Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer • Hacker News Board

Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#51

Post by gozur88 » Fri, Feb 12, 2016, 1:13 AM UTC

arca_vorago wrote: post #21

sremani wrote: post #4

Some are missing the point, most of the work we as software developers does not need long hours but deep focus. The best of the best are able to have 4 hours worth of deep focus, and we are lucky to get an hour or two of it. That would be huge. So the good habits that help us with focus and emphasizes on recovery like walking in the woods (our natural habitat), meditation etc. Its not the time, the hardware of brain…

On the same point, this is one of my primary frustrations as a sysadmin, because sometimes I need to be available lickety-split, but sometimes I need to be in deep focus mode, but my office environment isn't very conducive to deep focus mode... so sometimes I have to disappear myself to a hidden place just to get some thinking in. Or, what happens more often, is that my productivity suffers and I end up staying late…

>I don't think the baby-boomer generation realizes that there is no such thing as company loyalty in the big scheme of things anymore, especially in an at-will state.

I very much doubt this is true. It was the baby boomers who bore the brunt of the new paradigm in the '70s and '80s. By the time gen-X entered the workforce you had to be a bit delusional to think your employer saw you as anything other than an expense to be minimized.

Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#52

Post by foxbarrington » Fri, Feb 12, 2016, 1:16 AM UTC

If anyone's interested in the tl;dr bullet points:

  * At home have a sense of separation (psychological detachment) from work:
    * avoid work emails at home
    * incorporate a ritual like changing out of work clothes
    * get fully immersed (no negative work thoughts) in a sport, exercise, volunteering, musical instrument, or other creative pursuit
  * At work reduce nagging thoughts of "unfinished business"
    * plan and organize your work day / develop a clear picture of what you can realistically get done during the day
    * do not start a new task right before leaving
    * take rest breaks, and seek out natural environments if possible,
    * do not do errands on a break

Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#53

Post by dota_fanatic » Fri, Feb 12, 2016, 1:17 AM UTC

simplemath wrote: post #8

Overworked? Everyone is overworked. We live in a post scarcity industrial world, or very very close to it, and bad actors have gobbled up the spoils of the huge gains in productivity in the last 50 years. How much of the entire economy is predicated on grey money? How much of your time is indirectly consumed by this leviathan? The more I think about it, the more i want to opt out of the entire fucking thing.

Imagine if all the 10x and 100x engineers were all on the same team.

Keep competition, but play for the same team. The losers are losers because they didn't create the best solution, but the losers are winners because they get to enjoy the spoils, since they're on the same team. Isn't status everything, after a point? Why can't the United States actually be united?

Develop universal human code, highly vetted, secure, and performant code; employable by everyone to satisfy the tedious data management and automation of everyday needs that arise as a consequence of our biology and community structure, like health care, administration, maker technology, infrastructure, education, and the creation of art. The amount of mediocre code getting created, and relied upon, is atrocious, and often the highest quality, most valuable software is completely inaccessible except for by some very small subset of the global population! It's some kind of collective insanity.

> bad actors have gobbled up the spoils of the huge gains in productivity in the last 50 years.

I would say the worst of the present are written deeply into the structure of our societies, iterative processes spanning a very, very long time. These non-friendly, non-cooperative entities are very self-protective. It is only recently that it has been able to reap such unimaginable power.

How much harder does it become to create a better form of government, the longer this goes on? Our existing governments clearly can't handle current problems in any kind of respectable schedule, much less the ones that will result from the increasing acceleration of technological change. Perhaps whatever comes after human is already here, and it's eating us.

Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#54

Post by gigigufuch » Fri, Feb 12, 2016, 1:24 AM UTC

DenisM wrote: post #44

golergka wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope you're talking about taxes. That's where half of my salary is going to, not to some mythical "evil rich", but to pay for beurocracy and welfare programs.

I know a guy in a project that generates a few millions per employee. His share is less than 10% in salary. In this case the discrepancy is easy to see, but the same is true in many other places where it's not so obvious. But we can see it in the big picture, statistically half the money in the country goes to the 0.01% or something along those lines. All the gains from productivity went to the super-rich. It doesn't…

Spend some time tracking who gets what from the government, directly through tax subsidies, and indirectly from fed zirp policies, its total kleptocracry.

