
Stop Glorifying Hard Work and Long Hours - Ataub24
http://alexstechthoughts.com/post/55085393173/stop-glorifying-hard-work-and-long-hours
======
edw519
For developers building something, the following are often true:

    
    
      Tweeting != Work
      TalkingAboutWork != Work
      Blogging != Work
      DoingSomethingInYourIDE does not necessarily = Work
      DoingSomethingInGithub does not necessarily = Work
      ThinkingButAppearingToBeDoingNothing may = Work
      Meetings != Work
      CodeReview may = Work
      Testing usually = Work
      DeliveringBuiltSoftware(AndItsPrerequisites) = Work
      HackerNews definitely != Work

~~~
RyanZAG
I disagree here. If what you're saying is correct, then the following would be
true:

    
    
      School != Work
      Learning new language != Work
      Testing new lang/framework != Work
    

This is blatantly false, because doing these things may enable you to create
something you couldn't before. Let's take two people. Person A only does code.
Person B both codes and learns new theory. Person A creates something in X
hours. Person B spends X/2 hours learning and creates something in X/2 hours.
You can't say A has worked twice as long as B - both have put in X hours and
gotten a result.

And so,

    
    
      Learning new things on HackerNews = Work
      Blogging to reinforce your understanding and help co-workers = Work
      Setting up Github to speed compilations and testing = Work
      Meetings to discuss new features instead of re-doing the same 
        feature incorrectly 5 times = Work

~~~
ritchiea
It really depends on what you're reading on HN, if you're reading about
acquisitions or gossip or meta commentary like this, then definitely HN !=
work if you're reading a technical article then definitely HN = work. And I
believe they're both useful information, but one of them definitely isn't
work.

~~~
dasil003
I would split the hair even finer and say if you're _researching_ how to
accomplish a particular task and you serendipitously find an article on HN
then you're doing work, but that's pure luck since normally you would be
Googling rather than surfing HN. Reading HN "for the [tech] articles" is at
best like going to university—you may be preparing for future work, but all
this abstract preparation and self-betterment is not the same thing as real
work and we would be wise not to fool ourselves.

~~~
ritchiea
I actually disagree. I believe abstract self-betterment is as important as
what you are calling "real work". There's certainly a balance to be kept
between direct production and abstract self improvement but they aid each
other in a big way. I would say they are both part of "real work" as long as
you don't stray so far into theoretical improvement that you lose sight of
getting stuff done.

~~~
dasil003
Eating and breathing is also necessary, but it's still not work.

~~~
umsm
Unless you're eating WHILE you're working.

~~~
visakanv
Whatever work might be, this thread certainly isn't it.

------
ryguytilidie
I just don't get it at all. Just this morning I quit a job partly because of
the hilarious hours and how inflexible our executive team was about them. It's
like there's some sort of shame in working a normal workday, eating dinner at
a normal hour and having your own life. I really vow to never put my health
and well being on the line for a job where if we hit the jackpot I might get
like 50 k and every other time I will get nothing.

Its one thing if you're a founder and want to spend all your waking hours
pursing your dream, but a hiring strategy of "I will only hire people who want
to work slave hours on my project for 1/50000th of my equity", is just no.

~~~
ripter
When looking for a job, find out how many people in management have kids. They
are likely to work normal hours and not expect you to work insane hours. At
least that's been my experience.

~~~
kamaal
The management is likely to go home and play with their kids while you grind
your bones in office.

------
yangez
> I have a friend who brags that he busts his __* 60 hours a week driving a
> Coca-Cola delivery truck. Congratulations, I work 35 and make twice as much
> as he does.

This is a straw man. The point is that if you worked 50 vs 35 hours at the
same job, you'd simply get more done - even considering diminishing returns.

There's a reason many hugely successful people are notorious workaholics - see
Elon Musk, Oprah, Marissa Meyer, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, etc. One of the
simplest advantages that you can get is to just put in more hours than the
next guy. No new-age "find-yourself" touchy-feely work-life balance talk will
change that.

