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This sounds a bit condescending. Just because it's normal for shops to open early doesn't mean that people who work those jobs are less negatively impacted by a

• naasking 9y ago
  The cognitive difficulty of the work, I imagine. For instance, consider the scope of the screwup for getting something wrong because you're tired, ie. affecting thousands of people rather than a few people in the shop.
  • pc86 9y ago
    Yup, it's not like people working manual labor or machine shop labor can kill themselves or others if they're tired. Clearly the fact that we need to think about overengineered microservices written in JavaScript means our lives are just as hard. For fuck's sake HN we're talking about waking up and going to work. Most of us here are getting paid $100k+ (or twice that in SV) to type for a living. Stop trying to pretend your life is so difficult because you need to set an alarm, be presentable at an office, and work normal hours.
    • danharaj 9y ago
      The obvious resolution is that all workers should be able to set their work conditions so that they can do their jobs without sacrificing any bit of their wellbeing.
      • dasmoth 9y ago
        That would certainly seem like the ideal.
        • spurcell93 9y ago
          Ah, the old, if you don't like it go somewhere else argument employed by privileged capitalists everywhere. "People who are worried about the negative conditions at Uber shouldn't drive for Uber! It's not anyone's problem that those conditions are negative. "
          • pc86 9y ago
            Nobody here is talking about sexual harassment, discrimination, or anything of the sort. Nobody is defending those. But being present for a daily meeting during normal working hours is a pretty low bar to meet. Not everyone can meet that bar! That's fine. Not everyone can do every job. If you have some medical, psychological, socioeconomic, or ideological reason why you can't be present for a meeting from 9:00-9:10 Mon-Fri, it's not a violation of your human rights to suggest maybe you can't do whatever that job is.
            • mbrock 9y ago
              I don't care about morning meetings as a bar to meet; I just think they're almost always useless or harmful. Luckily I now work remotely, set my own hours 100%, and collaborate asynchronously with no daily synchronization points. I could rush off to an office at the exact same time every morning... but why? It
      • pc86 9y ago
        Being at a 9am meeting is not a sacrifice to any part of anyone's wellbeing.
        • danharaj 9y ago
          What's your justification for that?
        • stephen_g 9y ago
          That’s overly broad and simply false. It can be quite damaging to the wellbeing of people with severe circadian rhythm disorders.
          • pc86 9y ago
            One would think those people would not be applying for work that required you to be in an office before 9am then.
            • Sir_Vival 9y ago
              Good luck with that. I had aspirations of being a developer but ended up being a wedding photographer instead due to my circadian rhythm issues. Maybe in major cities you'd have enough options to find something that'd work, but in smaller cities or rural areas there's no hope.
        • bovermyer 9y ago
          Show me the data that supports your claim.
    • naasking 9y ago
      > Yup, it's not like people working manual labor or machine shop labor can kill themselves or others if they're tired. If you're going to make a comparison, at least be honest about it. Plenty of software engineers work on mission critical software that can cost lives as well, while not all "shops", whatever you mean by that term, are life-threatening work.
      • pc86 9y ago
        Plenty in an absolute sense, sure. I don't appreciate the implication I was being dishonest, but let's really be honest. If you pick a random software developer in 2018, they're writing forms over data web apps for a line of business application. It's a fluffy job with no real physical danger. That was my point.
        • naasking 9y ago
          And the same applies to "shop" workers, which can mean anything from retail to machine shops. You seem to have employed a rather narrow interpretation of that term, an interpretation which perhaps is culture-specific, but whose context is not specified in the posts that started this thread.
          • pc86 9y ago
            You know I specifically said "machine shop" in my original comment so I'm not sure why you're talking about retail.
            • naasking 9y ago
              Because no one before you said "machine shop", you're the one who interpreted "shop" in an overly narrow sense and then ranted about it as if that's what everyone was talking about.
      • kungtotte 9y ago
        100% of those software engineers have a plethora of safety checks that are applied continuously and repeatedly before their work is ever used in an environment where any harm might actually be done to anyone. Someone operating a backhoe for example might dig into a gas main, swing their boom around and crush or decapitate someone, swing it across power lines and electrocute themselves, etc. Yes, mission critical software can kill people if it's not done right. That never happens because the developer was tired of a morning. So, back at ya with that honesty bit.
    • SaltyBackendGuy 9y ago
      I love this statement (maybe I shouldn't). Being an Army vet transitioning to software, it was difficult for me to understand why people come in late and complain about having to work too early (9:30 being early is quite laughable). I also understand that you need to be in the right frame of mind to preform optimally, however if the people signing the check want you to come in at 9am then you adapt and overcome (your body will adjust), or find someone else to sign the check. If coming in early to code is the hardest thing you had to do today you're pretty lucky in life.
      • nrhk 9y ago
        A lot of software engineers grew up working late and it's hard to break that habit or it just doesn't feel natural. I have no problems with waking up at 6:30 to make it into the office but if I had the choice I would pick 11 because it fits with my natural preferred schedule I've spent most of my life living.
        • pc86 9y ago
          Unless you have a legitimate medical issue it only takes a few weeks to reset your schedule.
      • komali2 9y ago
        All you've done here is restate "there are children starving in Africa, so you are not hungry." It's even got a dash of "I'm from Wisconsin, you call this cold?!" I don't think anybody is arguing that we engineers are not better off than starving children in Africa or soldiers who are forced to potentially suffer permanent harm from bad sleep culture[1], it's just being pointed out that due to the nature of the job, there's usually no reason to come in early, and there are reasons to come in late (health reasons) [1] https://taskandpurpose.com/military-sleep-problems-research/ https://taskandpurpose.com/military-sleep-problems-research/
  • candu 9y ago
    To be honest, most of us working "cognitively difficult" programming jobs make far less mission-critical things than your average trade shop. Backend service goes down? Welp, a few million people can't tweet, or view cat photos, or watch videos off YouTube for a bit. Weld fails? There goes a bridge, or maybe an office tower, airplane engine, power plant, etc.
    • naasking 9y ago
      I honestly don't understand why some people seem to be interpreting "shop" to mean "machine shop". It could also mean retail, so the category is much broader than you imply, and the risks and costs of failure in this broader category are much lower than software that typically affects hundreds to thousands of people, even for lowly software jobs.
      • panzagl 9y ago
        Ever deal with drunk people while coding? Shoplifters? Code Adam? Homeless? Been robbed? Screw up those interactions and it's pretty serious. If you can mess up a software delivery in a similar amount of time then your organization isn't doing any type of serious engineering.
      • emodendroket 9y ago
        I worked in a Kmart one summer and some dummy sprayed oven cleaner in my face. I would have been less upset if he'd shut off access to Twitter for me a day or two.
• dasmoth 9y ago
  Just because it's normal for shops to open early doesn't mean that people who work those jobs are less negatively impacted by alarms and sleep quality. I’m not at all implying that they aren’t. However, because shops are open for fixed hours, it’s at least sort-of understandable that employers believe they can get more benefit from people working scheduled hours (which aren’t necessarily “first thing in the morning” — see sibling comment). Regardless, “people are tired and miserable doing job X” seems like poor justification for making sure that people doing job Y are tired too.
• whataretensors 9y ago
  Yes I've heard this line of reasoning before. It's the crabs in a bucket mentality. A child starving in Africa must mean you aren't hungry. The truth is the difference is that I'm an engineer. If I was a machine shop worker I'd be on /r/machineshopworkers saying the same thing likely.