24 ms·

The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

691 points by fahd777 9y ago

dfsdfdsfds 9y ago
It makes it sound as if work was more healthy in the past. Was it? When? I know hunter gatherer times were supposed to be paradise, but anything since then? Farming sounds rather arduous. Or what about mining, or working in factories where safety measures have not yet been invented?
- sjg007 9y ago
  This has nothing to do with work in the past being more healthy. It is not a this or that situation.
  - dfsdfdsfds 9y ago
    The way it is written suggests "the workplace" used to be better: "But I would say that with all the evidence I’ve encountered — and it’s not perfect evidence — I’ve seen nothing inconsistent with the statement that the workplace has generally gotten worse" - "I see a workplace that has become shockingly inhumane." Of course it is still valid to ask how a healthier workplace could be created. Just the notion that things were better in the past seems very unlikely to me.
    - adamson 9y ago
      I interpreted "the workplace" as him referring narrowly to white collar work (either in an office doing clerical/technical work or in a mobile setting like a salesperson).
    - washadjeffmad 9y ago
      We might not be crushed in machinery as children or poisoned by the products we produce at the same rate as in the industrial era, but that was seen in the same way as humans living today to be an acceptable cost of making a living. The question is of the acceptance of compulsory discomfort leading to potential harm later being an unquestioned norm.
- medlazik 9y ago
  >It makes it sound as if work was more healthy in the past. Was it? When? 20 years ago, before the lax in regulations made the whole world a competitive nightmare for most workers.
- lowbloodsugar 9y ago
  As other commenter says, it's not "this or that", but having said that, quality of life for the middle class was definitely better only a few decades ago. An average job would get you a house, a car and a pension, working eight hours a day, five days a week. And "middle class" meant a much greater range of jobs. Factory work could get you a house, a car and a pension. Time with kids, no worries about the future, or how you are going to eat when you retire, if you get to retire. Good times.
  - bproven 9y ago
    Agreed this is the biggest change... Those days are over.
  - jdminhbg 9y ago
    > Time with kids, no worries about the future, or how you are going to eat when you retire, if you get to retire. Good times. The numbers say you're wrong: http://www.nber.org/aginghealth/summer04/w10466.html http://www.nber.org/aginghealth/summer04/w10466.html
    - rifung 9y ago
      Is this the right link? This article is about poverty and not about how far you could go on a middle class income
      - jdminhbg 9y ago
        It's about elderly people living in poverty. It's very relevant to whether retirements and pensions are falling off a cliff and whether people won't be able to eat when they're retired, as alleged.
        rifung 9y ago
        Ah.. but what about being able to afford a house on a job that requires minimal education like working in a factory? That was actually the main point from my interpretation.
- derefr 9y ago
  The present population of workers the article is referring to with "work culture" are white collar workers. Comparing like to like, these wouldn't be people working in factories or mining. The equivalent jobs in previous eras would be those of priests, monks, and scribes; of surveyors, navigators, and architects; of military officers; and of nobles tinkering around in the sciences. Compare the working conditions of those jobs to those of current white-collar work.
  - 1787 9y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if priests or monks had quite long work hours; imagine the RSI one might get from copying out whole books by hand. You could reframe as underemployment a lot of the extent to which jobs in the past were less stressful (if they actually were). Trading stress for fantastic material wealth is a highly popular option afforded by technology.
  - dfsdfdsfds 9y ago
    But how many of those white collar jobs were around in the past, compared to toiling on farms and stuff?
- fiblye 9y ago
  I can't really say for certain, but the idea of a boring, average American life in the 90s/early 2000s was having a 9-5 job and watching TV after you finished work. I haven't seen a posting for a 9-5 job in years. But I see 8-5, 9-6, and increasingly 8-6 and beyond. You get a "lunch break", but don't stroll off too far just in case we need you (wink wink). Then once work's "over", many people are called in for extra hours or expected to answer messages no matter what time of day. And good luck getting paid any sort of overtime. America seems to be trending towards the Asian model of work.
  - internetman55 9y ago
    The bad part to me about jobs like that was how you were just spending massive hours doing stupid things. A lot of people would enjoy working 10 hours a day in a highly engaging, challenging environment. Instead everyone is so shot from overworking, stress, poor interpersonal relationships, etc. that it sometimes feels like you're working all day on a project nobody needs that doesn't work led by a manager who doesn't know what he's doing and doesn't care to. Basically like you're getting paid to get punched in the face rather than to do a job. I honestly had managers at the Kmart retail store I worked at who struck me as smarter (and certainly more humble) than at least one software manager I've had
happyand40 9y ago
For the love of Christ (btw not a Christian). We live in what people of any past time period would appropriately call paradise. We live longer, have the music and culture of the world at our fingertips, and the vast vast majority of Americans do not suffer from unsanitary conditions, having to hunt a giant animal, child slavery, or frequent rape. And yet our new priests are these pseudoscientific... whiners. Sure, stress affects the body. So does bitching about the best average living conditions ever. Go take a chi kung class, you have the time. If not, look up meditation on the Internet. Can't afford it? We have these amazing institutions called libraries. Walk 10 miles to one, its good for you. No one SHOULD care. Please. Grow the fuck up.
- sctb 9y ago
  If you're going to comment here please make it civil and substantive. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - happyand40 9y ago
    This is about as civil of a kick in the butt as this post deserves. Enjoy bitching about the best it will ever get, you fucking whiner. Flag away.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
      - jdmichal 9y ago
        If you really feel compelled to read flagged comments, you can turn on "showdead" in your settings.
    - sctb 9y ago
      Since it seems like you aren't going to follow the guidelines, we've banned the account.
chaseha 9y ago
Dealing w/ RSI has been an eye opener for me. What makes it worse: working on a laptop, working on the plane, having to do long hours in poor ergonomic conditions. What do I have to do to be good at my job? Basically, that. What happens if it gets worse and I can no longer use a computer for at least eight hours a day? That is my livelihood
- mancerayder 9y ago
  It WILL become a problem. The biggest issue with RSI and other repetive-use injuries (which happens in many professions and even athletics, especially with bad form) is that it happens slowly, then suddenly. It's so slow that it's discomfort. And you ignore that discomfort, especially as your concentration is on a computer monitor with important stuff to worry about being displayed on it. Also, sometimes inflammation happens later (later that night, later that week, etc.). Start now to reduce your RSI (and RSI isn't your only problem, more on that below): Get an external keyboard either that has an ergonomic design is is comfortable for you, and a mouse too. A Mac keyboard will be nightmare, don't use it. A Mac 'Magic Mouse' or trackpad will cause damage. It's not made for serious long-term work (there might be a lawsuit one day). Pro tip: this may sound crazy, but get two mice, one left, one right. Change often. Learn to use the lefty even if you're right-handed, or vice-versa. You'll be surprised at how quickly you get used to it (and you'll laugh when someone tries to show you something on your workstation). Get a desk that moves up and down. Spend some time standing, some time sitting. Again, change often. Next, other than RSI is your neck and back. As your rhomboids get stretched and weak from forward rotation of the shoulders, the rear neck muscles get stretched and weak, the serratus goes unused, the chest and front-neck muscles get short and tight... You arch your head forward which causes your head (which already weighs about 8 pounds) to exert a lot more than 8 pounds of force on those muscle groups. And you also look at your phone all day, which you hold down below you. Well you're in for a world of nightmares and headaches that'll make the RSI a distraction by comparison. Start early to avoid these things, before it becomes too late. Sincerely, A guy with some greying and screwed up wrists/hands and neck.
  - glitcher 9y ago
    Completely agree with these awesome tips. I began to get problems in my right wrist from too much mousing (and probably using wrong mice for too long). I started switching between right and left mouse usage, and not only did it reduce the pain in the right side, but I found I adapted to left mousing fairly quickly and easily.
dboreham 9y ago
Talk to your UPS or FedEx driver about the impact of their job on their body.
- tw1010 9y ago
  This is a common sentiment but I don't think it should be the end of the story. So what if people from two hundred years lived significantly worse lives than ourselves? I didn't live then and I'm not a UPS driver. I have all the empathy in the world for people in harm, but the fact that suffering exist should in no way act as a counterweight on levers that tries to improve situations where relief seems possible.
- XorNot 9y ago
  And the first step to improving their working conditions is taking our own seriously.
- getaclue 9y ago
  Dunno about UPS fam, but I did work as a FedEx driver in my previous life... and nothing close to the stuff I see in our field. For sure, we are disposable in both fields. Perhaps the constant need to deliver X items on my route, but you get used to it because it doesn't really change. Our field changes all of the time and if you don't adjust you aren't hired. But I definitely didn't need to check my Slack, or stay up to date on current trends and tech on twitter, hackernews, newsletters, et al.
- bbarn 9y ago
  Ah yes the ever present "it could be worse". It can also be better.
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someone7x 9y ago
