131–140 of 415 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did an HN poll, how many hours per day do you work including meetings and etc, and the answer was a normal distribution around 6 hours a day. https://imgur.com/qdSltlM The left axis is years of seniority.
i don't think you have enough data to be linking this as if it has meaning. N=104 is not a large sample size.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did an HN poll, how many hours per day do you work including meetings and etc, and the answer was a normal distribution around 6 hours a day. https://imgur.com/qdSltlM The left axis is years of seniority.
i don't think you have enough data to be linking this as if it has meaning. N=104 is not a large sample size.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What I concluded was that I was better as an L6 than an L7 This generalizes: often people want a promotion because it's the "next thing", but in many cases once you are mid career a promotion can make you pretty unhappy. Having a clear idea of how the work & responsibility will differ, and whether it is what you actually want.
My dad explained it to me like this when I was a kid. I ignored it for a long time, but it definitely stuck in the back of my head. I asked him if we wanted to get a promotion or be a manager but he said he thought his role as a documents library was fine. "Do you know the Peter Principle? It's the idea that you get promoted when you do good work, but at some point, you'll be promoted to a level you're not competent…
You’re just a living sign that we could work 3 hours a day and still create good value, and that our attempts at maximum efficiency isn’t actually working.
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Just because something is profitable for the employers does not mean it is ethically or morally right.
In the past I’ve hired engineers on a per hour basis; we agree on the hour count while we plan the tasks. Sometimes it takes them more hours than we planned, sometimes less, but our contract stays the same. There is nothing moral/amoral around them being efficient or padding their estimates IMHO.
This is exactly why I've concluded trying to go my own way is the best long-term plan for me. Before learning about YC and HN and such, the thought never really occurred to me. When I'm working on a personal project I'm really passionate about, my productivity is literally orders of magnitude higher than at any day job I've had. Months or years are compressed into days. For any ambitious personal project that I'm int…
Interesting. It also didn't really occur to me that being an employee might just not be for me, until I read this comment on HN over a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22520709. Although the reasoning is a somewhat different from yours. Excerpt:
> The reality is that if you care about your craft a tiny bit more than average, you will most likely end up feeling that you are overpaid for trivial work, that you could do so much more for the company, that your coworkers and hierarchy are apathetic to things that do not directly affect them (and will seek to avoid any change as much as possible). The more you stay in this situation, the likelier you are to burn out.
> If you are that kind of person, then you need to GTFO and start your own thing - have your own skin in the game
This sounds like it might be good thing for the company. Having employees who have extra capacity is incredibly important for an organization that wants to get things done; if you're constantly hard at work on something important, when something else comes up (someone has a question, there's a bug or an outage, whatever), you either have to delay the thing you're already working on, or delay the thing that came up. T…
I used to work a tech support job overnight. Some nights I'd take two calls. This was expected for the reasons you noted. When there was an emergency someone needed to be idle in the first place so they could immediately respond fully focused.
Things work differently in 21st century highly intellectual job. Doing that is a straight recipe for burnout.
I'm the kind of person who typically overly engages in every job but I'm tired full time as a result. I actually think I need to work less (but be better organized).
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Being snarkily dismissive of mental disorders isn't a great look, especially when OP stated that they also went to therapy for anxiety/depression and also stated they work less now than they did before because they're able to properly focus.
It might have been unhelpful way of formulating the response, especially in the light of OP's comments about getting treatment for anxiety and depression. But the comment was probably meant to highlight that there's a sense of ambiguity in medicating what's likely a natural individual difference in brain chemistry. Many diagnosed with ADHD would be considered perfectly well-functioning in a society where hunting, def…
I tried for a decade to make myself work "naturally". Almost left to be a monastic forever. At some point you have to pick up the same shovel everyone else is holding.
Unless you want to pay me 100k to keep trying to do my own thing.