
Why Some Men Pretend to Work 80-Hour Weeks - bootload
https://hbr.org/2015/04/why-some-men-pretend-to-work-80-hour-weeks
======
ukigumo
My first reaction when reading the title of this article was to think of a
variation of the punchline for an old _macho_ joke: "because other men pretend
to care".

In my experience, and granted I haven't worked in the US, the number of hours
you spend in the office is always expected to be in line with what your
manager has committed to paying you for.

In countries like Germany or Holland, if you consistently stay over-time in
the office you might be surprised to find that you will be called upon
justifying your behavior since the local belief is that you are either
incompetent and can't finish the work assigned to you in your normal work
schedule, which will cost the company money to train you or hire a
replacement, or your manager is incompetent because he over-assigned your time
and it will cost the company money when you finally burnout or start taking
shortcuts in your work.

Other European countries have established rules that forbid employers
contacting their employees (mail or phone) outside of business hours to avoid
the pressure of having to do work on your personal time.

I don't want to start a "war" about US vs insert-European-country-here
productivity but, honestly, do you know anyone who actually does measurable
quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?

~~~
engi_nerd
US engineer here. Agreed on not wanting to start a "war". Allow me to share
the rationale that my manager in a previous job shared with me.

This is not an exaggerated quote, it's taken from the notes I wrote
immediately after the incident.

"engi_nerd, we at $MEDIUM_SIZED_AEROSPACE_COMPANY expect our engineers to work
at least 15 to 20 hours of unpaid overtime each week. This is the minimum of
what you need to do to demonstrate that you are ready for a promotion. During
that extra time, we'll assign you duties that are beyond your normal job
responsibilities. Carry those out well and you'll prove that you're ready for
a promotion."

I swear I am not making this up. When I stated that I refused to do what he
asked, the manager said, "Then you'll never have a chance to be promoted from
what you're doing now." That very day I went home and began updating my
resume; my final day at that job was less than 4 months later.

~~~
ToastyMallows
Good on you. I would refuse to work at any company that places such ridiculous
standards on its employees. I'm surprised you even stayed for 4 months I would
have been out of there much sooner.

~~~
engi_nerd
It took that long to get to where I wanted to be -- I had to arrange to sell a
house and move, etc. But the actual "find a new job" process took a single
email to a key member of my professional network.

It pays to know good people.

~~~
ToastyMallows
That it does! Glad you're out of there.

------
Spooky23
None of this has anything to do with productivity or swindling clients, it's
about control.

If you want to be at the table, you need to be in the cool kids club. If you
want to be in the club, you need to sacrifice your identity to the club.
Membership requires that you look, think and act like a member. In exchange
for your sacrifice, you'll be financially rewarded, and usually become a
member of a little fraternity that will be a tight social network as your
career progresses.

It's all about what you want. In this case, you make a decision to become a
management consultant to banks and Fortune 50 companies. In doing so, you're
trading cub scouts for the prestige and rewards of working with those clients.
You're not going to be super-dad, you're going to be the cartoon character dad
who is never around and fucking around with your iPhone when you are. They
tell you up front that they own you -- it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

If you're in this situation "Take a pay cut" is a ridiculous approach. If
you're in a business like that, you're a type-A predator type, and doing that
will just marginalize you. "Be strategic in picking a career" is the advice
you should follow.

~~~
saiya-jin
Nicely written. Most of us are not in this league, and personally, I am so
happy for that. Companies, and world probably too, needs some people like
that. But it's a big fallacy to think everybody should be, act and work like
that. This world already has enough unhappy people chasing careers that won't
make them happy. What we need more of are balanced, happy and strong
personalities (that can create stable and loving environment for their kids
for example) to counter-balance these perceptions. One can be a great
performer, not despite but exactly because he has a life apart from work.
Seems to me like a failed management practices that hurt companies in long
run.

Raising a happy well-functioning family is freaking hard, I would say it's by
far the hardest task one could endeavor on. I have big respect for every man
who achieves that. What one has in CV is marginal and really unimportant
compared to that. But I am far from stating everybody should have this drive.

------
eep_opp
I recently worked for a company that expected employees to stay well pass 5pm.
I was personally working 13 or 14 hours a day and having to occasionally
volunteer my time on weekends. My salary in comparison to hours worked went
down significantly.

Anyway, I did what most of the men described in the article did. I learned how
to work without working. It was easy to copy the kind of workaholic appearance
expressed by many of my peers.

The strange thing was that most everyone was pretending. Everyone was just
lying. It was like there was some secret unwritten rule that we should pretend
instead of talking about the obvious elephant in the room. Which was that we
were asked too much of us and that needed to change.

When I was first starting out (way before I took that job) I was told that the
idea is to "manage perception" and that appears to be true of a few places.

