
The Curse of Increasing Marginal Work Utility, or Why I Work So Much - nkurz
http://togelius.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-curse-of-increasing-marginal-work.html
======
nazgulnarsil
Recognizing the increasing marginal utility of work is _exactly_ what allows
you to live your life well. IF you take advantage of it correctly.

Imagine you are stuck in a room with 10 screaming people. You could expend a
bunch of effort and get one of the people to stop screaming, but this hardly
seems worth the effort. There will still be 9 people screaming, and now you
will be too exhausted to work on your own projects. Instead you devote a
little effort to learning how to deal with the screaming while you get your
work done.

THIS IS A MISTAKE.

It is a mistake because getting that person to stop screaming is a permanent
improvement upon your situation. Getting the first person to stop screaming
has very little utility, but the next one is easier AND makes an even bigger
difference. The next one even more so, etc. By the time you get down to only 2
or 3 screaming people you are amazed at all the new things you can hear. You
can almost hear yourself think!

When you work on things that give yourself more capability you are making
permanent stackable improvements. By the time I had fixed the loudest
screaming voices of nutrition, sleep, exercise, and constructively reacting to
stress, I couldn't even recognize the person I used to be.

~~~
ido

        constructively reacting to stress
    

Can you expand on that point?

~~~
jacobolus
Small children (and many adults; and to some extent everyone) overreact when
they get stressed: they become angry, self-centered, and incapable of measured
logical thinking; they interpret incidental or minor problems as calamities;
they lose sight of context and feel insulted by normally harmless comments;
they ascribe their stress to totally unrelated causes. When multiple people
are involved, and more than one is stressed, you get horrible
miscommunication, and shouting matches where both people are convinced that
the other one is a jerk.

As people grow up, they can learn to control their emotional response, or at
least learn non-destructive coping mechanisms. (For instance, leaving an
argument alone until both parties have calmed down enough to think about
what’s really at stake in the argument and what’s important and come up with
solutions that both can agree to.) They can learn the true causes of their
stress, and try to fix those, instead of blaming unrelated people or events.

~~~
bostonpete
This is the most well-expressed comment I've read in a while.

------
marvin
This is only true if you don't value the "compulsory" part of the job:
Teaching, writing grant proposals, supervising Masters-level students,
supervising Ph.D students where you do not publish as first author, etc. The
system is set up so that researchers don't primarily research, which is a big
problem and places absurd incentives to do an unhealthy amount of work.

On the contrary, I find that in most jobs I do, there is decreasing marginal
utility of my work, since I have a finite amount of energy and the quality of
my work goes down as I cross the 40-hour mark. People seem to have individual
differences in where this cut-off point is, but I have yet to meet someone who
claims it is not there. So for me, given that I value all my work, the concept
of increasing marginal utility of work is strange. It would perhaps be
different in another field than plain vanilla software development consulting,
would be interesting to have a discussion around this.

~~~
_delirium
I think it's pretty common in tech jobs as well. A frequent setup is that you
have a longer-term project that's _really_ interesting but not deadline-
pressing, so you can only work on it when you've gotten other immediate things
out of the way first. There are attempts to try to explicitly make schedule
space for the interesting long-term work (like Google's 20% time), but it
still often ends up that you have to get a bunch of other less-interesting
stuff off your plate each day or week, before you can get to the best stuff.

~~~
wastedhours
Yeah, I've got an interesting website reflow project that's on my todo list
and will make a big difference, but it's not a priority I can block time out
for, and the daily stream of tasks that need to be done "now" means I rarely
get to it, but simply adding more hours to my work day wont actually produce
the desired/best work.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
You might be surprised with what you can get away with not doing from your
stream of daily tasks that need to be done.

~~~
wastedhours
I'm pushing that to its logical extreme already ;)

------
jeffdavis
"These are all tasks that I must do - not doing them would mean that I am
simply not doing my job... The utility of that sixtieth work hour is so much
higher than the tenth or twentieth because I can use it do my own research."

I don't think he makes a very good case here. The twentieth hour of work could
mean the difference between doing his job and failing at it. The sixtieth
could make him more prestigious.

