201–210 of 323 posts
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Work smart, not hard.
The falsest dichotomy of all. What are the circumstances? what is the "work" trying to accomplish? Who are your competitors? Sometimes you have to work both smart and hard.
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> Because psychology's topic is the mind, and because the mind is not a physical entity, That is a false statement, your mind is quite physical! (and indeed you call upon neuroscience in your very next line!)
>> Because psychology's topic is the mind, and because the mind is not a physical entity, > That is a false statement, your mind is quite physical! Citation needed. No responsible practitioner in the field of psychology argues that the mind is a biological organ or an empirical part of physical reality. > and indeed you call upon neuroscience in your very next line! Now I see what I'm up against. Neuroscience studies…
Huh? What psychologists do you go to, ones only attached to churches?
I'm not going to bother arguing against mind body dualism[0], I have better things to do with my time! I am however confused, you bring up criticisms of a field not acting scientifically, but it appears you are then arguing in favor of pseudoscience of the worst sort, unless I have misconstrued your position.
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_%28philosophy_of_mind%2...
In the restaurant industry it is part of the culture that no successful chef rises from the trenches of building a well-regarded establishment working less than 60-70 hours a week. That is the minimum.
I've worked nearly every position in the restaurant biz (I love the industry and would do it everyday if it paid anything decent) including a couple well-regarded NYC places where I worked consecutive 100+ hour weeks for extended periods of time, 24 hour shifts, and often times ended up sleeping somewhere in the restaurant so instead of spending an hour to get home and an hour to come back, I could use 2 extra hours of sleep. When I was 17 I saved a paycheck with 112 hours on it.
At almost 21 now and having recently completely left the industry (except for occasional catering gigs) I was up until recently still working consecutive 70-90 hour weeks.
It's likely because Im young and maybe naive but the appeal for me has always been the camaraderie and for the life of me I cannot find that in a startup. I've interviewed in person with over a dozen startups now in Manhattan and Brooklyn and I've turned down offers from the majority of companies I interviewed with because at 5pm, they all turn off their computers and go home.
I want to work with a team that's put all their chips into the company. Financially, physically, emotionally. I want the blood, sweat, and tears that make up the restaurant industry. Not because I think my hours are "cool" or "impressive" because I know I wont be able to maintain those hours as I get older and have real commitments. For now what I want is a team that has it all on the line. I know the risks are high but I know the reward is higher, the friendships that come out of those experiences have always been the strongest ones for me and the experiences have taught me how to handle the worst.
As I get older I'm sure I'll come to learn the differences between being paid for physical labour and being paid to develop software. Eventually I'll be in the same boat as most of you but for now I'll continue to work a 12 hour day and wakeup excited to check my emails and excited to hack on the next feature for my next side-project.
60 hours a week is a big much, but if you're working on your own company then I have no problem with it. Working on your own stuff, for your own benefit, is a totally different thing than working for someone else. If you're doing 60 hours a week to make someone else rich, you're most certainly doing it wrong.
Look at people opinion on HN (i.e. our peers). Being good require to train in new tech and work on personal project outside work time.
If you are pushing yourself to the max for an employer you are most likely not doing that. Meaning in addition of making your boss richer for no personal gain, you make yourself look incompetent to your peers, potentially arming your career.
I probably work 60 to 80 hours a week, most weeks. During slow times I work less. It includes everything from software development to discussing tech support issues with customers, to doing my own billing, to accounting, to any number of other tasks. If I worked less than 60 hours a week I wouldn't have time for real work most weeks.
But a few points:
1. I don't have a commute. When I used to work at Microsoft I would work 40 hours a week, spend at least ten hours a week stuck in traffic, and have at least 5 hours a week in unpaid break time. That adds up to 55 hours by itself. Had I lived a little further away, those could have added up to over 60 hours committed to work for 40 hours of pay. I also find being stuck in traffic significantly more stressful and draining than working.
