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.
Other screaming voices: learning which meetings you can skip (and how frequently), learning which emails you can ignore, learning what can be dropped without too much consequence, learning which 'emergency' requests can be deferred (as they will probably be overcome by events anyway), effectively delegating instead of micromanaging.
Basically, learn to stop sweating the small stuff.
Don't forget about its evil twin, three different people with equivalent rank coming to you with three different things and having all of them say this the highest priority issue you should be working on.
Nice analogy! I think this essay is very relevant here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/58g/levels_of_action/. It explores the concept of there being multiple levels of stackable improvements.
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.
First, realizing that your reactions (usually an expression of anger) are resulting from stress and not from the behaviour of the other person.
Second, inserting a pause between your immediate reaction and your response allowing yourself time to moderate and change it.
Finally, recognizing that your reaction is an indicator of stress and then doing whatever it is that makes you less stressed. Exercise, vacation, reading, etc.
I interpret that as constructively figuring out ways to mitigate the stress point, instead of trying to ignore it or running from it, which is destructive, because it doesn't reduce or remove it.
prepare and conduct my teaching, supervise my masters students, do my administrative duties (including answering lots of mails), review papers for some conferences and devote the minimum acceptable time to supervising my PhD students.
I imagine there are some ways to become more efficient at these things -- especially e-mail. The way he writes it sounds as if these are fixed burdens. You can get creative with them.
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.
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.
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.
Not to mention that quite a few small companies don't have the ability to hire a dedicated sysadmin, IT staff, and/or customer support rep. These tasks falls to the engineers.
Doing these tasks is almost certainly a suboptimal use of any single product engineer's job, but if they don't get done by someone the business won't be a business for long.
I was also thinking along these lines as I read, and there have been plenty of articles posted on HN on the diminishing returns of working too long. Basically it boils down to people getting tired, and especially in creative pursuits, it helping to get away from your project and let your mind wander sometimes.
What I expected the author might say is that with many accumulated hours you become more efficient such that over time your output per hour grows, but his view seems quite different.
"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.
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.
There could in fact be greater marginal utility when most of those activities reside in one head and one person, instead of a team. Students attend prestigious universities to study directly with highly regarded researchers themselves instead of their TAs or adjuncts. Reviewing papers and serving in a conference committee requires one to know the ins and outs of a field. And so on...
Maybe most researchers could produce more/better research on their own without these responsibilities, but research-only positions are much fewer, especially in academia. Feynman also argued that teaching gave him ideas for new research.
I guess we should conduct studies to find out how best the society should organize research; optimal models might be dependent on the field or sub-field.
Incidentally, two of the Chemistry Nobel laureates this year made their discoveries when working in an industry lab and in his own private company.
I thought the same. Its a straw man argument - the marginal utility increases because the author wrote it that way.
A secretary or assistant (what are all those graduate assts doing anyway?) would change the whole story. Also changing priorities. Also learning to empower the whole cohort. Or delegating.
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).
I know situation fairly well, my wife works in marine research. Organization with 150 people has 10 HR persons. There are no money to fund research, everything went into fancy office. McDonalds stuff are paid better than lab assistants...
My point is that people at such position can best serve science, if they funnel some money into actual research. There are many researchers, but qualified administrators who actually cares, are very rare.
> 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.
> "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...
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.
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):
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.
Law firms are a prime example of that. When the client calls at the end of a 60-hour work week, he wants to talk to the guy who is primary on the case. Even if he's burned out a bit, the answer he gets from him is still better than the answer any other person in the law firm could give him
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.
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.
High-value items are often dependent on low-value* things
* low value on their own. Breathing/sleeping/eating/commuting/booting-up is a very low value activity, but it is a prereq for all high-value activities
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for the additional analysis and prescriptions, Michael. I was just reading your poker and Haskell posts.
For everyone, I second the importance of maintaining the social life, relationships, fitness, and the like. Getting into regular exercise made a huge difference to my levels of focus, and participation in the local techie scene was instrumental to my own (ongoing) escape from such grunt work.
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.
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.
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:)
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.
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.