~~~
ryguytilidie
But where does that end? We decide the 8 hour work week isn't productive
enough, even though worker productivity has skyrocketed, so we go to 10, then
we decide 10 hour days are for socialist pussies and go to 12 hour days, then
eventually we are calling people lazy for sleeping and ridiculing them for not
dragging concrete blocks for a .0000001% holding Elon Musk's Mars Miner
corporation. I mean at some point life has to be about being happy versus
maximizing the profitability of the company you work for...

~~~
swamp40
Social norms are a pendulum that swings back and forth every 100 years or so.
At one end is 6 hours a day or 30 hrs a week, at the other end is
work/sleep/repeat. Any less and a society can't function, any more and a
person will physically break.

Individually, you get the same shake every free man has had since the
beginning. You climb the mountain until you don't feel like climbing anymore.
Maybe you're hurt, maybe you're tired, maybe you've found a nice plateau with
a wonderful view.

Meanwhile around you, above you and below you - others scamper up the same
mountain.

'Twas ever thus.

~~~
semiel
> Any less and a society can't function

I disagree with this. There is simply less work to be done than there used to
be, what with automated factories and powerful computers. We've somehow turned
this into an "unemployment crisis", when by rights it ought to be a huge boon
that means everyone can work less.

~~~
prodigal_erik
There are diminishing returns. You could easily have eight people each working
a one-hour shift on an assembly line once they all know the task, but writing
code that way would be absurd--they'd waste almost all the time explaining how
they intend to proceed with what they only just started on.

~~~
semiel
That's a pretty silly strawman. It would obviously be a better idea to work
fewer months out of the year, or weeks out of the month, or days out of the
week. How long a single session of work is is probably the least important
variable.

------
tehwalrus
I believe this is more of a problem in the US than elsewhere, although there
is some office in every city where this is the culture (like a game of chicken
over who will get up to leave first, that goes on beyond 8pm every evening.)

I like to imagine the whole of life as a not-for-profit business; where if you
can cover your (living) costs, you've won, and you don't need to work any
harder. If you can cover those costs in 2 days per week, great; three days for
"side" projects and fun, and two days for relaxing. If you need to save up for
a new toy, just work an extra day for a month.

This especially makes sense for programmers, who have well-paid telecommutable
desk jobs and are in a position to request pro-rata work - "You want to give
me a 20% pay rise? great, I'll keep the same salary and work 4 days, thanks."

------
wf
This seems incredibly one sided to me and I'm surprised at the number of
people who are in agreement. I guess if you make the assumption that the
person is lazy or inefficient and that's the reason they're working hard then
this would make sense. However, I'm 24; I work a day job from 8 to 5; I go to
the gym and go home and work on a startup from ~7-12 and do it all over again.
And yea, I'm proud of that.

Not only that, but I like when I see other people who "#hustle" because it
motivates me. I like to know my friends or people I respect are working hard
to achieve a goal they're excited about. Also "Working hard vs working smart
is something you don't learn till you burn out a few times." What? That is
just untrue. I agree after you do something the first time you'll definitely
become more efficient at executing it, but if you approach problems
practically you can almost always break them down and work them "smart". This
post just annoys me.

~~~
antitrust
> I'm 24; I work a day job from 8 to 5; I go to the gym and go home and work
> on a startup from ~7-12 and do it all over again.

And your life occurs where in that process?

Sounds like a path to being a droid.

