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lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: 996

#81

Post by HL33tibCe7 »

frontfor wrote: post #13
taminka wrote: post #10

not only are you missing out on what makes life great and worth living w/ this arrangement, but from a strictly utilitarian standpoint, working that many hours your productivity plummets (unless you're on stimulants), and it's just straight up more effective to work fewer hours...

When 996 makes being able to afford a house easier, many people will be compelled to do it.

What’s the point in having a house if you only spend one day in it, which realistically you will spend doing chores and sleeping?

Re: 996

#82

Post by ddavis »

j_bum wrote: post #5

When I was getting my Ph.D., my advisor jokingly told me that his lab has three 8 hour shifts per day, and I could pick two to work. This was never literally practiced. But excessive hours were the norm. And I loved it. It helped me launch into a successful career. But it hurt my relationship with my partner (now wife), and it burned me out. I miss those days, but I don’t miss what they did to my health.

I have a similar experience. I was a devoted PhD student working long hours taking on a lot of responsibility. It burned me out, hurting my productivity. I have mixed feelings about it; I love the friends I made and the things I learned, but I don’t think I should have had to suffer what I suffered. Simultaneously I’m somewhat glad I experienced it then, because now I work in tech and I’ll _never_ work outside of business hours (I’ll hack on personal projects I consider fun if I feel like it). And I’m more productive than my colleagues that do. There’s something mysterious about the contemporary PhD, not all good and not all bad.

Re: 996

#84

Post by petermcneeley »

jeremyjh wrote: post #62
petermcneeley wrote: post #52

If I spend my Saturday in the summer sun planting trees all day in my yard I feel liberated. If I spend my Saturday toiling for wages digging with my hands, sweating for hours, just please some land owner I feel exploited. It is not the work or the hours that is the core problem.

You aren't going to spend 12 hours a day, 6 days a week working in your garden. When you get hot and tired, you'll stop. I think that is the more relevant difference in this particular topic.

> When you get hot and tired, you'll stop

No? This is basically the philosophy of the "last man"

Many great things require overcoming the weakness of the flesh. From the moment you understand the weakness of your flesh it should disgust you.

Re: 996

#85

Post by malshe »

j_bum wrote: post #5

When I was getting my Ph.D., my advisor jokingly told me that his lab has three 8 hour shifts per day, and I could pick two to work. This was never literally practiced. But excessive hours were the norm. And I loved it. It helped me launch into a successful career. But it hurt my relationship with my partner (now wife), and it burned me out. I miss those days, but I don’t miss what they did to my health.

I didn't show up on the first Saturday when I started my Ph.D. program. Next Monday, a professor from _another_ department stopped by my desk to tell me that assistant professors and Ph.D. students are expected to be there at least six days a week. Then he gave examples of a few professors who were there even on Sundays despite being tenured.

Tbh, I was so poorly paid that going to the university on Saturdays wasn't so bad as they had better air conditioning and heating compared to my apartment!

Re: 996

#86

Post by analognoise »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #53
stego-tech wrote: post #9

These times really do feel like those once-in-a-century redefinitions of work and labor, similar to how we got Child Labor Laws and 40-hour work weeks from the labor movement early last century. Intrinsically, more people are realizing that the former social contract was long ago fed into a shredder, and that the lack of a formal contract will have consequences. Technology broke down the 40-hour work week by enabling…

It also took Russia going to shit to an extent that got everybody else scared—and that Russia still hasn’t really recovered from, because repeatedly cutting the elite out of your society (however unfairly it’s gotten there) really fucks that society up.

What?

When America was strongest, we had a large and increasing middle class, and the top marginal tax rate was above 70% - it was in the 90s.

We don’t need “the elite” - they don’t actually “create jobs”, and the “engine of the economy” is just a convenient vehicle for the rich (and private equity) to ruin the middle class further - it was never about “efficient markets”.

If anything what we’ve seen over the last 40 years is that we need better systems.

Re: 996

#87

Post by throiijowo9889 »

This obsession with the time put-in (either way) is quite silly to be honest. It's a notion inherited from the blue-collar industrial factory labor. If you're working on really hard problems there's no way you're putting in 12 hour stretches. Your diet takes a hit, your sanity takes a hit and so does everything else.

Japan tried this non-sense for a while (colleagues told they used to stay on till 11am !) only to completely fail at all three software revolutions (web/smartphone/ai). China obv. has had much better success, but I don't think this is sustainable. The central-banks in these countries operate in the war-economy mode which can heat things up a lot and work very well, but I think social-burnout effects are quite real.

Re: 996

#88

Post by reaperducer »

stavros wrote: post #11

I don't understand this expectation that employees work more, and stigma if you go home on time, yet we don't have a corresponding stigma for when the amount of money that reaches my account is "only" what we agreed my salary would be.

I don't understand this expectation that employees work more, and stigma if you go home on time, yet we don't have a corresponding stigma for when the amount of money that reaches my account is "only" what we agreed my salary would be.

Since I'm (mostly) work-from-home, my wifi router is configured to firewall my work devices outside of working hours.

This is frustrating for the IT department because it likes to push software updates overnight, but tough noogies.

The company pays for 30% of my internet connection, so it only gets to use my internet connection 30% of the day.

Re: 996

#89

Post by HL33tibCe7 »

alexnewman wrote: post #47

If you don’t want to grind, don’t pick a career where only the toughest survive—like startups. In China, programmers get massages. You could be giving the massages. I’m not smart, but I worked 7 days a week for a decade. It takes me 40 hours just to warm up, so real work means 100-hour weeks. Yet I’ve built 3 startups, 2 unicorns. In both, I was the dumbest person in the room—but I outworked everyone.

Being a founder is a completely different situation which the article is explicitly not talking about.

Although, frankly, even as a founder, 100-hour 7-day weeks aren’t right for the vast majority of people. Clearly it worked for you, which is great, but 99% of people do not have that level of energy, and furthermore are mentally unable to withstand the sacrifices such a schedule imposes on other aspects of life.

Re: 996

#90

Post by dyauspitr »

cushychicken wrote: post #65
stavros wrote: post #11

I don't understand this expectation that employees work more, and stigma if you go home on time, yet we don't have a corresponding stigma for when the amount of money that reaches my account is "only" what we agreed my salary would be.

I actually kind of like when companies are upfront about 996 expectations. The transparency makes it that much easier to avoid them.

The more upfront they are, the more normalized it gets which encourages other companies to do the same.
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