Every human being deserves an average of 8 hours of work, 8 hours of family/leisure, 8 hours of sleep and 2 days a week free. Even a doctor on whom many lives are depending. Lives of critical employees are just as valuable as the lives of those who are affected if they don't work harder. The whole "if I don't do this, the project will sink / things will be destroyed" is a self-imposed ransom situation that managers count on.
Especially a doctor on whom many lives are depending, because so many of those lives are being lost to fatigue-induced mistakes. I know someone who almost died that way; she had a healthy distrust of hospitals, watched carefully what was going on, and noticed just in time when an exhausted doctor was about to give her the wrong injection which would probably have killed her. The doctor just mumbled "oh, sorry," and shambled on her way, perhaps to kill some other patient at a later date.
By what natural law is this true? By what will of nature or physics are you deriving your statements?
Deserves? Why does anyone deserve anything? Nature itself does not act that way.
People around the world deserve not to live in fear of their government killing them. Women deserve not to live in fear of being raped. Children should not live in fear of abuse. Yet untold millions starve, are beaten, tortured, abused, have lives of unimaginable torment and despair, and you have the gall to talk about how the privileged few should not work so hard?
How about those of us born into a life of privilege work harder until suffering is alleviated, until pain is removed, until equality is reached.
As I have said in other threads, just because someone else in another part of the world has a worse life than you does not mean yours is OK. If person A gets beaten 3 times a day and person B only gets beaten 1 times a day, does person B not have the right to say they deserve better? Person A might be in a worse position, but perhaps both people deserve a better life.
>Deserves? Why does anyone deserve anything? Nature itself does not act that way.
Living as we would in nature would be a HORRIBLE way to live human life. The way things "naturally" would occur is irrelevant, we build societies and develop science to improve our lives to where we all want them to be.
> Deserves? Why does anyone deserve anything? Nature itself does not act that way.
Deserves in the same sense that they deserve the other natural rights and protections which are afforded them within our societies. I wouldn't be quite so prescriptive about the number of hours, but being able to work in a decent and humane manner, without damaging your health, and with space for an outside life, is significantly more important than many other natural rights.
> How about those of us born into a life of privilege work harder until suffering is alleviated, until pain is removed, until equality is reached.
Work, for the vast majority of people, has no such aim, and no such outcome. If anything, people in the developed world are often in direct competition with their counterparts elsewhere.
I can't speak for com2kid, but I am alleviating suffering around the world by working hard at my (not particularly shitty) startup job. The amount of money I give to charity is an approximately-constant fraction of my income. If I work harder I'm more likely to get paid more (and, unless I work so hard as to be less productive overall, which is certainly possible and a very bad idea, my employer is more likely to be successful and make my options worth something), so the starving billions get more money from me.
I don't think this situation is all that unusual. Charitable giving that's a fixed fraction of income is common practice in many religions (which have a whole lot of members) and among the "effective altruism" community (which is small but I bet it's overrepresented among HN types), and is a natural enough thing to do that I bet lots of other people do it.
(Ideally I wouldn't need to say these things explicitly, but I will anyway: Of course working harder is not always a good idea; as I said above, it's very much possible to work harder and merely make yourself tired and therefore less effective. And of course working harder, whether it makes you more effective or less, is no guarantee of getting paid more; plenty of employers are quite unresponsive to their employees' commitment and productivity. If anything I've said above looks as if it's denying those things then I expressed myself badly and I apologize.)
I think current best estimates are that the most efficient charitable donations you can make save about one life per $2000 donated. If you're a decently but not extravagantly paid US software developer (I'm not, but the money is in the right ballpark) then maybe your salary is $100k/year; let's say you donate 5% of that before tax, or $5k/year; that's 2.5 lives saved per year. Most things you could do by volunteering full time probably do less good than that.
(Of course "lives saved" is an unsatisfactory metric; something like QALYs would be better. But the lives-saved figure is the one I happen to remember.)
Being a developer is a very valuable skill. Presumably, working for eight hours as a developer can pay for a number of volunteering efforts, so it's strictly more valuable.
If a charitable organization needed some software written, volunteering to write it would certainly be helpful, but this still requires you to be a domain expert in two things, rather than one.
Unless you mean "valuable" in the sense of "makes you feel more fuzzy," in which case you are killing people and I advise you to stop.
Not really a natural law, but medicine from time to time finds out that working too much or sleeping less or not having time for pleasure/fun/family hurts your health.
> Why does anyone deserve anything? Nature itself does not act that way.
And yet we've progressed from our prehistoric roots and have decided as a society that everyone does deserve basic rights.
> How about those of us born into a life of privilege work harder until suffering is alleviated, until pain is removed, until equality is reached.
Working harder at a mundane job won't achieve this. At best it means you'll just have less family time, leisure time, and be unhappier. At worst it means you're taking a bigger slice of the global economic pie, and contributing to inequality.
Deserves may be the wrong term. Worker output is maximized at 8h*5 days/week. This is a lesson learned in the late XIX century that is so counter intuitive that it must be relearned by every management generation. So, yes, current knowledge points to workers "deserving" 8h work leaving the rest for life balance, where "deserve" means "needs" or "performs better at" or "maximizes output at".
In the factory floor, this has been quantitatively measured and is solid. In creative jobs, quantification is a lot harder, so proof isn't as solid. I can argue for longer hours in creative jobs. I can as easily argue for shorter than 40h weeks. In the absence of further solid proof, the best option is probably to stick with 40h weeks.
So, leaving aside the rant about evils in the world and other straw men, Nature does act that way.
It's all about context. We live in an entirely different world than that. What a weird issue to bring up on a forum where largely everyone works in a nice office. Obviously this stuff still goes down.
Are you one of those people where if I say, "Hey where do you want go for lunch?", would respond with "Nowhere, I just want to DIE, why do I get to eat if everyone else DIES!"
Don't take the numbers literally, and read it as "I believe every man deserves...". Merely an unscientific three-way split of a 24-hour day, with a liberal sleep quota and a traditional weekend. It's also the most defensible scheme against the old guard.
I think that "logical" three way split with weekend was big reason why that battle was won. It seems "right" and a fair divide. But at the same time it is a great obstacle moving forward the logical path to less work hours and more free time.
I don't know how the 35 hour work week in France is working out but I feel that they are the anomaly and could just as easily swing back to 39/40 hrs.
Of course 8 hours at work is not really 8 hours... it's 8 hours + time for travel.
In the 8 hours for 'free time', a lot is taken up by chores etc.
I totally agree that working less makes more sense - although we are much more productive, this has not gone into working less, or even paying people more (except those at the top).
Why not allocate more time for sleep or activities? Why not work more (not all people hate working).
Seems like we could come up with a bunch of other arbitrary decisions that would make just as much sense if they were already a part of our culture for the last 100 years.
There's a good article called "Bring back the 40-hour work week"[1] that seems to indicate that working more than 40 hours per week is less productive.
Thye found (in the 1930s) that the reduced work week paid for itself in reduced workplace accidents. However, after WW2 companies moved to employer-paid accident insurance instead of paying out-of-pocket workman's comp, and as a result, the cost savings would be socialized anyway. This tilted the equation back toward an 8-hour day, at least from management's perspective, though employees remained staunchly opposed to the longer day for a generation.
What ultimately killed it was a status thing: by the 70s and 80s, employees on the 30-hour work week felt like they were "slackers", and didn't have the same social status as those who worked harder.
On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company took the radical step of doubling pay to $5 a day and cut shifts from nine hours to eight, moves that were not popular with rival companies, although seeing the increase in Ford's productivity, and a significant increase in profit margin (from $30 million to $60 million in two years), most soon followed suit.[10][11][12][13]
My girlfriend is a doctor, and tells me stories about when she had recently qualified, and working silly hours.