> I see a workplace that has become shockingly inhumane. A thousand times this. Very few of the lessons my parents taught me apply in the corporate world. Be honest and straight with people, assume good intent, take responsibility, etc. All that behavior will do is paint you as naive. Sure there's room for honesty and responsibility, but only when used appropriately (strategically). Strikes me as acutely inhumane every time my career is rewarded for suppressing those behaviors. I am not even allowed to tell a candidate (another human being that probably NEEDS a paycheck) why I didn't hire them and what they can do to improve their viability. Just because the company has discarded this person it also means I must discard them as well? It kills me every time, but I NEED my paycheck more than I prefer to help my fellow human.
- ekanes 9y ago
  It sounds less like workplaces are broken, and more that you're working at a broken workplace. Go somewhere better - don't give your best efforts to the place you're at. There are workplaces where being honest and straight, assuming good intent, taking responsibility etc will move you UP.
  - mancerayder 9y ago
    Comments like these are naive, if well-intentioned. Work cultures permeate industries, cities and more. Moreover, for most people, even in the lucrative tech industry such as ourselves, don't have the luxury to peacefully and calmly pick and choose the ideal job: rent is due, mortgage is due, savings go down, or anxiety goes up and we take what comes up. The myth of equal contactual relationship between employer/employee is painful to see turned into a helpful platitude of the genre "if you don't like it, find somewhere else."
    - remar 9y ago
      I always wonder what the life experiences and world view of someone like the person you're replying to, consists of. The older I get, the more apparent it becomes that most of my peers and friends have lived extremely "privileged" lives solely based on the freedom of choice that they've had over certain aspects of life. In most cases the source of the privilege is a combination of well educated guardians and money. I find when talking to these people, they can never seem to fathom why someone can't just simply "get out" of a situation like this, or don't seem to understand what it could possibly be about their upbringing that lets them see the world this way or gives them a certain advantage. A lot of them seem to just see this privilege as a scalar value that just corresponds to a net worth, rather than seeing it as this incredibly powerful resource that can seed safety, well-being, knowledge, personal skills, mental stability, ... the list goes on.
megamindbrian2 9y ago
I was "managed out" and nobody cares. https://www.ft.com/content/356ea48c-e6cf-11e6-967b-c88452263daf https://www.ft.com/content/356ea48c-e6cf-11e6-967b-c88452263...
megamindbrian2 9y ago
People don't need healthcare, they need social food experiences.
osrec 9y ago
Work has become a strange thing. I see people foregoing their best years stuck in an office, in the hope they can enjoy their later years. What utter nonsense. I'm not sure what the right answer is, but society has got something very wrong, as our work culture seems to surgically remove the wonder and enjoyment from our days. Hardly surprising that it drives people to ill health. Glad I broke out of that cycle a long time ago and quit my corporate job. The job was torture, quitting was scary and bumpy, but looking back it was an excellent decision.
- derwiki 9y ago
  Do you have a job now? If so how is it better?
  - diab0lic 9y ago
    Judging from his profile he consults now: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=osrec https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=osrec
    - osrec 9y ago
      Yes, I have a consulting company now. Also starting to put together a few interesting products that my clients may be interested in.
      - deleted 9y ago
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- remar 9y ago
  I'm sure you're aware of this, but a lot of people just don't have the financial freedom to even begin thinking about a decision like this, or it ends up requiring a lot of energy to make that plan viable. And as you've probably experienced, energy is not exactly abundant after a day/week/month/etc in an environment like that...
  - 9y ago
retrac98 9y ago
I’ve always found it very effective to use a “just say no” policy to out of hours work or more work than I can handle comfortably. People stop taking advantage when you stop letting them. More than you might expect actually respect it. I don’t think this way of working has hurt my career progression, and it’s certainly done wonders for my mental health.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  100% true. > I don’t think this way of working has hurt my career progression I am sure it has helped.
  - lostcolony 9y ago
    Yep. The "if you give them an inch they'll take a mile" philosophy applies. My wife tends to try and accommodate, and it has meant she isn't respected in her current position. Meanwhile, same company, I've made it clear that I have boundaries. I may allow some time after my usual working hours; if I do, I will leave early/arrive late the next day. I'm not putting in over 40 hours, and -I- get to determine when my schedule changes. And, perversely, it's led to greater recognition, promotion, etc. The fact I act like I am in control leads people to believe I am, and should be given, control.
- rconti 9y ago
  Agreed. I've found the more you stand up for yourself, the more your boundaries are respected. That said, I'm sure it doesn't work in all situations, or with all bosses, so I'm hesitant to blame the victim -- I've been lucky to have very good bosses in my career.
  - Thriptic 9y ago
    I've found that assembling highly in demand skills helps a lot with this. For awhile I was by far and away the best developer in my org (which is not to say that I'm a good developer, just that our org had 0 formal software engineering xp). This gave me very broad power to say no to projects or put in place prerequisites which had to be met before I would take on a project. It definitely pissed people off, but I was adding enough value to be able to take the stance "hey if you don't like it fire me".
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tboyd47 9y ago
Honest question. How much of this is cultural or psychological? Can people be trained not to take so much shit from bosses or automatically make the company's problems their problems? I ask because at my current job, a lot of work is explicitly motivated by the threat of getting yelled at or publicly shamed in some way. I often wonder if these stressful interactions could just be handled politely but in a way that doesn't automatically turn into work that gets handled invisibly or passed down the chain to some other poor sap.
- tnzn 9y ago
  It's hard to evaluate a percentage, especially since culture and psychology are intertwined. However, there's much research going on about resilience in several contexts, and as far as I know, there are ways to take it easier, however there tends to be cultural factors at stake. Anyways, while teaching resilience could be interesting, imo we should also make the world a place where we need less of it, for both moral and practical reasons : not everyone may be able to develop enough resilience to deal with it.
- cyberpunk0 9y ago
  "Not take shit from your boss" = "get fired by boss for 'insubordination' "
  - tj-teej 9y ago
    I disagree, from most of my experience, toxic managers take advantage of the people they feel they CAN take advantage of. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's spiteful managers like you're hinting at, but from my experience at two major tech companies, a healthy two-way respect is earned by pushing back on management when they're out of line, as I think they know a lot of the time that they're being out of line but they can get away with it.
    - tboyd47 9y ago
      That's what I'm getting at. In my own experience, unhandled grudges against people end up being a major source of stress. Some people (my past self included) don't know how to stand up for themselves at a company. It's a combination of knowing what lines people can't cross with you, and what sorts of authority different people at work can have over you, because when someone crosses a line, how you correct them will differ according to their relation to you. For example, if a manager is rude to you, you can often excuse yourself but can't completely drop the issue, whereas, if a fellow collaborator is rude, sometimes you can just stop dealing with them altogether. Sometimes just looking perturbed without saying anything is enough to make people change how they deal with you. A lot of developers I see don't pay any attention to these things and nurse grudges against people for entire years.
remar 9y ago
I've had the chance to see the toll that a stressful environment (big tech company) can have on physical and mental health - I've experienced it personally and noticed it in others that I work with. The part about a big tech company being a stressful environment isn't the thing that surprised me, but rather people's responses to how they react to either being on the receiving side of the stress, and management's failure to respond to this or even try to talk about it. The thing that bugs me the most about the entire situation is that most of the stress that seems to exist, mostly exists because of people who have no idea what they're doing, make decisions they have no business making. Then you have engineers that either come from cultures that are high in agreeableness, or they've never been very assertive themselves and just accept these decisions, thinking it's a situation of "if I don't do this I'm going to get fired". Most of the people I work with don't even consider the option of just taking an extended period of time off to prevent being burned out because they're basically tied to their employment due to work visas (you guessed it, Indian and Chinese workers) and a lot of them are trying to support family back home. So even leaving their job and taking extended time off isn't a viable option. Don't even get me started on how I've seen people's physical and mental health completely deteriorate. I know lots of people in my organization that are extremely depressed and wouldn't even be the least bit surprised if I heard they ate a bullet tomorrow. This whole industry has just motivated me to work to achieve financial independence/early retirement as soon as I can just so I never have to think about working with incompetent people in my life again, or at least, have the financial freedom to cut those relationships once they do arise. It sucks because I know I'll be working on tech related projects for the rest of my life, but I have to ignore the desire to work on things that will actually make a difference so that I can build up that nest egg to have the financial freedom and peace of mind to actually pursue it.
- tboyd47 9y ago
  People who treat their workers in this way should be ashamed. Such blatant exploitation should be illegal.
- oceanghost 9y ago
  At some point, you have to admit that the stress is intentional. That it is a part of a misguided strategy to extract maximum value from employees, while minimizing managements political exposure.
ProxCoques 9y ago