There is a good case to be made for increasing marginal work utility, but it's
much easier to make in terms of basic numbers in an ordinary market economy:
working more hours often leads to a higher average hourly rate. For instance,
if you are a consultant, and you spend extra time writing books, you may
become a recognized expert and be able to demand much higher rates.

That makes it sound like overwork is logical. But this calculation targets
only money, and money has a _decreasing_ marginal utility. And many other
aspects of life also have a decreasing marginal utility, which is why people
lead varied lives.

So, this problem has more to do with tunnel vision about your goals than with
a fundamental curse of life. Keep at least a few goals in mind most of the
time, and that will prevent you from falling into this trap.

My list would be something like (not necessarily in this order): health,
family, friends, financial security, achievement, helping others, and making
improvements for future generations. Usually I'm falling behind in a couple of
these areas at any given time, and that helps me see what I need to do to
change.

------
mooreds
Marginal utility to whom? The author? His university? Society? It seems to me
in almost every case (except possibly the first) that everyone would be better
served hiring someone to take care of the incidental work that consumes the
first 60 hours (or as much as possible) and letting the professor work on his
research.

The fact that this isn't so points to a couple of possibilities.

1\. Only the professor gets much utility out of his research--the organization
which employs him would prefer him to spend his time on managing phd students
and teaching.

2\. Universities are organized to optimize for organizational utility and not
for each professor's maximal utility.

Incidentally, this story reminds me of many developers who are promoted to be
managers and then are removed from what they loved about their profession in
the first place. Similar to the author, such managers often have side projects
at home to keep coding.

Unfortunately, the professor doesn't have the option of 'dropping out' of
management like the developer-turned-manager does.

~~~
judk
Or, research, teaching, and management are ALL important and interconnected,
and have increasing marginal utility.

~~~
mooreds
That's a possibility, but then why does he prioritize teaching and management
over research?

~~~
chongli
Because teaching and management are on a more urgent timetable?

~~~
mooreds
Urgency is not the same as importance.

~~~
chongli
Right, hence the dilemma in the article.

------
qwerta
Author basically has a hobby (research), which costs him lot of time. It is
like a manager who can not code because of his job. There are two ways:

* step down from administrator/teaching role and become full time researcher with all implications (lower salary, less prestige)

* give others full supports to do "your research", give them credit, your ideas and so on.

Sitting on too many chairs is just bad.

~~~
_delirium
If it was just a question of salary/prestige, I think taking a lower-salary
job with more research time would be appealing to many people. But many pure-
research jobs also have little employment stability, or just don't exist. The
ones that do exist are often "soft money" jobs like postdoc and research
scientist, which are tied to grants, typically with a contract length of 1-3
years. It's _possible_ to chain such jobs together, but stressful and
uncertain, and may require moving frequently (which can be tricky if you have
a partner, and especially if you have school-age kids).

There are stable research positions, but they tend to actually be high-
prestige and hard to get, like faculty member or permanent fellow at a
research institute (Institute for Advanced Study and the like). In some fields
you may also be able to find research positions in industry, or at a national
laboratory, and those options are pretty popular, where they exist. A really
well-funded lab that can string together enough grants to insulate the
research scientists from the money flow and provide them _de facto_ permanent
jobs can also be such a place, e.g. the heyday of the MIT AI Lab, which had
many non-faculty researchers. Also a popular option when it exists, but fairly
rare in CS (more common in areas like medicine).

~~~
yodsanklai
> If it was just a question of salary/prestige, I think taking a lower-salary
> job with more research time would be appealing to many people.

My experience is that it's not necessary the case. Even when such jobs exist
("low-salary" permanent research positions that may exist in some european
countries for instance), a lot of people still prefer to take a professor
position at some point.

Also, passed a certain age, some researchers find themselves less productive
research-wise and want to do other things.

