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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

#61

Post by maccard »

underwater wrote: post #32
tardigr8 wrote: post #27

Working 80 hours a week is unhealthy and a bad idea. I don’t think there is any solid argument against that. Until recently I was a dev manager for about 20 devs (not all direct). I did work 80 hours a week, still do. I know I am unhealthy. I don’t like doing things that are not technical. I get uncomfortable and bored quickly. My work gives me complex tech problems constantly. So I feel better working. But I attribu…

80 hours a week is the equivalent of 8am to 10pm six days a week. That sounds completely unrealistic. Either the work is trivial, you're destroying your health, or you're over estimating the time you're actually spending.

it doesnt matter if the work is trivial, youre still working. if im dealing with slack pings at 9pm, thats work, even if they just need a thumbs up.

> six days a week.

Anecdotally when I was doing that much work, it was 7 days a week. When I woke in the morning my phone was full of emails slack pings and build issues, and it was closer to midnight when it stopped than 10pm. There is no down time whatsoever in an environment like that, everyone is constantly stressed and overworked and it just makes it worse

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

#62

Post by lmeyerov »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #54
eru wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Artists and musicians specifically get a lot of social prestige. Similarly for actors. That's part of why many people are willing to have a go at these careers despite the well-known abysmal earning expectations. It's just a lot of very willing supply and rather limited demand that depresses monetary earnings for labour in these sectors. Compare also pay and conditions for programmers in the games industry vs those w…

Artists and musicians specifically get a lot of social prestige. Similarly for actors. No, they - in general - do not. A few get this. A few more lucky folks make a living off of it. In the case of an artist, you are probably doing commissions and spend a lot of time on social media, in the post office, and such things just to tread water. Comic artists and animators you've never heard of go about their day in invisi…

That's true yet still feels rosy ;-)

There's a lot of waiting tables, and if lucky, teaching gigs. Paid performance gigs are rarer and not that rosy either, eg, boring wedding music or sporadic & low-paid pop-ified club gigs. In COVID... yikes.

Prestige includes a lot of 'when will you get a real job?'

Even for the rare folks who 'make it', there's often a lot of weirdness, especially around the one-hit wonder commercial music circuit. Unlikely and hard to get there, and often ugly if you do.

Sound rough? Even worse in visual areas because even less money. Gallery scene is basically charity from upper crust and whatever small grants, if you're lucky. More likely, still waiting tables or some other day job. There are commercial gigs, but rarely related to your art: an artist's exploration of abstract oil painting is far from say musclebound video game characters for adolescents. Even if someone likes your aesthetic style, commercial versions for say a big hotel/ commercial/product are dead/generic for accessibility reasons.

I was around a lot of this in my early 20's. The entertainment industry is at odds with art. Happy to be away from it, and empathy for artists pushing through it.

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

#63

Post by scrollaway »

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…

I'm in the same boat as you, and yet my hours look like the post author's. One scenario that leads to this is that I simply have other shit to do, and need to hard stop my focus on something that I far too often want to keep working on.

This is partly a delegation problem (I'm trying to free up time by delegating certain things), and partly just a problem of growing up: What interrupts me might sometimes be other work or menial tasks, but it's often also just social life or having to go to to the ice rink.

I'm super happy with my current work-life balance, though a bit unsatisfied at how often I have to context switch. I wish I could just schedule as well as you do, unfortunately when it comes to social engagements for example I'm often more restricted...

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

#64

Post by agumonkey »

tardigr8 wrote: post #27

Working 80 hours a week is unhealthy and a bad idea. I don’t think there is any solid argument against that. Until recently I was a dev manager for about 20 devs (not all direct). I did work 80 hours a week, still do. I know I am unhealthy. I don’t like doing things that are not technical. I get uncomfortable and bored quickly. My work gives me complex tech problems constantly. So I feel better working. But I attribu…

To an extent, if you function this way, its not even unhealthy. People give me strange look when I work because I love going fast (in smooth precise way). To them it's abuse, to me it's joy (granted I can stay in my own limits). To me their slow and bored ways are unhealthy. I start twitching.