Don't worry, wage slavery is just a phase we're going though because right now we can't see out of the capitalist bubble we're in. It doesn't have to be like this, and we will find our way out one day, be it through UBI, AI or other post-capitalist mechanism. Might take a few hundred years though, mind you. Once Trump has been flushed through at least.
- glup 9y ago
  As I was reading this I was thinking "uh oh, here comes the techno-utopian nonsense", but then I got to the "few hundred years" part. Yup, sounds about right. Cheers to dialectics.
- Libturd 9y ago
  spotted the libturd!
mathattack 9y ago
There is irony in this coming from a business school professor who sends his students into jobs with terrible hours.
minikites 9y ago
As I type this comment, there are 46 other comments, not one of them using the word "union". That's the only feasible method I can see to enact large scale change. CEOs and other executives aren't going to change out of the kindness of their hearts, as evidenced by the fact that they could start at any point and still choose not to.
- bobzibub 9y ago
  I think that people must move past the belief in "heroism" as a job function and understand that many companies (not all) are parasitic creatures which finagle to charge economic rents, not saviours of Western democracy that provide value added as is commonly assumed. I got the opportunity to apply for my current job yesterday. I expect an offer letter and threats to sign within two days or lose the job I have next week. My future company is a lowest bidder and was selected from around thirty applicants.
- lkrubner 9y ago
  I find it worrisome that your comment was downvoted to the very bottom of the page. You are suggesting the common sense solution. If the people on Hacker News could look at the industry situation in an objective, rational way, I'm sure your comment would be the top voted comment on the page.
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crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
I think the familial boundaries defined within most societies promotes us-vs-them mindsets and a more inclusive, integrated framework is needed for peaceful coevolution within within sectors of life. > Dying for a Paycheck, published by HarperBusiness and released on March 20, maps a range of ills in the modern workplace — from the disappearance of good health insurance to the psychological effects of long hours and work-family conflict — and how these are killing people. Thought experiment: How can the world be different if we changed the understood definition of family from "home life" or "family of current origin" to "family of choice"? What then happens if the majority chooses humanity as its family, followed by collectively choosing to meet the needs of all in the family?
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bitL 9y ago
If you are flooded with stress, I recommend Finnish sauna a few times a week with continuous adjustment to cold immersion after a few minutes you leave the hot area (try to stay in cold longer every next time until you hit 2 minutes). Try to repeat it 4-5x a session in like 90 minutes. After I started doing it, it usually clears my head completely and makes my evenings absolutely stress-free and happy, and I can tackle the most difficult tasks next day.
reality_czech 9y ago
The part which really makes me angry is that this guy probably also employs graduate students who make minimum wage, have terrible health care, and no job security. But he doesn't feel like that's important enough to mention.
- internetman55 9y ago
  My wage at some random school is roughly 2k/month for 20 hours work, ignoring free tuition.
  - deathanatos 9y ago
    And mine was $10/hr, for computer science. Peanuts. My last year there they dropped that to $0/hr, and then complained that they couldn't find enough TAs.
FlyingSideKick 9y ago
How can workers change corporate culture from within to demand work-life balance? I asked an executive VP this at a one of the worlds largest company’s here in Seattle and she said “If the young talent we need coming out of school across the board demanded shorter days and more vacation we would have to comply. But they don’t instead they are awed by an extra $10k on a hiring bonus they might or might not get after two years and they’ll work 60 hour weeks because that’s what they think ‘normal’ is because their peers are doing it.” So how from the ground up can we make corporate culture in America more focused on the social health of their employees?
- wmeredith 9y ago
  Unionize. That’s how we got things like the 40 hour work week.
  - rwmj 9y ago
    Yes I was very surprised there is no mention of unions in the article. The writer has supposed to have thought deeply about this issue, but doesn't come to the (to me) obvious conclusion?
- sotojuan 9y ago
  Yeah. Very eye opening how many of my friends in my age group (early and mid 20s) outside of the tech industry work. And none of them bat an eye - "That's just how it is".
- lostcolony 9y ago
  Inform. Even in such a culture, one person refusing to do it (not rudely, just passively; go home at the right time, not checking stuff) is enough to change things. We know from every bit of research that 60 hours is not more productive than 40 hours. The one person who refuses is going to shine. And their good habit, if they know to commit to it, and to socialize it, will help empower the others. I know as a team lead I've tried to empower the people under me to manage their own time, and actively encouraged them to ignore workplace communication after hours
- 9y ago
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odyssey7 9y ago
> You know what might change this? I gave a talk on this to Stanford alumni and afterward a lawyer came up to me and said there are going to be lawsuits. This won't happen as long as the worst offenders can push individual arbitration agreements. The Supreme Court heard arguments about them recently, and a decision on whether they are legal is expected soon. On the other hand, electronic health records should make it easy to show with statistics if a workplace causes chronic disease, relative its peers. We just need to add employer information to the standard information that hospitals collect. Certainly a group of university hospitals would be interested in seeing this data, and could organize an initiative to collect it. Edit: Actually, a way to link massive amounts of healthcare data to patients' employers might already be available. Medical records often store insurance information, which can be used to figure out a patient's employer if they are the subscriber.
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innocentoldguy 9y ago
While I applaud his efforts, Jeffrey Pfeffer probably doesn't really want his book to "be the 'Silent Spring' of workplace health," considering that Rachel Carson had a bad habit of citing suspicious sources, falsifying scientific research, and twisting words to fit her agenda. For example, egg thickness tests done on eagles didn't support the thin-shell claim she wanted to push, so her researchers lowered the calcium levels in the birds' diet until thinner egg shells were achieved. Also, Carson claims in her book that when quails were fed DDT, "few of the eggs hatched." If you actually read the research she's citing (from an article in "Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry," by James DeWitt), you find that around 80% of the DDT eggs hatched, compared to 83% in the control group, who weren't fed DDT. Since when are 80% and "few" synonymous? In the tests on pheasants, contained in the same article by James DeWitt, the control group (no DDT) hatched 57.4% of their eggs and the DDT pheasants hatched 80.6 of theirs. After eight weeks, the survival rate amongst the DDT chicks was also higher. I'm not saying we should use DDT as an ice cream topping, and that there's nothing wrong with it, but I'd prefer actual science on the matter rather than inaccurate sensationalism. I'd also prefer to believe Pfeffer's research is impeccable and that he's above the sort of consequentialism that Carson apparently embraced. I don't have anything against saving the environment nor saving ourselves from toxic work practices. I just don't think we need to stoop to mountebankery to demonstrate the need for awareness and change. Such consequentialism undermines good causes, I think.
DimitarIbra9 9y ago
I think Amazon is the perfect example that killing employees by spreading/polluting cultural environment.
derrekl 9y ago
I'm a CTO at a YC grad Care Revolutions. There's a lot of comments on what kind of work environment is bad. What do y'all suggest a startup with limited resources do to be an incredible place to work for while also being a highly productive environment? I'm especially interested in suggestions as it relates to your health both physically and mentally!
- beager 9y ago
  I would start by recognizing that the physical and mental health of your employees is also a "limited resource". Many companies, from scrappy and small to profitable and mega-huge abuse their human capital because health and wellness of human capital doesn't show up in a P&L. And if you feel with your limited resources that you need to push your work environment to an unhealthy point to survive, you'd better be sure that you're doing that only after exerting the same shrewd force to get the unreasonably good pricing from your vendors, squeezing your investors for as much money as they'll give you, cut-throating your competition to the same ethically-questionable level, and red-teaming your model and roadmap to be sure you're not wasting one breath on anything superfluous. Beyond that, if you have truly arrived at a point where you are asking things of your employees that could jeopardize their physical and mental health, be honest and open with your people about it. Candor goes a long way. And then, identify the exact things that are taking a toll on physical and mental health, and address them one at a time.
- tomc1985 9y ago
  Give your people flexibility and space. Neither cost much, at least directly. Results-based, not metrics-based. Et cetera
- kdamken 9y ago
  Base your entire company culture around 40 hour work weeks. If you find people are needing to work more than that to get things done in time, it’s a planning/work load problem, and you need to hire more people.
  - Sileni 9y ago
    And recognize that any work people do while stressed and tired is probably adding enough back end technical debt that you'll be double paying for those hours without a long term gain in progress.
crystalmeph 9y ago