~~~
walshemj
or work your self an early grave like my mate who works for one of the big 4
in London has seen some of his young co workers do.

~~~
mortehu
> the big 4 in London

Big Ben, Big Bus Tours, Big Red and ...? After Googling, it seems like the Big
Four are audit firms, two of which are headquartered in UK. I guess there's a
few people who don't know that.

------
DanielBMarkham
I used to train 20-somethings fresh out of college into the workforce of
running small, project-based consulting teams. (Working with high-performing,
motivated, recent college grads is the best job in the world)

I found that high-performers want to run hard. Additionally, I found the folks
back at HQ were more than willing to load them up with even more work than
their 40 hours per week. I kept having to tell the noobs, "Pace yourself. This
is a marathon, not a sprint. I want you just as fresh and energetic a year
from now as you are today"

So I am firmly on the author's side here. But I also think you can go too far.
I see a lot of these articles, and I wonder if they're not just telling people
what they already want to hear.

"Shouldn’t we stop pretending spending 50+ hours a week at the office or
jobsite to be a good thing and recognize that real genius is finding a way to
streamline the process and get that same job done in 25?"

He's creating a false dichotomy: work smart or work long hours. In fact, in
many cases it's possible to be the smartest-working person in the shop and
still have a lot of work to do. Being smarter doesn't give you a get-out-of-
long-hours card. In fact, the drive and dedication that got many people to
learn a lot is the exact same drive that will keep them there until late at
night. In fact, many of the most valuable things we can do in life need
exceptionally smart people working as hard as they can to pull off.

Remember, I'm on the author's side! But I also think that there's nothing
wrong simply enjoying a project that calls for a lot of work -- as long as you
don't do it to excess. I _enjoy_ projects with the occasional crunch time
every few months where folks work late and push through something fun. I like
hiking up mountains, even though smart people just drive their cars up or look
at photos on Facebook. Hard, difficult work to achieve a worthwhile goal is a
_good_ thing! Hard work all the time simply because it's expected or because
you confuse hours with value is not.

Work life balance is important, but we need to be clear that certain parts of
life actually require a lot of hard work. The guys studying to be brain
surgeons don't sit around talking about how they should take more time out to
go fishing. Simply because you make a choice to bust your ass doing something
tough doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. It's your choice.
Whatever your choice is, it just has to be sustainable and fit your values.

------
swamp40
Well, there are certainly two camps with regard to this.

If you don't feel like going over to Alex's campfire, holding hands and
singing Kumbaya - let me invite you over to the other fire for an
inspirational moment before getting back to work:

 _" Americans love to fight. All real Americans love the sting and clash of
battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the
fastest runner, the big-league ball players and the toughest boxers. Americans
love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the
time."_ ~ George S. Patton's speech to the Third Army, just before the
Normandy landings.

~~~
tsunamifury
Work is not war. Not even close. Executives and wannabe clueless use war
metaphors to try to rustle us up for what ends up being a trench digging
operation that lasts 40+ years.

I understand your naive enthusiasm but work is more of a marathon. Even doing
the most glamorous part, founding a company, is an Iron Man race with many
stages. Sprinting to the finish line with goofy motivational speeches when you
are still 100 miles away is just bad strategy.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Work is not war in any _material_ sense, but it _is_ war in _almost every_
cultural sense. The cultural norms used by Anglo cultures to make sense of
business, at the moment, are those of combat and war.

------
beat
In many cases, "work harder" happens because you're _too busy_ to "work
smarter". The boss expects 60 hour workweeks for months on end to keep up with
a time-wasting process that _could_ be automated if they'd give you a week to
do it. But you can't take a week to automate it, because you're too busy doing
it.

And this is what I hate about corporate work.

------
sriramk
I've seen this promoted in subtle ways. At Microsoft, I once saw a VP talk
about how a team had worked nights and weekends to make something
extraordinary happen and how he was surprised to get emails from them in the
middle of the night. I had a private chat with him later of how this
encourages the wrong behavior - the key is that great work got done, not the
fact that teams worked late nights or that they were on late night email.

~~~
NegativeK
What was the VP's immediate response to the chat?

More importantly, what was the VP's long-term response?

~~~
sriramk
Immediate response - he admitted it was a mistake. Long term - I didn't stay
to find out. I doubt anything changed, since this is so deeply engraved in
company culture.

------
Ataub24
One more thing about the post I wrote.

Jason Kincaid, formerly of TC, had a great tweet about four years ago- "The
amount of fun you’re having at a party is inversely proportional to the number
of times you’ve tweeted about it.”

Some joke and call it Kincaid's Law.

I think there is a new wrinkle to it:

"The amount of hard/smart work you are doing is inversely proportional to the
number of times you’ve tweeted about it.”

------
lectrick
Work smarter, not harder.

I am going to create a startup soon and we're going to work out of my
beachfront 2-bedroom FIOS-equipped apt for starters. The schedule will be:

9am-noon: 5 minute standup to spec work for the day, then code.

Noon-2pm: Lunch but also surf, bike, boogieboard, suntan, volleyball, just do
something fucking outside that involves physical activity.

