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People don't work as much as they say

drmaciver.substack.com

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

#221

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

hiptobecubic wrote: post #210
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, well...the consensus seems to be that I was a decent manager. I hated the job, but they kept me for 27 years, so I guess something went well. Glad it's behind me, though.

27 years is a long time to stay in a job you hate.

Yup. But it wasn't all hate. I worked for a company that I believed in, was a peer with some of the finest scientists and engineers in the world, ran a team of very high-performing engineers, and was proud to be a member of that brand.

I felt good about what I did, even though I didn't enjoy it.

> 27 years is a long time to stay in a job you hate.

This statement shows that we are in a privileged place, indeed. We get to have a career, where we can do work that we enjoy, and make a lot of money at it.

The great majority of people don't get that. Most of my friends don't like their jobs. Some, are very good at what they do, and make a lot of money.

The job was relatively easy. I liked the company I worked for, and my peers. I felt a great deal of Responsibility towards the company, my peers, and my employees. I made enough to live on, and save. I could have made a lot more money, elsewhere. Despite the obvious sneers and judging that I get, I'm actually no slouch.

Nowadays, I work for free, on software that helps others.

WFM. YMMV.

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

#222

Post by austincheney »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #87

I’ve been reading some variant of this, for many years. 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. I couldn’t work on my own projects (because I was on paid work time), and it would have been irresponsible, in the extreme, to put myself into the critical path (because it was no guarantee that I would be able to reliably work). I…

> I couldn’t work on my own projects (because I was on paid work time)

The only problem here is an employer claiming ownership of a personal project, assuming the personal project isn’t interfering with employee product delivery and isn’t violating employer security policies.

My solution to this is dual employment. My secondary employer has trouble differentiating work time from personal time so they end up with the most liberal IP assignment policies I have ever seen. Everybody, corporate IP attorneys, know this.

So, unless it’s making money or an employer wants to lay down a provision patent they won’t fight you on it. They are fully aware the alternatives are moving to another company or to stop innovating. As a result most employers with silently bless the personal projects even on company time. They won’t bless these efforts directly because personal projects on company time or property are ethical violations that legally compel the employer to take ownership and shut it down. That is the last thing anybody wants.

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

#223

Post by city41 »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #216
city41 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with all of this. But I can honestly say in my entire career I've only had about two good managers. One of the biggest issues in my experience is knowing who the bad/good performers are. Most managers have no idea. I've seen bad performers just let be, and I've seen great performers fired for seemingly no reason at all. Both kill team morale.

I'll add that if a good manager works with an underperforming IC and makes a meaningful difference, it is VERY UNLIKELY the IC will acknowledge this in a timely way, or perhaps even know it happened. The best case scenario I've ever experienced is several years after the fact. That's a long time to wait for some positive external validation.

Oh for sure. My first comment is pretty much me bagging on managers. But in their defense, it's a really hard job. So hard I've never taken it on because I'm positive I wouldn't be good at it. I think my experience of most managers not being as good as I'd like largely boils down to the job being extremely difficult.

I'm not surprised to hear a manager's work can go unnoticed. That's unfortunate :(

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

#224

Post by maerF0x0 »

sys_64738 wrote: post #116
vorhemus wrote: post #40

I don't think people who say they work 14 hours a day are lying. They just count in everything that is somehow related to their job, like reading about their business in the newspaper or thinking about work in the shower. And that's the crux of the matter, in jobs that don't have clearly assigned shifts or where attendance is measured, the boundaries between work and leisure become blurred. And then again, comparison…

I alway liken folk who say they work long hours to Intel cpus in the megahertz race. Sure it runs at 6ghz but it’s useless for a laptop. Performance per watt is where the quality is. I equate that to be forty hours of work per week.

high performance per watt is pretty low value for those of us who haven't moved our laptops from our home/desk in the past 2 years. In fact the whole premise of a laptop has largely been erased under work from home restrictions. Most of the point was to have a portable machine so your employees felt the need/desire to take the device home and continue working after hours.

There's maybe a slight argument to be made for meetings, but even then you're supposed to be paying attention to the meeting, if not then why are you there? One person might need to take notes...

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

#225

Post by hyperpape »

tardigr8 wrote: post #108
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,…

Another study here that uses an estimate for productivity. https://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf His models show peak productivity between 5 and 6 hours a day. In my own experience, I have found productivity more related to sleep and exercise than anything else. Getting 7 hours good sleep (which means winding down for at least 30 minutes before sleep, a stretching exercise or meditation), and enough exercise every day to ge…

It's been a minute since I read this study, and I didn't take perfect notes, but iirc, the top line result is that (among munition workers) productivity per hour peaks below 40 hours a week, but total productivity peaks above it.