I wonder if part of this is due to the ever-increasing push towards creating metrics for every aspect of human behavior. It’s not uncommon when applying for a job that you take a “personality test” that measures not just technical knowledge, but also scores you on traditionally “soft” traits like assertiveness vs. agreeableness, with the hiring manager getting a readout of where you fall relative to the “ideal” range of that metric for the job you’re applying for. We recently had an open position, and I know for a fact that we turned down multiple perfectly qualified people with successful track records in this exact role because they didn’t pass a personality test they received after the interview process - the reasoning for giving them the test after was that this personality test is particularly expensive. The “solution” was not to ditch the expensive personality test, but to bite the bullet and give all the rest of the candidates the test beforehand. But my eyes were opened. I’m very worried that applying metrics to people, not performance, is creating a homogeneous culture that goes along to get along, resulting in silent acceptance of the situation described in the article.
- cloogshicer 9y ago
  I think you're on to something. In our current culture, the general consensus seems to be that everything can be measured, and what can't be measured doesn't exist.
- Futurebot 9y ago
  "Market forces are also intensified by intensifying assessment, a development especially visible on the labour market. Even within a contract period, an employee will be subject to continuous assessment. The use of specialised software in call centres has provided some extreme examples: the time employees spend at the toilet is measured in seconds: this information is used to pressure the employee to spend less time away from the terminal. Firms with contracts are also increasingly subject to continuous assessment procedures, made possible by information technology. For instance, courier services use tracking software and GPS technology, to allow customers to locate their packages in transit. This is a typical example of the new hyper-provision of business information, in neoliberal economies." From "Neoliberalism: origins, theory, definition" http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/neoliberalism.html http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/neoliberalism.htm...
yters 9y ago
If life sucks so much in the Western world, why does everyone come here? And the "new rich" living in Costa Rica and other cheaper countries, why don't they live off the land like everyone idealizes instead of in mansions?
catnaroek 9y ago
It took me half a minute to just parse the title. Edit: I mean the title of this post here. The title of the linked article is, of course, very easy to read.
JDiculous 9y ago
Having a boring office job is really depressing, and it's a shame that you're not allowed to complain about it because there are people in third world countries worse off. Rather than comparing ourselves to impoverished countries, we should take the lead in using our technological advancement to create more humane societies that don't tie people to jobs they hate living paycheck to paycheck. Europe certainly has a better model here than the US (more vacation, unemployment benefits), but there's room for improvement (eg. basic income). Personally I left my office job in NYC about 4 months ago and have been traveling for the last 2 months (in South America). Being here and meeting other travelers (especially European), digital nomads, etc. has really made me realize how toxic American rat race work culture is. One Colombian I met who spent time living in the U.S. summed it up the best - Americans only seem to think about money. Now I know some of you will say "but Colombia is poorer than us!" That may be the case, but it doesn't dispute the fact that our culture has become toxic - money/work obsessed, 2 weeks/year vacation, usurious amounts of student loan debt, etc. If you need an example of a country with a bit more sense - I met a 28 year old Finnish guy here in Colombia in the middle of a multi-month vacation. His job back in Finland? Working in the deli section of a supermarket selling sausages. Completely blew my mind. If he were born in America and in the same occupation, he would probably not have the time or money for a 2 month international vacation. I've got friends the same age in professional occupations (eg. economist for the government) forgoing vacations until they pay back their 6-8% interest student loans. Europe in general has a much healthier attitude when it comes to work/life balance than America. Though on the bright side, at least we have it better than Asia (minus the student loan and healthcare part).
- gfarah 9y ago
  As a Colombian myself who studied and worked in the US in the past, I can confirm how the focus on money as the principal mean of finding happiness is specially strong in American culture. This distinction I believe, makes it very hard for people in the US when things don't work out the way they wanted.
- stolson 9y ago
  To the deli guy - I've had this experience too. When you meet someone who has what Americans would consider a "high school" job or "work between jobs" is very much someone's only job, it's really hard to wrap your head around it.
mykull 9y ago
How naive to think we aren't just being farmed like cattle. Of course, there is always a pressure on workers to be money makers. When the means don't matter to investors, neither do workers.
swlkr 9y ago
Companies large and small can suffer from this problem of what appears to be mundane, useless work. It’s worth mentioning that instead of striving for 50,000 person companies, we might be better off with much smaller companies, two pizza team companies or smaller.
lsc 9y ago
I'm sure work is pretty bad for a lot of people, and sure, something should be done with that. I personally think the biggest thing we could do is to just add a reasonable safety net. I get treated well because my employer knows I have a choice of jobs; if we gave the people on the bottom some minimal safety net so they wouldn't go homeless or starve without working, then employers would have to treat them well enough that working was better than living off the minimal government benefits. And that's a good thing, though it would need to be balanced with how much wealth we have as a society. Certainly, though, we can afford public housing and food for everyone right now, and we should. "Work or starve" is only morally justifiable when society has so little that someone must starve. But... on the other hand, I do think that in some ways a lot of us (especially a lot of us on hn who are in the top half of computer technicians and software engineers) have it pretty good. For me? I know I had a lot of negative feelings about management when I was younger. I thought they were stupid and evil. I became a lot happier as an employee after I blew a whole lot of time and money trying to run a business myself. And it was ramen profitable, but god damn did I work hard for that ramen. I'd be most of the way to retirement if I had lived on what I lived on and worked for someone else, investing the difference in index funds. But I think running that business really helped me be a happier employee; I mean, I am not saying I understand the business bullshit... I don't know what to do about all the moral dilemmas at that level, about negotiation, about hiding information, etc... some of it still does seem kind of stupid and evil. But I understand that business bullshit exists, and that I don't understand it - I ran the experiment, and the data showed that I really had no idea what management and business development was all about. Because of my time running the company, I'm much more laid back about letting management manage than I was before I ran my own company, because I tried. I gave it my best shot, and I'm just not very good at it. I'm a pretty good technician, though, and I really appreciate that I'm in a world where that means I get a well-paying and comfortable job where all I have to do is be that good technician, and not be too rude to anyone else. I don't have to worry about not saying this or that or the other (well, with some exceptions. As a general rule, I can tell my boss anything with the door closed... if that's not true, I get another job, because clearly they want someone with a different skillset.)
jasonkester 9y ago
There is no downtime anymore. You can never truly get away from work in an age of 4g connectivity everywhere. I'm doing a bit of consulting with a startup at the moment, and one of our team members recently disappeared off on vacation. Good for him, I thought. Two days later, he popped back up on the company slack, working away from his tropical beach. To be clear, this is not a case of digital nomadding. This is 10 days of vacation time that they somehow guilted him into throwing away after he had actually flown halfway around the world. 20 years ago, there was an expectation that when you left the office, you were unreachable except in an emergency. I don't see any hint of that expectation anymore. It's a combination of employers with serious boundary issues, and empoloyees fearing the ramifications of pushing back. You really need to stand up for yourself these days. But at least I've found that if you do so, it generally works.
- mieseratte 9y ago
  > There is no downtime anymore. You can never truly get away from work in an age of 4g connectivity everywhere. You can. Get rid of your phone. Most of us don't have a job that actually requires a phone, and it's really as matter of your work willing to take advantage of the fact that most of you won't push back when pressed. You can take advantage of the fact that they won't pay for you to carry a phone. I finally got rid of my phone about a month ago. Started off deleting all the apps, stopped carrying it. Finally, took a roofing hammer and smashed it to bits. I may purchase a pay-as-you-go "brick" and leave it in the trunk of my car for emergencies, but otherwise I will never have an internet connected device that I carry on me at all times. It's needless for most of us. You can talk about how convenient it is to have things like Maps at all times, and to be sure that is convenient. Just requires a little forethought and planning. Don't give into the FOMO, smash your phone.
  - shoo 9y ago
    Well done. Perhaps a middle ground is having a dedicated work phone, and then turning that off when you are not on the clock and not rostered to be on call.
    - 9y ago
purplezooey 9y ago
Not going to be fixed. The root cause is that there are a billion people in non-western countries ready to take increasingly sophisticated jobs for pennies on the dollar and are grateful for it.
machinehermit 9y ago
It is not office work's fault that most people don't take care of themselves to counteract sitting on their ass all day. All you have to do with an office job is actually use your gym membership and not eat take out every day.
- Joe-Z 9y ago
  Ooooohh, alright guys, wrap it up, finally someone came up with a solution. And here I was, thinking it's not so simple as to just tell people what to do and everything will fall into place...
hyperbole 9y ago
If people whose lives are scheduled in minutes have the ability to build muscle tone and stay fit so do you. Think Elon Musk I imagine he doesn't sleep much but he makes the time. Exercise is about priorities and it's far easier to not do it and create excuses than it is to find the time. Eating right however in the usa is perverse it's costs more to eat healthy and it's worse if you travel for work.