2-5pm: Code. If you finish early, you get to leave.

Basically 2 3-hour spurts of hard work a day. If you finish what you intended
to do that day early, you go.

I've noticed that I only get 1-2 solid things done a day, anyway, and the rest
of the time is mostly wasted (or reading, etc.) Just fitting a healthy
schedule to that.

~~~
southphillyman
I'd be interested in you blogging your experience with this.

~~~
lectrick
I would, once I'm there.

------
T_T
"I have a friend who brags that he busts his __* 60 hours a week driving a
Coca-Cola delivery truck. Congratulations, I work 35 and __make twice as much
__as he does. "

Is success or contribution measured by your salary? This is only fair if we
can all stop drinking beverages delivered to our offices.

------
digisth
HBR had an article about this not long ago exploring the "why" (based on
several studies on the topic):

[http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/05/why_men_work_so_many_hours.h...](http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/05/why_men_work_so_many_hours.html)

The takeaway:

'Not only is work devotion a "class act" \- a way of enacting class status--
it's also a certain way of being a "real" man. Working long hours is seen as a
"heroic activity," noted Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and her co-authors in their
1999 study of lawyers. Marianne Cooper's study of engineers in Silicon Valley
closely observes how working long hours turns pencil pushing or computer
keyboarding into a manly test of physical endurance. "There's a kind of
machismo culture that you don't sleep," one father told her. "Successful
enactment of this masculinity," Cooper concludes, "involves displaying one's
exhaustion, physically and verbally, in order to convey the depth of one's
commitment, stamina, and virility."'

The above shows that in many cases Long Hours Are Not About Working, but about
signaling dedication and toughness (maybe Robert Hanson could write a post
about this one.)

With that said: as someone who has worked many, many of those long weeks (and
still does so on occasion) I do see some truth in there, but it's of course
more nuanced. I've seen people work long hours because other things in their
lives are going wrong (and they were escaping it), because of management
pressure (this was in the lull between the previous boom and the current one),
or simply because it was "crunch/launch time" (for real - which is a
completely _valid_ reason for a long week.)

------
nkozyra
I want headlines to stop telling me what to do.

~~~
Ataub24
Free will #newrules

------
jusben1369
One small subset of the discussion that I think is relevant.

Anyone ever notice how sometimes your most productive days are when you know
you have to cut out early for some important event? "Can't mess around today
as I have to leave early" 3pm comes around and you're kind of shocked by how
much you got done.

------
dholowiski
I can speak as someone who has burned out several times -

The key to working a normal work-day is to develop a thick skin - to
understand that there are things that are possibly important, but just aren't
going to get done because you don't have the time to do them. And things might
blow up because of these things that don't get done, and that's OK, you're
just going to have to live with it.

This is not easy and I'm still very bad at it, but I'm working on it.

------
silverbax88
One hour of focused, efficient, undistracted work will accomplish more than
most people sitting at their desks will accomplish in a whole day.

------
riveteye
I strongly believe that work is not a job.*

Work is what you do in your life every day to create value for yourself and
for the people you care about. Your work should make you happy and help you to
feel fulfilled. Your work could take 5 hours a week or it could take 60 hours
a week. It could make you a ton of money, it could be where you spend your
money. Your work could be a volunteer gig at an animal shelter that you do
around your 9-5 day job, it could be the all-night code sessions you do as a
hobby, it could even be what you do every day as a high-functioning cog in
your office cube. __It 's up to you to find your own glory.

( _Sort of
like[http://blog.workisnotajob.com/](http://blog.workisnotajob.com/))
(_*Sometimes there is value in helping society be society.)

------
3am
This struck me as cynical and lazy.

I agree narrowly with not "glorifying" hard work. There's no need to make a
spectacle.

But I believe in what I do, and I believe in its importance. When I automate
something, I use the time that I've cleared up to automate something else,
improve the automation I've already written, or improve myself.

Granted, I'm not talking 100 hour weeks, but 8-10 hour days, then logging in
at night after taking the evening for myself and weekends as necessary when
there is a legit need.

I guess it's a question about how driven one is. It's sad this is on HN, I
would probably not hire anyone that was content to automate their work and
then phone it in for paycheck.

Then again, I have largely stayed out of the large corporate environment, too.
YMMV.

------
cupcake-unicorn
This is something that is really important to me. I've even thought of perhaps
finding another line of work where this mindset doesn't prevail. I suffer from
chronic health issues, and that really helps put things in perspective in a
different way. My number 1 commitment is to my health, and working 80+ hours a
week is not going to be doing me any favors in that department. Life is short,
and it doesn't mean anything to earn all that money if you're not healthy,
can't go anywhere to enjoy it, don't see your family, etc. People need to put
it in perspective.

------
lazyjones
Work isn't an end in itself, it's a means to an end. If you work hard and
achieve your goals quicker (or at all) because of it, that's admirable as long
as your trade-offs (spare time, family ...) are made consciously. If not,
adjust your goals accordingly.

Condemning hard work and long hours without any such considerations, is not
constructive. Personally, I don't see a value in working as little as possible
just to waste more time watching TV or drinking beer, but if that is what you
really want to do, fine ...