It seems crazy that a high responsibility job like that, where peoples lives depend on it, and it is expected to be done by sleep deprived junior doctors.
She is Mexican, but as far as I can tell it is not restricted to that country.
My friends who have become doctors here in the US say the same thing. 1st and 2nd year residents (the low paid gigs they get right after med school) often work 24 hour shifts pretty regularly with only 6-8 hours between shifts.
I think the main reason is there are two few doctors for too many patients. The reasons for that situation are a separate topic all together.
In this case someone is trying to sell you the idea of work-life balance. I guess you can take it or leave it, but it doesn't seem that slimy or nefarious to me.
I'm fine with it defined on the individual level - but somehow making a blanket statement about all people regardless of culture of culture on something as subjective as "work-life balance" seems a bit broad.
Us Europeans think your 10 days of holidays (vaccinations) a year is crazy in the US. But then you do seem to get paid a lot better in the tech sector.
Vaccinations have indeed been the topic of much craziness in the US as of late.
More on-topic, I once mentioned to a European colleague my company's policy of giving employees four weeks of vacation once they've been here for five years. It took some convincing for him to understand that those employees did not get that extra four weeks of paid vacation as their PTO balance every year thereafter.
Technically I live in Israel, where we have 14 days minimum holidays but nobody actually enforces labor law because there's More Important Stuff (ie: silly geopolitical game-playing) to take care of.
I'd argue it does. Deserve as mentioned in the parent implies some sort of generally accepted human 'right'.
The length of the work day/ work week is fairly arbitrary and definitely up for debate, there are great arguments that actually a three day working week would make far more sense [1].
Imo describing a simple convention in terms of deserve discourages debate and so should be avoided. Something broader such as `a human being deserves not to have to work every waking hour to live` would have been more acceptable as it separates the underlying principle from arbitrary conventions.
> Every human being deserves an average of 8 hours of work, 8 hours of family/leisure, 8 hours of sleep and 2 days a week free.
"[...]deserves an average of 8 hours of work[...]"
"[...]2 days a week free[...]"
I think that's the snake oil you're smelling.
How does society ensure this can happen? With laws, of course! Why, we can just make overtime and >5 in every 7 days with worked hours illegal, it's so simple...
It worked fine in France, ended up raising the overall productivity of their economy. France now has a higher standard of living than the US, so it might be worth looking at what they're doing right.
Also, a single number will be misleading. France has fewer immigrants and thus a different cultural structure. It also has very different neighbors and trade partners.
How about a law against ridiculously naive expectations of what can be achieved through the law? Ignoring a thorough analysis of unintended consequences when proposing a law should be punishable by the rack. It's so simple.
Actually "commodity" professions actually have it pretty good on this score. By definition, commodity profession jobs are everywhere, because there are a lot of them, that's what makes them "commodity" - there are cashier jobs within a kilometre of where most of us live, as an example. It's when you start getting specialised that it gets harder to negotiate where you work - there might only be one company doing web-development work in a 10km radius around your home. Of course specialisation allows you to negotiate up your salary, so you can offset the loss of freedom in choosing the location of your workplace with an increase in freedom of choosing the location of your house / apartment due to a higher salary.
Good point, because in the US at least, people will willingly sacrifice their leisure time for more money (longer commutes allowing for cheaper housing being just one example).
Funny thing. I commute not that much (1hr) per workday. I use this time, to listen to relaxing music and reading fiction (and sometimes popular science).
After the commute I have to walk 10 minutes, to arrive at my front door. I have to walk through a little park. Really. For me commuting and then walking is my way of coming down. Of letting go of the work, so that I arrive at home free of all the stuff, that happens in front of my two screens.
But that is just anecdotal evidence - and it might just work for me.
But on the topic, I would add one point: Regularly working more than the paid 8 hours might show another thing: You just are not fit for the work you do. You are not good enough, as you cannot get it done in 8 hours.
By the way is that a signal that you send to your boss, if you work longer regularly.
A driving commute makes you unhappy because it is exhausting, and you lose that time. It sounds like your commute is on transit, which isn't so bad... you can read, so that time is still yours. I'd love an hour transit commute. I like to read!
I’m actually considering moving a bit further from Amsterdam, because the amount of time I spend on the train is just a tiny bit too short for reading. Added bonus: I’d live next to the sea!
(but I also willingly increase the commute time by picking a „wrong” train station, to have a longer cycling leg of the commute)
A few years back I changed from a 1 hour drive (with completely unpredictable queues and delays) to get to work to a very pleasant 25 minute walk - which I love.
The only problem is that having got used to this I'd be very reluctant to take a job that I could walk or cycle to - which is a bit limiting.
I had a half hour walk to work for a couple years and I was always shredded. I exercise regularly anyway, but with that easy daily hour of walking my body fat stayed super low without any real deliberate effort.
I can't say my walk is great exercise - but as it is through central Edinburgh it is very scenic!
I did used to cycle ~10 miles to work, which was far better exercise. Unfortunately my employer doesn't want to relocate to a convenient distance just for me.... :-)
I commuted to an office for the first couple of years of my career and it was awful. Now I only commute to the farm and get excited about it. The drive itself is very similar to both locations.
I feel like the big difference is the expectations of others placed on me. When I had to commute to the office, I was doing it for someone else. Others wanted me there certain days, at certain times, and it becomes a dash to meeting their expectations. That was the most draining part of the entire job. On the farm, I'm doing it for myself. I want to go because it is what I want to do.
Driving itself isn't that bad. I spent nine hours in the tractor and another hour on the road yesterday and while I was certainly tired and beat up, I felt a certain euphoria of accomplishment.
That being said, I think a lot of physician work takes a lot of personal connections - it's not easily "handed off". There's probably a way to make this more efficient/manageable, but it's probably not trivial.
Labor unions, to replace the alternative, which was no weekend at all. Just like the 8h day.
The numbers didn’t come from nothing, but certainly didn’t come from any great calculation. It came from how much we (the workers) could wrestle away from industrialists. Google scholar searches (not very extensive, feel free to repeat) weakly suggests that cutting work hours may have a net positive effect on economy, so as long as I’m operating from the worker perspective, it actually makes sense to not settle on the current ratio. It’s like settling on your wage because you once got a raise 105 years ago.
I think the last point is also the most important: working longer hours does not make you more productive on an absolute scale! It's not that you accomplish less per hour, it's that you accomplish less full stop.
Now, working an 80-hour week once in a rare while? That actually works. If you have a really important deadline or really need to get something done, sure. But doing it regularly is completely irrational. Take a look at "Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work"[1].
It's also very important not to fall into a trap that demands extreme hours often. It's too easy to think it'll be "just this once". And if it really is just once--for some very good reason--then fine. But if you catch yourself doing it repeatedly, watch out.
If you want to accomplish anything, you should of course be willing to work hard. But, more importantly, you have to work efficiently. Constantly working long hours might be hard, but it's not efficient. Especially for a startup, how hard or long you worked simply does not matter--what's important is what you accomplished.
I always feel super lazy when I read these articles criticizing excessively long work weeks. Honestly, I think 40 hours is way too long, especially when the bulk of it is boring.
That being said, when you're working on something you enjoy and you get into that "flow" state, time becomes irrelevant. If something is fun and energizes you, you can do it without watching the clock, which the author does with his side projects.
If you work at a regular job and say you get into that flow state for 2 hour or so, when you're done, you realize, "shit, i have to be here for another 6 hours." Then you spend a lot of time dicking around on the internet/answering e-mails/doing non mentally taxing stuff. However, those 6 hours are actually pretty draining/depressing because you have to maintain the illusion that you're working + deal with the guilt that you're not being productive.
