ideal state for me as a service provider.
Put this way, 'overwork culture' would be a collective action problem in the context of an economic system where owners have more leverage than workers.
So what about tech, where workers seem to have high leverage? Why do they still overwork? One factor that may be overlooked is this: workers are not only competing against their contemporaries but also future workers (which may be more numerous and perceived as less expensive).
Do they?
In my experience, most software engineers do experience a better work/life balance, especially at startups where they have more leverage. Even so, we can do better.
1. Efficiency wages. Highly motivated and skilled programmers are so much better at their jobs than unmotivated and unskilled replacements that it's best to "overpay" above the market-clearing price, giving employers meaningful choice in applicants and regain some of the negotiating power in the relationship.
2. Tournament theory of compensation. Quantifying performance of engineers is difficult, but rank-ordering them (especially without an explicit stack-ranking) is relatively easy. So an efficient solution is to overpay the best-performing "winners" and underpay the rest, getting the same incentive effects as piece work without the cost of quantifying work output.
https://ourworldindata.org/exports/annual-working-hours-per-...
In the past most work was directly tied to feeding your family.
I am certain the apocryphal slacker is out there, otherwise we'd not have the parody. From my perspective at least, people had to produce, regardless of what they were expected to deliver. If they didn't, they eventually got moved out.
Just grab an empty box and say you're delivering it to the other end of the factory when someone asks. Works every time if you're confident enough.
edit: My point is that believing hard work pays off is a much more effective framework for achieving literally anything.
It's important to realise that both play a role, because you don't want to self sabotage when your business fails due to extraneous circumstance. Perhaps you should try again, preparing better for things you can't control. Perhaps it really just was a bad time to get promoted and you should stick with the company longer.
It's also important to realise that someone who got a couple mill as an inheritance or "boost" for their business will always have a leg up - if you're measuring success in monetary terms. The same goes for challenging entrenched competition in your sector. Perhaps you should re-target to businesses that will be amenable to your agility and tailor-made solutions, because that kind of service might not be offered by well-established competitors.
Equally important is realising that there is a basic truth to the biblical parable of the talents: no matter what you get, you won't get anywhere without applying yourself, whatever that means to you.
Work _IS_ exciting if it fits with one's target. I think the key takeaway is that one _CAN_ love his work, or at least part of it, which results in overwork, which is normal and even should be encouraged. But none should be forced to overwork in the ideal world.
>"We glorify the lifestyle, and the lifestyle is: you breathe something, you sleep with something, you wake up and work on it all day long, then you go to sleep," says Anat Lechner, clinical associate professor of management at New York University. "Again and again and again."
IMO this is actually indeed the ideal way to live. You burn your life for something you love. You live with it, expose your soul to it and you bet all your awaken time on it. Gekko, regardless whether his actions were legal or not, indeed worked the job he loved and as a fund manager he had his way in the fund. This is perfect for anyone.
On my side, let's just say that work, albeit that 80% of it is boring, is still a lot more interesting than non-work, that includes changing diapers, cooking meals and others. Plus it pays the bills.