~~~
antitrust
> Personally, I don't see a value in...[spending] more time watching TV or
> drinking beer, but if that is what you really want to do, fine ...

That's an entirely separate issue, isn't it?

------
andyhmltn
I totally agree with this. I'm part way through 'the 4 hour work week' by Tim
Ferris. He's a bit off the deep end with things he says, but the general
message he puts out is really good: Why would you slug 8 hours getting hardly
anything done because you're so bored/unmotivated when you can walk in at 12
and get more done in a few hours than you would usually?

Sadly, most employers see Time = Money. The fact is that that isn't the case
at all when people are working 9-5 5 days a week.

------
knodi
Please don't tell me how to work or spend my time doing.

------
Nursie
I certainly don't.

Other than for the sheer technical joy of it, I thought we were in this game
because we can get paid enough to enjoy the other parts of life?

------
ivankirigin
Many people enjoy working long hours if they feel the work is impactful.
Hustle by itself is pretty distasteful though. It is a humblebrag.

I actually just published a tangential blog post, mainly focusing on whether
more people should work less while focusing on other things in life that
matter. [http://blog.kirigin.com/10x](http://blog.kirigin.com/10x)

------
OhHeyItsE
I feel like this is pretty widely accepted in the tech/hacker world, right?
I've found it's generally the more business-y (creative, PM, etc) types that
do the weekend check-in/late night thing.

Also - it seems to be magnified in the highly transient NYC/SF environments.
Recently relocated young people without families just may not have that much
to do outside of work.

------
yankoff
I see glorifying of short hours way more often here.

------
delcom5
With many (15) years of experience in the industry from junior to now manager
I have to say, GettingTheJobDone()works for me.

I found some people perform MUCH better at their own schedule, while some just
have it in their DNA and enjoy working hard and long hours. Should we,
however, abuse that? Absolutely NOT! They are the rare gems I admire.

------
mpg33
Productivity > Hard Work and Long Hours

------
arcosdev
Not to mention ...and for what? Most of the time what you're working on isn't
worth the agony.

------
mcgwiz
This post is annoying in that it conflates and oversimplifies far too much. On
the point of humblebragging: I (and 95% of the internet population) agree,
humblebragging should not be done (even though the author later goes on to
humblebrag that he only works 35 hours per week... hypocritical much?).

But on the separate implied point that working 50+ hours a week is mutually
exclusive with working smartly, I disagree. That is naive and simplistic. When
you have a finite runway (which decreases in length whether you are or are not
working) there's a very strong case to be made for sacrificing a degree of
your free time in order to maximize the utility of that runway. Separately,
one should carefully balance the multitude of competing development concerns
to be working as smartly as possible, i.e. YAGNI, refactoring, testing and CI,
tight customer feedback loop, etc.

Conflating smart work with the need to work long hours betrays the likelihood
that the author has never even considered the reality of bootstrapped
startups.

------
saosebastiao
I see this all the time and it just isn't correct. Working long hours isn't
about productivity. We know long hours aren't productive. But they are fast.
Sometimes 80 hr weeks at 75% productivity really are better than 40 hr weeks
at 100%

------
cafecodelife
I like this article. My viewpoint is that it sucks that even if you finish all
of your work on Friday at noon, you still have to, due to corporate culture,
sit at your desk until 5 or 6pm, regardless of if you are producing or able to
produce anything.

