31–40 of 66 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This and take away his nannies, chauffeurs and other servants. Let his wife work a regular job too. If you are not privileged, running a family is another 40 hour a week job.
I mean, I take your point and even agree with you. But, to be fair, I'm sure Sergei worked 60+ hours/week when Google was starting.
Can I suggest an experiment? Sergey could decide to be put in a shared cube farm for 6x 10s a week and see how long he lasts. I think there's a large difference between the fatigue invoked in work that is some variant of managerial "in meetings where it's low information hot takes 80% of the time" work, and actual engineering work where drafting design documents, working on code, and context switching while waiting f…
I would argue that the difference is not as much in the type of activities, but rather in your ownership and control over them. When it's "your" project and you decide how to do things (at most with feedback from a handful of others whom you all know personally), then you can be extremely productive and motivated working even more than 60h/week for months.
As someone who actually really likes process, if you want to encourage some sort of best practice without causing pain, you absolutely must automate the process and not put people in the critical path. For example, if you have a coding standard make sure that linters that are fast and cheerful enforce it, not other people.
Also, I don't agree with the "months" - maybe a weekend or whole week, but other than that you're headed into burnout territory.
Can I suggest an experiment? Sergey could decide to be put in a shared cube farm for 6x 10s a week and see how long he lasts. I think there's a large difference between the fatigue invoked in work that is some variant of managerial "in meetings where it's low information hot takes 80% of the time" work, and actual engineering work where drafting design documents, working on code, and context switching while waiting f…
I would argue that the difference is not as much in the type of activities, but rather in your ownership and control over them. When it's "your" project and you decide how to do things (at most with feedback from a handful of others whom you all know personally), then you can be extremely productive and motivated working even more than 60h/week for months.
You’d think that a guy this smart would know that the data not only disagrees with this, but that this rules out anyone with a family
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, I take your point and even agree with you. But, to be fair, I'm sure Sergei worked 60+ hours/week when Google was starting.
It's almost like how many hours a week a person can work on a thing depends on their ownership of the thing, their domestic situation, and their financial state.
I'm going to continue to shill for the billionaire in this instance: what's the right number of hours to work on the most important technology of our lifetime (or maybe ever)?
Of course Sergey doesn't have to spend 60 hours as he retired.
I have never been asked to work more than 40 hours when I was working at Google, I had amazing salary, and I knew that the people who are getting promoted over level 4/5 were working on the weekends as well, 60 hours was just normal for them.
Google has enough data to see that the most productive engineers are the ones who spend so much time mastering their skill.
Also I believe an AI company (which Google categorizes itself as) can't stay competitive with China if the 100 people in the core AI team work just 40 hours a week. For the rest of 100000 people it doesn't matter that much, as they are working more on integration and less competitive stuff.
Seems to be normal elsewhere, why not here in the West? What makes the "workers" here any different to those in other places?
This is globalisation, internationalisation and capitalism. Be thankful not to have to go down the mines to fetch the rare metals needed for the "digital" revolution. Nor working slave-like conditions making the fast fashion to glorify our individualised tastes and styles. Or having to work on container ships carry the cheap plastic products from China to the West. Those kind of jobs don't have "work from home" clauses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, I take your point and even agree with you. But, to be fair, I'm sure Sergei worked 60+ hours/week when Google was starting.
It's almost like how many hours a week a person can work on a thing depends on their ownership of the thing, their domestic situation, and their financial state.
He is Empire and he is what Matters.