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I just don’t want to be busy anymore

elenasalaks.medium.com

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Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#381

Post by bumby »

whatever1 wrote: post #161
bumby wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is tough if you actually try to have a team-oriented mindset. I’ve worked in groups (hard to really call them a team) where everyone, everyone , stiff armed duties. The end result is that the hard stuff, or low status stuff, never got done. I get there’s a balance, but if you entered a career where you actually care about the mission, it’s hard to just see that mission suffer because people want to take the easy…

I don’t want overworked medical professionals. I want the hospitals to hire more people to work healthy 8 hour shifts. There is a viable different approach, but the employers do not like it. Let’s stop pretending.

Hiring may be a part of it, but not the whole answer. It actually needs a more process-oriented solution. Adding people to a broken process makes things worse.

When people complain of being over burdened, more often than not it means the process they worked within had a lot of waste. Invariably, the proposed solution was always “we need more people”. You can sometimes hide process waste problems with inventory. The number of times hiring people made for a long term solution is exactly zero in my experience, and this includes process improvement work within healthcare.

“Just hire more people” tends to be a myopic view that underscores a misunderstanding of the systemic effects at work.

Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#382

Post by bumby »

whatever1 wrote: post #223
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say doctors were responsible for all understaffed roles in the country. But they are partly responsible for understaffed physician roles. :) The payer aspect I mentioned is relevant for the nurses.

In America we pay on average ~$3000 per day of stay in the hospital. How much extra do we have to pay to have enough nurses so that we don't work them to death? Why British hospitals have a fraction of that cost (1/10th)? Oh yes, it is because they decided that it is not a moneymaking business. Overworked employees should not blame themselves for not being able to keep up with unreasonable hours. They should blame th…

There’s a saying that your can choose between access, quality, and low cost but you can only choose two. The US system has chosen quality and access at the expense of cost.

Other countries benefit largely from the US healthcare R&D machine. The US funds over 40% of the world medical R&D. While other countries put price controls on their medicine, this arrangement won’t work with the current system if the US does the same. To a certain extent, US high prices partly subsidized the rest of the world.

Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#383

Post by bumby »

nicoffeine wrote: post #340
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels good to have a villain to blame, but in a complicated problem, there are often complicated reasons. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/08061... Hospital profits are part of the costs, but doctors and nurses here are also paid more than elsewhere. Doctors in the US are paid multiple times as much as doctors in the UK, and supply restriction is a big part of why that is possible. There are…

It's not that complicated. When we setup competition for infrastructure, we needlessly duplicate management, marketing, accounting, and everything else that does not directly result in the service being provided. The US is doubly idiotic by creating huge financial barriers for anyone who wants to enter healthcare. We make the problem even worse with a system that encourages people to delay treatment for problems that…

>It's not that complicated

Just out of curiosity, what’s your proposed solution?

There's been decades of very smart people working on this problem and its still a problem largely because of its complexity. If there was a simple solution, I have a feeling it would have been implemented already.

The irony of your post that starts with "its not that complicated" ends with an anecdote about just how complicated the system is.

Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#384

Post by bumby »

viciousplant wrote: post #175
bumby wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is tough if you actually try to have a team-oriented mindset. I’ve worked in groups (hard to really call them a team) where everyone, everyone , stiff armed duties. The end result is that the hard stuff, or low status stuff, never got done. I get there’s a balance, but if you entered a career where you actually care about the mission, it’s hard to just see that mission suffer because people want to take the easy…

Have you ever thought how and why the “it’s not my job” attitude fostered? Most people at least myself on their first day working would never thought they would end up at some point as people they despised so much.

Like most problems I think there’s the actual issue at hand and also the feelings that fosters. Feeling under appreciated is the #1 complaint amongst employees, I believe, and even out-ranks salary. There’s probably a balance. Sometimes the employer isn’t appreciative and sometimes the employee overly inflates their contribution.

Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#385

Post by bumby »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #214
bumby wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is tough if you actually try to have a team-oriented mindset. I’ve worked in groups (hard to really call them a team) where everyone, everyone , stiff armed duties. The end result is that the hard stuff, or low status stuff, never got done. I get there’s a balance, but if you entered a career where you actually care about the mission, it’s hard to just see that mission suffer because people want to take the easy…

I wouldn't appeal to a person's better nature to counteract this attitude. If their nature were to be a team player, they would be a team player. Instead, employers need to recognize that there will be mercenary employees, and they need to set up their systems to reward the behavior they actually want to encourage. If mercenary behavior is rewarded, that's what you'll get at the margin. At least at my employer, it do…

I couldn’t agree with this more. I think it also speaks to the importance of leadership in creating a culture that incentivizes the right behavior

Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#386

Post by globular-toast »

Another day, another woman realising that the career they've been told to pursue isn't what it's cracked up to be. These are getting pretty common now.

