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I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month

simonberens.me

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Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month

#141

Post by Aperocky »

Aaronmacaron wrote: post #124
12345hn6789 wrote: post #29

I honestly cannot believe this. The porn part, the make me a smoothie request, dating dinners. This guy seriously paid people to sit behind him and didn't even think about them stealing his $1000 monitors until after the fact? He didn't try blocking any non productive sites? No productivity software? No pomadoro technique-esq focus methods? This guy should have paid $88/hour for therapy if we are being honest here

He's got a 'Date Me' button on his website which takes you to a Google Form where you can apply to be his girlfriend. I can't decide if this makes the blog post more or less believable. Could it be that he's just a satirical character and doesn't really exist?

This is in line with the content of the blog post and make me believe it is real. Author may have certain degrees of narcissistic personality, but I am no doctor or psychiatrist.

Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month

#144

Post by SunghoYahng »

urbandw311er wrote: post #111
SunghoYahng wrote: post #91

What a great idea. I've been grappling with low productivity for 20 years, trying various solutions without success. I would love to emulate your approach, but don't have the means at present. Regardless, I'm eager to observe the outcome of your experiment, with hopes of replicating it in the future. Don't pay attention to detractors, as tackling productivity is a critical concern and worthy of pursuing with determin…

I think the people who don’t support his experiment can probably justify their reasons for themselves without you insulting them.

[flagged]

Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month

#145

Post by barbarr »

vuckin wrote: post #26

This is incredibly bizarre, to the point where I wonder if this isn't just a creative writing exercise. Why does he feel the need to be 'productive' for 16 hours a day? Why did he think the best way to deal with this was to hire a group of babysitters? Why was he being so weird to his assistants? It just doesn't add up. The whole thing is so damn strange. Maybe this is an experiment on the readers of his article, to…

He is into effective altruism.

Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month

#146

Post by fho »

darth_avocado wrote: post #20

I like how he concluded that $88 per extra productive hour is worth it and more people should consider it. Here’s other ways you could introduce productivity: 1. Hire house cleaners @400/month for a large house to come in twice a month. 2. Get a grammarly or similar subscription @60/month to write documents faster 3. Personal trainer 2 days a week for $60/session 4. A dietitian for weekly sessions @100/session (you c…

Just what you listed comes out to USD 1540 a month ... which (here in Germany) is more than half of what an average software developer earns [1].

[1] https://platri.de/informatiker-gehalt/

Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month

#148

Post by dan-robertson »

12345hn6789 wrote: post #29

I honestly cannot believe this. The porn part, the make me a smoothie request, dating dinners. This guy seriously paid people to sit behind him and didn't even think about them stealing his $1000 monitors until after the fact? He didn't try blocking any non productive sites? No productivity software? No pomadoro technique-esq focus methods? This guy should have paid $88/hour for therapy if we are being honest here

The article strikes me as an amount of weirdness within the normal range for ‘rationalism’ people.

And the guy literally links to a website-blocker he develops.

I guess his being weird doesn’t particularly bother me. I liked that the post was frank and (seemingly) honest. Doing that sort of experiment and writing about it seems basically fine to me. Maybe he’ll be able to contrast it with other things, like maybe having one extra hour of productive work is worse than using the same amount of hours more productively by eg avoiding blunders.

Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month

#149

Post by HDThoreaun »

da39a3ee wrote: post #19

I hope this is satire. If it is not, then the author is a disgusting narcissist with no understanding of people or of human dignity. It's very depressing that HN readers are genuinely responding with approval and encouragement.

Misguided sure, but disgusting? Nothing he did was disgusting. There's nothing undignified about being paid $20/hr to watch someone work, people do far worse for far less everyday.

Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month

#150

Post by travisjungroth »

12345hn6789 wrote: post #29

I honestly cannot believe this. The porn part, the make me a smoothie request, dating dinners. This guy seriously paid people to sit behind him and didn't even think about them stealing his $1000 monitors until after the fact? He didn't try blocking any non productive sites? No productivity software? No pomadoro technique-esq focus methods? This guy should have paid $88/hour for therapy if we are being honest here

I doubt this 0%. I’ve hired people just to help me focus and also to help with chores. To me, this is someone with the same job in the same city as me just taking what I’ve done two steps further. Literally nothing in that post is unbelievable to me, including the behavior of the people he hired.

In the first paragraph he did mention tools for focusing, saying he went as far as making his own.

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