651–660 of 695 posts
I would still rather be doing tech right now than anything else. Job market is not as good as it used to be, but it is still better than other work. Honestly, I kind of only just scanned the article because it was clearly written by GPT.
> demanding 80 hour weeks IME, most of the people in tech who work extremely long hours have not actually had this "demanded" of them by anyone, and in fact either want to do it or have sort of hallucinated themselves into a corner where they (mostly incorrectly) believe that they will land in hot water if they don't work long hours.
Do they have lunch? How long is their commute? I presume they are in the office, otherwise you’d have no way of verifying they work 80 hours. Are they working weekends? What do they do if they need to go to the doctor or dentist? Do they take holidays - how much? Sick days?
Do they take breaks during the day? How much time in the office is actually spent working?
I have never seen anyone consistently work more than 65 hour weeks, and the only person I can verify is me, and long term even that probably wasn’t sustainable.
Simple calculation 80 hours, let’s say spread over 6 days. 13 hour days. Say 30-40 mins for lunch now we are at 14 hour days.
Let’s say they can get up and out and to work and back and to bed within 1.5 hours.
Now you are at 17 hour days. Leaving them 7 hours to sleep, 0 hours to exercise, take any breaks, do any kind of life admin, speak to anyone on the phone, do any kind of social media. And that gives them one day off to do absolutely everything they need to do. Obviously none of them can have children or other dependents. And none can have hobbies, a gym routine, etc.
It just doesn’t add up. There is no world where people actually sustainably work 80 hour weeks where they work for 80 hours.
Ran this through few AI checkers and they all flagged this as highly likely written by AI. Surprised to see it passed the sniff test for users on HN enough so to make it to the front page. Sure AI gen can be hard to detect but for the most common models it’s easy to detect. I would hope HN has a way in the future to filter out clear AI generated blogs. HN has been an oasis to get away from bot spam and AI slop.
Why does this AI-generated article have 400 upvotes? The conversation here is valuable, but surely we could find a human article to have it under instead?
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Turns out when your work is thinking, you end up thinking a lot about the alienation of your labor's fruits. Burnout isn't about pace of work or ability to take vacations. Burnout is about a disconnect between effort, meaning, and rewards.
I disagree. Burnout is caused by your body running on adrenaline and cortisol for too long as you’re pushing past what is sustainable. Eventually your body says - enough! And it forces you to stop. The _symptom_ of burnout are as you describe: essentially you no long see the point of what you’re doing. Speculatively, I believe the drop in motivation is your body’s way of stopping you pushing it any further. It’s a de…
What causes the workplace to make you have high adrenaline and cortisol for too long? Stress is perceived by the body as a threat and it subsidizes when the body perceives that the threat is overcome. If we exert ourselves for a while but then we have a good outcome and we celebrate with our colleagues, we will have dopamine and oxytocin levels rise and adrenaline and cortisol subsidize. Something one might say makes the exertion meaningful.
So I hear what you're saying but I think we're both describing the same thing from two perspectives and not actually different causality directions. I described the subjective interpretation and you described the biochemical process underlying it.
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> I haven’t heard of any way for objectively measuring the value of anything Really?
If you know of some way that is logically coherent, and can demonstrate it via standard proof notation, then you should definitely publish it. And become the most famous human being to have ever existed…
I also don't thing it contentious that the stockholders pocket some of the results of the workers labor. That is the whole point of employing people isn't it?
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Non-profit organizations are often colloquially called "non-profit businesses" in recognition of the fact that they are organized and operate as any other business would - in developing business plans, filing with the IRS, hiring employees, minding balance sheets, etc - except in ways related to their purposely not seeking a profit (though revenue is another matter). >but the way we measure that is by how much they e…
> Again, it's a flawed heuristic. Military contracting is wildly profitable. Value to society is questionable. It's not questionable at all but if you don't already see that I'm not interested in arguing it with you. > Analysis of the subtle successes of social democracies and "Gross National Happiness" are just two examples that put the lie to this myth. GNH is cope from the Dragon King of Bhutan to justify the pove…
Militaries exist expressly to destroy (enemy) societies. Even if you agree with the reason for a war, that fact doesn't change. So "preservation" of one society (if becoming beholden to a MIC doesn't change that society) versus the destruction of another. Questionable value.
>GNH is cope from the Dragon King of Bhutan to justify the poverty and ethnic cleansing of his nation in the international community.
The commencement of measuring GNH coincided with marked increases in Bhutanese living standards by traditional measures. Nordic countries have roughly the same GDP per capita as the US. Countries like Japan and France feature lower GDP per capita and, while not traditionally considered social democracies, feature comparable approaches to social welfare, income equality, etc.
Free-Market Capitalism as the only way, or even best way, to prosperity is indeed a myth. Even at its best or most successful, it has to be tempered with robust social policy and economic controls, lest people fall to excess and the economy itself burn out. That's called, "Late-Stage Capitalism", and you'd best start believing, because we're in it.
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> rest of the world outside of tech, looks at tech and sees a bunch of very overpaid developers They most certainly do, but it says A LOT more about them that they see developers as overpaid rather than themselves as underpaid. Propaganda from the owners of capital has worked well by ensuring that anyone relying on an income is more likely to look left, right, and strike down than to ever consider looking up.
Most businesses are not very profitable at all. Like 5-10% margin. If you took all their profits and made them wages (ignoring the consequences), thats not a crazy amount of pay increase especially compared to what tech workers make.
Absolutely requiring the American "minimum" standard of living is propaganda set nearly in stone by The New Deal.
I'm a child of the working class. I don't think it does my parents a disservice in stating that their sacrifice(s) and toil were not compulsory. I appreciate them, but my father would not have required extensive surgery to walk again if we had settled for less years prior.
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> This write up sounds like it describes a very particular subset of companies Indeed. 80 hours a week (or even 60): Never had to deal with that in over a decade across 3 jobs. In fact, I've never had to work a weekend (and if I did, it was either to fix my own screwup, or because I intentionally slacked off during the week and needed to make up for it). Slack/email off work hours? Just ask up front in the interview:…
Incredible idealism. If you work in infrastructure, even development, there's no such thing as shutting down at the end of the day or weekends. 'You never know' if someone senior gets agitated off hours because something is broken, and is expecting a big group on a zoom call
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You're not arguing in good faith, dude.
I dunno, he's asking a really basic question that should be trivial to answer. When I see a basic, level-setting question like this go unanswered, it starts to seem like the side refusing to answer is the one acting in bad faith, not the side asking the question