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What Long Hours Really Mean

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Re: What Long Hours Really Mean

#171

Post by kulkarnic »

SubuSS wrote: post #159

Most of these articles that deride long work hours don't account for the following: 1. When you are the smartest in the room, you can get away with 40 hours because what you produce in 40 hours will be orders of magnitude ahead of what a normal guy produces in 80 hours. Trouble comes when you start being part of super smart teams (mine has about 9 engineers sharing around 150 years of systems/db building expertise am…

This is bunk. You're paid to do work which can be done in 40 hours/wk or you're being exploited (and so are a lot of other people). When you're 60 would you rather have memories with your kids, or have the satisfaction of writing lots of code in the 2010s that is not being used anymore because it got obsolete/automated? (don't believe that can happen? Talk to rule-based AI researchers from the 80s)

The only reasons to do long hours are because a) you need a temporary career boost, and b) you're Batman and the world depends on you.

Re: What Long Hours Really Mean

#172

Post by corresation »

dustingetz wrote: post #139

"LONG HOURS ≠ MORE PRODUCTIVITY OR BETTER WORK." this is false and debunked in mythical man month. It follows from "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" that we need to add hours, not people. Or we can break our contract if we'd rather to that. "We respect ourselves and our people enough to honor their time and their personal lives so we cannot agree to your deadline." This also misses the point…

>This also misses the point - projects start on time and end late. at the time the deadline was agreed to, we happily accepted payment.

Deadlines are artificial constructs in software development, usually built up and justified using completely fictional inputs. It amazes me how many can input assumptions and guesses and then treat the output as some concrete statement of fact.

This isn't to use the too common "it'll be done when it's done, man" Dude-ism, but it is a complete cop-out to point to some initial, often agreed-to-under-duress calendar mark as the agreement to unlimited overtime. It never means that.

I remember being in an agile meeting once where everyone estimated out some features and gave them durations (span of weeks based essentially on gut feel). These were all studiously entered into the workboard, where the manager then said "okay so that is n hours assuming 6.5 hours of work a day [assuming administrative overhead, bug fixes, etc]. So now if we just put in 9 hours of work a day we'll be done by [some calendar date]". That is the nonsense that yields most "deadlines".

Re: What Long Hours Really Mean

#173

Post by Mikeb85 »

com2kid wrote: post #69
dalek_cannes wrote: post #9

Every human being deserves an average of 8 hours of work, 8 hours of family/leisure, 8 hours of sleep and 2 days a week free. Even a doctor on whom many lives are depending . Lives of critical employees are just as valuable as the lives of those who are affected if they don't work harder. The whole "if I don't do this, the project will sink / things will be destroyed" is a self-imposed ransom situation that managers…

By what natural law is this true? By what will of nature or physics are you deriving your statements? Deserves? Why does anyone deserve anything? Nature itself does not act that way. People around the world deserve not to live in fear of their government killing them. Women deserve not to live in fear of being raped. Children should not live in fear of abuse. Yet untold millions starve, are beaten, tortured, abused,…

> Why does anyone deserve anything? Nature itself does not act that way.

And yet we've progressed from our prehistoric roots and have decided as a society that everyone does deserve basic rights.

> How about those of us born into a life of privilege work harder until suffering is alleviated, until pain is removed, until equality is reached.

Working harder at a mundane job won't achieve this. At best it means you'll just have less family time, leisure time, and be unhappier. At worst it means you're taking a bigger slice of the global economic pie, and contributing to inequality.

Re: What Long Hours Really Mean

#174

Post by Mikeb85 »

Long hours mean facetime - the illusion of working as hard or harder than your peers. I've worked in industries where this is the norm - it's terrible.

Especially if you actually are more productive than others, because then you're in a situation where you know you're working more hours than you need to, being unproductive, yet you know that the more work you finish, the more will be put onto your plate and the less likely you'll ever be able to have a decent work-life balance. So you wind up sandbagging it, put in the facetime for the hell of it, and look for a new job...

Re: What Long Hours Really Mean

#175

Post by Nimi »

Something always troubled me: Why are long hours the equilibrium? If everyone is fighting to hire engineers, why not proudly declare "We're working 40 hours a week here, and still pay market rates"? Every engineer in town would consider working for you. Or not?

