Busyness leads to bad decisions • Hacker News Board

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#51

Post by the_af » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 4:04 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #13

throwaway72873 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is perfectly fine to be idle and bored; lay on grass and watch clouds or just do fishing... Not everyone comes from puritan american culture.

> puritan american culture [ => busy busy busy ] There's definitely something to that. Calvinistic thinking that labor is pious seems to have been a part of American workplaces forever, especially tech. It's even a part even of the stackoverflow ethos-- god help you if you ask a question without showing that you've "done the work" up front. But it's all over the place. Look at the China tech sector with their popular…

> god help you if you ask a question without showing that you've "done the work" up front

I think that's different. It's not about puritan work ethic or whatnot, it's about showing the minimum respect for the people you're asking to make an effort for you. Questions which don't show any effort [1] are shunned in tech circles, and this isn't something particular to StackOverflow. And there's a good reason for it: many are asked by "help vampires" [2], people who will burn honest answerers with pointless, ill-researched questions with no follow-up, no useful feedback or even a thank you. Extreme help vampires will even ask the same question repeatedly, apparently too lazy to even see it has been answered already. Some of them just want people to do their homework for them, free. Once or twice may not seem much, but if you don't cut them short, they'll overrun your community.

The mere act of thinking how to phrase a question well, showing you've made all the research you could before finding yourself at a dead end, is often enough to actually find the answer for yourself!

So the StackOverflow community may be a bit trigger-happy, but I completely understand why they'd be upset at people lazy enough to not even bother to formulate their questions clearly.

[1] "How to ask questions the smart way": http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

[2] "What is a help vampire": http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#52

Post by gerbilly » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 4:06 PM UTC

leggomylibro wrote: post #20

birdyrooster wrote: post #2

"And humans enjoy feeling busy and productive." I have never enjoyed feeling busy.

How about feeling idle with nothing to do but consider your own mortality? Not many people enjoy that, and Pascal wrote an interesting paper about it: http://stmaryvalleybloom.org/pascal-diversion.html Personally, my main takeaway can be summarized by this passage: >And those who philosophise on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for spending a whole day in chasing a hare which they would not have bought, sca…

> The hare in itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamities

The irony is not lost on me that the man in this anecdote is bringing untimely death to the hare, to distract himself from his own.

Death probably feels just like you felt before you were born.

Why not celebrate that there is anything to experience at all? It seems so improbable.

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#53

Post by hippich » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

DarwinMailApp wrote: post #28

afarrell wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> assessing if they were actually important to begin with. I've found answering "Is this important?" very hard. I find it much easier to answer "What is the impact if I do this?"

You and me both buddy! I like your style.. and sometimes I ask myself other questions like will it matter to me in 10 hours, 10 days or 10 weeks? The longer into the future it matters to me, the more important it is to get done IMO :)

My procrastination works as such filter. If 10 weeks later I still care about it, it is probably something important. Doesn't work that well for security-related issues (where 10 weeks might be too late...)

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#54

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

alexgmcm wrote: post #50

Frost1x wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>One of the many ways it's expensive to be poor. These sort of time luxury, magnitude of free/disposable income, and free cognitive load (less stress, etc.) aspects are all too frequently overlooked when shunning the working poor and now, even many working middle class Americans. I remember the sort of stress I had first starting out simply keeping up with utility bill payment schedules to avoid late fees. I had the…

>the working poor and now, even many working middle class Americans. The fact is that many of those middle class people are now poor but just don't want to accept it. I'd always define myself as working class because while I have a STEM Masters degree I am entirely dependent upon my salary (which isn't that high, we don't have US level salaries in tech here in Southern Europe) and I have no other sources of income or…

[deleted]

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#55

Post by crispyambulance » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 4:43 PM UTC

the_af wrote: post #51

crispyambulance wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> puritan american culture [ => busy busy busy ] There's definitely something to that. Calvinistic thinking that labor is pious seems to have been a part of American workplaces forever, especially tech. It's even a part even of the stackoverflow ethos-- god help you if you ask a question without showing that you've "done the work" up front. But it's all over the place. Look at the China tech sector with their popular…

> god help you if you ask a question without showing that you've "done the work" up front I think that's different. It's not about puritan work ethic or whatnot, it's about showing the minimum respect for the people you're asking to make an effort for you. Questions which don't show any effort [1] are shunned in tech circles, and this isn't something particular to StackOverflow. And there's a good reason for it: many…

> So the StackOverflow community may be a bit trigger-happy,

Not "a bit"... actually very trigger happy.

Even perfectly reasonable questions that don't exactly fit what a quite a lot overzealous members consider to be on-topic and properly researched questions get slammed hard.

It very much is a form of Calvinist thinking at work, IMHO. There's a notion of "worthiness" that the asker has to meet. It's a needlessly harsh standard that turns off a lot of people who need help.

BTW the dated, smug and dismissive ESR advice and premature labeling of people as "help vampires" doesn't help the argument on the SO side.