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

#226

Post by brightball »

vincentmarle wrote: post #214
brightball wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my favorite jobs was managing about a dozen Python programmers for 3 years…because I don’t know a lick of Python and it forced me to focus on the team more than the tasks. I got a lot of joy out of helping everybody develop, find their groove and helping them coordinate and learn from each other. The business demands I was shielding them from were extremely stressful though. A million things that everybody wan…

It sounds like you were trying to be too nice and were trying to appease both sides; that’s a losing proposition. You are working with adults, and adults should be able to handle bad news (if handled properly), and a good manager should be able to bring the bad news but at the same time give enough context so that everyone understands.

Maybe. It was my first time being full time management only. Balanced it effectively for the better part of 3 years. There were a lot of unique challenges (in the non-exaggerated sense) and learning experiences in that job.

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

#227

Post by ahelwer »

sulam wrote: post #212
ahelwer wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very entertaining to read a thread of managers telling themselves they shouldn't do any work, and then simultaneously describing not doing any work as "many times the return of you as an IC" (presumably counting themselves not interfering with the people doing the actual work as equivalent to doing the sum of that work).

Your imagination is very far from the reality of what managers do. I’ll give you a run-down of my day: 1) reading emails. These emails generally consist of a few categories of things — stuff I need to be informed about, questions, asks for permission (a special form of question), documents (generally decision and decision docs, or stuff from Product), and meeting requests. 2) meetings. These meetings generally consis…

You are mistaken, this is literally - word for word - my imagination of what managers do.

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

#228

Post by zozbot234 »

jug wrote: post #69

While this blog post and reading about his opinions may be interesting, ultimately it's an opinion piece and I strongly dislike when people write opinion pieces and make it sound like they did a study in the title! For all we know, he may be completely wrong! Maybe he is the outlier and people generally, in fact do perform more "focused work" than two hours a day... Maybe he isn't overly enthusiastic about his work p…

The OP does mention "being in the zone" as a possibility. He just says that it's rare, inherently not applicable to many kinds of work, and requires optimal conditions that generally don't apply. It's very much the exception, not the rule.

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

#229

Post by faet »

dls2016 wrote: post #131
FearlessNebula wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is almost certainly taking a toll on the doctors health. They’re stuck in that situation because of unions, but that isn’t the case for an SWE. We shouldn’t be expected to work at our healths expense.

How are unions responsible for doctors’ long work hours? According to a quick google there are very low rates of unionization and it seems to be a recent phenomenon (I didn’t know there were any.) Downvotes for asking a Q?

>For the past quarter-century, the American Medical Association and other industry groups have predicted a glut of doctors and worked to limit the number of new physicians. In 1994, the Journal of the American Medical Association predicted a surplus of 165,000 doctors by 2000.

Most residencies are paid for my Medicare funds. The 1997 Balanced Budget Act capped the number of residencies that Medicare funds, which led to fewer physicians. Who pushed for the cap?

>Lawmakers received cover from the American Medical Association (AMA), the Association of American Medical Colleges, and other major stakeholders in American medicine who endorsed caps on funding for residents and other graduate medical education programs. In March 1997, months before the Balanced Budget Act was enacted, the AMA even suggested reducing the number of US residency positions by approximately 25% from 25,000 to fewer than 19,000. “The United States is on the verge of a serious oversupply of physicians,” said the AMA and other physicians’ groups in a joint statement

https://qz.com/1676207/the-us-is-on-the-verge-of-a-devastati...

And also in the past they have lobbied to shut down medical schools which led to shortages in the 60s. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMhpr033066

They have recently pushed for more physicians but those changes will take time.

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

#230

Post by maerF0x0 »

pmichaud wrote: post #179

I guess I'll add my anecdote. For me this really depends on whether I'm "into it" or not. When I'm doing what I need to do but my heart isn't in it, I mostly match the "a few hours of real work per day" descriptions, doing my tasks in between some reading and chatting or whatever. Push it too hard, and I start getting into burn out territory. But when I'm excited and really enjoying myself, watch out, I'm a fucking p…

aside fun on S, A, B...

https://gaming.stackexchange.com/a/172006/46542

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