Special laws, ie you're now mandated to purchase healthcare, special barriers to entry, copyright give aways etc etc, the rich get super rich through government corruption.

Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#55

Post by elcct » Fri, Feb 12, 2016, 1:28 AM UTC

Regardless of how much time you you spend at work I think having a couple of weeks in a year for yourself to explore the world or be it just mindlessly staring at the sea waves is a reality check and time when you can evaluate whatever you are doing. It is also a good benchmark - if your current job doesn't allow you to do that then - is this a good job? Or you can't really afford to go at the other side of the world, then - am I being paid right? Go figure...

Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#56

Post by sandworm101 » Fri, Feb 12, 2016, 1:29 AM UTC

>>> So instead of having large breaks every few months or once a year, it’s better to incorporate simple recovery practices into your everyday routine.

Is this some Orwellian nightmare? Rather than have the workers do less work through holidays, let's have deal with the stress during their off hours. Don't take a 2-week holiday, just exercise more every day. Sitting at a desk all day isn't making you fat, it's that you're spending the hour between work and sleep with your kids rather than at the gym.

Some things matter more than productivity. Give your people the time off they need. Or how about just allowing employees to exercise and de-stress on company time.

Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#57

Post by devishard » Fri, Feb 12, 2016, 1:56 AM UTC

golergka wrote: post #34

simplemath wrote: post #8

Overworked? Everyone is overworked. We live in a post scarcity industrial world, or very very close to it, and bad actors have gobbled up the spoils of the huge gains in productivity in the last 50 years. How much of the entire economy is predicated on grey money? How much of your time is indirectly consumed by this leviathan? The more I think about it, the more i want to opt out of the entire fucking thing.

I really hope you're talking about taxes. That's where half of my salary is going to, not to some mythical "evil rich", but to pay for beurocracy and welfare programs.

You realize that if the rich paid the same percentage of their income that you pay, you'd pay drastically less taxes? And that a lot of your taxes go to the evil rich?

Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#58

Post by sanderjd » Fri, Feb 12, 2016, 1:59 AM UTC

losteric wrote: post #33

static_noise wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cancer has befallen the whole planet. Everything will be made to money. The whole world is becoming one big machine.

We're seeing the rise of humanity's vile offspring (to borrow from Accelerando)... ethereal ideas birthed from greed and made corporeal by law, financial machines beyond the power or comprehension of individuals.

At this point, I'm honestly not sure if this thread is a series of extremely pessimistic people, or a fairly clever riff on Lovecraftian doom writing.

Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#59

Post by neltnerb » Fri, Feb 12, 2016, 2:12 AM UTC

FreedomToCreate wrote: post #12

These points are spot on, but I also believe these are common sense things everyone knows. The issue is that its extremely difficult to detach from the digital world and many jobs require you be available at any time. A a previous job (they named themselves after a fruit) I couldn't even think about turning my phone off. I was pretty much on call 24/7. Companies are global, and there are always problems to deal with…

I don't think everyone knows these things; particularly tricks like "don't start a new task right before you leave" took me probably a decade to figure out on my own. But I agree that disconnecting digitally is hard for a lot of jobs if you work on a project rather than small tasks especially, where half the work is planning, logistics, and coordination.

I definitely sleep so much better putting my phone into airplane mode about fifteen minutes before I want to go to bed though. That certainly seems fair all around, and means when I inevitably wake up in the middle of the night I don't see a pile of unread emails to deal with and get tempted to read them while I should be sleeping so I can be productive the next day!

Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#60

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Feb 12, 2016, 2:14 AM UTC

cballard wrote: post #20

toomuchtodo wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dues are fine, someone needs to pay for the people who manage the union (Bernie Sanders contributions could be considered dues for those who believe in his causes, me included). I agree that political contributions should be prohibited though (as well as corporate political contributions).

Why does the union need management? Can't we do it in a chat room/mailing list - for which there are numerous free options?

Why do businesses, nonprofit organisations, schools, governments, and complex multicellular organisms require management (or seem to benefit from them)?

Yes, there are some systems which work by emergent properties alone without central organisation, but the very fact that they're limited to specific areas, and are prominantly missing in others, suggests limitations to their effectiveness and scope.