------
general_failure
Well, stop glorifying 'free time'. Many of my friends spend practically all
their free time drinking beer and 'chilling out' watching TV. Yeah, I am sure
that's more healthy than we working hard learning something new.

~~~
ilyanep
I spend eight hours a day in the office, then I go home and read some
textbooks, follow an online class, read a paper, write a blog post, go to the
gym, practice saxophone, or hang out with friends. While I find the stuff I do
at work enjoyable, I wouldn't do another 6 hours of it a day at the expense of
giving up all that other stuff, because it's the other stuff that gets me
through the more tedious weeks at work. Fortunately, my employer understands
the necessity of doing those other things.

Yeah, lots of people waste their free time. I don't think that working 60
hours a week is any less of a waste for those people.

------
chewymouse
"I have a friend who brags that he busts his __* 60 hours a week driving a
Coca-Cola delivery truck. Congratulations, I work 35 and make twice as much as
he does. "

The elitism you're all basking in is embodied by this sentence.

------
ultimatedelman
As the son of a man who loves sending my mom on vacation with her friends so
he can get to the office to get work done (because he genuinely loves it), I
can tell you this article does not apply to everyone.

------
riggins
I'm thinking that of the things that get glorified, hard work is probably one
of the better choices.

Better than athletes, getting hammered, drugs, 'balling', and Britney Spears.

------
linuxhansl
That!

I work fewer hours than most of my peers and I get more done. The reason is
not that I am exceptionally smart (I am not), but that I stay relaxed and
avoid being burned out.

------
kenster07
Working hard and working efficiently are not mutually exclusive. I would
expect a false dichotomy like this to be posted on mtv news, but definitely
not here.

------
antitrust
Glorify results.

Glorify efficient results. And then, going out there and having a life, even
if it's sitting home alone drinking tea and ready mystery novels.

------
megaframe
disarm them. Reply to their tweet/post saying you feel sorry they had to work
so late, hopefully it will calm down for them soon. When it does they should
join you for the exciting/fun/relaxing `insert activity` you're doing right
now while they're at work.

------
erso
I found this post entirely unreadable due to its usage of Helvetica Neue Light
#777 body font.

~~~
Ataub24
tumblr default... sorry

------
rocky1138
OT: Anyone else getting garbled output from viewtext.org when attempting to
view this page?

------
samsnelling
90 Hours A Week And Loving It!

------
snambi
Absolutely true.

------
gcatalfamo
I like hard work sessions. Fuck me, right?

~~~
Ataub24
Nah. Hard work + smart work is great. Just don't tweet about it. Don't glorify
it.

~~~
paranoiacblack
ITT, don't tweet about things you are proud of. It makes us regular people
feel bad. ;(

~~~
silverbax88
If someone is proud enough of not being able to finish their work in a
reasonable amount of time, then sure, they should let the world know about it.
I know I won't hire them, either.

~~~
paranoiacblack
Huh? How do you figure that people proud of their work aren't finishing it
fast enough. It turns out that when you finish your work, you can work on
something else. You don't have to end your work week right then and there.

------
bjliu
on the other hand, there is also a need to "Stop Glorifying Laziness and
Distractions"

------
augbot
True True!

------
senekisa
It is the harsh reality.

------
GoldfishCRM
Amen

------
rfnslyr
When I worked at a large corporation, I nearly automated all of my work and I
was called lazy. I'd do about an hour work a day, customize an existing script
to process new data, then read for the remaining 6 hours. Co-workers called me
a lazy nerd and proceeded to copy paste words into excel for 8 hours.

Now I get to wake up at 12, smoke a joint, have a beer, take a shower, go for
a walk with my dog, and then work on whatever the hell interests me that
particular day. I dictate my own hours, rates, and clients. Meanwhile my
friends in law firms and other similar disciplines talk about how much and how
hard they work. I don't get it. Congrats busting your ass for a year doing 60
hour work weeks for $20/hr? They haven't gone out in weeks. They have nearly
no friends beyond their immediate work circle. No interests. Nothing.