691 points by fahd777 9y ago

It makes it sound as if work was more healthy in the past. Was it? When? I know hunter gatherer times were supposed to be paradise, but anything since then? Farming sounds rather arduous. Or what about mining, or working in factories where safety measures have not yet been invented?

sjg007 9y ago
This has nothing to do with work in the past being more healthy. It is not a this or that situation.
- dfsdfdsfds 9y ago
  The way it is written suggests "the workplace" used to be better: "But I would say that with all the evidence I’ve encountered — and it’s not perfect evidence — I’ve seen nothing inconsistent with the statement that the workplace has generally gotten worse" - "I see a workplace that has become shockingly inhumane." Of course it is still valid to ask how a healthier workplace could be created. Just the notion that things were better in the past seems very unlikely to me.
  - adamson 9y ago
    I interpreted "the workplace" as him referring narrowly to white collar work (either in an office doing clerical/technical work or in a mobile setting like a salesperson).
  - washadjeffmad 9y ago
    We might not be crushed in machinery as children or poisoned by the products we produce at the same rate as in the industrial era, but that was seen in the same way as humans living today to be an acceptable cost of making a living. The question is of the acceptance of compulsory discomfort leading to potential harm later being an unquestioned norm.
medlazik 9y ago
>It makes it sound as if work was more healthy in the past. Was it? When? 20 years ago, before the lax in regulations made the whole world a competitive nightmare for most workers.
lowbloodsugar 9y ago
As other commenter says, it's not "this or that", but having said that, quality of life for the middle class was definitely better only a few decades ago. An average job would get you a house, a car and a pension, working eight hours a day, five days a week. And "middle class" meant a much greater range of jobs. Factory work could get you a house, a car and a pension. Time with kids, no worries about the future, or how you are going to eat when you retire, if you get to retire. Good times.
- bproven 9y ago
  Agreed this is the biggest change... Those days are over.
- jdminhbg 9y ago
  > Time with kids, no worries about the future, or how you are going to eat when you retire, if you get to retire. Good times. The numbers say you're wrong: http://www.nber.org/aginghealth/summer04/w10466.html http://www.nber.org/aginghealth/summer04/w10466.html
  - rifung 9y ago
    Is this the right link? This article is about poverty and not about how far you could go on a middle class income
    - jdminhbg 9y ago
      It's about elderly people living in poverty. It's very relevant to whether retirements and pensions are falling off a cliff and whether people won't be able to eat when they're retired, as alleged.
      - rifung 9y ago
        Ah.. but what about being able to afford a house on a job that requires minimal education like working in a factory? That was actually the main point from my interpretation.
derefr 9y ago
The present population of workers the article is referring to with "work culture" are white collar workers. Comparing like to like, these wouldn't be people working in factories or mining. The equivalent jobs in previous eras would be those of priests, monks, and scribes; of surveyors, navigators, and architects; of military officers; and of nobles tinkering around in the sciences. Compare the working conditions of those jobs to those of current white-collar work.
- 1787 9y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if priests or monks had quite long work hours; imagine the RSI one might get from copying out whole books by hand. You could reframe as underemployment a lot of the extent to which jobs in the past were less stressful (if they actually were). Trading stress for fantastic material wealth is a highly popular option afforded by technology.
- dfsdfdsfds 9y ago
  But how many of those white collar jobs were around in the past, compared to toiling on farms and stuff?
fiblye 9y ago
I can't really say for certain, but the idea of a boring, average American life in the 90s/early 2000s was having a 9-5 job and watching TV after you finished work. I haven't seen a posting for a 9-5 job in years. But I see 8-5, 9-6, and increasingly 8-6 and beyond. You get a "lunch break", but don't stroll off too far just in case we need you (wink wink). Then once work's "over", many people are called in for extra hours or expected to answer messages no matter what time of day. And good luck getting paid any sort of overtime. America seems to be trending towards the Asian model of work.
- internetman55 9y ago
  The bad part to me about jobs like that was how you were just spending massive hours doing stupid things. A lot of people would enjoy working 10 hours a day in a highly engaging, challenging environment. Instead everyone is so shot from overworking, stress, poor interpersonal relationships, etc. that it sometimes feels like you're working all day on a project nobody needs that doesn't work led by a manager who doesn't know what he's doing and doesn't care to. Basically like you're getting paid to get punched in the face rather than to do a job. I honestly had managers at the Kmart retail store I worked at who struck me as smarter (and certainly more humble) than at least one software manager I've had

happyand40 9y ago

For the love of Christ (btw not a Christian). We live in what people of any past time period would appropriately call paradise. We live longer, have the music and culture of the world at our fingertips, and the vast vast majority of Americans do not suffer from unsanitary conditions, having to hunt a giant animal, child slavery, or frequent rape. And yet our new priests are these pseudoscientific... whiners. Sure, stress affects the body. So does bitching about the best average living conditions ever. Go take a chi kung class, you have the time. If not, look up meditation on the Internet. Can't afford it? We have these amazing institutions called libraries. Walk 10 miles to one, its good for you. No one SHOULD care. Please. Grow the fuck up.

sctb 9y ago
If you're going to comment here please make it civil and substantive. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- happyand40 9y ago
  This is about as civil of a kick in the butt as this post deserves. Enjoy bitching about the best it will ever get, you fucking whiner. Flag away.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
    - jdmichal 9y ago
      If you really feel compelled to read flagged comments, you can turn on "showdead" in your settings.
  - sctb 9y ago
    Since it seems like you aren't going to follow the guidelines, we've banned the account.

chaseha 9y ago

Dealing w/ RSI has been an eye opener for me. What makes it worse: working on a laptop, working on the plane, having to do long hours in poor ergonomic conditions. What do I have to do to be good at my job? Basically, that. What happens if it gets worse and I can no longer use a computer for at least eight hours a day? That is my livelihood

mancerayder 9y ago
It WILL become a problem. The biggest issue with RSI and other repetive-use injuries (which happens in many professions and even athletics, especially with bad form) is that it happens slowly, then suddenly. It's so slow that it's discomfort. And you ignore that discomfort, especially as your concentration is on a computer monitor with important stuff to worry about being displayed on it. Also, sometimes inflammation happens later (later that night, later that week, etc.). Start now to reduce your RSI (and RSI isn't your only problem, more on that below): Get an external keyboard either that has an ergonomic design is is comfortable for you, and a mouse too. A Mac keyboard will be nightmare, don't use it. A Mac 'Magic Mouse' or trackpad will cause damage. It's not made for serious long-term work (there might be a lawsuit one day). Pro tip: this may sound crazy, but get two mice, one left, one right. Change often. Learn to use the lefty even if you're right-handed, or vice-versa. You'll be surprised at how quickly you get used to it (and you'll laugh when someone tries to show you something on your workstation). Get a desk that moves up and down. Spend some time standing, some time sitting. Again, change often. Next, other than RSI is your neck and back. As your rhomboids get stretched and weak from forward rotation of the shoulders, the rear neck muscles get stretched and weak, the serratus goes unused, the chest and front-neck muscles get short and tight... You arch your head forward which causes your head (which already weighs about 8 pounds) to exert a lot more than 8 pounds of force on those muscle groups. And you also look at your phone all day, which you hold down below you. Well you're in for a world of nightmares and headaches that'll make the RSI a distraction by comparison. Start early to avoid these things, before it becomes too late. Sincerely, A guy with some greying and screwed up wrists/hands and neck.
- glitcher 9y ago
  Completely agree with these awesome tips. I began to get problems in my right wrist from too much mousing (and probably using wrong mice for too long). I started switching between right and left mouse usage, and not only did it reduce the pain in the right side, but I found I adapted to left mousing fairly quickly and easily.

dboreham 9y ago

Talk to your UPS or FedEx driver about the impact of their job on their body.

tw1010 9y ago
This is a common sentiment but I don't think it should be the end of the story. So what if people from two hundred years lived significantly worse lives than ourselves? I didn't live then and I'm not a UPS driver. I have all the empathy in the world for people in harm, but the fact that suffering exist should in no way act as a counterweight on levers that tries to improve situations where relief seems possible.
XorNot 9y ago
And the first step to improving their working conditions is taking our own seriously.
getaclue 9y ago
Dunno about UPS fam, but I did work as a FedEx driver in my previous life... and nothing close to the stuff I see in our field. For sure, we are disposable in both fields. Perhaps the constant need to deliver X items on my route, but you get used to it because it doesn't really change. Our field changes all of the time and if you don't adjust you aren't hired. But I definitely didn't need to check my Slack, or stay up to date on current trends and tech on twitter, hackernews, newsletters, et al.
bbarn 9y ago
Ah yes the ever present "it could be worse". It can also be better.