I dunno, maybe I'm just especially lazy and would like to spend as little time as possible working on things I don't enjoy.
a lot of comments here dance around the "quality" of hours.
the "flow" state you describe is quality time. we all pretty much like that.
on the flip side, if i'm at home 12 hours a day but my wife is in the other room and my child is watching tv while i'm on my phone checking twitter and hacker news... you get the point.
all these numbers and thresholds are practically irrelevant. quality of time spent is key...
"Working for free" after 40 hours never resonated with me. It comes out of hard fought labor battles, but an assembly line is difficult to relate to when I'm eating free snacks in my comfy Aeron chair and working on things that generally interest me.
I think the biggest issue here is misaligned expectations between boss and worker. Personally, I've always gone into a job understanding what it was going to take to be successful. My comp expectations are adjusted accordingly. In trading bonds, which is nearly a 24 hour market, it does require >8 hours on the trading floor. At the end of the year my boss doesn't really care about my hours as long as our customers are happy and I've produced PnL.
I'd like to add that the statement "If you’re salaried, you’re working for free" is inaccurate in two very important dimensions:
1) Equity stake. The 40 hour workweek was invented for laborers, not owners. Would the author admonish a business owner to only work 8 hours a week? At what level of ownership stake does it become acceptable to work more than 8 hours?
2) Compensation increase through recognition and achievement. Working extra hours may not increase one's immediate paycheck but after many years in this business I feel comfortable saying that consistent hard work generally results in rather substantially increased compensation and opportunity in the long term.
I had the opposite experience. Working long hours never got me a raise or promotion. Successful projects got me raises and promotions, but I generally don't need to work even 40 hours to make that happen. Once I lifted my head up out of the code and started taking a more business approach to my work rather than engineering approach, that's when my value and income skyrocketed. The guys I know that rack up those 50+ hour weeks every single week get the same 3% raise they've always gotten and most of them are pretty bitter about it.
This is why hitching yourself to the wrong boss can be extremely detrimental to your career. A good boss would compensate and promote any 50+ hour rockstar performer for making him look good. As the organization gets bigger, the manager with the most senior people often wins, regardless of competency. If a boss is not giving out raises and fighting for promotions, he is going to have to play out more political capital in order to get anything done, or to cover his ass when shit doesn't get done.
Working any number unpaid hours is working for free, no matter how you spin it.*
1) Business owners aren't laborers. They work, and they may draw a salary for tax purposes, but they cannot be placed in the same bin as "employee," which is what "laborer" means in this context. As a matter of opinion on your aside, I'd argue that the "level of ownership" required would be one sufficient to imbue the equity holder with the significant responsibility, authority, share of the profits that other "major" equity holders have.
2) That compensation generally rises with recognition and achievement is: a) not in dispute; b) not relevant to the point, because it doesn't address unpaid hours worked.
* There's a certain argument that exempt salaried employees are paid for their expertise, not their time. Therefore, the hours they work merely divide the salary they earn, so that their effective hourly rate decreases as hours worked rises, but is never zero. Of course this isn't applied symmetrically--a salaried worker who completes his tasks "early" in the week is unlikely to be allowed to take the rest of it off without a reduction in pay (or, more likely, suspicion and being marked for termination).
In regards to #1 I understand your point. I am suggesting that a large portion of software developers in startups do have significant responsibility, authority and share of profits. Even at a large company: Consider a scenario of a Principal/Architect earning $150k salary and $150k in equity grants and working on a flagship product. Even at an extremely large company it appears to me, based on my own experience, that a meaningful connection exists between effort and reward.
In regards to #2, I don't think you can wave away this point. A raise is, in fact, compensation.
If the "Principal/Architect's" equity grant affords him a definitive say in the direction of the company, then he's an owner, not a worker. If it doesn't, then the grant is indistinguishable from an ESPP with a larger discount, in terms of raw compensation, and any hours he works over 40 is unpaid (i.e. 'free' work).
With respect to #2: A raise is not, in fact, compensation. It's a promise of future compensation based on future work. Calling it anything else is, frankly, less than honest.
Any equity stake is improved by work in the company. Your argument seems to be that the work isn't sufficient, but you're not being clear about where you draw the line.
WRT #2, the impact on income when viewing a career over a long period of time is clear. It appears you're being dishonest by refusing to acknowledge this rather obvious fact. You can say "it's not compensation" until you're blue in the face but at the end of the day people who do more will on average earn more.
I think the line is somewhat blurred, but I object to the notion that I'm not being clear: if the equity stake doesn't give a person the same, or comparable, authority and take of the profit as "major" shareholders, the person is an employee, not an owner. To take one specific case as an example, if a person can be fired by the "real" owner/equity holders, he's not an owner. So the "Product Manager" in your example, if he doesn't get paid for every hour he works, is working for free for some hours, regardless of the particulars of the ESPP program he's participating in.
You're conflating "compensation in year N+1" with "being paid for hours worked in year N." The compensation you're talking about is dependent on work done in year N+1, and is not some sort of "back pay" or "built in, amortized pay" for the work done previously.
A simple example may help illuminate what "working for free" means in the context of this discussion.
1) You earn $1000 per week in salary compensation.
2) You work 45 hours during a given week.
3) You are paid $1000 for work done that week.
It doesn't matter whether you get a raise the next week, or what the amount of the raise is. For the week you already worked you contributed 5 hours of unpaid, free labor to your employer.
Surely what matters is the overall, effective, relationship between work done and money received.
Consider the following "toy model", which is of course a deliberate oversimplification. Everyone starts at a salary of $10000/year, in exchange for which they are required to work 40 hours per week. If you choose, you can work 50 hours per week instead (all year), in which case your salary the next year will be 10% higher.
In this model, all the compensation-or-not-whatever-you-want-to-call-it you get for working extra hours is in the future, and does indeed depend on your working in the future. Just as you say.
On the other hand, someone who works 40 hours a week every week for 10 years gets $100k and someone who works 50 hours a week every week for 10 years gets almost $160k.
I don't think the fact that the compensation is in the future and subject to uncertainty makes it any less real. Imagine that it works this way instead: When you work extra hours one week, you get "paid" a token. If you collect enough tokens, you can exchange them for a salary increase. It seems clear to me that these tokens have value (would you rather have 100 of them than 50? Yes? Then they have value), and therefore being given them in exchange for doing extra work is a form of compensation.
Of course in the real world you don't know that your extra hard work will lead to a salary increase, and you don't know you'll still be working at that employer to take advantage of it. So let's say that those tokens are exchangeable, once you have enough, for stock options instead of salary increases. Again, clearly compensation (though you might choose to be skeptical about how valuable it is) and uncertain in very much the same ways.
It is, for sure, true in a sense that for the extra-hard week you just worked you contributed some "unpaid, free labor to your employer". But you probably did it with the understanding that it would, on balance, lead to your employer paying you more in the future (either in recognition of your productivity and commitment to the company, or on account of being more successful through your efforts, or both). The difference between this and real unpaid work is much the same as the difference between lending someone some money (when they might just run away with it and never repay you) and giving it to them.
Now, if you weaken your claim a little and say that extra work is generally very badly paid, I'd be much more likely to agree.
> that consistent hard work generally results in rather substantially increased compensation and opportunity in the long term.
I agree. I don't think I'd be in the same place in my career today if I had a "working for free" attitude. Sometimes it was more hours and sometimes it was just a genuine curiosity about taking on challenges that are completely foreign to me.
Getting increases in comp is always a long-term game. There's no road map (i.e., work 2 more hours building this to get that experience which will increase my market value by X) and you'll go down a lot of wrong roads that will add zero to your market value. More importantly it requires delayed gratification. There can be a long delay between the work you put in and the payoff.
But as well as your comp expectations, your comp is also adjusted accordingly through a bonus program. I am not sure the advice provided applies to those with a bonus and equity incentive.