~~~
_delirium
> "low-salary" permanent research positions that may exist in some european
> countries for instance

Hmm, I'd be interested in learning more; sounds like the kind of position I
want. :-) Around here (Nordic region) I don't know of any such positions
though. There are teaching-only positions, which can be a good option if you
like teaching but not research: no grant or publication pressure, just a
stable job with reasonable work hours. And there are regular faculty
positions, with the usual teaching/service/research/management mix. But I
don't know of an option to go research-only, at least in CS. In some areas you
could work for a state agency as permanent research staff, but I don't know of
any that do CS research (civil-service research positions do exist in areas
like historical archives, social science, energy policy, international
relations, healthcare policy, etc.).

edit: I did think of one place with such positions, the French state technical
research institute INRIA. Maybe I should learn French...

~~~
yodsanklai
Actually, I was thinking of INRIA and CNRS in France. You don't even need to
speak French to apply. Basically, there are two types of positions, junior and
senior. What I find surprising is that many junior researchers apply for a
professor position it they think they won't be able to get a senior researcher
position (there is less and less of those). They trade a lot of academic
freedom for about fifty percent salary increase.

------
yummyfajitas
There is academic work studying this. The superlinear return on time invested
does occur in a variety of fields, and pay tends to follow the productivity
gains.

Here is a paper which cites a lot of the literature (note: primary topic of
the article is flamewar inducing):

[http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2014conference/program/retrieve.ph...](http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2014conference/program/retrieve.php?pdfid=1103)

~~~
sqrt17
I didn't read the paper in its entirety, but is the argument something like

competition introduces a superlinear factor in the time/pay equation

superlinear factors on average hurt women more than men since the latter are
more likely to be on the upper end of workload (assuming a linear correlation
of time/pay, you'd already get from a 77% "wage gap" to a pay gap of around
92%, which would tighten further or disappear if we account for "winner-takes-
it-all" distribution of pay)

I find it relatively easy to believe that today's working environment leads to
an incentive structure similar to all-pay auctions, where the employer reaps
huge benefits due to everyone's fiction of attainable winning, and which hurt
a majority of people, but women more visibly than men.

------
sgentle
Let's say you have a queue processor called Q. It takes in jobs described by
tuples of (hours, utility) like (8,1), (2,4), (5,15).

Using the above example, you make an interesting observation: if your queue
processor processes only two items, it has an efficiency of (1+4)/(8+2) = 0.5
utilities per hour. If you process three items, it shoots up to
(1+4+15)/(8+2+5) = 1.33 utilities per hour.

Remarkable! It would seem that the more items on the queue you process, the
more efficient this queue processor becomes. Perhaps you have just discovered
the Law of Increasing Marginal Queue Processing Utility.

Or perhaps the queue is being processed in the wrong order.

~~~
mynegation
Or perhaps we attach a third field to the tuple and call it a "priority" and
require that everything with higher priority is done before anything with low
priority. Let's call it (I am probably inventing the term here) "priority
queue".

Author actually writes about it. There are plenty of tasks that may be of low
value to him but are absolutely essential for external reasons.

------
rverghes
The problem here is that the first 40 hours of work--which the author believes
has low utility--are the hours which generate the money to pay for the
author's job. The author places higher utility on the next 20 hours, but those
hours don't generate money, but prestige and scientific advancement.

The situation is similar to an artist who cannot (yet) make money off her
"artistic" work. Instead she has to do commercial work to support her
"artistic" ambitions.

Utility seems to have several dimensions. It's easy to say that the first 40
hours of commercial work have low utility, but without those first hours, you
would not able to survive to do the rest of the work that you are more
interested in.

At the end of the day, you have to pay your bills. The work that pays your
bills is not automatically lower utility than the work that you do for
fun/prestige/skill/art/etc.

~~~
thesteamboat
Except that's likely not the case here. For many professors, their salary is
effectively paid by grants they bring to the university, which depend solely
on their research. People who are paid to be teaching with no expectation of
research do not generally have tenure track positions.

------
asgard1024
My company (rather big american software house) doesn't encourage me to work
very hard. The harder I work, the more of my coworkers will be let go, but the
software will still suck the same. The customers will pay the same. The
competition adopts a similar strategy.

------
ivan_ah
For certain types of academic work (e.g., writing a book) the mental cost of
initially loading all the relevant material into working memory takes a very
long time, so once I've paid this upfront cost, I tend to keep working as much
as physically possible to amortize the upfront costs.