~~~
wesleytodd
> When I was first starting out (way before I took that job) I was told that
> the idea is to "manage perception" and that appears to be true of a few
> places.

I have been giving this advice to quite a few people lately, both inside and
outside my company.

As a manager I feel that my team's productivity benefits more from "work
hygiene" than from long hours, but we have a few team members who have come
under scrutiny because of perceived short hours.

My advice to them is always, "I trust that you are doing your best as a part
of the team. But remember, the teams perception is what matters. And when you
leave at 3 it looks like you are slacking. No one knows you got here at 6
because they weren't here. So rather than changing your behavior, work on
changing their perception."

~~~
brianwawok
So you spend 4h extra away from your family to look good to coworkers? That
seems a symptom not a cure.

~~~
wesleytodd
Agreed. Luckily I am 28 and don't have kids yet. Hopefully I will get to a
point before I do have kids where I can be a little more free.

~~~
imaginenore
You could spend that 4 hours developing a side project. 4 hours a day is a LOT
of time.

~~~
wesleytodd
Often times that is what I am doing during my breaks. Resolving github issues
or answering side project emails. So it really all does work out.

~~~
v13inc
There is potentially a big legal difference between tinkering on your side
projects at work, compared to carving out time for them at home. Unless you
have a specific exemption in your contract, then your employer owns all your
work that you do in the office or on their equipment.

------
Red_Tarsius
This is what happens when the reward culture does not match reality. In
school, every time you value grades over learning, you foster a classroom of
_cheaters_.

The company is looking for _cheater_ types because:

1) they clearly can't cope with employees telling the truth, that is, there
are priorities other than work.

2) they reward _looking busy_ over _being productive_.

~~~
bryanlarsen
It's a consulting shop. They want to give their clients the impression that
they're always working, always available, and to bill the maximal hours
possible. So it may be rational for the firm (at least in the short term) to
encourage this cheater culture -- it's the clients they are cheating, not the
firm.

~~~
loup-vaillant
In this case, they should tell their consultants how to… "communicate" with
the client. They want cheaters? Then cheating the client should be part of the
contract.

Except, well… that might be illegal.

~~~
learnstats2
Exactly. Show, don't tell.

Telling people to cheat the client is illegal and unethical, but creating a
culture where people behave in that way is only unethical.

------
hvidgaard
When I read this

> You know it’s tough to say I can’t be there because my son had a Cub Scout
> meeting.

I felt a sharp disdain for the managers. Seriously, children growing up is a
onetime thing.It's fucked up beyond reason that people accept this, and I'd
gladly take a lower paying job so I can be there.

~~~
monk_e_boy
You have to wonder at the mentality of someone who wouldn't be there for their
kid. I know you can't be there 100% of the time, but you've got to make some
effort and stand up for yourself. Take a pay cut, do less hours.

I loved the book Red Mars in which children were quite uncommon, so whenever a
child was about all the adults would pay them lots of attention. This included
bosses.

~~~
danieltillett
I have twice taken pay cuts so that I could be there for my kids and have
given up on businesses so I could be there for them. I have always been of the
belief that nobody on their death bed ever says "I wish I had spent more time
at work".

~~~
conradfr
[http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-
five...](http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-
of-the-dying)

~~~
danieltillett
This certainly fits with my personal experience.

Now all I need to do is figure out how to live for a 1000 years so I can just
do some of the things I still want to do.

------
stupidcar
"I studied a global strategy consulting firm with a strong U.S. presence"

That's the problem right there. These kind of consulting firms are the worst
kind of soulless, dysfunctional, corporate sweatshops, preying on the ignorant
management of other companies. They desperately try to compensate for the
essential mediocrity of their expensive solutions with a veneer of marketing,
overwork and crassly macho professionalism.

