31–40 of 246 posts
And this is what I hate about corporate work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meetings: where minutes are taken and hours are wasted.
Depends on the meetings. And if you are wasting time in meetings, then you are wasting time in meetings.
> I have a friend who brags that he busts his * 60 hours a week driving a Coca-Cola delivery truck. Congratulations, I work 35 and make twice as much as he does. This is a straw man. The point is that if you worked 50 vs 35 hours at the same job, you'd simply get more done - even considering diminishing returns. There's a reason many hugely successful people are notorious workaholics - see Elon Musk, Oprah, Marissa M…
But where does that end? We decide the 8 hour work week isn't productive enough, even though worker productivity has skyrocketed, so we go to 10, then we decide 10 hour days are for socialist pussies and go to 12 hour days, then eventually we are calling people lazy for sleeping and ridiculing them for not dragging concrete blocks for a .0000001% holding Elon Musk's Mars Miner corporation. I mean at some point life h…
Individually, you get the same shake every free man has had since the beginning. You climb the mountain until you don't feel like climbing anymore. Maybe you're hurt, maybe you're tired, maybe you've found a nice plateau with a wonderful view.
Meanwhile around you, above you and below you - others scamper up the same mountain.
'Twas ever thus.
Well, there are certainly two camps with regard to this. If you don't feel like going over to Alex's campfire, holding hands and singing Kumbaya - let me invite you over to the other fire for an inspirational moment before getting back to work: "Americans love to fight. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-l…
I understand your naive enthusiasm but work is more of a marathon. Even doing the most glamorous part, founding a company, is an Iron Man race with many stages. Sprinting to the finish line with goofy motivational speeches when you are still 100 miles away is just bad strategy.
> I have a friend who brags that he busts his * 60 hours a week driving a Coca-Cola delivery truck. Congratulations, I work 35 and make twice as much as he does. This is a straw man. The point is that if you worked 50 vs 35 hours at the same job, you'd simply get more done - even considering diminishing returns. There's a reason many hugely successful people are notorious workaholics - see Elon Musk, Oprah, Marissa M…
But I've also seen people put in 50-60 hours at a job where others put in 40 and get paid basically the same salary, without any increased possibility of promotion either. They were basically workaholics for the sake of it, or for appearances, not for any concrete benefit. I think what they got was a feeling of moral superiority for working the hardest (even though they didn't necessarily get more actual work done), as well as a sense of security that they wouldn't be the first on the chopping block when the next round of layoffs came (not necessarily true).
It's not a straw man, I know people who do this in real life. I think of it as cargo culting for career success.
People in managerial positions don't just want to be rewarded for their work. They want prestige and the root of almost all forms of prestige is nostalgia.
Nostalgia (and its attendant fallacies) leads to this long-hours glorification, because people who suffer a lot to push something through, after it succeeds (regardless of whether the suffering contributed) end up remembering the "glory days" of energy drinks and double-all-nighters as if those moments were better than they actually were. Those weren't fun at the time. That's a happy-ending reinterpretation because scary things that end well are often remembered positively.
What's missed is that (1) those crunches aren't sustainable, (2) they're only "glory days" for people who get major, career-improving and permanent benefits from the work-- otherwise it's just managerial abuse, and (3) most of those crunch-driven efforts fail and just become miserable death marches that make people really bitter, and the career damage of that can last years.
If people actually leave at 5:00, they recover better from those death-march episodes because they haven't let their health and network go to shit.
For developers building something, the following are often true: Tweeting != Work TalkingAboutWork != Work Blogging != Work DoingSomethingInYourIDE does not necessarily = Work DoingSomethingInGithub does not necessarily = Work ThinkingButAppearingToBeDoingNothing may = Work Meetings != Work CodeReview may = Work Testing usually = Work DeliveringBuiltSoftware(AndItsPrerequisites) = Work HackerNews definitely != Work
Meetings: where minutes are taken and hours are wasted.
Only if you run bad meetings. Don't call one without an agenda. Stick to that agenda (have a chair). Arrive and leave on time. Send minutes (even notes) within the hour after the meeting.
Meetings take discipline on the part of the attendees and it's just a structured communication method. It's not fair to blame the tool because most people are too lazy to use it well.
I like hard work sessions. Fuck me, right?
> I have a friend who brags that he busts his * 60 hours a week driving a Coca-Cola delivery truck. Congratulations, I work 35 and make twice as much as he does. This is a straw man. The point is that if you worked 50 vs 35 hours at the same job, you'd simply get more done - even considering diminishing returns. There's a reason many hugely successful people are notorious workaholics - see Elon Musk, Oprah, Marissa M…
I'd imagine that part of the reason they can be workaholics is that they are hugely successful people. The type of work you do plays a huge rule in how much work you can do.
Especially when you consider this:
> The point is that if you worked 50 vs 35 hours at the same job, you'd simply get more done
Is not something you can bank on.