I think somewhere down the line we got lost, or fucked by the previous
generation, probably a combination of both. Work has consumed life. I don't
know too many people with external interests beyond work. You get the odd
hardcore cyclist, the casual musician, the nerd etc, but most people just go
home, crack open a beer and watch some TV.

Work should be about providing a means for you to live your life. The moment I
finished my work, it left my head entirely. The way it should be.

My goal has always been to leave the office as early as humanly possible while
still completing the work I had to do that day.

We've grown into a culture where the following happens: do decently in
highschool -> pick a degree that you hope will pay out but don't really care
about -> office life. It's saddening.

Our lives are WAY too goddamn short to be spending 1/3rd of it sleeping, and
another 2/3rds working with the occasional weekend.

~~~
nether
> When I worked at a large corporation, I nearly automated all of my work and
> I was called lazy. I'd do about an hour work a day, customize an existing
> script to process new data, then read for the remaining 6 hours. Co-workers
> called me a lazy nerd and proceeded to copy paste words into excel for 8
> hours.

Oh my god, I'm dealing with this now. I made a Python program that automated a
lot of our Excel work. It reduced hours of tedium to seconds. Showing it to my
manager, the reception was chilly at best. There was some disbelief that a
program could parse dozens of slightly inconsistent worksheets (that made it a
bit harder, but recognizing the patterns wasn't complex) but mostly deep
annoyance at taking on a project he would have never approved. He seemed to
think the program needed more vetting even after I'd fed huge amounts of our
past analysis into it and verified it reproduces the correct results. He
didn't want to see the proof that it worked, he just insisted that the
spreadsheets were too complex and that some of the numbering schemes we use
were too subjective to define by logic (they weren't).

This is at a workplace where a coworker likes to type in hundreds of sums from
a hand calculator into Excel instead of dragging a row. I might have to wait a
decade or two for them to retire if anything is to improve.

~~~
rfnslyr
You need to run the scripts under the radar. Once you are discovered you are
fucked. No manager will pat you on the back for automating your work.

Programming is a tool in your toolbelt that should be used with stealth.

~~~
oz
Listen to this advice. There was a guy on Reddit sometime ago who automated
lots of his work, and his co-workers hated him for it. Wish I could find the
thread.

~~~
shrikant
I remember that.

Original thread:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/reddit_my_f...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/reddit_my_friends_call_me_a_scumbag_because_i/)

Follow-up:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/vomtn/update_my_f...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/vomtn/update_my_friends_call_me_a_scumbag_because_i/)

------
michaelochurch
I feel like most of work life is now driven by silent aspirations (because
they're socially unacceptable) rather than immediate industrial need. Bosses
want people in for long hours because it makes them feel important. It serves
no benefit to the business (in the long term) but it's about emotion and
careerism.

People in managerial positions don't just want to be rewarded for their work.
They want _prestige_ and the root of almost all forms of prestige is
_nostalgia_.

Nostalgia (and its attendant fallacies) leads to this long-hours
glorification, because people who suffer a lot to push something through,
after it succeeds (regardless of whether the suffering contributed) end up
remembering the "glory days" of energy drinks and double-all-nighters as if
those moments were better than they actually were. Those weren't fun at the
time. That's a happy-ending reinterpretation because scary things that end
well are often remembered positively.

What's missed is that (1) those crunches aren't sustainable, (2) they're only
"glory days" for people who get major, career-improving and permanent benefits
from the work-- otherwise it's just managerial abuse, and (3) most of those
crunch-driven efforts fail and just become miserable death marches that make
people really bitter, and the career damage of that can last years.