Bonus is part of an overall compensation package. Its not payment for 'overtime'. Its just a different risk/reward calculation then only salary. The key point in all of this is to have a mutual understanding of expectations with your manager.
Working even half an hour extra each day adds up to ~3 weeks a year of extra work that you're not getting paid for. That's several thousand dollars in wages. It's easy to dismiss a half-hour here or there but if you sit down and run the numbers, it's quite an unpleasant conclusion.
What if your salary already has that factored in? What if you wouldn't have that salary without those extra 3 weeks/year you are working? To say it another way, if I only work 1 hour/day and run the numbers it is a great conclusion.
That's kind of what I'm getting at, though. If a job is advertised at $50k, and then you find out they expect you to work 9 hours a day instead of the usual 8, it's really more like $44k. Such discrepancies just make it harder to compare apples to apples when looking at the job market.
Most of these articles that deride long work hours don't account for the following:
1. When you are the smartest in the room, you can get away with 40 hours because what you produce in 40 hours will be orders of magnitude ahead of what a normal guy produces in 80 hours. Trouble comes when you start being part of super smart teams (mine has about 9 engineers sharing around 150 years of systems/db building expertise amongst them). Here 40 hours gets you only to the 'achieved level'. For some people this is not good enough, especially if they come from a continuous string of 'excelled levels'.
2. I am not paid to do 40 hours of work. I am paid to get things done. Some things are automatable (which we do) but a lot of things require NLP and is hard to automate. These we do manually. They add up.
3. It is VERY hard to hire good senior engineers. My company (Amazon) pays a ton of money, has offices in great cities but still we find hiring hard. This means you won't be offloading a bunch of those anytime soon and to be competitive, you have to do this.
4. Many of us do this not out of coercion, but because we want to. I personally have a set of goals, own a bunch of stuff that I really want to get done. 8 hours is not enough.
5. As you grow senior, you spend a ton of time co-ordinating work. This means unless you dedicate time before and after regular office hours, you personally aren't going to get coding done. And somethings require your personal coding/debugging effort - no way around it.
Family setup is personal: At least in my case, thankfully my wife chose to be a home maker and a full time mom. This frees up a lot of my responsibilities and allows me to focus harder on my job for the betterment of the family as a unit. YMMV.
EDIT: I always plug my team, so will do it again here. We are hiring. If you want to work with world class engineers in a great & growing service (AWS DynamoDB) - PM me. I chose this for the learning and no regrets till date.
This is bunk. You're paid to do work which can be done in 40 hours/wk or you're being exploited (and so are a lot of other people). When you're 60 would you rather have memories with your kids, or have the satisfaction of writing lots of code in the 2010s that is not being used anymore because it got obsolete/automated? (don't believe that can happen? Talk to rule-based AI researchers from the 80s)
The only reasons to do long hours are because a) you need a temporary career boost, and b) you're Batman and the world depends on you.
Just because there is a possibility that my work could be made obsolete, I can't stop working. That is a non-starter. Why do you think people keep working on various fields like physics when most of them are theories that might be disproved very soon?
You are also forgetting the reason where you want to address the engineering need in you: Some of us have fun making this. Believe it or not, We want to do this :)
I do have other time that I spend with my family etc. More or less is personal preference. Family is one of those things that one can sink in infinite time and still feel incomplete - we all strike balances. FWIW - I sleep only 6 hours or so, so it provides a bit of a leg up. I usually nap a bit on the weekends though.
My meta-point is: Some people look at a job as a means to make a living. I look at mine as an opportunity. Here I have a company that is willing to put millions of dollars in the direction I point at or into the work that I am doing, based purely on trust. This kind of scale / experience is impossible to get by myself. For this I have to go the extra mile. The end result might benefit the company, but I find joy in the process of creation.
The company is not exactly chintzy either. They compensate me well enough to keep that from becoming an issue to me or my family.
I would add that a lot of employers (and I suppose that also VCs, but I haven't had the experience first hand) love to try to make you think you're Batman, in order to trick you into long hours.
Amazon tried to recruit me (I have almost 30 years experience, much of it as team lead). However, when I found out about the corporate "death march" culture, I decided not to pursue it. My annual salary would go up, but my hourly compensation would go down.
It might not matter to your wife and kids, but it matters to mine.
Otherwise, the work there did in fact sound pretty interesting, but the opportunity cost was too high.
1. Because we are in a super competitive market. The talent pool at the top end is VERY contested and for every offer from one of FB/GOOG/AMZN/TWTR/MS there is a competing bigger offer elsewhere.
2. The top end doesn't usually move for things like money/perks. They feel ownership to the thing they are building meaning they move only when they are super pissed or are at a logical endpoint. They might also have familial ties to their locale by now.
3. Also even if you move as a super senior engineer, you will have to go through the age old cycle of convincing EVERYONE in the new company that you are worth your salt etc. else you won't garner much respect. This is way harder in these smarter teams.
That's off the top of my head.
>Can you positively exclude the influence of the known long-hour culture?
I think so. Most of the high-achievers seem to not care about this. These are people who ride on the high of solving complex issues and they need the repeated hits.
I meant ownership in terms of features / products. The money becomes a non-issue after a point.
To answer your specific question: Yes. You do receive shares / sign-on bonuses and these amount to be very big. But they usually have a vesting period though.
Google for example would still be profitable it paid everyone including secritary's 500,000$ a year. So no companies stick with a market rate well below what a top engineer's output is actually worth.
If you are working with a group of people that are considered "super smart", and you are in that group, well, regardless of what you say, the inclusion in the group makes you also "super smart". So, in fact you should be working even less than 40 hours and get much much more done than the "average" group.
It almost seems like Amazon culture foster's this attitude of "we hire really smart people, if you can't keep up, you need to work harder." This might make sense if one or two people in the group were doing the long hours but when its the whole group, well, I would suggest that the company has done a great job of selling the kool-aid.
Amazon doesn't foist a 'keep up' requirement on people. You can just do your job, make a bunch of money and have fun working here for a long time. There might be a little bit more work compared to other companies that build packaged software, but nothing the web companies don't have.
And no - I was not saying the team does long hours either. We have all mixes of people, some do long hours and some wrap it at 40 or 45 max. I was only justifying why some might do long hours.
Any super-smart group with good camaraderie gets a bunch of work done. But if you want to distinguish yourself in that group, you are going to have to put in extra. There is also the pesky part about differing experiences / knowledge bases. It takes extra to tap into all that as well. All of that add up.
The OP does mention that long hours are not sustainable which recognizes that occasional bursts of extra effort will get results. As for point number 5, nobody said that people should go home and sleep at the end of their 8 hour day. If you have a hobby that is completely different from your day job, then it will energize you, as you have discovered. Your day job is management and your hobby is coding.
Most of my hobbies are related to my product - so no issues there. But even in the main project, there are some issues that require the personal attention of senior engineers. These will require time aside from the regular co-ordination / mentoring.
Also I don't manage people. Just projects - a Technical lead so to say.
I've found that long hours are indicators, sometimes of good things and other times not. Long hours over a lengthy duration of time have shown me two things: 1) an individual's work ethic, and 2) bad management.
In the tech industry, specifically with software development, I've had teams I've managed where we needed to pull longer hours in order to meet a deadline. And my teams stepped up, because we all wanted to succeed. The long hours were a known entity, and weren't the negative long hours.
I've also had teams forced into the negative long hours, and those were my fault (or rather, they were my responsibility to manage and I didn't do a good job.) Environments that somehow believe that those of us in the tech industry somehow enjoy acts like the "diving catch" and being "the savior" offer no value, other than learning what not to do.