When a company is built on bullshit, and everyone knows it, even if they won't
admit it, then the same falseness and bullshit eventually pervades every
corner of the company, and produces the kind of poisonous atmosphere that
makes them such a nightmare to work for.

~~~
praptak
A classic article about this:
[http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N18/dubai.html](http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N18/dubai.html)
"The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell"

------
lordnacho
Back after I finished uni, a friend of mine with the same degree went to work
in investment banking.

We lived together. Sort of. I basically had the whole house to myself outside
of midnight - 0700. Some nights he'd check in with me as I was lying in bed
about to sleep. Quite often we'd go a whole week without seeing each other,
the only sign of life from him being that his door was closed when I went off
to work. Weekends were precious, sometimes we could get a meal in together.
His Blackberry would ring, but he could push some things aside to after the
meal. The initial rush of getting a prestigious job was soon replaced by
complaints about the insanity of the system: sit around from morning to
evening doing nothing, wait for the MD to make some work that you can do
before the next morning.

So one day his boss decides he's had enough of everything and ends it all.
This was a guy of similar background to my friend, similar culture. Just 20
years down the line.

I think it caused my friend to have some thoughts about where he wanted to be,
how he wanted to live. He's changed jobs now, much happier, married, got a
kid.

~~~
waylandsmithers
This was the impression I got from friends who worked in that industry after
college. They were definitely at work for 80 to 100 hours per week, but it
seemed like a lot of that extra time was stuff like waiting around for someone
else to finish something, eating dinner at the office, or just hanging out
because a higher up hadn't left yet.

------
neap24
So much of this is framed around working less to spend time with your kids --
which is perfectly admirable. But, how about working less to spend more time
for yourself (personal hobbies, interests, etc) or more time with your spouse?
These also seem like equally admirable and important reasons to not work 60-80
hours a week.

~~~
bowlich
The focus on kids drives me nuts. I worked in a web dev shop that billed
itself as "family friendly." Flexible hours, work from home, etc.

The reality was that the childless developers never got to use the flexible
benefits. Your child has a soccer game? Is sick? Sure take the afternoon off,
the childless devs will cover for you. We wouldn't want you to not be there
for your child. Oh you want to take a two hour lunch to go out with your
girlfriend. Too bad, so-and-so needs to pick their kid up from school so we
need you to sit here and babysit the server while he's out.

------
JulianMorrison
This is why people need unions. Because while an individual can say "no" only
at the expense of their career, the entire united workforce can force the boss
to the negotiating table.

~~~
rev_bird
Exactly. In the U.S., we've _done_ this already, and then essentially undid it
in the name of free enterprise.

------
sukilot
Summary: bosses promote based on butts in seats. By working remotely, with a
mobile device , you can fool your boss into thinking you work 13-hr days by
working only mornings and evenings.

~~~
mauricemir
Butts in seats they can see I think

------
keithpeter
_" We kind of have a shared agreement as to what work–life balance is on our
team. We basically work really closely with each other to make sure that we
can all do that. A lot of us have young kids, and we’ve designed it so we can
do that."_

Quote from OA itself quoting a statement made by a member of a team that self-
organised their work-life balance. Later in the quote the team member points
out that their team is regarded as highly effective. Just wondering if a
positive work-life balance might be correlated with that high performance!
Perhaps the company is missing a trick there.

------
geon
> expectations that one be an “ideal worker”—fully devoted to and available
> for the job, with no personal responsibilities or interests that interfere
> with this commitment to work—are widespread

Wat? Is this a thing in the US? If so, I'm incredibly happy I live in Sweden.

> many men experienced these expectations as difficult to fulfill or even
> distasteful.

No shit?

~~~
lobe
I'm an Australian who spent 6 months last year in Sweden. I definitely got the
impression that companies needs came second to the needs of individuals. Here
in Australia, it is much more balanced, depends on your circumstances. My
American friends tell me the US is the other way, the company comes before the
individual.

If you are in the driving seat for your career, I certainly feel that the USA
provides more opportunity. However for the ~70% (random guess) of people who
don't have the luxury of being selective with their jobs, the Swedish model
looks extremely appealing.

------
grownseed
An extreme example of this is South Korea. The basic idea in most medium/large
companies being that underlings must be present whenever their bosses are, so
people will turn up really early in the morning to greet the boss, and leave
really late at night, often just waiting for the boss to go home.

Hierarchy is a very important cultural concept in SK, socially and
professionally, and generally companies are far more layered than they would
be in most western countries, resulting in lots of bosses. Because of this you
have a trickle-down effect of "work more than the boss" hours, with people at
the bottom working completely ridiculous hours.