If people actually leave at 5:00, they recover better from those death-march
episodes because they haven't let their health and network go to shit.

~~~
antitrust
I find your message to be profound.

> They want prestige and the root of almost all forms of prestige is
> nostalgia.

There's something of the hazing cycle in this too. They suffered, so they
glorify the suffering, and share it with others.

> (2) they're only "glory days" for people who get major, career-improving and
> permanent benefits from the work-- otherwise it's just managerial abuse

In other words, for most people, this is nothing but slavery.

Interesting.

------
hayward2
Work in itself is not fulfilling unless you are a simpleton. Fulfilling
intellectual curiosity, relationships, pleasure, those things are fulfilling.
Work is simply a means to those ends. It's amazing how many people don't
understand this.

I'm not a hacker because I love programming and it's my purpose in life and
the reason I live. I program because it's a relatively good career and an
efficient way to make money so that one day I won't have to (and while I do, I
still get 30+ hours a week to pursue the things that do bring fulfillment).
Sure I'd rather be a programmer than a plumber, truck driver, accountant or
even another highly paid profession like corporate lawyer, but I'd rather be
an independently wealthy intellectual seeker, family man, world traveler,
explorer and pleasure-seeker than a programmer...

------
papsosouid
"Work smarter not harder" is a false dichotomy. Someone working hard and smart
is going to accomplish more than someone just working smart. And equating
"working hard" with "putting in empty meaningless long hours" is ridiculous.
Working hard is about effort, not time. As someone who was praised for being
smart and developed a habit of putting in very little effort as a result:
working hard is great. Work hard. Just don't work hard and stupid.

------
seivan
It's only ok if you're the founder and developer. But usually I can see myself
taking a whole day off, then to spend 16 hours straight coding. It's not by
choice, it just happens.

------
paranoiacblack
No, you stop glorifying "smart" work and shorter hours.

Could it possibly be that people work at different paces, have different work
ethic, and have different aspirations, but that they can't be compared at face
value purely on the hours worked? Just because you work less hours, doesn't
necessarily imply you're doing the work "smarter," it probably just means that
you are only doing the required the work. It is possible that I work much
"smarter" than you do and still work 50-60 hours work weeks because I am doing
twice the required work. This isn't that bizarre if you are really trying to
cover a large amount of the material that exists in CS beyond making cool, hip
web-apps and mobile sites. In that case, you might NEED to put in extra work
since you are possibly taking on two jobs: one as an employee and one as a
student.

That being said, I recall a lot of people making this argument to me as I
progressed through school and every activity I've done. They claimed the exact
same thing about being the "real geniuses" (please don't fool yourself here)
because they learned how to work "smarter"; which usually came down to putting
in ONLY the minimally required hours, constantly calculating their grade to
make sure it was high enough for them to fail the tests and still pass with a
C, and overall cutting corners. You want to know what I saw happen to those
people? Failure. These are the same people who were high school dropouts or
got kicked out of college for not doing the work. Here's the thing, in a world
where the job market is extremely competitive, your stubbornness to work
"unreasonable" hours is purely a weakness and hardly a strength. You can have
all of knowledge in the world and truly be a "real genius," but if your boss
can't confirm your work ethic, you still don't have a job. Oh, and good luck
starting/running a business with your 35 hours work weeks.

Finally, you should probably apologize to those of us who are hard workers out
there for being purely insulting. As if CEOs and CTOs and great hackers all
over the world worked somehow less "smart" than you did because they worked
hard hours and slept underneath their desks. Sometimes to excel and to surpass
yourself, you have to sacrifice and change the pace of things. Do you really
think Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Steve Jobs, etc, got where they were
by saying "well, I've done 35 hours of 'smart' work now, I need to stop an
meditate?" Well, maybe, but they definitely didn't start like that. And god
forbid you have to take care of a family and multiple children. Do you think
your spouse is going to be happy with "Oh, I already did my 35 hours of
'smartly' raising the kids and providing for the family, I'm done now."

There are reasons that people "glorify" the hard work and long hours they put
into things; they are proud of their work. It doesn't take a rocket scientist
to figure this out. If your twitter friends are "humble brag"-ers, get new
friends. But don't pretend everyone who loves to share their hard work is
trying to shame you or brag about it.

~~~
antitrust
> These are the same people who were high school dropouts or got kicked out of
> college for not doing the work.

Like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and every hacker known to humanity?

> Could it possibly be that people work at different paces

People who are less efficient at a certain job may be in the wrong career...
and we shouldn't hold others back because some are slower.

~~~
paranoiacblack
Uh Steve Jobs and Bill Gates weren't high school dropouts nor did they get
kicked out of college, they consciously moved past it. And when they did, you
bet they worked more than 35 hours a week to make it.