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

#65

Post by tester756 »

mkl95 wrote: post #20

I spend a significant part of my day working synchronously (engineering / product / etc. meetings, mandatory unplanned calls to fix some crappy system that is failing in production...) as opposed to working asynchronously (reviewing someone else's PR while they work on something else, reading some spec, etc.). I work as much as it seems, but I do it in a wildly inefficient way due to my employer's work-hard-not-smart…

>The fact we work 50 hour weeks

50?! but why?

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

#66

Post by agumonkey »

dilawar wrote: post #42
tardigr8 wrote: post #27

Working 80 hours a week is unhealthy and a bad idea. I don’t think there is any solid argument against that. Until recently I was a dev manager for about 20 devs (not all direct). I did work 80 hours a week, still do. I know I am unhealthy. I don’t like doing things that are not technical. I get uncomfortable and bored quickly. My work gives me complex tech problems constantly. So I feel better working. But I attribu…

Thanks for sharing. I am probably in the same boat. I feel miserable when not working. I managed to improve my situation though - 100 km running minimum per month. I take this seriously. - Writing notes about work in a notebook. Not publishing but that's the only way I can stay away from other work and not feel bored. - Spending more time on two hobbies: hardware/circuits and cooking. Things are improving!

Do you feel time running gives you more opportunity for new ideas ?

I used to take 15min jog cuts, it made me have just a few more thoughts ready when I was back at my desk.

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

#67

Post by maccard »

tardigr8 wrote: post #27

Working 80 hours a week is unhealthy and a bad idea. I don’t think there is any solid argument against that. Until recently I was a dev manager for about 20 devs (not all direct). I did work 80 hours a week, still do. I know I am unhealthy. I don’t like doing things that are not technical. I get uncomfortable and bored quickly. My work gives me complex tech problems constantly. So I feel better working. But I attribu…

> I did work 80 hours a week, still do

> All my devs wanted to also work 80 hours a week.

> DONT work crazy hours because someone else in your sphere is doing it.

Do as I say, not as I do. The culture of being always on, and working these insane hours comes from management allowing it or leading by it. It's utterly meaningless for you tell your reports to not work crazy hours only to show them that you need to do it.

Being a manager puts a power dynamic at play; it's one thing if a team member is working silly hours but if your boss is, it sets the expectation that you can too. By working you are setting the precedent for your team

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

#68

Post by phist_mcgee »

beebeepka wrote: post #11

Eh, I know it's just an expression but I automatically distrust awfully presumptuous stuff like "as much as you think". The author doesn't have the slightest idea what I think, yet he proclaims to know better and tries to correct me. Rant aside, it is my experience that the vast majority of people are useless bums. Pretty sure that's nurture as opposed to nature, though. If it weren't learned behaviour, people wouldn…

No post body was provided.

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

#69

Post by jug »

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 place, maybe he is in a remote work environment where he isn't inspired to work more efficiently through his peers. Maybe there is a little of everything and he's just trying to warrant this one hour focused work days through "insights".

The reason I'm questioning this is because I have procastrination issues at work and take several short mental breaks, but even I, once I get going and in "the zone" (often later in the work day), I can often do focused work at least twice as long as him. He really gives nothing to go by as for his bold title, which I ask why it's not at least the more undeniably accurate: "I don't work as much as you think".

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

#70

Post by KnobbleMcKnees »

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,…

I think you're completely right, however I'd love to see a graph of average work time claims on HN plotted against this.

There's no denying that there are far more people claiming they work 60-80 hour weeks than would collate with the data that you and OP have provided.

I think these people are generally overworked but are also poor assessors of their own performance, taking worst cases as averages and calling a day in which you finish at 5pm but answer a slack message at 9pm, a 12 hour day.

Not to be too sardonic, but: I'm on call frequently but I don't tell people I've been working for 24 hours because I got a page at midnight, even if it can feel a bit like that by the end of the next day.

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