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People don't work as much as they say

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Re: People don't work as much as they say

#181

Post by wpietri »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #172

Have spent a lot of my life doing manual labor, and still slightly in that boat now but do have a proper office job (receptionist). it was incredible for me to experience my first office job and realize this general fact. Not only was my body not sore everyday, but my day was suddenly largely my own, my "labor" was suddenly not defined necessarily by constant action. I dont even really have to think as much as I did…

It's a huge privilege! In high school and college I worked a bunch of random jobs, including factory worker, McDonald's cook, and convenience store cashier. It helped me really appreciate the cushiness of office jobs.

But in some ways, it's the source of ongoing frustration. Office culture IME is not very interested in getting direct work done. When I was on the McDonald's breakfast shift, I had a solid block of hours where people knew not to bother me unless something was literally on fire. I could get into a glorious flow state. Even managers, even visiting execs knew to button their lips until the time was right. But these days? There are so many people who are happy to put 30 minutes on my calendar or interrupt me on Slack. They mean well; they just don't know anything else. How I wish they did!

Re: People don't work as much as they say

#182

Post by paulcole »

blorenz wrote: post #142
paulcole wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the point of earning the money?

It’s for another day. Currently his happiness is in exactly what he is doing. He is building and creating.

Do you know the commenter I replied to personally or are you guessing?

Re: People don't work as much as they say

#183

Post by Noumenon72 »

d12345m wrote: post #129
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen a convincing explanation for why doctors work these long hours that didn't boil down to 'the doctors union restricts the supply of new doctors and limits the tasks that can be delegated to non-doctors'. As a result, the regular mention of their long hours generally just makes me angry at them rather than grateful to them, but I guess I'm in the minority.

This isn't my domain by any means, but one common argument for long hours that is that patient handoffs during shift changes can cause information loss, and thus cause medical errors which lead to worse patient outcomes. The shifts are intentionally kept long to reduce the number of times that this handoff has to occur. Again, this isn't my wheelhouse at all. I'm just repeating something I hear often when this topic…

At the plastic factory, I preferred 12-hour shifts to 8-hour for this reason. I just got more efficient as my shift went longer. I also felt the loss of efficiency whenever I took a vacation. The thing I disapprove of is the sleep deprivation.

Re: People don't work as much as they say

#184

Post by distances »

dpark wrote: post #166
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve logged my work time (automatically with time tracking apps) for over a decade. I’ve also done a significant amount of hourly-rate consulting where I’m very careful to only bill for actual working time. When I was younger, one of my early challenges was that I had been misled to believe that only time spent in the editor, writing code counted as “working”. There’s a somewhat pervasive idea among devs that meeting…

> Some of the laziest, least productive people I've worked with are the same people posting on LinkedIn on Sunday morning about their 80 hour grinds every week. In my experience, people who claim to regularly work 60-80 hours/week are completely full of it. Yes, there’s this “thought about work for a second, that’s another hour” mentality. But there’s also just a ton of people outright lying about the amount of time…

I used to work at a company where we could clock in and out if we wanted. If we did, we could keep any extra hours at our convenience as a day off. If we didn't it would be a full workday by default.

I liked the freedom to work long days every now and then, and then take some time off later when I wanted a long weekend or so. A colleague decided that's a great idea and started doing the same, but stopped after a week or two when he realized he's just accruing negative time.

I'm not claiming that I was fully productive with my office hours, just agreeing with you that some people really do think they work more than they actually do.

Re: People don't work as much as they say

#185

Post by maerF0x0 »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #173

It depends on the age. At 20 something I could easily pull 16 hours of straight hard coding. Now? Forget about it.

So could I. The caveat being that I was only a fraction as productive. roughly guessing, 16 hours was probably worth about 3 of today's.

most of the difference is just the ability to go more directly to the right solution or implementation versus when i was younger I often found out late that something was off and had to change _everything_ to cascade the refactor.

