Could it be that there is some selection bias in this study? I don't mean to say the conclusions are wrong per se, but I would think that people working very few hours (unemployed?) or too many hours (factory workers?) are typically less educated than those in the middle, which could explain the IQ disparity.
Is full-time work bad for our brains?
31–40 of 229 posts
Re: Is full-time work bad for our brains?
#32[deleted]
Re: Is full-time work bad for our brains?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
A non-trivial part of my job is ansering questions that co-workers run into while trying to do their jobs. This would become far less efficient if we didn't all keep mostly the same hours.
Good thing you don't work in a globally distributed company, nothing could get done. Maybe you should look into technologies like email that allows people to send messages that can be responded to when the person has the time.
People I work with have trouble understanding my emails, and I have trouble understanding their emails. Together we make Linus look like a demi-god.
Re: Is full-time work bad for our brains?
#34:( As if this industry needed any more excuses for it's blatant ageism.
What is soylent green?
Re: Is full-time work bad for our brains?
#35My brain usually goes in to "prepare to shut-down" mode every day at about 3:30pm (having started work at ~9am). I tend to have slow mornings, and stay pretty busy/head-down for the last half of that time. The funny thing is, it doesn't really matter if I was busy working on hard technical challenges all day, or just reading articles/browsing the web; my brain shuts down the same time regardless.
This sounds like it could be a diet thing. Have you tried eating different things for lunch to see if that affects your mid-afternoon mood?
I was going to suggest the same. The "prepare-to-shutdown" brain mode could well be that more blood is flowing to the stomach (and thus less to the brain) after a heavy meal.
Re: Is full-time work bad for our brains?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
But "family, friends, pets" are in the category of "someone else", right? Also by working for someone else, you make money, which you use for your health, family, etc. So either way, I don't get the point.
Not sure if your being pedantic but your relationship with your 'company' and your friends/family is certainly not the same thing.
Most of us don't work for our pets.
(Unless they're cats.)
Maybe the whole idea of working for someone is a strange one. Would people still work towards doing cool stuff if they were free to make/break associations on a project basis?
There might not be the cycle of hyperconsumption driven by superficial novelty we have now. But would it be replaced by something more or less interesting?
Re: Is full-time work bad for our brains?
#37This is why companies need to be "results driven" vs "face-time driven". "What did you deliver this week? This month? This quarter?", should be the only relevant question in the workplace, managers included.
> "What did you deliver this week? This month? This quarter?", should be the only relevant question in the workplace, managers included.
Unfortunately, there's another camp that (with credible arguments) claims that task-estimates are almost always meaningless. If you buy into that camp, and if someone under-delivers, it doesn't tell you anything about whether or not they are performing poorly. They could simply be the victim of an overly optimistic task-estimate. As a manager, what are you going to do then?
This is pretty much the double-edged-sword in the NoEstimates movement. Either you judge people purely on the basis of results, and end up punishing people who are victims of poor task estimates. Or you don't judge people at all, and watch as people take advantage of the situation to slack off as much as they want. Or you judge them on the basis of hours-spent-at-work, which will then induce the same complaints we see in this thread.
Re: Is full-time work bad for our brains?
#38Yes. Same with school.
Re: Is full-time work bad for our brains?
#39Stretching 2 hours of work into an 8-9 hour day through meetings and sneaky Reddit/hn usage is certainly bad for our brains. But this is the norm as long as managers interpret productivity as butts in seats.
As bad as you think this is here, trust me Korea is worse.
Re: Is full-time work bad for our brains?
#40[deleted]