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Tempting. Are your working hours more reasonable than SpaceX? With a family to love, 70-hour weeks just don't fit well.
by BrandonMarc 11y ago
Tempting. Are your working hours more reasonable than SpaceX? With a family to love, 70-hour weeks just don't fit well.
- victor9000 11y agoI do not envy those who place their quality of life in the middle of a pissing contest between Bezos and Musk.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoProgress is not cheap, nor easy on the soul.
- gaze 11y agoYeah but... to a degree, right? Many amazing things have been accomplished by people not working themselves to death. If the workforce convinces itself that people are expendable then I suppose people are expendable! I however choose to fight this attitude. Frightened, stressed people work hastefully and make mistakes... somehow the worst thing imaginable for a space exploration company, right?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jzwinck 11y agoMany truly incredible things were built at some cost in human lives. I recently watched a documentary which said large tunneling projects expected to lose one man per X miles dug, a few decades ago. I'm not saying you should be willing to die for your work. But historically someone always seems to be. Not least of all in the space business.
- scrollaway 11y agoThe truly incredible things tend to be created/discovered by the most passionate. This means you'll have selection bias on the people who have a tendency to "work themselves to death" for the cause they're passionate about. It does not mean that you have to work yourself to death to arrive there.
- agumonkey 11y agoThis makes Steve Jobs 'tyrannic' glow a little pale all of a sudden.
- jahaja 11y agoAre you really completely oblivious to the working conditions of workers at those times? I think the workers were as passionate about their work as the capitalist was for worker welfare and safety expenses. Sorry but this comment and some child comments are truly shocking for me in their historical ignorance.
- saiya-jin 11y agoI presume this topic is less about dying for your work, rather about screwing up your relationships, marriage, ending childhood of your kids with divorce and similar. Reality of an engineering employee even for such a company is, success means bringing tiny increase ineffectiveness, weight reduction etc. into super complex system. No truly world changing discoveries. If you are alone, do whatever you want with your life. But once you go for family, working 70-hour weeks is plain stupid, selfish or just extremely bad deal. No work is worth making decisions that you will regret for the rest of your life.
- gaze 11y agoI agree. I think I'd just add that I really believe that the climate of fear that seems to exist in these super high pressure companies creates the wrong incentives. Would we be okay with a bridge building company being a super high stress environment? I think it's somehow more obvious why this is a bad idea. The problem then is that you're fundamentally making a time-quality tradeoff. If you're okay with this, you're saying you're willing to risk the lives of the people you're sending into space a little more to get ahead in the race. I suppose this will always be true, but where do you wanna be on the curve? I've had many different kinds of managers. I've had the type that encouraged me to slow down and think carefully about what I'm doing at every step, and I've had the kind that keeps a watchful eye and is always asking "Why isn't this done yet?" Under the latter I started grinding my teeth at night and started engineering things in a fairly brittle way... but my rote productivity was higher than it had ever been. Managerial styles are all engineering decisions just as any other are.
- Wingman4l7 11y agoWell, to use our last space race as an example: several engineers who worked on Apollo said during interviews that they strongly suspected the consistently long hours they and many others worked directly contributed to later divorces. (My source is the excellent series Moon Machines, for those curious; I believe it was the Navigation episode.)
- kzhahou 11y agoProgress demands not one tear his soul asunder! As the sweat of a man can be stretched far, so too can the Company above increase their efforts of hiring.
- hyperbovine 11y agoI'm happy to let somebody else do the spending.
- gaze 11y agoWell we all know that Bezos is known for his healthy and reasonable approach to work-life balance.
- spyspy 11y agoI'm surprised The Times was even invited for the tour.