This has two interesting consequences.

The first one I call "gold star sticker promotions", whereby people get
promoted on a regular basis, often without a pay rise, sheerly for "working"
more hours than the next guy. While the promotions often mean very little by
themselves, they tend to result in slightly less work hours.

The second consequence is that people, as described in the article to some
extent, actually end up doing very little work despite occupying a seat for so
many hours. A friend of mine actually plays Diablo 3 while seating at his
desk, and everybody's ok with that. In fact, he got promoted three times just
last year. The point is not to get work done, it's simply to show that you're
willing to give your soul to your employer.

~~~
rwallace
What exactly happens if you just refuse to work more than forty hours a week?
I mean, obviously you won't get promoted, but promotion at that price isn't
worth having. Do you get fired? The reason I ask is that I've heard in
countries like that it's very difficult to fire an employee, so I was
wondering how those two aspects of work go together.

~~~
grownseed
You would be made absolutely miserable, be assigned the most menial of tasks
with ridiculous deadlines, tasks that are often largely made up and of no
benefit to the company. Your boss might call your parents or your spouse and
shame you, might even insult you to your face. If that doesn't make you fall
in line and you finally decide to jump ship, you may be ridiculed publicly,
potential employers will be contacted and told about your "work ethics",
making it really hard to be employed again. You'll essentially be shunned for
the foreseeable future, which in SK is generally not culturally acceptable.
It's pretty harsh, but it's also important to note that this is not a culture
based on individual interest.

------
leklund
What struck me the most about the article was the employee who was denied a
promotion because of his 6-weeks of unpaid FMLA leave. That's not only
unethical it's also against the law (as is denying FMLA). I can understand the
lure of the huge salary but having to work in such a toxic culture would never
make it worth it to me.

------
pckspcks
I can see what the author is saying, but... It's not necessarily about
everyone working 80 hour weeks. It's about a corporate culture of 80 hour
weeks. Cheating, if you get the job done, and maintain the image, doesn't
discourage that culture. Acknowledging that some people are working 40 hours
does.

80 hour weeks are important. It gives 40 hours for work, and 40 hours for
personal growth. The former is a short cycle, and the latter is a long cycle.

1\. If you trim down the growth part, your employees won't be competitive in
the long term. Growth compounds, and sometimes superlinearly. If you know
more, you learn faster.

2\. This may be less relevant to management consulting, but if you trim down
the work part, product part falls apart. I've seen organizations killed when
work-life balance management stepped in. You go from 20 employees at 80 hours
per week to 80 employees at 40 hours per week. Knowledge becomes much more
distributed. Communication channels grow. Hiring standards slip.

In addition, if it's an 80 hour week, it becomes your life. It may sound like
just 80 hours, but it dominates your life. You think about it in the shower.
You dream about it. When you spend time with family, you're distracted with
work and want to go work.

In practice, if I can get the same quantity of output from 20 employees as
from 80 or a hundred at a higher level of quality, I can pay those employees
at least five times as much. Many high-performance organizations try to make
this trade-off.

But when society demands work life balance of employees with salaries starting
at $300k and going into millions -- that falls flat.

Part of the obscene salaries go into making sure kids and families are
healthy, even with a parent out of the house.

~~~
Joeri
The premise that 80 hour work weeks are somehow more productive than 40 hour
work weeks is known to be false in the typical case. It's not the hours which
determine your productivity, it's the engagement and motivation. Most people
who do 80 hour work weeks slack off during a majority of that time and
probably realize lower productivity than if they had stuck to a 40 hour work
week.

Making your workforce do 80 hours instead of 40 does not make them more
productive. Motivating workers and putting them in control of their own work
is what gets stuff done.

~~~
mistermann
> The premise that 80 hour work weeks are somehow more productive than 40 hour
> work weeks is known to be false in the typical case.

How do you know this for sure? Not saying you're wrong, but I can think of
many exceptions to this rule.

~~~
Ygg2
An 80 hour work week implies 16 hours work during the workdays or 10 if you
work weekends. If work takes 16/10 hours for your work, when do you sleep or
eat or socialize?

