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I don't think you know what day of the week it is friend. A study by the Standford CS department shows that total productivity sharply declines after 50 hours

I don't think you know what day of the week it is friend. A study by the Standford CS department shows that total productivity sharply declines after 50 hours of work in a week. Mistakes get made, inefficiencies are introduced. I only shoot for 60 because I can typically vary the work and disperse it over the weekends, which helps. https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/crunchmode/econ-hours-productivity.html https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/crunc... Also my fiancee supports me in my efforts and gives me an extra reason to go to work in the morning. She makes me more productive and provides much needed support and motivation (we largely depend on my salary at the moment). Now sure if I had no desire for a family or friends or life experiences and became some kind of solitary engineer-warrior-monk, and was able to do so without falling into severe depression, maybe I'd be marginally better, but the difference would not be nearly enough to warrant the sacrifice. Even Elon Musk spends some (albeit limited) time with his family and talks about how he's had to tone it down recently (from getting 4 hours a night to 6 hours), and recently tweeted about having a fun night mixing wine and ambien. I have no doubt he works harder than me, but even he has a family and down time. Also, I work at a big traditional defense contractor. Large companies are hardly monolithic. Some programs suck and are staffed by lazy/ineffective engineers, but my program's customer is quite satisfied at the moment, as are other programs' customers. That's why we get business, we do have competition that will take it from us if we don't deliver. You can't paint 100,000+ employees with one brush, and trying to do so makes you sound unintelligent. Correspondingly your statement "What the issue is at traditional companies doesn't matter, the fact is that they suck and they cultivate lazy engineering." makes it clear that you're not interested in discussing the issue and more interested in validating your own beliefs, which you have no evidence for beyond having "read some interviews". Once again, that diminishes your credibility. And I don't give a damn what you think about my 3rd grade drawings (fyi you clearly rushed through reading my post and missed the phrasing, I don't have a 3rd grade kid). It was meant to support the statement that I actually am passionate about space tech and would love to work on what SpaceX works on, nothing more. And warm-fuzzies are clearly something you need more of in your life. Tesla will probably help save the world, but they're hardly the only force out there, or even the decisive force when it comes to combating climate change. Even if they fold I don't think you have too much to worry about. I've been polite up to this point, but I'll be blunt: You sound like a 14 year old who's sole knowledge of the world comes from blog posts. Which is fine, but don't expect anyone to take you seriously. You have to earn that when you're in a room of strangers (which is what this forum largely is), and you've only done the opposite.

crush-n-spread 9y ago
There might be a study that supports working shorter hours but the truth is that if keep a mental image in your brain for longer, it will be easier to recall that mental image later. This is how Calculus was invented, keeping the image of the problem in the brain at all times; that is how good work gets done, and that is when inefficiencies are reduced. Fiancees are great, I agree. And I don't think there is anything wrong with families. You admit yourself that your company has some bad programs. Those programs are hemorrhaging money that comes from the public. That's really awful and everyone involved should be fired for wasting taxpayer money. I dunno about the rest of this, I'm just super passionate and I'm willing to come along and tell some mid-level engineer at a big company that he sucks and his company sucks, because it's probably true. I could come to your company and observe long coffee breaks, people who put in three hours a day, and all that stuff, and you'd brush it off when I brought it up. It's cynicism because that's what is actually out there. People suck. You try and rationalize it but your company is going nowhere fast as soon as the government contracts and fat military cheques run out. I'm in my 20s and and been incredibly hard working and suffered a lot in my life, I'm just very passionate and I'm willing to tell you that your company is really not good, because it's not.
- scottLobster 9y ago
  Sure. And yet Thomas Edison intentionally nodded off with a handful of ball bearings (to wake him up just as he nodded off) to help solve problems. Diffuse mode learning, aka putting things on the back-burner can be very useful for solving complex problems. As any number of articles posted here can attest, there's more than one way to skin that particular cat. A lot of those programs probably are due to fold. At the end of the day that's up to the customer. As I said, we have competitors willing to snap up business on fairly short notice. Quite often the contracts are structured so that the customer can cancel them at will, no lock-in. Saying everyone involved should be fired is a carpet-bomb solution that risks punishing good talent. Sometimes the program you work on ends, or you want a career change, and take what looks like a good opportunity but turns out to be shit. Sometimes a change in leadership turns a good program bad and there are no good transfer opportunities. There are no glassdoor.com reviews for internal company programs, if you're lucky you get hearsay, and I've known many good engineers that were stuck on bad programs for some time before being able to transfer off. Fire the offenders sure, but it's not black and white. I wouldn't brush any of the criticism off, actually. I'm well aware of my company's institutional flaws, many of us gripe about them on a daily basis. But I think you'd be surprised how many of us bag lunch and work unpaid overtime when deadlines are near. I'm not defending my company, but I am defending most the engineers I've met there. A lot of us are actually hoping for some extra competition to shake up upper management. Hell we had no less than two dozen people, including a low-level manager watching the SpaceX live-stream when they landed the first Falcon 9, and we were as excited as anyone. We'd universally love to work on something like that, but we don't get to pitch contracts or control the money. I can't speak for the entire company, or even a substantial fraction of it, but that's my neck of the woods. The picture is not as black and white as you think. Don't let your passion or prior suffering blind your attention to detail. Yeah, my company sucks when it comes to vision (and some other things). Here's hoping SpaceX eventually makes us better in that regard. Not that my program's in danger anytime soon, we're not in SpaceX's direct line of business. I'm in my late 20s BTW.