deleted 9y ago

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someone7x 9y ago

> I see a workplace that has become shockingly inhumane. A thousand times this. Very few of the lessons my parents taught me apply in the corporate world. Be honest and straight with people, assume good intent, take responsibility, etc. All that behavior will do is paint you as naive. Sure there's room for honesty and responsibility, but only when used appropriately (strategically). Strikes me as acutely inhumane every time my career is rewarded for suppressing those behaviors. I am not even allowed to tell a candidate (another human being that probably NEEDS a paycheck) why I didn't hire them and what they can do to improve their viability. Just because the company has discarded this person it also means I must discard them as well? It kills me every time, but I NEED my paycheck more than I prefer to help my fellow human.

ekanes 9y ago
It sounds less like workplaces are broken, and more that you're working at a broken workplace. Go somewhere better - don't give your best efforts to the place you're at. There are workplaces where being honest and straight, assuming good intent, taking responsibility etc will move you UP.
- mancerayder 9y ago
  Comments like these are naive, if well-intentioned. Work cultures permeate industries, cities and more. Moreover, for most people, even in the lucrative tech industry such as ourselves, don't have the luxury to peacefully and calmly pick and choose the ideal job: rent is due, mortgage is due, savings go down, or anxiety goes up and we take what comes up. The myth of equal contactual relationship between employer/employee is painful to see turned into a helpful platitude of the genre "if you don't like it, find somewhere else."
  - remar 9y ago
    I always wonder what the life experiences and world view of someone like the person you're replying to, consists of. The older I get, the more apparent it becomes that most of my peers and friends have lived extremely "privileged" lives solely based on the freedom of choice that they've had over certain aspects of life. In most cases the source of the privilege is a combination of well educated guardians and money. I find when talking to these people, they can never seem to fathom why someone can't just simply "get out" of a situation like this, or don't seem to understand what it could possibly be about their upbringing that lets them see the world this way or gives them a certain advantage. A lot of them seem to just see this privilege as a scalar value that just corresponds to a net worth, rather than seeing it as this incredibly powerful resource that can seed safety, well-being, knowledge, personal skills, mental stability, ... the list goes on.

megamindbrian2 9y ago

I was "managed out" and nobody cares. https://www.ft.com/content/356ea48c-e6cf-11e6-967b-c88452263daf https://www.ft.com/content/356ea48c-e6cf-11e6-967b-c88452263...

megamindbrian2 9y ago

People don't need healthcare, they need social food experiences.

osrec 9y ago

Work has become a strange thing. I see people foregoing their best years stuck in an office, in the hope they can enjoy their later years. What utter nonsense. I'm not sure what the right answer is, but society has got something very wrong, as our work culture seems to surgically remove the wonder and enjoyment from our days. Hardly surprising that it drives people to ill health. Glad I broke out of that cycle a long time ago and quit my corporate job. The job was torture, quitting was scary and bumpy, but looking back it was an excellent decision.

derwiki 9y ago
Do you have a job now? If so how is it better?
- diab0lic 9y ago
  Judging from his profile he consults now: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=osrec https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=osrec
  - osrec 9y ago
    Yes, I have a consulting company now. Also starting to put together a few interesting products that my clients may be interested in.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
remar 9y ago
I'm sure you're aware of this, but a lot of people just don't have the financial freedom to even begin thinking about a decision like this, or it ends up requiring a lot of energy to make that plan viable. And as you've probably experienced, energy is not exactly abundant after a day/week/month/etc in an environment like that...
- 9y ago

retrac98 9y ago

I’ve always found it very effective to use a “just say no” policy to out of hours work or more work than I can handle comfortably. People stop taking advantage when you stop letting them. More than you might expect actually respect it. I don’t think this way of working has hurt my career progression, and it’s certainly done wonders for my mental health.

saas_co_de 9y ago
100% true. > I don’t think this way of working has hurt my career progression I am sure it has helped.
- lostcolony 9y ago
  Yep. The "if you give them an inch they'll take a mile" philosophy applies. My wife tends to try and accommodate, and it has meant she isn't respected in her current position. Meanwhile, same company, I've made it clear that I have boundaries. I may allow some time after my usual working hours; if I do, I will leave early/arrive late the next day. I'm not putting in over 40 hours, and -I- get to determine when my schedule changes. And, perversely, it's led to greater recognition, promotion, etc. The fact I act like I am in control leads people to believe I am, and should be given, control.
rconti 9y ago
Agreed. I've found the more you stand up for yourself, the more your boundaries are respected. That said, I'm sure it doesn't work in all situations, or with all bosses, so I'm hesitant to blame the victim -- I've been lucky to have very good bosses in my career.
- Thriptic 9y ago
  I've found that assembling highly in demand skills helps a lot with this. For awhile I was by far and away the best developer in my org (which is not to say that I'm a good developer, just that our org had 0 formal software engineering xp). This gave me very broad power to say no to projects or put in place prerequisites which had to be met before I would take on a project. It definitely pissed people off, but I was adding enough value to be able to take the stance "hey if you don't like it fire me".

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

tboyd47 9y ago

Honest question. How much of this is cultural or psychological? Can people be trained not to take so much shit from bosses or automatically make the company's problems their problems? I ask because at my current job, a lot of work is explicitly motivated by the threat of getting yelled at or publicly shamed in some way. I often wonder if these stressful interactions could just be handled politely but in a way that doesn't automatically turn into work that gets handled invisibly or passed down the chain to some other poor sap.

tnzn 9y ago
It's hard to evaluate a percentage, especially since culture and psychology are intertwined. However, there's much research going on about resilience in several contexts, and as far as I know, there are ways to take it easier, however there tends to be cultural factors at stake. Anyways, while teaching resilience could be interesting, imo we should also make the world a place where we need less of it, for both moral and practical reasons : not everyone may be able to develop enough resilience to deal with it.
cyberpunk0 9y ago
"Not take shit from your boss" = "get fired by boss for 'insubordination' "
- tj-teej 9y ago
  I disagree, from most of my experience, toxic managers take advantage of the people they feel they CAN take advantage of. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's spiteful managers like you're hinting at, but from my experience at two major tech companies, a healthy two-way respect is earned by pushing back on management when they're out of line, as I think they know a lot of the time that they're being out of line but they can get away with it.
  - tboyd47 9y ago
    That's what I'm getting at. In my own experience, unhandled grudges against people end up being a major source of stress. Some people (my past self included) don't know how to stand up for themselves at a company. It's a combination of knowing what lines people can't cross with you, and what sorts of authority different people at work can have over you, because when someone crosses a line, how you correct them will differ according to their relation to you. For example, if a manager is rude to you, you can often excuse yourself but can't completely drop the issue, whereas, if a fellow collaborator is rude, sometimes you can just stop dealing with them altogether. Sometimes just looking perturbed without saying anything is enough to make people change how they deal with you. A lot of developers I see don't pay any attention to these things and nurse grudges against people for entire years.

remar 9y ago

I've had the chance to see the toll that a stressful environment (big tech company) can have on physical and mental health - I've experienced it personally and noticed it in others that I work with. The part about a big tech company being a stressful environment isn't the thing that surprised me, but rather people's responses to how they react to either being on the receiving side of the stress, and management's failure to respond to this or even try to talk about it. The thing that bugs me the most about the entire situation is that most of the stress that seems to exist, mostly exists because of people who have no idea what they're doing, make decisions they have no business making. Then you have engineers that either come from cultures that are high in agreeableness, or they've never been very assertive themselves and just accept these decisions, thinking it's a situation of "if I don't do this I'm going to get fired". Most of the people I work with don't even consider the option of just taking an extended period of time off to prevent being burned out because they're basically tied to their employment due to work visas (you guessed it, Indian and Chinese workers) and a lot of them are trying to support family back home. So even leaving their job and taking extended time off isn't a viable option. Don't even get me started on how I've seen people's physical and mental health completely deteriorate. I know lots of people in my organization that are extremely depressed and wouldn't even be the least bit surprised if I heard they ate a bullet tomorrow. This whole industry has just motivated me to work to achieve financial independence/early retirement as soon as I can just so I never have to think about working with incompetent people in my life again, or at least, have the financial freedom to cut those relationships once they do arise. It sucks because I know I'll be working on tech related projects for the rest of my life, but I have to ignore the desire to work on things that will actually make a difference so that I can build up that nest egg to have the financial freedom and peace of mind to actually pursue it.

tboyd47 9y ago
People who treat their workers in this way should be ashamed. Such blatant exploitation should be illegal.
oceanghost 9y ago
At some point, you have to admit that the stress is intentional. That it is a part of a misguided strategy to extract maximum value from employees, while minimizing managements political exposure.

