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A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

jeffarchibald.ca

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Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

#281

Post by dwaltrip »

gaius wrote: post #267
dwaltrip wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making some leaps, as well as a few judgments, based on relatively little information. I hope you realize this.

Sure, but there is only one community that uses that vocabulary. No-one doing computational chemistry or machine learning or weather forecasting or quantitative finance (or any of a hundred other kinds of programming) calls themselves a "full stack engineer" or a "javascript ninja". Only guys assembling websites out of pre-built components (aka frameworks) like Ikea furniture, for companies to use for marketing.

He didn't even call himself a "javaScript ninja". He read a book that has that phrase in the title. Also, why do you assume building websites is mutually exclusive with doing something meaningful? Pretty bold assertion.

Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

#282

Post by singingfish »

lutusp wrote: post #254
singingfish wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yawn. There are very few scientific laws compared to the body of scientific knowledge. Most scientific concepts are relegated to theory rather than law as they are are amenable only to inductive proof. The only scientific ideas that have the status of law are those that are amenable to deductive proof. You are very long winded, and you present as if you think your understanding is better than it actually is.

You have failed to address any of my arguments, standard arguments that clearly define what science is and is not. And you have decided that ad hominem is a better approach, even though a logical error. Given your inability to defend your position, this isn't too surprising.

No, I outlined that your entire frame of reference is wrong, yet you persist with long winded and mostly irelevant time wasting.

Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

#283

Post by scribu »

wellboy wrote: post #123
ryandrake wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another perspective. I had that exact same attitude when I was 26 and single and had no pets. "I'm going to get awesome at embedded C++ programming, work my ass off in my 20s so I write world-changing software in my 30s and I can retire in my 40s." No pain, no gain, live at work, 80 hour days, all night caffeine and coding sessions. F-yea! I'm a varsity software jock training for the Career Olympics! Almost 2…

But have you never tried to start your own company as creating wealth by working for someone else just doesn't work? Looking at the failure rate of startups of 82% as a first timer, by starting your own company you have just 40-folded your chances to success.

That 82% failure rate seems suspiciously low. May I ask where you got that figure from?

Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

#284

Post by WalterBright »

A study of this was done during WW2. They found that 60 hr weeks initially boosted productivity, but that boost faded over time to less than that of a 40 hr week. (And this was with a motivated work force.)

They discovered that going back and forth between 60 and 40 hr weeks did produce a sustained production increase.

Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

#285

Post by dclara »

einhverfr wrote: post #247
dclara wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really true. Counting for hours regardless of the intensity of workload is meaningless. I also think the OP's meaning behind how the hours is counted is regarding the full capacity of work load during the day, instead of including everything work related. The intensity of the software development prevents one to work over 8 hours a day, and even not for too long without a break. What I mean is pretty much cont…

I can do 8 hours of light-weight development easily enough, things like minor bugfixes, minor tweaks, etc. and carry that on for months if needed. But for stuff like coding from scratch, aside from brief bursts, I usually find that 4 hours is a good general guide. Obviously when nearing release, the long stretches of 8-10 hours of coding is going to be much lighter. Most of the tweaks are going to be minor, you hope,…

Yes, on top of the 40 hours of intensive work including design, coding, learn a new technology with intensive reading, or even tackling business/marketing strategies and tactics, etc., the rest hours are on lighter work related things, such as email, news, phone calls, book-keeping, etc.

Regarding how to dividing the time slots, my usual practice is to concentrate on one major task and get it done completely in the shortest time period. For example, while I'm doing patent application, I have to complete it with all the available resources being collected and everything in the real-time memory for 2-3 weeks until it can pass the criteria. If it's a software development or fundraising, it may take 3-4 weeks to finish one round of intensive development and reach a milestone. After that period, I'm pretty much exhausted, and have to switch to something else to concentrate on, just like what you said. Focus and hammer down the nails with a deadline in mind is so important. Bug-fixing is a side job, light but time-consuming to cover every possible exceptional cases, but it also depends on whether it needs a redesign.

Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

#286

Post by com2kid »

lutusp wrote: post #277
com2kid wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your position is still not 100% clear, although it appears that you are arguing that something called "the mind" exists outside the physical realm. Without resorting to religious nonsense that hardly seems like a tenable position. Psychology's job has been one of categorization. It is fancy pattern recognition that some poor fools thought had actual meaning behind it. Now it turns out it also managed to realize that…

> Your position is still not 100% clear, although it appears that you are arguing that something called "the mind" exists outside the physical realm. Wait, hold on, I didn't invent the mind, psychologists did. I'm simply pointing out that the subject of psychological work doesn't have a physical existence. I'm certainly not arguing that the mind "exists outside the physical realm". I'm arguing that psychology needs t…

> Wait, hold on. I'm not arguing that the mind exists on a non-physical plane, that's psychology's claim -- I'm objecting to it, as do most scientists.

Ah OK, I was obviously confused.

All the psychologists I have known have admitted that they are just an inaccurate subset of neurology, none of them would follow the concept of "mind", I tend not to bother dealing with people who go for mind/body dualism!

Any psychologist who is an atheist and a skeptic pretty much has to come to the same conclusions. Meh.

Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

#288

Post by notastartup »

At a company I worked at few years ago in Vancouver, the ratio of project managers to developers was 4 to 1, on average a designer or a developer was dealing with 4 different project managers at a time, sometimes more, switching back and forth between projects with impossible deadlines. This led to people working on the weekends, often leaving after hours (because people think it's selfish to leave on time and leave others behind with more work).

What's even worse is when the executives started to delegate tasks outside of one's job description because they were undermanned. That's where I drew the line, call them out on it, and got canned. What's even more funny was being outcasted where a typical company lunch or gathering would always be about who has done the most hour of work or have become "heros" by saving the project by working beyond the work hours.

At one point the vice president called me at 1 AM (after leaving work at 10 pm) on the commute back home as I walked him through logging into the company backend used to power mobile applications.

It's quite interesting because they got funded 6 million dollars but they couldn't afford to hire more staff and they insisted on breaking even when it clearly was not scaling.

What I realized about the tech market in BC is that a lot of it is huff piece by local media and the continued image of "grass is greener over here" where none of it highlights the exploitative work environment for highly skilled technical engineers in the software/web industry. With the rising real estate prices and people basically living check to check to keep a roof over their heads, I wouldn't be surprised if Vancouver turns to a resort town with people leaving for tech jobs outside of BC to where the cost of living and wages are justified. Already many of the engineers at the company I worked for have left for United States.

I'm not alone with this story there are many many horror stories I hear from other local engineers and designers. In fact the only people I hear that are happy are freelancers charging higher wage.

Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

#289

Post by notastartup »

Shivetya wrote: post #206
x0054 wrote: post #181

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 is fine when you enjoy your work. 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 amaz…

You just blew past the whole industrial revolution process and the marginalization of wage workers.

Working on the farm with labor intensive work is totally different from the mentally taxing and stressful tech work environment. That's a whole different topic.

Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

#290

Post by notastartup »

zxcvvcxz wrote: post #56

This false dichotomy is seriously getting annoying. If 60 hours is sustainable for you, do it. If only 30 hours is sustainable for you, do that instead. But stop imposing onto others what is right or wrong when there are so many factors at play. Some of my most productive memories are summers studying and working for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week (= 72 hours). I didn't get tired, burned out, or anything. Another summ…

The point of the story is that more hours is not increased productivity.

Look at Germany's working hours for the average salary man. They work less than British salary man and are far more productive.

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