The biggest thing to be cautious with long-hour situations is burnout. The negative long-hour scenarios can lead to resentment, but those feelings often pass after a while. Burnout, on the other hand, can have very real long-term consequences.
Well said. Most of the points can be derived from the first one ("You are working for free"), much in the way that most of Mechanical Engineering can be derived from F=MA. Once you take that idea on board, the motivations behind companies, managers, clients, etc. creating a culture of "Heros That Work Long Hours" become rather transparent.
Adding "long hours don't actually mean you get more stuff done" into the mix is just a little ironic icing to the whole situation.
The thing is most early startup employees dip heavily into the equity/options side of the compensation. So they aren't working for free, they are working to make their equity share worth more by helping the company succeed.
(Poor management, poor planning, dropping productivity per hour worked as the workday is increased).
It's nothing new of course, Ford pushed for 8 hour shifts, not out of the kindness of his heart.
As for working "for free" -- that could be seen as poor labour laws. Norway has very strict rules regarding work hours (and compensation). Not that they're not broken -- but generally only managers (or others who realistically can set their own hours) are allowed effectively unlimited over time.
This reminds me of the section in Freakonomics[1] about how drug gangs are organised. Only the top guys actually rake in the money. The rank and file are wannabes giving their time and taking all the risk with little reward, in the hope that they'll get noticed. Ring any bells?
Small company got acquired by a big 4 accounting firm.
Lots of changes, seemingly lots of room for growth.
Some people left.
I stepped up (no promotion or raise) and took over for several departed people.
Worked 12-14 hour days, 6 days a week, for 10 months.
Received the highest performance award, which is given to 0.25% of the 50k+ employees in the US.
Got a 1.25% raise because our unit was underperforming as a whole.
Quit 4 months later. (after taking 2 months off after my second daughter was born.)
During my first startup, I worked 6 or 7 day weeks, 13+ hours a day. At Hyperink, in my first year, I (on my own accord) slept in the office over 30 days. During this entire stretch, I was perhaps more productive and happier than any other time I can remember. The main reason why? The teams and the comradery.
I wish this article at least had relevant studies + statistics on this subject as it is not representative of any of the 4 startup experiences I've been involved with. Actually, in diametric opposition to this author's stance, our teams' cultures were united and strenghtened around the concept of working hard (which, in our case, happened to at least partly equate to long hours).
I should be fair and admit, it may be the case that this article is more relevant to later stage companies -- I don't have a great amount of experience at 100+ employee companies.
From my experience, when one loves what one works on, one often works on said thing a lot. Some of the hardest working people I know work (addictively) towards projects they're not (necessarily) paid to work on. For instance, one of my teammates, Mischief, spends about 5 hours a day porting packages over to Plan9 and writing terminal emulators in go (why not).
Im not so enlightened that I can draw conclusions about people who _don't_ work long hours, but it seems intuitive that people who do work long hours fall into one of two binary classes: (1) they are forced to (in order to achieve some level of compensation) / fear layoff, (2) they like the product, team, or like working hard. That is, intrinsically one either wants to work hard or they don't want to.
You want people in the latter category, and you achieve this by being fair with equity, providing people opportunities to have an impact or work on what they love, by providing a supporting environment, and by having good hiring practices.
There will always be great people who love your team / vision / culture / management (un)structure and who physically cannot commit to 70 hour work weeks (family, etc). You and your team have to decide whether it makes sense for this person to be part of the team and be prepared to make adjustments to make it work.
What I wish this article was about:
* How teams can (and should learn to) effectively prioritize teammates' health
* Why pressure to work hard can be destructive
* How to programmatically or systematically eliminate or amortize stressful tech/scaling/hr/bd problems to avoid disasters.
The CxOs of these companies make it a priority to build team spirit for precisely this reason: the sense of camaraderie will compel employees to work hard. All for the team, you know.
The military does this with its soldiers too. It's a system finely honed through centuries, and enables campaigns that truly rational players would abandon in an instant.
And, in another twisted example, viewers of the TV show 'Lost' were manipulated into caring for the characters, so that by the ridiculous end foisted on them, the entire thing had become 'about the characters'.
>or instance, one of my teammates, Mischief, spends about 5 hours a day porting packages over to Plan9 and writing terminal emulators in go (why not).
Interesting that communities like this one define work as 'your day job'. See for you, it's okay that your teammate works the standard 8 hours on his computers, then goes home and spends another 5 doing more computer 'work'. Perhaps your distinction is that between 9 and 5, he's working for other people, not himself. What about somebody doing a startup? In that case, there should be nothing wrong with coding for 12 hours a day, since it's a personal project really.
Personally if I'm already spending half the day writing code, I will stay away from computers in the evening. There's much more to life.
I spent two months this past spring on a project where I put in similar time of my own accord as well. Had 2.5 days off in 7 weeks. Averaged 78.5 hours a week over the period. Slept 4-5 hours a night.
It was one of the most rewarding and happy periods of work I've had.
I know there are medical studies that suggest less than x hours of sleep a night is bad for your health. Or, working more than 45-ish hours in a week spikes cortisol levels.
I'd like see the results of these studies correlated with respondent's happiness and satisfaction.
You've got a good insight here:
> Why pressure to work hard can be destructive
I also wonder if the negative health effects are more strongly correlated to the stress of "having" to work those sorts of hours vice legitimately "wanting" to work them, sans stress.
I appreciate you offering up fair counter points. I think anyone who reads this article should take a look at your response to understand what "long hours" can mean in a good way. Definitely agree there's a lot more to discuss.
It's worth noting that the original article is content marketing for that company and they do not explicitly state that "culture consulting" is their business in the article. So it's fair to say they are using this as a mechanism to get more customers, and offering a fair point of view is secondary.
Next time you are on an airliner think what kind of "work ethic" you'd like your pilot to have. One who puts in 80 hours a week, or a "lazy" one who only works 30 hours per week.
(Note that FAA actually limits how many hours a week an airline pilot can fly. I think the number is close to 30).
From my experience, I can only agree. Aged 24, I was given responsibly for a near 150-year-old weekly newspaper which is read by more than 30,000 people a week. Needless to say, I ended up working a quite ridiculous amount of unpaid overtime.
Keep asking myself why I put in all the extra hours. Journalism's about as competitive an industry as exists but I didn't have self-advancement in mind. It wasn't because it was almost expected even if unwritten. Nor was it because of procrastination.
The explanation that jumps to mind's two-fold.
First, circumstance and necessity. The industry's not so much shrinking as shrivelling. By the time I left in July, I had two full-time staff to produce a newspaper which more oft than not numbered more than 100 tabloid pages. To give those numbers some context, there were many fewer pages and many more editorial staff when the paper was founded in the 1800s. Jobs simply needed doing and I was a willing horse.
And second, pride. Not pride in long hours but pride in a job well done. I was a martyr to the readers' cause and I was going to put out the best paper in my power.
However, three years later and long burned out, it was part a wider culture which culminated in me leaving the company. I've drawn similar conclusions to the author when he says work long hours--but only on your own terms.
In my first development job, I worked very long hours — perhaps because I didn't have great mentors, often worked remotely, and found myself doing tons of learning/education just to get by. This was OK for a while; I had to pay my dues and learn how to do the job, but I do not think it is sustainable, after the first year I burned out and was ready to move on.
Now, I prefer long, uninterrupted workdays, but I do not like to work much more than 40 hours per week. The traditional 5 day per week model is not perfect, though. I prefer 4 longer days (10-12 hours), and 3 days off.
This entire piece is written from the perspective of someone who sees their job as only a way to make money. That person might look at me and say something along the lines of "look at him, wasting his life away spending time at work." To me, though, he is the one wasting his life spending even a few hours a day to do something he would not do for free. If you don't absolutely love your job, quit. And if you absolutely love your job, why the hell wouldn't you want to stay a few more minutes?
