Productivity > Hard Work and Long Hours
Stop Glorifying Hard Work and Long Hours
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Re: Stop Glorifying Hard Work and Long Hours
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on the meetings. And if you are wasting time in meetings, then you are wasting time in meetings.
I agree with that. Sometimes a meeting is the only way to get the right people talking about the problem or issue.
Doesn't that indicate a huge organizational dysfunction, if you cannot get an answer through (say) email?
Re: Stop Glorifying Hard Work and Long Hours
#63For 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
This is a popular idea, but developers can also fall into the trap of thinking they can code their way through every problem. Tweeting and blogging especially may in fact be extremely important, if done well and purposefully. Same with (some) meetings, depending on who you're meeting.
You can build the best damn software in the world, but it won't matter if no one knows.
Re: Stop Glorifying Hard Work and Long Hours
#64I've seen this promoted in subtle ways. At Microsoft, I once saw a VP talk about how a team had worked nights and weekends to make something extraordinary happen and how he was surprised to get emails from them in the middle of the night. I had a private chat with him later of how this encourages the wrong behavior - the key is that great work got done, not the fact that teams worked late nights or that they were on late night email.
Re: Stop Glorifying Hard Work and Long Hours
#65When I worked at a large corporation, I nearly automated all of my work and I was called lazy. I'd do about an hour work a day, customize an existing script to process new data, then read for the remaining 6 hours. Co-workers called me a lazy nerd and proceeded to copy paste words into excel for 8 hours. Now I get to wake up at 12, smoke a joint, have a beer, take a shower, go for a walk with my dog, and then work on…
I think some of this stems from our feeling the need to compete early on in high school to get acceptance into a "good" college. Later on in life this is merely repeated in different forms at work. E.g., "I want to get ahead and get that VP spot, I need to outsmart or outwork everyone else." "Crap someone just stepped into our space and is eating our lunch, we need to move our roadmap up by 3 months."
And also fear of getting blamed when something goes wrong.
If something goes wrong and you were working 80-hour weeks, you can say, "We did everything possible and still the ship sank."
If you were out having fun most of the time and the ship sank, most of the people standing around are going to blame you for laziness and inattention.
Re: Stop Glorifying Hard Work and Long Hours
#66I feel like this is pretty widely accepted in the tech/hacker world, right?
I've found it's generally the more business-y (creative, PM, etc) types that do the weekend check-in/late night thing.
Also - it seems to be magnified in the highly transient NYC/SF environments. Recently relocated young people without families just may not have that much to do outside of work.
Re: Stop Glorifying Hard Work and Long Hours
#67When I worked at a large corporation, I nearly automated all of my work and I was called lazy. I'd do about an hour work a day, customize an existing script to process new data, then read for the remaining 6 hours. Co-workers called me a lazy nerd and proceeded to copy paste words into excel for 8 hours. Now I get to wake up at 12, smoke a joint, have a beer, take a shower, go for a walk with my dog, and then work on…
your mention of lawyers reminds me of the Kia Motors outside counsel technology audit[1]. Many lawyers waste ridiculous amounts of time doing busywork. In my day job, I spend many hours visiting customers and spend much of that time adding automation for them, simple bash scripts that allow them to do things much more quickly. Yesterday, I taught someone the rename command[2]. Previously, they had been spending an do…
> I am constantly reminded about the amount of low-hanging fruit there is out there for automation that is currently handled extremely manually, sometimes by some very well-paid people.
On the other hand, they have job security that way.
I've seen the same thing, and encountered huge amounts of pushback from the same people.
If I automate, they no longer have 80 hours of work to do every week. How are they gonna get promoted then? By being competent or something?
That, like, never happens.
Re: Stop Glorifying Hard Work and Long Hours
#68This seems incredibly one sided to me and I'm surprised at the number of people who are in agreement. I guess if you make the assumption that the person is lazy or inefficient and that's the reason they're working hard then this would make sense. However, I'm 24; I work a day job from 8 to 5; I go to the gym and go home and work on a startup from ~7-12 and do it all over again. And yea, I'm proud of that. Not only th…
sorry man. I hear you. the point isn't to bash working hard- it pushes a bit that you should work hard + smart. it's more of a rant about pushing that out to the twitterz/4sq. I mean how many successful people actually push out how hard they are working and how much shit they are getting done? I can't count any. can't agree on the #hustle comment though. That stuff makes me cringe the f out.
I can give you the #hustle, I don't know anyone who does that specifically haha, it also makes me cringe, but the idea of it is what I'm getting at.
And, as far as "successful" people who talk about the hard work they're doing, I guess that also depends on what you define as successful, I know people who have day jobs and are doing incredible things on the side and they are happy and motivated doing what they love. I personally count that as success.
Re: Stop Glorifying Hard Work and Long Hours
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meetings: where minutes are taken and hours are wasted.
> "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 us…
It's not just bad meetings, it's meetings that shouldn't exist in the first place.
Meeting can be useful, but I've worked at companies where meetings are (reasonably) well-run (minutes, chairs, time-capped, etc), but ultimately unnecessary in the first place. People leave with action items but feel as if the whole exercise could have been accomplished in half the time with only half the people in the room.
Or a quick email from one person to another.
In my trailing days at Amazon we had a project that was falling behind due to unforeseen team attrition. The more it fell behind the more meetings were called - one by each stakeholder - to discuss why the project was behind and what can be done to solve it. Ultimately this just meant more engineers in a room explaining things to a lineup of PMs rather than writing some damned code. A few months of this and I decided it was time for me to attrition out.
Before worrying about whether or not your meeting has an agenda, a chair, and set times, figure out if you need the meeting at all.
Re: Stop Glorifying Hard Work and Long Hours
#70When I worked at a large corporation, I nearly automated all of my work and I was called lazy. I'd do about an hour work a day, customize an existing script to process new data, then read for the remaining 6 hours. Co-workers called me a lazy nerd and proceeded to copy paste words into excel for 8 hours. Now I get to wake up at 12, smoke a joint, have a beer, take a shower, go for a walk with my dog, and then work on…
> When I worked at a large corporation, I nearly automated all of my work and I was called lazy. I'd do about an hour work a day, customize an existing script to process new data, then read for the remaining 6 hours. Co-workers called me a lazy nerd and proceeded to copy paste words into excel for 8 hours.
Oh my god, I'm dealing with this now. I made a Python program that automated a lot of our Excel work. It reduced hours of tedium to seconds. Showing it to my manager, the reception was chilly at best. There was some disbelief that a program could parse dozens of slightly inconsistent worksheets (that made it a bit harder, but recognizing the patterns wasn't complex) but mostly deep annoyance at taking on a project he would have never approved. He seemed to think the program needed more vetting even after I'd fed huge amounts of our past analysis into it and verified it reproduces the correct results. He didn't want to see the proof that it worked, he just insisted that the spreadsheets were too complex and that some of the numbering schemes we use were too subjective to define by logic (they weren't).
This is at a workplace where a coworker likes to type in hundreds of sums from a hand calculator into Excel instead of dragging a row. I might have to wait a decade or two for them to retire if anything is to improve.