If I stop working at 5pm like salaried ppl (or say 8pm like startup ppl), then
the next day I'll have to spend another 2--3 hours to get back to the same
mental state. I rather continue push on and ship something tonight (with some
damaging health effects) than pay the upfront costs again tomorrow.

~~~
Moru
And burn out at 40 realizing that you can't keep a train of thought more than
2 minutes.

~~~
dantheman
Or just structure your time differently, work really hard for 2 days. Take a
day off, work a half day the next and work a normal day.

There are gains from working in long shifts, but if it's done everyday they
completely disappear and turn negative.

------
hawkice
First thought: this person has described a clear way in which his job is
(truly, seemingly unfixably) broken.

Second thought: this seems like a business opportunity. Why are there such
high-ritual organizations employing these people?

Third thought: Why are university professors allowed to do research at all if
this isn't profitable? You'd expect if it makes them money they'd actually
help, that's not happening, so it must not, but why have them spend so much
time on it anyway? I keep hearing about publish or perish... what on earth is
going on?

~~~
xaa
This author has an unusual view on what constitutes his job. In my area,
bioinformatics and life sciences, it is taken for granted that a professor or
PI (principal investigator) will be performing very few or no experiments
personally.

Becoming a PI is a devil's bargain: you get more resources and personnel to
tackle the questions that interest you, but in exchange, you largely give up
the ability to directly do research yourself. The research gets done, but the
actual code is written or experiments performed by grad students and postdocs.
The PI has two main tasks: 1) getting grants, and 2) deciding on the goals and
methods of the research.

Many PIs would argue that having a PI do experiments personally is actually a
suboptimal use of time, like having Steven Spielberg meddle in minutiae of
costume or set design instead of managing the big picture.

------
Anderkent
I don't understand this. If he has the freedom to choose what he works on, and
if it's conceivable that he could coast on 40 hours doing 'just his job', what
forces him to spend the 40-60th hours on advertising research etc rather than
doing his own?

It seems like he should be able to just do his 40 hour job then do as much
personal research as he likes after hours.

~~~
analog31
It seems like work because it's done at work. An aspect of an academic job is
that once you've done your 40 hours, you are free to use your employer's
facilities, which include physical infrastructure but also library access, and
the "branding" of the university to promote yourself. This is what provides
that extra utility.

A line cook at McDonald's, if faced with what to do after putting in 40 hours,
could at most make more burgers. Many white collar workers are restricted by
things like confidentiality and conflict of interest rules.

Many of us get our super utility out of hours 41-60 by having a side business
at home.

------
aangjie
> But as I was good at research I got promoted to a position where I had to
> spend most of my time doing something else

Peter principle??

~~~
VLM
I would ascribe it to a different form of bad management. Lets say you have 10
first class applications graduated for every first class level job. There are
immense value judgments to be made, but from a lazy manager perspective its
much less psychically painful to just reward the guy who works the longest
hours or has the worst stockholm syndrome (as this guy clearly has, because
someone's getting a reward for his excessive work and it isn't him...)

Things are always going to get weird when the supply is too large compared to
the demand.

If the average PHD creates 4 new PHDs in his lifetime, then all four are in
deep trouble unless three extra jobs are created for them to sit in. What, you
say the number of jobs is shrinking? Whoops. Life's going to suck for all
four.

~~~
aangjie
Ah.. that's a better explanation. Thanks for that.

------
michaelochurch
This issue is one of the reasons the Iron Triangle (MacLeod-Gervais-Rao
organizational model) is so interesting to me. See also:
[http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/can-agile-
bre...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/can-agile-break-the-
iron-triangle-can-open-allocation/) .

I spent a lot of time investigating this in a number of different
organizations. What I found is that most people who think they're overworked
and have "no time" are spending a lot of time working on the wrong things.
They've volunteered for mediocre projects and created too many recurring
commitments for themselves. Recurring commitments make it harder to fire you,
but they don't do much for your career, because doing the same job 20 times
doesn't deliver much more benefit than doing it once.

If you work at a company where everyone works 9 to 8, you also have to work 9
to 8. The good news is that you can still probably get most of your work done
in 2 hours, freeing up 9 to network internally and look for better projects,
or read books/papers to study up on the skills your next job will require. If
you never volunteer (except for a career-advancing project) and avoid
recurring commitments, this means you have a lot of time to "learn on the
clock". (Don't be dumb and write side-project code at your day job; you can do
your exploration/research at your day job to make the side-project work more
efficient at home, but it has to be done on your own time and machinery.) This
is how most of the programmers who are reinventing themselves as "data
scientists" are doing it.