Quite clearly you love your job more than you love your friends and family if you're happy staying back because you love your job as opposed to going home to your husband or wife, or catching up with your best friend who you haven't seen in 3 months because you've been too busy working.
Overtime is expected in the design and development industry. It's when companies factor in overtime into their estimates in order to quote lower than other agencies competing for the same work because they know that the employees will pick up the slack to get it done, that's when it's not alright.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love my job and where I work, but if overtime is an expected thing every single project, that's taking advantage of your own employees and a sure-fire way to churn through workers like butter and eventually get yourself a reputation in the industry for being a bad place to work. People talk and reputation matters in the design and development industry more than people realise, it's everything.
I have a family and friends, you might be okay with working overtime, but what about your wife, is she okay with it? What if you have children at home wanting to see their father? You might be okay with it now, but you'll regret it when you're older and realise you missed out on your children growing up.
You mention family a bunch, and I think that's important.
If you are 20 and single, and staying late in the office means pizza and a bit of XBox with your team later on, it is genuinely much nicer than going back to your empty little apartment and microwaving an instant meal.
If you have a family, then regardless of how much you like XBox, if you are a decent person you will run out the door at 5.
I'm young and irresponsible. When I glance round the office at 8pm, and see a guys I know have baby children working free over time like every other night, I want to shake them.
I don't absolutely love my job. I mean, I'm pretty happy with it. It's satisfying. Not "absolutely love," though.
You know what I do absolutely love? Having a roof over my head at night. Not starving to death.
"If you don't absolutely love your job, quit" is a great sentiment if you live in a utopian fairyland where you can comfortably support yourself knitting sweaters or playing video games or whatever it is you might love to do. In the real world, it's insultingly naive. Loving your job is a luxury that is simply not available to the large majority of humans, not at any price. If you're one of the exceptions, more power to you, but it's not really relevant to the rest of us.
If you don't love your job, then that's the whole point of having a social deal that it's perfectly okay to work 40 hour weeks + have a roof over your head + don't starve.
I love my job, and I love working extra hours on it. But on my own terms and as a means of building something more, not compensating for lack of planning or management.
> why the hell wouldn't you want to stay a few more minutes?
Strawman. Everyone stays that extra few minutes. Sometimes even a few hours on occasion. That's not what 'long hours' here refer to.
If you work for yourself that's something. But I really hope you don't work for someone else with that attitude because in that case people like you are making it difficult for the rest of us.
If you work for someone else and your attitude is "haha I love this job so much I'm willing to do it for free" then everyone else starts discounting everything on you "because hey that guy loves doing this stuff".
Don't bring your love for the job into the equation because that will only hurt you.
this is false and debunked in mythical man month. It follows from "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" that we need to add hours, not people. Or we can break our contract if we'd rather to that.
"We respect ourselves and our people enough to honor their time and their personal lives so we cannot agree to your deadline."
This also misses the point - projects start on time and end late. at the time the deadline was agreed to, we happily accepted payment.
The Mythical Man Month points out that adding manpower doesn't accelerate a project. In no way does that mean that adding hours does. They are completely unrelated ideas.
Adding manpower doesn't accelerate a project because more people doesn't immediately mean more productivity. Adding hours can only accelerate a project if more hours means more productivity. There are multiple studies that show this is false after a short period (a week or two), and that you rapidly go in the opposite direction. The mythical man month's points are irrelevant to this.
You're starting off with the base idea that there is something you can add can make a late software project more on time. Reality seems to indicate that often, a late software project will simply be late, unless you cut scope or corners mercilessly. Unless, in essence, you remove something.
"From a business point of view, long hours by programmers are a key to profitability. ..."
wrote Phil Greenspun[1], here's the rest of the quote:
"... Suppose that a programmer needs to spend 25 hours per week keeping current with new technology, getting coordinated with other programmers, contributing to documentation and thought leadership pieces, and comprehending the structures of the systems being extended. Under this assumption, a programmer who works 55 hours per week will produce twice as much code as one who works 40 hours per week. In The Mythical Man-Month, the only great book ever written on software engineering, Fred Brooks concludes that no software product should be designed by more than two people. He argues that a program designed by more than two people might be more complete but it will never be easy to understand because it will not be as consistent as something designed by fewer people. This means that if you want to follow the best practices of the industry in terms of design and architecture, the only way to improve speed to market is to have the same people working longer hours. Finally there is the common sense notion that the smaller the team the less management overhead. A product is going to get out the door much faster if it is built by 4 people working 70-hour weeks (180 productive programmer-hours per week, after subtracting for 25 hours of coordination and structure comprehension time) than if by 12 people working 40-hour weeks (the same net of 180 hours per week). The 12-person team will inevitably require additional managers and all-day meetings to stay coordinated."[1]
This is a mathematical analysis built on unstated assumptions of how long the brain can focus on something in the long term. By this line of reasoning, 4 people working 168-hour weeks would be maximally productive, but they wouldn't be sleeping, so obviously the purely mathematical argument falls down on its face.
My point is, knowing that turning dial A up doesn't help doesn't mean that turning dial B up does. It just means turning dial A up doesn't. Sometimes the reality is that turning neither dial up is the only option, and you have to plan around that fact.
In reality, there's decent evidence out there to support the statement that turning dial B up can be just as counterproductive as turning dial A up unless it's done very judiciously.
>This also misses the point - projects start on time and end late. at the time the deadline was agreed to, we happily accepted payment.
Deadlines are artificial constructs in software development, usually built up and justified using completely fictional inputs. It amazes me how many can input assumptions and guesses and then treat the output as some concrete statement of fact.
This isn't to use the too common "it'll be done when it's done, man" Dude-ism, but it is a complete cop-out to point to some initial, often agreed-to-under-duress calendar mark as the agreement to unlimited overtime. It never means that.
I remember being in an agile meeting once where everyone estimated out some features and gave them durations (span of weeks based essentially on gut feel). These were all studiously entered into the workboard, where the manager then said "okay so that is n hours assuming 6.5 hours of work a day [assuming administrative overhead, bug fixes, etc]. So now if we just put in 9 hours of work a day we'll be done by [some calendar date]". That is the nonsense that yields most "deadlines".
I'm a neuroscientist by training. I'm really surprised that we don't talk today about the brain among knowledge workers like we do muscles with professional athletes. We all know that less sleep, worse nutrition, and long hours affect how we perform. Yet, we still expect to work 60 to 80 weeks and be at our best? It makes no sense and some day we'll look back and wonder what this generation was thinking.
"Working for free" after 40 hours isn't necessarily accurate if you are on salary, at least if your company is run reasonably well. At my job, I'm paid a salary based on my performance and the quality of my deliverables. If I finish those in less than 40 hours, I am free to go home (although I generally stay and get some work done on projects that are less time sensitive), but if I have to stay late to finish them, I may end up working more than 40 hours. Nowhere in my agreement to come work here was 40 hours a week specified. If it became the norm that I worked 60 hours a week to complete my deliverables (and I wasn't sandbagging), I would ask for a raise to reflect that.
However, I agree that many companies are not great at this. While my company is not perfect, their handling of this issue is one of the many things they do extremely well.
We were faced by constant pressure to develop customer stuff faster, and the team were doing regular 60+ hour weeks. I put in some new rules on hours, including:
- no dev worked more than 40 hours on scheduled projects. Overtime was for disaster recovery or slippage repair to meet a deadline
- if the salesperson agreed to a new deadline, then we went over their other tasks and worked out what needed to shift to make room. If they insisted on overtime, then we insisted on lieu time to pay it back, from their scheduled project time.
- if someone came in to fix a disaster, we gave them time of in lieu. If we really couldn't do the time off, we paid them overtime for the time.