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#56

Post by ssivark » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

ThalesX wrote: post #25

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet the reality is Americans do work long hours. https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/12/americas-white-collar-w... You might not realise it but this stuff gets exported to the rest of the world. I frequently see American lobbyists on British TV pushing a low regulation agenda with the intention to weaken workers rights.

I was working for a project with a small company in Scandinavia. For those unaware, Scandinavia as a region in Europe is very much pro socialist policies and pro work-life balance. We got two consultants from the US of A and that was a hell of a month, constantly pushing us to overwork our employees, saying that we need to show them the carrot on the stick. Their idea was that people will work for 80 hours per week o…

If you/your CEO/folks from your company could write an article/blog post about the experience, it would be a great resource to share and point people to — to seed discussion. Please consider :-)

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#57

Post by the_af » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #55

the_af wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> god help you if you ask a question without showing that you've "done the work" up front I think that's different. It's not about puritan work ethic or whatnot, it's about showing the minimum respect for the people you're asking to make an effort for you. Questions which don't show any effort [1] are shunned in tech circles, and this isn't something particular to StackOverflow. And there's a good reason for it: many…

> So the StackOverflow community may be a bit trigger-happy, Not "a bit"... actually very trigger happy. Even perfectly reasonable questions that don't exactly fit what a quite a lot overzealous members consider to be on-topic and properly researched questions get slammed hard. It very much is a form of Calvinist thinking at work, IMHO. There's a notion of "worthiness" that the asker has to meet. It's a needlessly ha…

I tried to explain it's not a SO thing. The Help Vampire describes a real phenomenon, codified by someone not on SO (search for "stackoverflow" in the text...). If you feel it's premature, you're probably lucky to have never dealt with them. ESR's advice is a bit smug -- I don't like the guy myself -- but will clearly help anyone to ask good tech questions; it also predates SO by years if not decades.

Put yourself in the position of the people answering questions for free. It wastes their time. How long would it take to burn you if every day you had to answer the same questions by people too lazy to write with punctuation and to search for the answers to see if they already exist, who never come back to tell you if it helped them or not, who never reply to requests for clarification, who could have found the answer for themselves if they simply tried to run the code, and who are sometimes rude if you ask them a counter-question? There are so many times you can attempt to help someone asking "plz help this code doesn't run why doesn't it run plz help me" before giving up on the website.

Low quality, poorly researched questions also make SO as a whole less useful to other people. Forums full of garbage often devolve into more garbage. So there has to be a threshold -- arbitrary by definition -- and you may or may not agree with the precise one, but without one SO would be full of garbage. SO evolved into trigger-happiness because of the problem it was trying to solve: quality Q&A without the noise and garbage.

This has nothing to do with puritan work ethic or "worthiness" or gatekeeping. How to ask good questions is something every programmer (or tech-minded) needs to be good at in order to do their job. It's not too much to ask. How else would they know what code to write or what problem to solve?

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#58

Post by hef19898 » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

Ididntdothis wrote: post #35

Frost1x wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>One of the many ways it's expensive to be poor. These sort of time luxury, magnitude of free/disposable income, and free cognitive load (less stress, etc.) aspects are all too frequently overlooked when shunning the working poor and now, even many working middle class Americans. I remember the sort of stress I had first starting out simply keeping up with utility bill payment schedules to avoid late fees. I had the…

Very true. I always feel like that when people’s first recommendation for a problem is to get a lawyer. For a lot of people this is prohibitively expensive.

Oh yes. Lawyers are, unfortunately, a bare necessity in some cases. The first time I ran into that problem years ago I was lucky enough to know someone who's father was a pretty good one. He also refused to take any payments from me. That helped so much, I it is hard to fathom. Thing is, even with a white collar job, I would never have been able to afford a lawyer like that without connections. So in that regard, I assume I am not poor.

Without connections like that, and especially that one, certain periods of my life would have been a lot harder. With all the long term impacts that has.

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#59

Post by hef19898 » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

birdyrooster wrote: post #2

"And humans enjoy feeling busy and productive." I have never enjoyed feeling busy.

Personally, I think there is a big difference between busy and occupied and lazy and idle. I love being productive / occupied, yet I hate being busy. And that has nothing to do with stress or pressure, but rather with impact.

And yes, being busy resulted in a couple of less than perfect decisions on my behalf. The worst ones just for the sake of doing and deciding something.

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#60

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 5:17 PM UTC

leggomylibro wrote: post #20

birdyrooster wrote: post #2

"And humans enjoy feeling busy and productive." I have never enjoyed feeling busy.

How about feeling idle with nothing to do but consider your own mortality? Not many people enjoy that, and Pascal wrote an interesting paper about it: http://stmaryvalleybloom.org/pascal-diversion.html Personally, my main takeaway can be summarized by this passage: >And those who philosophise on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for spending a whole day in chasing a hare which they would not have bought, sca…

[deleted]