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Maybe you should do less 'work'

johnwhiles.com

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Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#181

Post by nostrademons »

adenozine wrote: post #165
caffeine wrote: post #135

You are the boss of a company of one. Your company sells labor to the labor market, it makes investments in assets, it borrows funds, etc. It’s your job to decide how that company is run. It’s your job to decide what investments that company needs to make to get good returns. It’s also your job to interpret the contracts your company enters into and decide what is acceptable, and to appropriately risk-manage legal ha…

Do you have kids? This makes no sense from my perspective. I could literally put myself through anything that I needed to, if it meant the safety or well-being of my children. It's not a company, it's a primal force from thousands of years of primordial reinforcement. I'd manage with less capital, so that my kids have a chance at college. I'd manage with less chance of promotion, so that my kids can have my presence…

It's the same calculus, it's just the kids need to figure into it once you have them.

I made a number of choices differently once I had kids. I folded up a startup and took steady employment at a company with good work/life balance. I bought a house in a good school district rather than renting and taking the risk that rising rents would force them away from their grandparents. I make a choice to drop the work at 4:30 so I can go walk to pick the older one up from pre-school rather than get an extra 20 minutes of work in.

But all of these are still choices - they're weighing the things important to me and deciding that I'm going to allocate my labor and capital in different ways. Once you start getting into the economics of pricelessness, when you must do this for your kids or you're a bad parent, bad things often happen. You lose the ability to make rational trade-offs, and your kids often sense that and never learn the ability to make rational trade-offs.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#182

Post by CipherThrowaway »

0des wrote: post #5

Getting my task completed at my own pace makes me feel good. Often that is fast and on time. In my heart, when I touch the keyboard, I feel like a greyhound dog with a little Bob Ross afro - it can be a race, a competition, but it is also an expression of my art. This article makes me feel bad because in the authors world, people like me are relegated to worker bee monkies trying to please the bossman due to patholog…

The theme of the article is not that you should be less productive, it's that stepping back and slowing down can make you more productive. For example you could have saved yourself some offense if you had taken the time to consider the author's point before reacting.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#183

Post by [deleted] »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #99
TacticalCoder wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A bit off topic but as of late there is this creeping normalization of intentionally subpar or less optimized results I'm noticing in our industry but also general society. > When did we become so not only complacent but also discouraging of any genuine effort? And these same people are going to expect nothing short of the best of the best from surgeons / plane pilots / car manufacturers / etc. So they can slack of…

Sure but most engineers aren't working on anything with near that level of importance. Like sorry but another bugfix on Youtube or the Uber app really pales in comparison to a Triple Bypass or safely landing a plane with 200 passengers during a high crosswind for example.

[deleted]

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#184

Post by Apocryphon »

0des wrote: post #180
Apocryphon wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even getting past climate change gloom, present economic situations don’t inspire much confidence. College admissions seem much more stringent than they were a decade or two ago, never mind the rising tuitions, the debt obligations, and so on. Housing prices continue to climb. A lot has happened since the Great Recession.

You realize this has been going on for at least a century, right? At one point we literally confiscated all of the gold by order of government. Whether the overton window is shifting or not, this stuff has been going on since time immemorial.

I’m talking about specifically concerns that the youth would have. And the Overton Window does not refer to things getting worse, nor does it mean things were inevitably getting worse for an American audience until living memory. Certainly ‘90s kids can point at a solid decade of optimism, until it all abruptly ended. To children growing up today, this must all feel like a step back compared to those earlier eras.

The reference to the end of the gold standard is a complete non sequitur.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#185

Post by Toine »

caffeine wrote: post #135

You are the boss of a company of one. Your company sells labor to the labor market, it makes investments in assets, it borrows funds, etc. It’s your job to decide how that company is run. It’s your job to decide what investments that company needs to make to get good returns. It’s also your job to interpret the contracts your company enters into and decide what is acceptable, and to appropriately risk-manage legal ha…

From a certain extreme perspective, there is some truth to what you're saying, but wow, this is so one-sided, extreme, partial and damaging. What decades of neo liberal brainwashing has done to people.

This is so sad, really. We are NOT companies, we're not robots only driven by free will, we don't live in an economy. We are hardcore social animals with huge biological & affective needs, this is scientifically proven.