Re: People don't work as much as they say

#186

Post by Noumenon72 »

Pigalowda wrote: post #128
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen a convincing explanation for why doctors work these long hours that didn't boil down to 'the doctors union restricts the supply of new doctors and limits the tasks that can be delegated to non-doctors'. As a result, the regular mention of their long hours generally just makes me angry at them rather than grateful to them, but I guess I'm in the minority.

Some of it is capitalism. Here’s a nice introduction to private equity in radiology. https://www.benwhite.com/medicine/the-private-equity-model-i... Now with surgery? Again there’s some capitalism but also surgery is hard. Extremely hard. Here’s a link to a common surgery for orthopedics for example. They have to memorize these procedure steps and be very quick. Time on the table for the patient matters for money and…

You really have to memorize when you have a checklist the nurse could read off so you don't miss a step? I wouldn't trust my memory to hold a single step of that checklist, I'd refer to it every time.

Re: People don't work as much as they say

#187

Post by Noumenon72 »

orzig wrote: post #43

Valuable prospective, but (as is the gist of half my comments here): People are even more different than you think. RescueTime wrote a similar post, but +100 data: https://rescuetime.wpengine.com/work-life-balance-study-2019... Look at the second histogram. The average is roughly aligned with OP’s summary, but there is huge variance. These comments have already devolved into people telling each other they are lying,…

And that's a self-selected group of people who have enough trouble focusing on work that they went to find an app to monitor whether they're focusing.

Re: People don't work as much as they say

#188

Post by qzx_pierri »

indymike wrote: post #159
qzx_pierri wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the person you replied to, but it's because manager's will never truly fit into a project. Most people don't want to go against the manager, or question decisions made by the manager. Even if the manager specifically says "Hey everyone, give me some feedback. Be open and honest" - That's a trap. No one will ever actually do that, because if you bruise your manager's ego, they have the power to make your life a li…

I've been a hands on contributor and manager for long time. I do three things that seem to make this a lot more functional: 1) I pick what I'm going to work on after the rest of the team picks their tickets. 2) I fix one bug per day, not matter what. 3) HIPPO (HIghest Paid Person's Opinion) is not an acceptable reason to make a decision. It's worked well for me, your milage may vary.

At least that's what you think. I'm sure your direct reports have a lot of opinions on that setup that they'll never reveal. I say this with 100% confidence.

Re: People don't work as much as they say

#189

Post by taormina »

vp8989 wrote: post #149
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the reasons that I hated being a manager, was because the job involved a lot of sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen. As a manager-of-managers, when I hear that a manager is doing "a lot of sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen", it's usually a sign that something has gone wrong. Don't get me wrong: I don't expect everyone to be productive 100% of the day, but if managers are reaching a point wh…

"2) Or: Managers have too narrow of a view of what their job is. Speaking generally (not accusing the parent comment) - This often happens when developers who haven't experienced good management or managerial mentoring get promoted into their own management positions and assume their job is literally just to delegate to the engineers and then check on them until it's done. In non-stagnant tech companies, there is alw…

Even then, the manager needs to reaching out to those specialists, coordinating and nurturing those relationships. No one says the eng manager needs to be all of those roles, but as the member of the team without a "real workload" they should absolutely be the liason to the rest of the org.

Re: People don't work as much as they say

#190

Post by ZeroGravitas »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #186
Pigalowda wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of it is capitalism. Here’s a nice introduction to private equity in radiology. https://www.benwhite.com/medicine/the-private-equity-model-i... Now with surgery? Again there’s some capitalism but also surgery is hard. Extremely hard. Here’s a link to a common surgery for orthopedics for example. They have to memorize these procedure steps and be very quick. Time on the table for the patient matters for money and…

You really have to memorize when you have a checklist the nurse could read off so you don't miss a step? I wouldn't trust my memory to hold a single step of that checklist, I'd refer to it every time.

In "the checklist manifesto" the author suggests one of the main benefits of checklists for medical procedures is that nurses or other lower ranked people in the room who know the doctor is about to kill someone or cut off the wrong leg by mistake can communicate this information without the Doctor ruining their career for making them look stupid.
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