> And I for one, no longer want to sprint in this rat race.

Great, but you'll have to downgrade your lifestyle. No more road trips around Europe [0], for example. I notice that is distinctly missing from the article. Leaving the rat race doesn't just mean you stop running, it means you stop running in the same direction as everyone else.

[0] https://elenasalaks.medium.com/20-tips-for-a-successful-road...

Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#387

Post by leokennis »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #109

One thing that helped me is not to care so much about my employer's goals. It's almost heretical. But once you embrace this mindset, it does wonders. Or at least, it has for me so far. I think a lot of us want to be proud of the work we do, and we feel that if we slack off, then we shouldn't be proud. But it's the other way around. I think the slackers have it right. You're probably not going to get rich from working…

> You're probably not going to get rich from working a day job. You're replaceable, and if you left your job tomorrow then you'll soon be forgotten. This is true for the majority of software engineers.

This part is so true. I worked with people who were the "conscience" of the project I worked on - they started it, knew everything about it, worked late nights to fix issues etc. Then they left and...the project kept running...everyone managed.

Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#388

Post by globular-toast »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #91

I have a friend who once told me that they can only work for about 4 hours a day. When I challenged them that this seemed like a very priviledged position to be able to take, they insisted that it was actually true for pretty much anyone, it's just that as a society, as an economy, as a series of employer/employee relationships, we pretend that it's not. What they meant of course was not whether they could be "at the…

I don't think this is true. First, as others have pointed out, you can absolutely do a full day of manual labour. I've done this myself before. The hardest day of my life was unloading 12 kitchens from the back of lorries and moving them across a muddy building site. I woke up at 6:00, got home at 18:00 and slept the instant I hit the sheets.

Secondly, we do work for more than 4 hours a day. In fact, I work in my sleep. The brain doesn't just shut off. The reason you can't just "keep going" at the keyboard for more than 4 hours is your hands are faster than your brain. But the brain doesn't stop. It keeps crunching away. Every morning I find myself with new insights and new ideas that I didn't have the day before. I'm not just being paid for the hours I spend bashing away at the keyboard, I'm being paid to engage my brain with the business.

Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#389

Post by mmmmmbop »

WealthVsSurvive wrote: post #365

It's called depression, not burnout. It's an evolutionary response to factors in your life that lead you towards thanatos and away from eros, allowing you the super-power of obsessive negative thought and absolute joylessness (anhedonia), so you may bide your time and fight them with the abandon of one who no longer cares about their own safety. Some choose to call it a genetic disease. I like to think of it as a val…

Do you have more background on this? What's the best way to approach a feeling like this, in your experience.

Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#390

Post by lanstin »

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #209
resonious wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like the premise here is that the only purpose for a career is to "get rich". I think a lot of people genuinely enjoy the work they do, and the relationships they have with their co-workers. Or, on the darker side of things, over-work themselves because they can't find anything engaging _outside of work_. For both of those groups of people, they might not actually enjoy getting…

>the only purpose for a career is to "get rich". What other reason is there for a career? If there was no financial incentive for most, I highly doubt anybody would waste the time learning how to be a lawyer, programmer, or doctor. People don't just go into a career hoping to make a menial wage and work 40-60 hours a week.

OMG, until like what Netscape IPO almost no programmers wanted or expected to get rich. It was about a job where they paid you to solve problems so interesting you would have contrived to work on them for free.

And even now, I don’t understand why the response to “company will overwork me” is act with bad faith. Just take care of yourself, stop working before the long term costs to yourself your family and your life get too high. That P1 will still be there later. If you have worked for more than two years and not recognized them saying this is crucial is just how they talk, you aren’t as clever as you think. The job market for “can make computer programs” essentially guarantees you cannot be exploited without your consent. Just find you limits and protect them. It will work out. But you don’t need to not offer helpful advice or sketch out solutions for people. That sounds like you are burning down the fun parts of the job to avoid overwork. But the easier way to avoid overwork is to work less.

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