ProxCoques 9y ago

Don't worry, wage slavery is just a phase we're going though because right now we can't see out of the capitalist bubble we're in. It doesn't have to be like this, and we will find our way out one day, be it through UBI, AI or other post-capitalist mechanism. Might take a few hundred years though, mind you. Once Trump has been flushed through at least.

glup 9y ago
As I was reading this I was thinking "uh oh, here comes the techno-utopian nonsense", but then I got to the "few hundred years" part. Yup, sounds about right. Cheers to dialectics.
Libturd 9y ago
spotted the libturd!

mathattack 9y ago

There is irony in this coming from a business school professor who sends his students into jobs with terrible hours.

minikites 9y ago

As I type this comment, there are 46 other comments, not one of them using the word "union". That's the only feasible method I can see to enact large scale change. CEOs and other executives aren't going to change out of the kindness of their hearts, as evidenced by the fact that they could start at any point and still choose not to.

bobzibub 9y ago
I think that people must move past the belief in "heroism" as a job function and understand that many companies (not all) are parasitic creatures which finagle to charge economic rents, not saviours of Western democracy that provide value added as is commonly assumed. I got the opportunity to apply for my current job yesterday. I expect an offer letter and threats to sign within two days or lose the job I have next week. My future company is a lowest bidder and was selected from around thirty applicants.
lkrubner 9y ago
I find it worrisome that your comment was downvoted to the very bottom of the page. You are suggesting the common sense solution. If the people on Hacker News could look at the industry situation in an objective, rational way, I'm sure your comment would be the top voted comment on the page.

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crawfordcomeaux 9y ago

I think the familial boundaries defined within most societies promotes us-vs-them mindsets and a more inclusive, integrated framework is needed for peaceful coevolution within within sectors of life. > Dying for a Paycheck, published by HarperBusiness and released on March 20, maps a range of ills in the modern workplace — from the disappearance of good health insurance to the psychological effects of long hours and work-family conflict — and how these are killing people. Thought experiment: How can the world be different if we changed the understood definition of family from "home life" or "family of current origin" to "family of choice"? What then happens if the majority chooses humanity as its family, followed by collectively choosing to meet the needs of all in the family?

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bitL 9y ago

If you are flooded with stress, I recommend Finnish sauna a few times a week with continuous adjustment to cold immersion after a few minutes you leave the hot area (try to stay in cold longer every next time until you hit 2 minutes). Try to repeat it 4-5x a session in like 90 minutes. After I started doing it, it usually clears my head completely and makes my evenings absolutely stress-free and happy, and I can tackle the most difficult tasks next day.

reality_czech 9y ago

The part which really makes me angry is that this guy probably also employs graduate students who make minimum wage, have terrible health care, and no job security. But he doesn't feel like that's important enough to mention.

internetman55 9y ago
My wage at some random school is roughly 2k/month for 20 hours work, ignoring free tuition.
- deathanatos 9y ago
  And mine was $10/hr, for computer science. Peanuts. My last year there they dropped that to $0/hr, and then complained that they couldn't find enough TAs.

FlyingSideKick 9y ago

How can workers change corporate culture from within to demand work-life balance? I asked an executive VP this at a one of the worlds largest company’s here in Seattle and she said “If the young talent we need coming out of school across the board demanded shorter days and more vacation we would have to comply. But they don’t instead they are awed by an extra $10k on a hiring bonus they might or might not get after two years and they’ll work 60 hour weeks because that’s what they think ‘normal’ is because their peers are doing it.” So how from the ground up can we make corporate culture in America more focused on the social health of their employees?

wmeredith 9y ago
Unionize. That’s how we got things like the 40 hour work week.
- rwmj 9y ago
  Yes I was very surprised there is no mention of unions in the article. The writer has supposed to have thought deeply about this issue, but doesn't come to the (to me) obvious conclusion?
sotojuan 9y ago
Yeah. Very eye opening how many of my friends in my age group (early and mid 20s) outside of the tech industry work. And none of them bat an eye - "That's just how it is".
lostcolony 9y ago
Inform. Even in such a culture, one person refusing to do it (not rudely, just passively; go home at the right time, not checking stuff) is enough to change things. We know from every bit of research that 60 hours is not more productive than 40 hours. The one person who refuses is going to shine. And their good habit, if they know to commit to it, and to socialize it, will help empower the others. I know as a team lead I've tried to empower the people under me to manage their own time, and actively encouraged them to ignore workplace communication after hours
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odyssey7 9y ago

> You know what might change this? I gave a talk on this to Stanford alumni and afterward a lawyer came up to me and said there are going to be lawsuits. This won't happen as long as the worst offenders can push individual arbitration agreements. The Supreme Court heard arguments about them recently, and a decision on whether they are legal is expected soon. On the other hand, electronic health records should make it easy to show with statistics if a workplace causes chronic disease, relative its peers. We just need to add employer information to the standard information that hospitals collect. Certainly a group of university hospitals would be interested in seeing this data, and could organize an initiative to collect it. Edit: Actually, a way to link massive amounts of healthcare data to patients' employers might already be available. Medical records often store insurance information, which can be used to figure out a patient's employer if they are the subscriber.

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innocentoldguy 9y ago

While I applaud his efforts, Jeffrey Pfeffer probably doesn't really want his book to "be the 'Silent Spring' of workplace health," considering that Rachel Carson had a bad habit of citing suspicious sources, falsifying scientific research, and twisting words to fit her agenda. For example, egg thickness tests done on eagles didn't support the thin-shell claim she wanted to push, so her researchers lowered the calcium levels in the birds' diet until thinner egg shells were achieved. Also, Carson claims in her book that when quails were fed DDT, "few of the eggs hatched." If you actually read the research she's citing (from an article in "Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry," by James DeWitt), you find that around 80% of the DDT eggs hatched, compared to 83% in the control group, who weren't fed DDT. Since when are 80% and "few" synonymous? In the tests on pheasants, contained in the same article by James DeWitt, the control group (no DDT) hatched 57.4% of their eggs and the DDT pheasants hatched 80.6 of theirs. After eight weeks, the survival rate amongst the DDT chicks was also higher. I'm not saying we should use DDT as an ice cream topping, and that there's nothing wrong with it, but I'd prefer actual science on the matter rather than inaccurate sensationalism. I'd also prefer to believe Pfeffer's research is impeccable and that he's above the sort of consequentialism that Carson apparently embraced. I don't have anything against saving the environment nor saving ourselves from toxic work practices. I just don't think we need to stoop to mountebankery to demonstrate the need for awareness and change. Such consequentialism undermines good causes, I think.

DimitarIbra9 9y ago

I think Amazon is the perfect example that killing employees by spreading/polluting cultural environment.

derrekl 9y ago

I'm a CTO at a YC grad Care Revolutions. There's a lot of comments on what kind of work environment is bad. What do y'all suggest a startup with limited resources do to be an incredible place to work for while also being a highly productive environment? I'm especially interested in suggestions as it relates to your health both physically and mentally!

beager 9y ago
I would start by recognizing that the physical and mental health of your employees is also a "limited resource". Many companies, from scrappy and small to profitable and mega-huge abuse their human capital because health and wellness of human capital doesn't show up in a P&L. And if you feel with your limited resources that you need to push your work environment to an unhealthy point to survive, you'd better be sure that you're doing that only after exerting the same shrewd force to get the unreasonably good pricing from your vendors, squeezing your investors for as much money as they'll give you, cut-throating your competition to the same ethically-questionable level, and red-teaming your model and roadmap to be sure you're not wasting one breath on anything superfluous. Beyond that, if you have truly arrived at a point where you are asking things of your employees that could jeopardize their physical and mental health, be honest and open with your people about it. Candor goes a long way. And then, identify the exact things that are taking a toll on physical and mental health, and address them one at a time.
tomc1985 9y ago
Give your people flexibility and space. Neither cost much, at least directly. Results-based, not metrics-based. Et cetera
kdamken 9y ago
Base your entire company culture around 40 hour work weeks. If you find people are needing to work more than that to get things done in time, it’s a planning/work load problem, and you need to hire more people.
- Sileni 9y ago
  And recognize that any work people do while stressed and tired is probably adding enough back end technical debt that you'll be double paying for those hours without a long term gain in progress.