Doing more grunt work, here meaning work that you don't learn or gain anything
from, is a pointless game (for the Clueless). You get tired faster, you're
more likely to lose social polish and fail politically. The first people fired
or PIP'd in a "low performer initiative" (which is a dishonest layoff) are
usually overperformers who worked too hard, got themselves emotionally
overinvolved, and lost the political game. It's only in a deep cut (10 to 20%)
that the company runs out of politically-failed "pain in the ass" employees
and start removing the long-term underperformers who've been hiding for years.

Of course, there is work (growth-oriented work, in particular) where the
returns are exponential and, for that kind of work, you shouldn't stop because
it's 5:00pm. If one programmer is growing at 4% per year and the other one
works three times as hard and grows at 12% per year, the difference over 20
years is that the former will be just 2.2 times more productive, and the
latter will be 9.6 times more productive. (In capability, if not salary, I've
seen programmers grow at _30_ percent per year.) That may not matter for
salarymen, but it's a big deal if you ever want to go off and start your own
thing. The 4%-growth engineer is barely able to justify a senior-level salary;
the 12%-growth engineer is a sought-after "10x" engineer.

So what's the answer? If the work is strategically valuable and growth-
oriented, do as much of it as you physically can do well. This doesn't mean
neglecting your social life or relationships or fitness, because those are
important too. It does mean that you shouldn't stop just because it's 5:00 and
you're three episodes behind on the Walking Dead. (I'd say that the average
person can handle about 65 hours per week; beyond that, it starts to get
unsustainable for most.)

For the scut work that's not going to help your career or teach you anything,
that just gets shuffled around because no one wants to do it, do as little as
possible. The politically optimal point, when assigned bad work, seems to be
the 35th percentile in quality. Below the 25th percentile, you risk the
appearance of having intentionally blown off the grunt work (which is
different from just not being well-suited to it, because the former will be
taken against you and the latter will be tacitly accepted) but above the 50th,
you're in danger of doing it too well and getting assigned more of it.

The importance is knowing the difference. You need to do just enough of the
"dues paying" work to fit in, and avoid recurring commitments as much as you
can get away with, but put as much of your work time as possible into the
compounding-interest growth-oriented work, and as little into the dead-end
grunt work. In Iron Triangle terms, this is why strategy wins out over
dedication.

~~~
MrDom
Do you have any tips for identifying career advancing projects? Identifying
grunt and growth work is easy enough, but correctly guessing what might become
a high profile project is a skill that has always eluded me.

~~~
michaelochurch
It's easier to tell if the project will help your _external_ career. Will you
get to put some of the work into open source software? Will you be able to
present it at conferences? Is it going to make an interesting line on your CV?

For _internal_ career prediction, that's harder. My advice: just talk to
people. The reputation of the project is a better indicator than any technical
details. A project that is technically excellent but poorly sold internally is
still going to be an effective failure.

~~~
nostrademons
Not necessarily. GMail, Google Instant, Knowledge Graph, and every visual
redesign Google's ever done were all very controversial internally, with a
number of people predicting that they'd be the death of the company. (When
Instant was under construction, we had a betting pool going on in my team
about how long until it'd be rolled back, something I'm glad to say nobody
won.) All of those turned out to be quite large career boosts to people who
worked on them, and in GMail & Instant's case, good career boosts externally
as well.

I would evaluate external career boosts the same way I evaluate startup ideas.
(Evan Williams has a good framework here:)

[http://evhead.com/2007/12/how-to-evaluate-new-product-
idea.a...](http://evhead.com/2007/12/how-to-evaluate-new-product-idea.asp)

For internal career boosts, I would do the same, but eliminate the question
about discoverability and monetizability, and view "wideness" and "deepness"
through the lense of the power of individual executives within the company.
It's not enough to hold a wide appeal to potential users, you need to hold
wide appeal to the users _that your VP cares about pleasing_ , or you need to
deliver value along the lines of your VP's thought process.