2. I don't spend more than 40 hours a week doing any specific kind of work. Most weeks, I do less than 20 hours of work software development, and I know that if I am doing particularly heavy software development work, that going above 20 hours a week is courting burnout (I would rather put in 20 hours of really good effort than have to throttle effort in order to stay sane). For lighter work? Sure I could go up to 40.
3. The 60 to 80 hours includes a lot of time that would otherwise be hobby or personal project time, but which I can count because I am self-employed ;-). For example, I spent 20 hours worth of work this week on a strategic project that has no immediate impact regarding revenue, etc, but is fun and I think will make the rest of my work a lot more fun (when I have examples of how I will certainly submit them here on HN). That counts.
4. I work from home so all kinds of break time are usually family time unless I am on HN ;-).
So my point is that there are so many factors that go into this. I think the author is talking about working 60 hours for a business, particularly where you don't work from home, doing just one job. That's fine for short bursts but I wouldn't recommend it as a lifestyle. On the other hand there are certainly contexts where over 60 hours a week for the long run makes sense once you escape the idea that "it's a job."
To everyone who jumped in to comment that 60+ hours at work is just fine, because they can do it. I have to say, stop equating work with progress. Busiest time in my life was when I was studying for the California Bar exam. According to the program I was doing, I was expected to study 12 hours a day. Most people I knew did 12+ hours of studying at least, all of them passed the bar. I did about 6 hours a day (+ other…
Sixty hours a week was a short week in the old days, the conveniences of a modern society allow us to choose more free time should we want it, all you have to do is venture outside of our comfortable environments and you will find people wishing 60 was the max.
Having grown up on a farm all I can say is, you don't notice it unless the wrong stuff keeps piling up. Its amazing how energized you feel when you enjoy the work and don't have idle time to worry.
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[Citation needed] I've gotten the following list of citations in the past, which suggest that the 40-60 hour regime is (aggregated over many workers) optimal for construction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7089557 But I've never seen anything even remotely suggesting that an individual needs to be an "actual snowflake" in order to productively work more than 40 hours. Since you claim there are "numerous studie…
Read the mythical man month.
That means emergencies can't be every week.
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> falsifiable evidence ("testable against the empirical world") That's not what falsifiable means. > I'm a doctor and I've created a revolutionary cure for the common cold. My cure is to shake a dried gourd over the cold sufferer until he gets better. The cure might take a week, but it always works. Because the common cold has a non-zero mortality rate, you can't say that your cure always works. That statement, taken…
>> falsifiable evidence ("testable against the empirical world") > That's not what falsifiable means. You truncated the original, cut out an essential word, then argued against the edited version. Here's what I said: > Because psychology's topic is the mind, and because the mind is not a physical entity, psychology cannot produce empirical, falsifiable evidence ("testable against the empirical world") to supports its…
What is correct is that experimental designs are more or less not possible in behavioural psychology. This could be OP's second point of confusion. Essentially the only time real experiemnts as opposed to quasi-experiments are possible in science is where a known physical quantity is already well understood (e.g. moles of Hydrogen, quanta of photons, metres of distance, joules of energy etc). Where complete control over a known physical quantity is not practical, the only possible experimental design is in fact a quasi experimental design. However, to claim that quasi experiments are not valid is to deny a large amount of scientific knowledge, and flies in the face of deductive logic.
Next up we have this whole notion of falsifiability. It's a red herring. The discipline of psychology was the original field that enabled the types of statistical analysis that underpin much of the modern economy. Psychology provided the intellecutal basis of using single case studies (e.g patients with a rare or unique illness) to further scientific understanding. In psychology this resulted in much of our understanding of the functions of different parts of the brain prior to the development of neuroimaging.
Finally, lots of concepts in computer science originate in psychology - heuristic being the one that comes to mind at the moment. My entire development methodology is based on the idea that human short term memory is fixed to 7±2 items (based on data from quasi-experimental studies). Thus when I am writing code my primary purpose is to only have to attend to 5 things at a time, at most, as this is the lower bound of the reliability of my short term memory.