I hope young people don't read this and blindly believe it.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#186

Post by adenozine »

bobkazamakis wrote: post #177
adenozine wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have kids? This makes no sense from my perspective. I could literally put myself through anything that I needed to, if it meant the safety or well-being of my children. It's not a company, it's a primal force from thousands of years of primordial reinforcement. I'd manage with less capital, so that my kids have a chance at college. I'd manage with less chance of promotion, so that my kids can have my presence…

I don't see how changing the perspective of selling labor to ...selling labor really jumps the gap into psychosis.

Your children (they're human beings btw) are not extensions of your "inner company" is the point I was making. It's not rational to reduce children to that sort of algebra problem thinking. That's a huge red flag for someone's mental state. If you're not able to recognize that you can only solve human problems with human solutions that incorporate human needs and wants, then you start down the path of psychosis and anti-social behaviors. It's small animal torture, fire-setting, bed-wetting, and then it's full-blown serial killer.

I'm obviously exaggerating, but not THAT much.

You can't just paint over that with an analogy. Maybe I just treat my kids different, but there's literally nothing about work that I care about even remote as much as my childrens' well-being. I'd burn my inner company to the ground if it meant they get a chance at a decent life. I believe it's a biological imperative to remain willing to self-sacrifice to any necessary extent for the betterment of the offspring.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#187

Post by dmje »

Um, because life is more important than work? Because your kids will only be young once and they don't give a sh*t about your CV? Because you could be dead tomorrow? Because there is lots apart from work that gives you love, satisfaction and pleasure? Because you don't need to be insanely wealthy? ...and a gazillion other reasons.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#188

Post by danielvaughn »

Toine wrote: post #185
caffeine wrote: post #135

You are the boss of a company of one. Your company sells labor to the labor market, it makes investments in assets, it borrows funds, etc. It’s your job to decide how that company is run. It’s your job to decide what investments that company needs to make to get good returns. It’s also your job to interpret the contracts your company enters into and decide what is acceptable, and to appropriately risk-manage legal ha…

From a certain extreme perspective, there is some truth to what you're saying, but wow, this is so one-sided, extreme, partial and damaging. What decades of neo liberal brainwashing has done to people. This is so sad, really. We are NOT companies, we're not robots only driven by free will, we don't live in an economy. We are hardcore social animals with huge biological & affective needs, this is scientifically proven…

I think you're severely misreading the original comment, and to be frank, your interpretation is pretty juvenile. Nowhere does the person say that we are robots.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#189

Post by burntoutfire »

krinchan wrote: post #128
0des wrote: post #5

Getting my task completed at my own pace makes me feel good. Often that is fast and on time. In my heart, when I touch the keyboard, I feel like a greyhound dog with a little Bob Ross afro - it can be a race, a competition, but it is also an expression of my art. This article makes me feel bad because in the authors world, people like me are relegated to worker bee monkies trying to please the bossman due to patholog…

It sounds like you're misinterpreting the article or you did not read it. > When did we become so not only complacent but also discouraging of any genuine effort? It is as if everyone is so aloof that if you show any effort or appreciation of your craft that you're societally[sic] acknowledging your own serfdom or that you're serving "the man". In my decades long experience in corporate programming, when people accus…

On the other hand, there truly are people who can sustainably work 60+ hours weeks for decades. Some of the Internet celebrity developers, like John Carmack or Jon Blow, are like that. However, they mostly work on their own thing, which must help a lot with sustaining motivation.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#190

Post by lijogdfljk »

noahtallen wrote: post #166
lijogdfljk wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well i'm not talking hours, to be clear. Just some idea that we're all equal. Ie, if a hypothetical society depends on addicts working more than "lazy people" (in the parents words) then it feels to me we're set up for failure.

How does one avoid the inequality, though? One could be working 60 hours a week at fast food joints and not make anywhere close to a part time software developer. As a result, the “lazy” developer is generating more tax revenue. There are too many possibilities to make it “fair”, unless we get rid of the income tax. Even if everyone paid the same amount, it wouldn’t be fair, unless everyone made the same amount of mo…

It's not a complete avoidance. Rather, i'm just advocating that we don't build the idea of less work on the shoulders of people who work more. That seems to me to almost codify the need for some people working more, and that seems a slippery slope for _some_ people getting good work-life balances and others not.

My argument is that we _all_ should qualify for a work-life balance. Not depend on some people not getting a good work-life balance.

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