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Fuck being productive

dostoynikov.bearblog.dev

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Re: Fuck being productive

#301

Post by roguas »

pdimitar wrote: post #299

Absolutely, indeed frak being productive. It's a Ponzi scheme, you have to keep grinding so you can land your next job that might be slightly better (and often is not). And we're talking in your free time, not even during the work hours. How about some new propaganda? "Work maximum 5h a day and the other 3h you will donate to your employer if they are kind and give you good atmosphere and money"? How about that one,…

I think 5h of work is a ton in SWE. IF you can focus, isolate important work and put hard 5 hours... kid you are going places. If not, you will not be going places while putting 10 hours, I think.

Re: Fuck being productive

#302

Post by wahnfrieden »

lurking_swe wrote: post #294
deprecative wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being a wage slave is a choice. If you don't like your life, change it. It's incredibly unfortunate that instead of using a shred of empathy to see that your situation isn't the situation of nearly everyone else in the industry, or alive for that matter. "If you don't like your life, change it" screams "I have no idea what I am talking about" because you're failing to see that situations elsewhere are different. Ta…

you’re a SWE working 45 hours a week? You can do better, even in the US. I suggest focusing on company culture when interviewing if you care about this kind of stuff. I’ve worked at 3 companies in my career so far, and worked about 40 hours a week at each of them. i was not born into wealth…neither were (most) of my coworkers. I won’t even ask about the $70k salary. I made that much at my first gig after college. Sou…

>The national average salary for a Software Developer is $88,383 in United States.

Yes many of us here are capable of making multiples more than that and so have I, but we're not talking career advice here, we're talking about material conditions industry wide

Re: Fuck being productive

#303

Post by nly »

dahwolf wrote: post #209
BossingAround wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this argument over and over again, as if "more expensive to employ" directly causes "lower salaries". I don't think the two are directly tied. If it costs you $150k to pay $90k employee salary, for example, that doesn't explain why there are $300k+ employees in the Valley (while that amount of money is kind of preposterous in Europe, though I'm sure some have it as well). In my mind, it's rather a combinati…

None of your listed reasons make a dent in explaining the massive salary differences between the US and EU. There's a much simpler explanation: The EU simply doesn't have the capital. There are no pools of venture capitalists clustering hundreds of billions of dollars they can piss away on half-ass ideas. It's as simple as that. They funding money simply doesn't exist.

That doesn't explain salary discrepancies between the US and the UK at the same company

A Facebook engineer in London is probably earning 70% of what a Facebook engineer in the US is earning, even after taking in to account taxes, benefits and any cost of living discrepancies.

Re: Fuck being productive

#304

Post by pdimitar »

roguas wrote: post #301
pdimitar wrote: post #299

Absolutely, indeed frak being productive. It's a Ponzi scheme, you have to keep grinding so you can land your next job that might be slightly better (and often is not). And we're talking in your free time, not even during the work hours. How about some new propaganda? "Work maximum 5h a day and the other 3h you will donate to your employer if they are kind and give you good atmosphere and money"? How about that one,…

I think 5h of work is a ton in SWE. IF you can focus, isolate important work and put hard 5 hours... kid you are going places. If not, you will not be going places while putting 10 hours, I think.

Yeah, exactly.

I've actually used counters -- privately, I'll never give anyone access to my machine or my activity times -- for a small period of time and I discovered that my true creative time was something in the order of 2.0 to 3.5 hours a day. And we're talking truly good work here, adding features, refactoring, adding and fixing tests, making automation scripts, you name it, it was all there.

5h doing everything right is enough to burn you out for the next 2-3 days.

Re: Fuck being productive

#305

Post by adave »

tilne wrote: post #176
gdsdfe wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

where did you find your passion? just curious

On the advice of a commenter in a different HN thread I recently read Cal Newport’s book, “So Good They Can’t Ignore You.” The main premise is that passion results from valuable skills built via hard work over years of deliberate practice. Only after you have those valuable skills, the book argues, do you have the leverage to dictate your life in a way many people find necessary for satisfaction. Passion follows from…

What do you drink in the morning for working years for a skill only to hope passion shows up. Imo, if you actually listen to yourself(if you can hear) its easy to find out if you are passionate about certain things. No need to spend 10 years hating woodworking only to find no passion for it lol.Self help authors these days.

Re: Fuck being productive

#307

Post by michaelcampbell »

incahoots wrote: post #189
danny_taco wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason we all work for someone else is for money but there is something to be said about the things we build at work and not caring about them. This is something that took me a long time to realize but you need to stop thinking about software as a field and start thinking of it as a skill set. From there figure out what interests you. Wildlife, economics, vehicles, etc. or whatever, and then use your skill s…

I think what you've laid out here is invaluable. My skill-set is mostly geared towards sysadmin work, and I loathed working for corporate places, being on-call, dealing with immediate emergencies (which were all superficial), stressed over attending bullshit meetings. I saw my local library was looking for a sysadmin, it did come with a pay cut, but damn if it isn't a quarter of the responsibilities, fulfilling work,…

> pension, decent healthcare... > Much much happier now.

Many of us in the US would also be, working for less money and responsibility if we had those.

Re: Fuck being productive

#308

Post by allarm »

FredPret wrote: post #77
zwieback wrote: post #20

Yeah, just wait till you're in your fifties and feel like you're also running out of time to do things! For example: "how many more growing seasons do I have to try this or that tomato" or "should I learn Spanish?". On the plus side kids are out of your hair.

As an adult second-language learner, my advice is not to even bother learning a second language unless you have to, or would love to. You can get proficient quickly, but much of the language's beauty will lie in the subtleties which will take decades of effort to learn. And there's the accent, which you'll never lose. The best time to learn a language is between 0 and 10 y.o.

re: accent

The funny thing is that I spent some time working on my English accent, and it wasn't that hard. Grammar and common phrases are two difficult things that I still haven't mastered. The combination of these two factors causes me to sometimes get funny looks when people assume I'm probably a native speaker because I sound so similar, but make weird mistakes when I speak.

Now that I learn a third language (German), I put more effort into grammar and vocabulary but don’t really care about the accent. I’m not a native, deal with it.

Re: Fuck being productive

#309

Post by listenallyall »

mcv wrote: post #291
listenallyall wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you catch up? Administrative stuff like going to the post office, DMV, getting a haircut, would all be closed... due to 4 day work week.

Everybody should have a different 4 day work week, of course. Shops are still open in the weekend.

He stated "administrative stuff" -- not "shops". Stuff that's already open on the weekend isn't an issue.

And are people willing to take a 20% pay cut? I would doubt many people could afford (or wish) to do so.

The entire premise is absurd, which is what I was pointing out.

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