crystalmeph 9y ago

I wonder if part of this is due to the ever-increasing push towards creating metrics for every aspect of human behavior. It’s not uncommon when applying for a job that you take a “personality test” that measures not just technical knowledge, but also scores you on traditionally “soft” traits like assertiveness vs. agreeableness, with the hiring manager getting a readout of where you fall relative to the “ideal” range of that metric for the job you’re applying for. We recently had an open position, and I know for a fact that we turned down multiple perfectly qualified people with successful track records in this exact role because they didn’t pass a personality test they received after the interview process - the reasoning for giving them the test after was that this personality test is particularly expensive. The “solution” was not to ditch the expensive personality test, but to bite the bullet and give all the rest of the candidates the test beforehand. But my eyes were opened. I’m very worried that applying metrics to people, not performance, is creating a homogeneous culture that goes along to get along, resulting in silent acceptance of the situation described in the article.

cloogshicer 9y ago
I think you're on to something. In our current culture, the general consensus seems to be that everything can be measured, and what can't be measured doesn't exist.
Futurebot 9y ago
"Market forces are also intensified by intensifying assessment, a development especially visible on the labour market. Even within a contract period, an employee will be subject to continuous assessment. The use of specialised software in call centres has provided some extreme examples: the time employees spend at the toilet is measured in seconds: this information is used to pressure the employee to spend less time away from the terminal. Firms with contracts are also increasingly subject to continuous assessment procedures, made possible by information technology. For instance, courier services use tracking software and GPS technology, to allow customers to locate their packages in transit. This is a typical example of the new hyper-provision of business information, in neoliberal economies." From "Neoliberalism: origins, theory, definition" http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/neoliberalism.html http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/neoliberalism.htm...

yters 9y ago

If life sucks so much in the Western world, why does everyone come here? And the "new rich" living in Costa Rica and other cheaper countries, why don't they live off the land like everyone idealizes instead of in mansions?

catnaroek 9y ago

It took me half a minute to just parse the title. Edit: I mean the title of this post here. The title of the linked article is, of course, very easy to read.

JDiculous 9y ago

Having a boring office job is really depressing, and it's a shame that you're not allowed to complain about it because there are people in third world countries worse off. Rather than comparing ourselves to impoverished countries, we should take the lead in using our technological advancement to create more humane societies that don't tie people to jobs they hate living paycheck to paycheck. Europe certainly has a better model here than the US (more vacation, unemployment benefits), but there's room for improvement (eg. basic income). Personally I left my office job in NYC about 4 months ago and have been traveling for the last 2 months (in South America). Being here and meeting other travelers (especially European), digital nomads, etc. has really made me realize how toxic American rat race work culture is. One Colombian I met who spent time living in the U.S. summed it up the best - Americans only seem to think about money. Now I know some of you will say "but Colombia is poorer than us!" That may be the case, but it doesn't dispute the fact that our culture has become toxic - money/work obsessed, 2 weeks/year vacation, usurious amounts of student loan debt, etc. If you need an example of a country with a bit more sense - I met a 28 year old Finnish guy here in Colombia in the middle of a multi-month vacation. His job back in Finland? Working in the deli section of a supermarket selling sausages. Completely blew my mind. If he were born in America and in the same occupation, he would probably not have the time or money for a 2 month international vacation. I've got friends the same age in professional occupations (eg. economist for the government) forgoing vacations until they pay back their 6-8% interest student loans. Europe in general has a much healthier attitude when it comes to work/life balance than America. Though on the bright side, at least we have it better than Asia (minus the student loan and healthcare part).

gfarah 9y ago
As a Colombian myself who studied and worked in the US in the past, I can confirm how the focus on money as the principal mean of finding happiness is specially strong in American culture. This distinction I believe, makes it very hard for people in the US when things don't work out the way they wanted.
stolson 9y ago
To the deli guy - I've had this experience too. When you meet someone who has what Americans would consider a "high school" job or "work between jobs" is very much someone's only job, it's really hard to wrap your head around it.

mykull 9y ago

How naive to think we aren't just being farmed like cattle. Of course, there is always a pressure on workers to be money makers. When the means don't matter to investors, neither do workers.

swlkr 9y ago

Companies large and small can suffer from this problem of what appears to be mundane, useless work. It’s worth mentioning that instead of striving for 50,000 person companies, we might be better off with much smaller companies, two pizza team companies or smaller.

lsc 9y ago

I'm sure work is pretty bad for a lot of people, and sure, something should be done with that. I personally think the biggest thing we could do is to just add a reasonable safety net. I get treated well because my employer knows I have a choice of jobs; if we gave the people on the bottom some minimal safety net so they wouldn't go homeless or starve without working, then employers would have to treat them well enough that working was better than living off the minimal government benefits. And that's a good thing, though it would need to be balanced with how much wealth we have as a society. Certainly, though, we can afford public housing and food for everyone right now, and we should. "Work or starve" is only morally justifiable when society has so little that someone must starve. But... on the other hand, I do think that in some ways a lot of us (especially a lot of us on hn who are in the top half of computer technicians and software engineers) have it pretty good. For me? I know I had a lot of negative feelings about management when I was younger. I thought they were stupid and evil. I became a lot happier as an employee after I blew a whole lot of time and money trying to run a business myself. And it was ramen profitable, but god damn did I work hard for that ramen. I'd be most of the way to retirement if I had lived on what I lived on and worked for someone else, investing the difference in index funds. But I think running that business really helped me be a happier employee; I mean, I am not saying I understand the business bullshit... I don't know what to do about all the moral dilemmas at that level, about negotiation, about hiding information, etc... some of it still does seem kind of stupid and evil. But I understand that business bullshit exists, and that I don't understand it - I ran the experiment, and the data showed that I really had no idea what management and business development was all about. Because of my time running the company, I'm much more laid back about letting management manage than I was before I ran my own company, because I tried. I gave it my best shot, and I'm just not very good at it. I'm a pretty good technician, though, and I really appreciate that I'm in a world where that means I get a well-paying and comfortable job where all I have to do is be that good technician, and not be too rude to anyone else. I don't have to worry about not saying this or that or the other (well, with some exceptions. As a general rule, I can tell my boss anything with the door closed... if that's not true, I get another job, because clearly they want someone with a different skillset.)

jasonkester 9y ago

There is no downtime anymore. You can never truly get away from work in an age of 4g connectivity everywhere. I'm doing a bit of consulting with a startup at the moment, and one of our team members recently disappeared off on vacation. Good for him, I thought. Two days later, he popped back up on the company slack, working away from his tropical beach. To be clear, this is not a case of digital nomadding. This is 10 days of vacation time that they somehow guilted him into throwing away after he had actually flown halfway around the world. 20 years ago, there was an expectation that when you left the office, you were unreachable except in an emergency. I don't see any hint of that expectation anymore. It's a combination of employers with serious boundary issues, and empoloyees fearing the ramifications of pushing back. You really need to stand up for yourself these days. But at least I've found that if you do so, it generally works.

mieseratte 9y ago
> There is no downtime anymore. You can never truly get away from work in an age of 4g connectivity everywhere. You can. Get rid of your phone. Most of us don't have a job that actually requires a phone, and it's really as matter of your work willing to take advantage of the fact that most of you won't push back when pressed. You can take advantage of the fact that they won't pay for you to carry a phone. I finally got rid of my phone about a month ago. Started off deleting all the apps, stopped carrying it. Finally, took a roofing hammer and smashed it to bits. I may purchase a pay-as-you-go "brick" and leave it in the trunk of my car for emergencies, but otherwise I will never have an internet connected device that I carry on me at all times. It's needless for most of us. You can talk about how convenient it is to have things like Maps at all times, and to be sure that is convenient. Just requires a little forethought and planning. Don't give into the FOMO, smash your phone.
- shoo 9y ago
  Well done. Perhaps a middle ground is having a dedicated work phone, and then turning that off when you are not on the clock and not rostered to be on call.
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purplezooey 9y ago

Not going to be fixed. The root cause is that there are a billion people in non-western countries ready to take increasingly sophisticated jobs for pennies on the dollar and are grateful for it.

machinehermit 9y ago

It is not office work's fault that most people don't take care of themselves to counteract sitting on their ass all day. All you have to do with an office job is actually use your gym membership and not eat take out every day.

Joe-Z 9y ago
Ooooohh, alright guys, wrap it up, finally someone came up with a solution. And here I was, thinking it's not so simple as to just tell people what to do and everything will fall into place...

hyperbole 9y ago

If people whose lives are scheduled in minutes have the ability to build muscle tone and stay fit so do you. Think Elon Musk I imagine he doesn't sleep much but he makes the time. Exercise is about priorities and it's far easier to not do it and create excuses than it is to find the time. Eating right however in the usa is perverse it's costs more to eat healthy and it's worse if you travel for work.