It took a few months for this to settle in, and I got to test the productivity changes (by measuring project estimates vs actuals). Productivity improved as the hours worked decreased.
The productivity gains came mostly from more realistic project estimates, but a significant part from increased dev productivity... they just wrote better code that needed less correction, faster.
I would post the data, but it's commercially sensitive and about ten years old now.
I'd like to second this - I ran the same stats once, while contracting for a customer with excessive demands.
I found that a week of working long hours was about my max, and after that I started making mistakes to the point that the extra hours actually became counter productive.
You can debate until you're blue in the face the claims about poisonous workplace culture, broken management, unreasonable / unsustainable expectations, or other intangible things unmentioned in this piece (like people working extra because they're angling for a promotion, or trying to learn a new job skill that will be valuable in the future) -- but the math doesn't lie.
If you are salaried and you work overtime, you are working for free. If you're on an hourly wage and you don't get any sort of overtime pay, you're working for free.
Yeah, and if you're in a startup and you have a significant equity position then you are not working for free, you are directly monetarily motivated.
Also, people act to maximize their utility, not necessarily compensation. The act of working hard and hitting deadlines is a form of compensation in itself.
Finally, lots of people work a lazy 8 hours (with lots of time spent on the phone, Facebook, personal email) and need the extra hours to accomplish 8 hours worth of real work.
Ah! The equity position as fake compensation. Unfortunately for the worker beeze, said "equity" usually turns out to be worthless in a exit, except in unicorn situations (Facebook, etc). The founders, early investors and insider shareholders are all first in line, so mostly likely, you end up with shit, or maybe some options that might be worth something in a few years, if the company hasn't tanked by then.
No thanks, unless I can take your company stock and flip it the same day, I'll take cash.
If pay is one's only reason, long hours for no extra pay are certainly objectionable. But that's a circular argument.
I like working long hours when it's work that I want to be doing. If people are working at something they don't want to do, maybe that is the real problem. For menial jobs that no one enjoys, there may be no easy way to fix the situation, but in an industry like tech there is little excuse for accepting it.
Most large companies will grade you based on your work adjusting bonus and the amount of stock you recive. That way there is at least some monetary incetive for it as well.
Working extra hours with that in mind would only be wise if you could accurately predict the reward. It would be a rude surprise if you worked extra hard all year only to hear "Sorry, no performance bonuses this year, our CEOs decided they weren't earning enough."
I think you missed his sarcasm. He feels that objective truth exists. :)
BTW, I have found Yudkowsky's "The Simple Truth" an effective argument against those claim that objective truth doesn't exist. If you walk in the way of a speeding train, you will die irrespective of your beliefs. Beliefs don't alter the reality. http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth/
Hmmm... yes let's disregard the last century of philosophical thought and the postmodernism movement as a whole because the dude who write's Harry Potter fan fic wrote a cute story.
How would you convince a Solipsist that there is an objective truth?
> How would you convince a Solipsist that there is an objective truth?
I can't. But let me quote Bertrand Russell from "An Outline of Philosophy":
Solipsism (the theory that I alone exist) is a view which is hard to refute but still harder to believe. Solipsism is not really believed even by those who think they are convinced of its truth.
A solipsist would have no objection to jumping from a cliff, would he? But he won't actually do it.
That's not the point. If you really are a solipsist, why would jumping off a cliff have more probability of leading to death than not jumping (because the cliff doesn't really exist)?
All solipsism says is that you can't be sure reality exists outside of your own mind. You can question whether or not you would be dead outside of your own experience, but you'd still be dead in your internal world.
The only reason to believe that jumping off a cliff leads to death is because that's what we observe happening to other people and we assume we are like other people. But the solipsist has no reason to believe this as the other people don't exist outside of his own mind therefore he is not like them.
"But the solipsist has no reason to believe this as the other people don't exist outside of his own mind therefore he is not like them."
Except the solipsist is also unsure he exists outside of his own mind too, so why would he believe he is the sole exception to everything he's observed in the only reality he can be sure of?
No? How does him being unsure that reality exists outside his own mind mean he believes he's the sole exception?
I mean if you're unsure there is a reality outside of your own mind, wouldn't that make you more risk adverse? Your death could potentially mean that everyone you've ever known/loved would cease to exist, even if they are a product of your unconscious mind...
> No? How does him being unsure that reality exists outside his own mind mean he believes he's the sole exception?
A solipsist isn't "unsure", he definitely believes reality doesn't exist outside of his own mind. That alone sets him apart from everyone and everything else in the universe, because a solipsist believes he is the only one who actually exists.
That's a pretty unique definition of solipsism. As far as I'm aware a solipsist believes he can't know if reality exists outside his own mind.
But we've strayed pretty far from my original point, which was that you can't disregard centuries of philosophical thought with a story that doesn't address any of the arguments of the ontological frameworks it's trying to refute. I'm not personally a solipsist, but solipsism is by definition not falsifiable, so I'm a little confused about where this conversation is supposed to go...
Considering that everyone is a solipsist these days, that's an interesting problem but it's not a philosophical problem. If someone else is a solipsist I know from experience that they're wrong, and I'm not a solipsist.
> How would you convince a Solipsist that there is an objective truth?
"I refute you!"
Joking aside, I feel Solipsism is immature. Do you know which demographic also comprises Solipsists? Two year olds. "Mommy doesn't exist when I close my eyes." This gives Solipsists an excuse to stop thinking critically about things like ethics, et al. So in this sense, Solipsism's just a cop-out which justifies laziness. When someone says "objective reality doesn't exist", what I really hear is "everybody's equal; you all get a trophy; we all have a right to our opinions". You might recognize this as the Red Herring Fallacy. I think Solipsism is a subtle version of this same fallacy.
Paul Graham says something similar about the subjectivity of aesthetics * : "Your mother at this point is not trying to teach you important truths about aesthetics. She's trying to get the two of you to stop bickering." I think this applies to Moral Relativism, Solipsism, and generally most philosophies which deny the existence of objectivity.
Post Modernism is often said to have been a reaction to Modernism. But I think it's even more important to realize that Post Modernism is a reaction to World War I and II. After WWII, I imagine people realized "Science and objectivity gave us cars and electricity, but it also gave us mustard gas and nuclear weapons. Maybe this whole Modernism gig isn't so great after all..."
According to Literary Post Modernism, there's lots of conflicting narratives rather than a single objective perspective. During the chaos of World Wars I and II, I imagine war-stories naturally contradicted one another. I like the conflicting POV aspect because it can encourage the reader to question the author's reliability, like in Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. Unfortunately, Post Modernism can also have the opposite effect: encouraging readers to quit thinking too hard and to accept the text as it is since "it's all equally valid". This negative aspect fits really well with the self-esteem movement, which (I'll say again) I think is a cop out for thinking critically.
You may notice I'm not refuting Solipsism per se, but ulterior motives for believing Solipsism is valid. This is because going down the road of "formal proofs" probably won't yield anything convincing. We'd simply talk past each other, and in circles, and bicker over definitions. But at the end of the day, it's pretty difficult to disprove abstractions and ideologies sin finding an inherent contradiction. And I'll even admit, maybe Solipsism actually is true. Who knows? I won't claim outright that Solipsism is false. But in my own experience, I find it very unlikely that Solipsism is true * . And I do want to acknowledge a possible bias for believing "Solipsism is true" due to it's convenience.
I wasn't necessarily saying that solipsism is a good philosophical framework. I personally think it's rather limiting. My point was simply that you can't refute centuries of philosophical thought with a story, you actually have to put in the effort to critically examine existing theory and and address the actual arguments of the ontological frameworks you are trying to refute.
