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Maybe you should do less 'work'

johnwhiles.com

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Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#391

Post by lliamander »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #372
lliamander wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I said had to do with what you said. OP set out a prescription (quite literally defined adulthood for everyone), it was questioned and you criticized the questioners. I'm questioning the criticizing of the questioners. I'm correctly critiquing yourself and others for not actually understanding what caffeine said. It seems that you still don't. > Why assume bad faith in the other comments? Try a different persp…

Making the fundamental assumptions that everyone shares the same perspective on success in a career. Other world-views may take other positions. That doesn't make them wrong, or acting in bad faith.

Honestly, what do you think the OP is saying? Because I still don't think you've corrected your misconceptions.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#392

Post by tonyedgecombe »

burntoutfire wrote: post #189
krinchan wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is always more to these stories than first meets the eye. Especially so when it is self reported. I remember people lionising Thatcher because she only slept four hours a night. It turned out that she took many naps during the day.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#393

Post by imtringued »

ryandrake wrote: post #298
glitchc wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 10 year old feels this way. His depiction of the future is far more pessimistic than mine was at his age, and the conditions under which I grew up were objectively worse compared to his present circumstances (he has his own room, multiple electronic devices, gaming consoles, etc. etc., typical middle-class). There seems to be a persistent message saying “buckle your belts, things are going to get worse” across all…

I mean, we've been hearing crisis warnings for decades. When I was a kid, it was acid rain, then styrofoam cups, smog, leaded gasoline, ozone holes. Each, it was promised, would surely destroy the environment for good. And when one didn't cause Armageddon, the next one would definitely destroy the environment any day now. Today, it's climate change, next decade maybe something else. It's the same song, just a differe…

If it's not a big deal then do something about it.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#394

Post by imtringued »

adwn wrote: post #238
avgcorrection wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear armaggedon is avoidable with some luck and enough safeguards. Catastrophic climate change is inevitable at our current trajectory.

Climate change can be mitigated by technological solutions. Sure, you also need political action, but it's a marathon, not a sprint: a chain of bad decisions will make matters worse, but you'll still have a chance to recover. During the cold war, a chain of bad decisions could have led to immediate, full-scale disaster. That you had to depend on "some luck" to prevent the collapse of civilization as we know is terrif…

The thing about climate change is that it is 100% avoidable yet nothing is being done. Everyone just says "we can fix it afterwards with twice the effort".

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#395

Post by imtringued »

adwn wrote: post #138
adamsmith143 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These concerns, in many forms, have been present for years, however we were once instilled with the instinct to overcome, but now frailty is more valued because even in failure you can not criticize those who are less able. Actually I think you are totally off base here. I know in my cohort of age 30+ millennials there is a strong sense of doom. Many people have the attitude of "why should I have kids when they'll…

> boomerisms Kind of ironic, given that "boomers" lived under the 4 decades long threat of total nuclear war. Frankly, as an instance of those "age 30+ millenials", that would instill a far stronger sense of doom in me than the rather gradual, rather benign (compared to WW3 between the US and the USSR) effects of climate change.

I'm pretty sure I would be more terrified if there was a planned schedule of sending 1 nuke per year and then 2 nukes per year and then 3 nukes per year and so on than if you sent them all at once even though the first scenario is unlikely to kill me any time soon. It's far more benign yet it is scarier.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#396

Post by tonyedgecombe »

Decabytes wrote: post #141

I'm convinced that the only people who actually make what they are worth (at least in my industry) are people who either contract or start their own business. During my grad school years, my PI contracted with other companies for a minimum of $300 an hour, but I've seen others in the industry with higher rates. The higher up you go in our company go from being able to reimburse a couple thousand dollars in travel, to…

Most business owners earn about the same as if they worked for someone else. It's only the top decile where the numbers start to differ.

http://reactionwheel.net/2019/01/schumpeter-on-strategy.html

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#397

Post by imtringued »

chii wrote: post #367
pydry wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're after parasites, lazy software developers aren't the low hanging fruit. People who pull in multiple thousands a month plus from dividends, bonds, rental and stock portfolios are where the real fat is. Weirdly American culture has twisted these people into paragons of success while the people who do all the really tough and necessary work are paid poor wages, made to feel like shit about it at the same time…

> People who pull in multiple thousands a month plus from dividends, bonds, rental and stock portfolios are where the real fat is. those people risked capital to obtain that income. There's this idea that capital is "lazy" and people who risk it doesn't deserve the rewards that come with such risks.

In my opinion people should only be able to earn money through work. After all, if everyone stopped working and started living off their investments, there wouldn't be any capital gains.

The problem isn't that capital is lazy, it's that the interest rate can't actually reach 0% and the capital market can't actually reach an equilibrium so it is stuck at some low interest rate floor instead of going all the way to 0%.

The idea that your net worth should grow based on how much you own is absurd. You should instead be paid more for your work and then get to increase your net worth that way. That's better for everyone involved except for those who don't want to work at all.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#398

Post by wildmanx »

Msw242 wrote: post #376
dominotw wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ask them what the work environment is like. I've been asked this when i interviewed ppl but i never gave them the truth and I've never gotten any honest truth when i was on the other side also.

Reach out to people who aren't interviewing you People in the interview are under scrutiny and don't want to be responsible for driving away candidates

Anybody you reach out to, no matter hiring responsibility or not, has the interest of getting good people into the company, irrespective of how happy they themselves are at the workplace.

Really good people are hard to come by in this market (need to be not just smart but also easy to work with, communicate etc), so you better don't express dissatisfaction, otherwise they go to a competitor.

It's really hard to get honest opinions before accepting an offer. You have mostly gut feeling to go by, maybe join a team for a coffee break, this kind of thing. A direct question "what do you like least about your job?" could work too (it's kinda "what's your biggest weakness?" in reverse), but often times that's also just used to upsell or BS you, e.g. "the food here is too good, I'm getting fat". But you can try to read between the lines of course.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#399

Post by wildmanx »

gedy wrote: post #142
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for going from junior to senior, this is true, but for going from senior beyond, it’s the opposite.

Lord, not my last boss. Basically was dividing salary by # of Jira tickets to measure productivity even for architects and directors. I got out of their asap.

Just open tickets for those things then. "Read Xyz book", "catch up on C++17", "brush up on advanced git concepts", "have coffee with Jim from product management", "play pingpong this week with Jack and Julia from my team". Tons of ticket opportunities, and soon enough you'll be underpaid in the pay-per-ticket metric.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#400

Post by beaconstudios »

BobbyJo wrote: post #374
beaconstudios wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I didn't make the robot comment, but I think it's valid to say that promoting people trying to operate rationally in the market can be pretty robotic if that's your primary motivation. However, given I withdrew that contention, having realised the OP was not talking about making market optimisation and profiteering your primary goal but just talking about how the labour market works, of course the robot thing is…

My bad since that wasn't you. These threads tend to get long in both content and time between messages, and it gets easy to mix up statements. I do think people should always try to operate rationally in the market as, even though it isn't perfect, it will generally produce the highest likelihood of success. In any case, I appreciate the engagement!

Thanks, you too! I agree these things can get a little confusing but I always appreciate the discussion.
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