~~~
logfromblammo
Firstly, 80:00:00 / 7 = 11:25:43

~ As for those other things you mentioned, the remaining 88 hours in the week
would allocated as follows: 56 hours for sleep, 10 hours for meals, 3 hours
for personal hygiene, 2 hours for exercise, 16 hours for a personal side
project, and 1 hour to socialize. ~

~ You'll have plenty of time for friends and relationships when you're dead.
If you really cared about the company, you would abandon your personal side
project and work 96 hour weeks. If you spent less time eating, you could also
spend less time exercising. And some of your co-workers do get a bit ripe at
times, so you're probably over-allocating time to hygiene. It takes me 3
minutes to shower, head to toe. That's how you get ahead in this business:
effective time management. Also, I survive on a nutrient slurry that allows me
to consume an entire day's worth of meals in only 30 seconds. And since I
don't have time to actually buy anything, almost all my earnings go straight
to savings! ~

The real answer is that you either sacrifice some sleep or you don't have any
leisure time. That previous schedule breakdown intentionally ignores the time
cost of transportation between activities, and little things like bathroom
breaks.

Calculating from my own life, if I worked 80 hours per week, I would have
approximately 4 hours of disposable leisure time left. That would only be
possible if 95% of my weekly fun requirement was met by work. The likelihood
of that happening in any workplace that expected 80 hour weeks is abysmally
low.

~~~
realusername
If you are just 30min away from work, you can already remove 5 hours per week
assuming you work from Monday to Friday. And that's an absolute minimum, you
just cannot live normally and work 80 hours a week.

~~~
logfromblammo
The schedule assumes that the employee sleeps at his or her desk.

------
VLM
1) Not so stealthy ageism. So someone your age should be out of the trenches
and on his way up the management chain and we're not saying you're fired
because you're 30 yrs old because that would be illegal but you are going to
work 60 hr weeks or get fired for not working enough, and not being
sustainable is not something we care about because our pyramid says up or out
in a couple years, so if you insist on staying 20 unsustainable years its not
our problem, you're only supposed to sustain it for 6 years not 20. And we
don't care about the large fraction who are kicked out either. Aren't we just
the most lovable human beings ever?

2) Management is expected to falsify / adjust metric reports and manage
appearances in this number driven company from the lowest to the highest
levels because we're crooks and we know it, and this is how we train the front
line to groom them for mgmt, and the 1 in 20 who get promoted (the other 19 in
20 will be ageism fired) will rely on their experience pretending to work to
pretend to produce great numbers.

3) We all know we're lying to the client and upper mgmt and maybe the .gov,
and you'll keep quiet about that or we'll have to notice that you're only
putting in 30 hours of "real" net positive productive work per week even if
you're on paper butts in seat 75 hours per week. You're productively working
30 hours per week and you'll shut up about the other issues or you'll only
earn credit for the 30 instead of being the 75 hour "hero" you currently are.
Now shut up or we start auditing your internet access logs too.

4) I hate my wife and kids and being a provincial idiot of a manager with no
empathy for other human beings (hey, someone has to be the failure, after all)
I assume all others are the same as me because I'm great so why don't you hang
out at work for 80 hrs per week just like me? If my whole family hates me the
problem can't be me because I've got an ivy diploma so whats the problem with
staying at work all night? I actually worked for a guy like that and this is a
paraphrase of a couple conversations I had with him. A sad, sad dude.

------
wooger
Sites with static header bars like this one need to die. Vertical space is a
horrible thing to steal, given that most of the world are using 16:9 monitors.

Even worse when they're applied in on mobiles / responsive-design.

------
copsarebastards
This is just a technique for mostly pointless management structures to keep
power over the technical workers who are actually providing value. Technical
workers are paid well, but managers of technical workers are usually paid
more, even though their role is frequently limited to telling the technical
workers what to do (when in fact the technical workers are quite capable of
figuring out what to do). A better manager acts as more of a facilitator of
communication, but even then that puts them at best on even footing with the
technical workers, which is not reflected in compensation. A manager of a
technical team is a glorified secretary, and meritocratic compensation would
reflect that by paying managers less than technical workers.

In order to keep this structure, companies create an environment of “this is
just how we do it”. The whole pretense of long hours is part of this. A few
more examples are covered in Bob Black’s _The Abolition of Work._

[http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/abolitionofwork.htm...](http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/abolitionofwork.html)

------
rayiner
In client-service industries, the hours are unavoidable. Your client doesn't
want to talk to two people each doing half the work. At the same time, the
artificial expectations are just self-abuse. When people hang out around the
office when they don't have work to do, it really is money out of the
company's pocket.