Re: What Long Hours Really Mean

#176

Post by arjie »

sdoering wrote: post #51
jonny_eh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet studies show that next to being below the poverty line, nothing correlates higher with unhappiness than commute times. http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/03/30/commuting/

Funny thing. I commute not that much (1hr) per workday. I use this time, to listen to relaxing music and reading fiction (and sometimes popular science). After the commute I have to walk 10 minutes, to arrive at my front door. I have to walk through a little park. Really. For me commuting and then walking is my way of coming down. Of letting go of the work, so that I arrive at home free of all the stuff, that happens…

This is _exactly_ it. My morning commute was essentially free time. Public transit is a glorious thing.

Re: What Long Hours Really Mean

#177

Post by nileshtrivedi »

quinnchr wrote: post #157
nileshtrivedi wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed his sarcasm. He feels that objective truth exists. :) BTW, I have found Yudkowsky's "The Simple Truth" an effective argument against those claim that objective truth doesn't exist. If you walk in the way of a speeding train, you will die irrespective of your beliefs. Beliefs don't alter the reality. http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth/

Hmmm... yes let's disregard the last century of philosophical thought and the postmodernism movement as a whole because the dude who write's Harry Potter fan fic wrote a cute story. How would you convince a Solipsist that there is an objective truth?

> How would you convince a Solipsist that there is an objective truth?

I can't. But let me quote Bertrand Russell from "An Outline of Philosophy":

Solipsism (the theory that I alone exist) is a view which is hard to refute but still harder to believe. Solipsism is not really believed even by those who think they are convinced of its truth.

A solipsist would have no objection to jumping from a cliff, would he? But he won't actually do it.

Re: What Long Hours Really Mean

#178

Post by vdaniuk »

Double_Cast wrote: post #153
vdaniuk wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats a good argument and may be generalized by quoting George Edward Box "Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful."

I occasionally reread Isaac Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong . While Yudkowsky's The Simple Truth is more rigorous, I find the brevity of Asimov's essay more refreshing. Another perennial favorite of mine is George Orwell's Politics and the English Language . http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

Great links, thanks.

Re: What Long Hours Really Mean

#179

Post by SubuSS »

kulkarnic wrote: post #171
SubuSS wrote: post #159

Most of these articles that deride long work hours don't account for the following: 1. When you are the smartest in the room, you can get away with 40 hours because what you produce in 40 hours will be orders of magnitude ahead of what a normal guy produces in 80 hours. Trouble comes when you start being part of super smart teams (mine has about 9 engineers sharing around 150 years of systems/db building expertise am…

This is bunk. You're paid to do work which can be done in 40 hours/wk or you're being exploited (and so are a lot of other people). When you're 60 would you rather have memories with your kids, or have the satisfaction of writing lots of code in the 2010s that is not being used anymore because it got obsolete/automated? (don't believe that can happen? Talk to rule-based AI researchers from the 80s) The only reasons t…

Just because there is a possibility that my work could be made obsolete, I can't stop working. That is a non-starter. Why do you think people keep working on various fields like physics when most of them are theories that might be disproved very soon?

You are also forgetting the reason where you want to address the engineering need in you: Some of us have fun making this. Believe it or not, We want to do this :)

I do have other time that I spend with my family etc. More or less is personal preference. Family is one of those things that one can sink in infinite time and still feel incomplete - we all strike balances. FWIW - I sleep only 6 hours or so, so it provides a bit of a leg up. I usually nap a bit on the weekends though.

My meta-point is: Some people look at a job as a means to make a living. I look at mine as an opportunity. Here I have a company that is willing to put millions of dollars in the direction I point at or into the work that I am doing, based purely on trust. This kind of scale / experience is impossible to get by myself. For this I have to go the extra mile. The end result might benefit the company, but I find joy in the process of creation.

The company is not exactly chintzy either. They compensate me well enough to keep that from becoming an issue to me or my family.

Re: What Long Hours Really Mean

#180

Post by SubuSS »

Roboprog wrote: post #169
keithpeter wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" It is VERY hard to hire good senior engineers. My company (Amazon) pays a ton of money, has offices in great cities but still we find hiring hard." Why? Can you positively exclude the influence of the known long-hour culture?

I have only a very small data set: myself. Amazon tried to recruit me (I have almost 30 years experience, much of it as team lead). However, when I found out about the corporate "death march" culture, I decided not to pursue it. My annual salary would go up, but my hourly compensation would go down. It might not matter to your wife and kids, but it matters to mine. Otherwise, the work there did in fact sound pretty i…

Different strokes for different people I guess :). I respect your choice.
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