People don't work as much as they say • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by muttled » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 6:18 PM UTC

bregma wrote: post #114

saurik wrote: post #37

> Most days I can do somewhere between one and two hours of hard thinky work. Wow. Once I start doing this kind of work I both have a hard time stopping (as I find working on such problems addictive, both in good ways and in bad) and feel like it takes at least a couple hours of loading state into my brain before I could even begin to be working "at speed" on a hard problem, which means I actively try to schedule my…

That's great until a PM schedules a quick meeting to make sure your progress is tracking their spreadsheet line. And there are 4 or 5 PMs. You end up with your days split into 6 or 7 segments between quick standups and triage meetings and status meetings and emergency customer calls where you're brought in "just in case" and because it takes at least a half hour of concentration just to get back into the zone, your w…

I've had a lot of luck with blocking out a couple hours a day for "dedicated work time." You have to aggressively defend that time and reject requests where someone carelessly double-books you anyway to be able to keep that time sacred. I've worked for places who wouldn't respect that and expected me to be "always available". Those places got the level of output from me that they deserved when I found myself unable to concentrate and would just be waiting for the next interruption.

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

#312

Post by euaa26 » Tue, Feb 01, 2022, 10:29 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #145

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…

> 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…

Is it really that bad for a company to have over-hired? Wouldn't it be better for the employees wellbeing to have a company that over-hires rather than under-hires?

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

#313

Post by naveen99 » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 8:43 PM UTC

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #298

inglor_cz wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is any country in the world where doctors work for 40 hours, regardless of the economic model. The world of human disease places some limitations on what can be done. Many people either do not have the grit or the stomach to become doctors (I could easily learn the theory, but I couldn't cope with all the blood, pus, vomit and frequent feeling of helplessness). People develop critical problems at…

Medical school application rates beg to differ. There's at least 10x more people that want to be doctors than get to be doctors.

Those application rates are 10:1 in india, but only 2:1 in the usa.