------
erikb
Is it really people passing of as 80-Hour Workers, or is it that they just
solve the tasks given to them without creating additional work for their
bosses?

Are the successful guys fakes or are they doing something that we could learn
to be more successful hourselves?

In any case I would be interested in more in depth stories of these successful
guys to learn from them. Choosing the right tasks to work on, for example,
seems to be a very important strategy. I would love so much to read more
details about how to do that. And especially in this case, if I would be the
boss, I would appreciate people with that skill more than people without that
skill. Someone with that skill will be able to pick most of the low hanging
fruits and might also be more able to solve the really necessary ugly tasks,
because he cares about getting it done.

------
pfranz
Thankfully, I haven't see too much employer imposed long hours, but I have
seen self imposed long hours. I read a different article about 6 months ago
from a professor that I'd love to read over again. I can't seem to find it.
The premise was that they worked extra hours because the regular hours were
filled with "procedure" like meetings, time cards, and getting interrupted. It
only left a little time each day for doing the interesting stuff; the reason
they chose that profession.

I and others have talked about how much more productive we are when working
early or late in the day and are compelled to stay late to finish something
because it seems to take longer to pick it up and finish it the next day.

------
loveableloser
Kind of surprised that no one has brought up the Gervais Principle.

It was even covered on this site a few years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296)

The guys who pretend are Losers, the true believers who don't are Clueless. As
the subjects of the HBR article are consultant types, I'll bet many of the
Clueless there think they are Sociopaths. Anyhow, my hat's off to the Losers
who manage to score a solid paycheck without working/drinking themselves into
an early grave.

------
Jimmy
>At this firm, people believed that success indeed required ideal-worker-like
devotion.

The word "success" seems like a misnomer here. Success is not possible under
these conditions. Killing yourself for transient business projects designed
and managed by others, for the adulation of peers whose only accomplishments
in life are, similarly, killing themselves for transient business projects
designed by others, is no success at all.

Perhaps the monetary compensation is decent. But what are you going to _do_
with that money?

------
chojeen
I love that the desire for developer talent is so great that many employers
will bend over backwards to accommodate your desire for work-life balance.

------
antocv
I pretend to work 40h week.

In fact, when I have - out of pure boredom - attempted to work, get something,
whatever, done, the initiative was quickly destroyed by managers.

The illusion of work, pretending, we are all adults here playing on a theatre,
must be maintained, and nobody is allowed to step out of line. When I look at
it that way, that we are just adults but playing like when small children play
that they are adults, so are we playing that we are working, then it all makes
sense.

~~~
protonfish
Hey kids - important lesson here. You don't realize how hard it will be to
receive permission to do work at work. Of course, you will still be expected
to look like you are working and to even put in overtime pretending to work.

My recommendation is to find things to do that look like work. If you are a
programmer, learn new languages or develop your own projects. If you are
expected to write, work on your own blog articles. If you sometimes work
offsite or in different parts of the building, go sleep or read in your car
(away from where you could get caught.) If you are writing or programming,
nobody can tell over your shoulder if it is work related or not. Hell, your
manager probably has no clue what you are supposed to be doing anyhow and is
just pretending to do his job too. Help the guy out and give him the warm
fuzzy feeling that you are working. Telling everyone you meet how much work
you have to do and how hard you are working on it won't hurt either.

I know it sucks but you can't fix it. The ability to look like you are working
while not losing your mind is a critical survival skill. The sooner you
cultivate that skill the happier you will be.

~~~
antocv
I wish there was a way to fix this. Not easy.

One guess is, its just not in human nature, its not possible, to be productive
8h between X and Y hours of the day. Not for you, programmer, not for the
manager either.

So we start learning how to pretend and eventually all we do is pretend. Thats
just one of the reasons.

To fix the problem - an organization and contract which is not time or space
based, you dont have to sit there in that open space, or be there between X
and Y.

But then we woudl've been back to quite radical economy, quite radical model
of society than we have now - where you dont sell your labor, where you would
sell your produce. And thats problematic because we cant really measure or
quantify "what programmer/manager produces". So we end up in this circus of
pretending to know what that value is of programmer when in a cubicle on a
timeclock, and pretending to care, and then come the backstabbing and office
politics.

------
a3voices
People need to stop worrying so much about what their boss thinks of them. If
you get fired, it's probably a sign you shouldn't be working there in the
first place. If you don't get a promotion or raise, who cares? Your life won't
get better if you make slightly more money.