crush-n-spread 9y ago

There might be a study that supports working shorter hours but the truth is that if keep a mental image in your brain for longer, it will be easier to recall that mental image later. This is how Calculus was invented, keeping the image of the problem in the brain at all times; that is how good work gets done, and that is when inefficiencies are reduced. Fiancees are great, I agree. And I don't think there is anything wrong with families. You admit yourself that your company has some bad programs. Those programs are hemorrhaging money that comes from the public. That's really awful and everyone involved should be fired for wasting taxpayer money. I dunno about the rest of this, I'm just super passionate and I'm willing to come along and tell some mid-level engineer at a big company that he sucks and his company sucks, because it's probably true. I could come to your company and observe long coffee breaks, people who put in three hours a day, and all that stuff, and you'd brush it off when I brought it up. It's cynicism because that's what is actually out there. People suck. You try and rationalize it but your company is going nowhere fast as soon as the government contracts and fat military cheques run out. I'm in my 20s and and been incredibly hard working and suffered a lot in my life, I'm just very passionate and I'm willing to tell you that your company is really not good, because it's not.

scottLobster 9y ago
Sure. And yet Thomas Edison intentionally nodded off with a handful of ball bearings (to wake him up just as he nodded off) to help solve problems. Diffuse mode learning, aka putting things on the back-burner can be very useful for solving complex problems. As any number of articles posted here can attest, there's more than one way to skin that particular cat. A lot of those programs probably are due to fold. At the end of the day that's up to the customer. As I said, we have competitors willing to snap up business on fairly short notice. Quite often the contracts are structured so that the customer can cancel them at will, no lock-in. Saying everyone involved should be fired is a carpet-bomb solution that risks punishing good talent. Sometimes the program you work on ends, or you want a career change, and take what looks like a good opportunity but turns out to be shit. Sometimes a change in leadership turns a good program bad and there are no good transfer opportunities. There are no glassdoor.com reviews for internal company programs, if you're lucky you get hearsay, and I've known many good engineers that were stuck on bad programs for some time before being able to transfer off. Fire the offenders sure, but it's not black and white. I wouldn't brush any of the criticism off, actually. I'm well aware of my company's institutional flaws, many of us gripe about them on a daily basis. But I think you'd be surprised how many of us bag lunch and work unpaid overtime when deadlines are near. I'm not defending my company, but I am defending most the engineers I've met there. A lot of us are actually hoping for some extra competition to shake up upper management. Hell we had no less than two dozen people, including a low-level manager watching the SpaceX live-stream when they landed the first Falcon 9, and we were as excited as anyone. We'd universally love to work on something like that, but we don't get to pitch contracts or control the money. I can't speak for the entire company, or even a substantial fraction of it, but that's my neck of the woods. The picture is not as black and white as you think. Don't let your passion or prior suffering blind your attention to detail. Yeah, my company sucks when it comes to vision (and some other things). Here's hoping SpaceX eventually makes us better in that regard. Not that my program's in danger anytime soon, we're not in SpaceX's direct line of business. I'm in my late 20s BTW.