"Unfortunately, Post Modernism can also have the opposite effect: encouraging readers to quit thinking too hard and to accept the text as it is since 'it's all equally valid'"
Isn't deconstructionism sort of a core component of Postmodernism? Doesn't the deconstructionist view say that you shouldn't accept the text as it is?
Thats a good argument and may be generalized by quoting George Edward Box "Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful."
I occasionally reread Isaac Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong. While Yudkowsky's The Simple Truth is more rigorous, I find the brevity of Asimov's essay more refreshing. Another perennial favorite of mine is George Orwell's Politics and the English Language.
There is mathematics and physics, at least. A lot of arguing can be, and has been, had here but it's largely arguing about definitions; you cannot deny that they allow you to obtain the "truth" in the sense that that truth can be used to predict and affect what happens in the real world as far as your senses can best tell you. There's no arguing away fire or public key encryption.
>that doesn't mean reality exists
outside of my own experience.
I am aware of phenomenology and I've read some Merleau-Ponty. To my taste, however, the situation where an objective/"objective" scientific truth makes consistent predictions about my sensory experiences that suggest a physical outside world and another where that truth makes consistent predictions about the outside world itself, which in turn causes the sensory experiences, don't seem different in a meaningful way. Why make that distinction?
I mean yeah if you don't care about understanding the nature of existence, the distinction doesn't matter. If all you're concerned with is making useful predictions, there is no point in quibbling about the subjectivity of experience.
My point is simply that just because the scientific method leads to useful predictions that doesn't make it objective truth nor does it invalidate the importance of subjective experience.
>if you don't care about
understanding the nature of
existence, the distinction doesn't
matter
Okay, I think I understand your position now. (Though I'm not sure if the lack of belief in objective truth is as common as you claim.) Sorry be so persistent but I have to ask: suppose you do care about the nature of existence; how do you tell if it's one or the other or which one is more likely?
I'm not sure how to answer that. What is the purpose of determining which one is more likely? I don't think that's a question that's possible to answer nor one that reveals anything about the nature of existence.
There's a good deal of middle ground between the self-evident
>We are not merely rational creatures we are also feeling creatures
and a thought-terminating cliche like
>Objectivity doesn't exist.
The latter doesn't seem like a helpful response to someone who is apparently asking for scientific evidence for long working hours and/or overtime doing harm to you. If anything, knowing what science says on the matter is emotionally important as it could either (if the possibility of permanent harm is limited) provide some relief to or (otherwise) justify the indignation of a person currently doing overtime and unhappy about it (and hopefully lead to action on their part). Both scenarios seem desirable to me.
Edit: Could you explain the downvotes? In case it sounded dismissive I changed "thought-stopper" to the more formal "thought-terminating cliche" above and added the ellipses for clarity.
You pissed off those who are highly invested in either side without provoking any support from the middle; your rewording is no less offensive, especially with the pointer to the pre-edit version, and your usage of parentheses necessitates an above average working memory or rereading.
Thanks for your insight. I'm genuinely surprised if I did come off as being against both sides. I thought my comment was obviously pro-rationalist (my reasoning being that a deliberately rational person would recognize the importance of one's emotional state and use rational thought to improve it). I may have inadvertently stumbled upon a trolling strategy: in what appears to be a binary choice don't be recognizably for either.
I was also apparently too sleepy to call parentheses by their name.
This is a billion or trillion dollar question, and there are many academics and industry analysts studying this and publishing results. It's just not in an area that the current HN audience is particularly competent in.
Something always troubled me: Why are long hours the equilibrium? If everyone is fighting to hire engineers, why not proudly declare "We're working 40 hours a week here, and still pay market rates"? Every engineer in town would consider working for you. Or not?
Long hours often die out when the compensation (i.e. share options) dries up.
I started off working 80+ hours a week, as did many of the others, and loved it. We all did pretty nicely out of it thanks to share options.
But 10 years later, post acquisition(s), and most people who are still here have families and more life outside work. I work part time so I have a day with my daughter and I officially work 33 hours a week, in a "long" week I maybe work 35 hours and I rarely ever take my laptop home. It's all helped me to be a lot more focused in the relatively short time I am at work.
I guess a lot of it is about experience and, as the saying goes, "Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."
I think the article is missing a very important point. Forced long hours are disastrous. But there are plenty of projects where people automatically put in long hours because the experience is rewarding. Either the money is good, or the project is interesting, or there is tons to learn. That varies from person to person.
This is yet another thing that I see with regards to procrastination. It automatically seems to vanish every time I work on some interesting projects, or if good money is involved. If you are unconsciously procrastinating for no good reason, may its a good sign that you find that project no longer rewarding. And its time to move onto something else.
Long hours mean facetime - the illusion of working as hard or harder than your peers. I've worked in industries where this is the norm - it's terrible.
Especially if you actually are more productive than others, because then you're in a situation where you know you're working more hours than you need to, being unproductive, yet you know that the more work you finish, the more will be put onto your plate and the less likely you'll ever be able to have a decent work-life balance. So you wind up sandbagging it, put in the facetime for the hell of it, and look for a new job...
While I take issue ith the "deserves" comment floating around the top of the page, in general the article is spot-on. For the most part, extended periods of high volumes of work indicate a project is either under-staffed or poorly managed.
Sprints and pushes now and again are exceptions -- there is nothing inherently wrong with needing to put in a long week or two, even a month or two, irregularly in order to get a feature out that just needs to be built. But extended continual work definitely does sap the creativity and stress every relationship a person has outside of the office.
I work long hours and I know it adds 0$/hour into my account. My motivation is to build a product that I can proudly add in my portfolio and it may help me tap bigger opportunities in future. I consider it as investment, and I am fully aware that, like other investments, it may turn out to be zero. But then every effort worth-doing in life is a gamble and nothing comes with assurities.
No, this is what long hours mean to someone who doesn't want to work long hours but does out of some obligation or feeling that they should or have to.
I've said it before, but these kinds of articles/blog posts always read as a justification on the part of the author for not working more.
This is not correct, you don't 'pretty much always end up getting paid for hard work'.
I've worked in a few startups, as well as had my own where I was working 6-7 days a week 15+hours on most week days, and it didn't result in a big pay day. I've had lots of stock in bankrupt companies and experience to show for it.
However, I will say that it is possible you'll gain lots of experience, and I wouldn't give up my long hours in my youth for anything else. It was great experience and I loved being in the thick of it.
As I've gotten older, I've started to appreciate more of a balance.
He specifically said it was false for a certain group of people (those in banking).
People in banking/finance have a very skewed sense of reality when it comes to work and fair compensation. You generally have to take their anecdotal advice with a grain of salt if that's all they've ever done.
No line of work can consistently deliver the kinds of returns that finance can. Hence its very easy to justify the longer hours in that industry since they turn into very real dollars. For the rest of us, putting a dollar value on our output is much harder to quantify.
"Tier 1 bonus bucket at a bulge bracket one year, Tier 2 the other year."
He was at a bank, not at a startup. Since you are not familiar with bonus structures at banks, what he's talking about could roughly double a salary in a _cash_ bonus.
Which kind of work did you do that wouldn't have been more effective if it was split in two (or even three) shifts (assuming it would've been possible to find qualified people to help/hire with/for the workload? How much of that time is for breaks/lunch etc? Genuinely interested in what an 18 hour work day consists of.
Personally I can absolutely see "working" long hours -- but then that'd probably be something like 6 hours effective programming/planning/implementing and 6-8 hours of studying.
Either that or doing some form of manual labour with which I'm familiar/skilled enough that slips in concentration wouldn't be damning. But even for those kinds of jobs, having three (or four) shifts to 24 hours would probably be much more effective (again, if possible).
This work hours issue is quite contentious. I don't want to stifle discussion but right now I wish there was a standard "gwen" response at the top of the thread with well researched papers on the subject.
