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Personally being a tech worker in Silicon Valley, I’ve found the big barrier to this now to be cultural and personal. All my companies (large and small) have ha

Personally being a tech worker in Silicon Valley, I’ve found the big barrier to this now to be cultural and personal. All my companies (large and small) have had incredibly relaxed policies around when to arrive, leave, remote work, time off, bereavement. Even in what have been SRE or Software Eng roles with on-call. I get the sense that if I’m doing my work, I could do whatever I want. But I still feel some pressure, some voice in the back of my head that thinks other people will look down on me or I won’t be deserving my high salary. Like anytime I have downtime I feel guilty, and I see others behave the same way.

AmericanChopper 7y ago
Personally I think a fair amount of the worst decisions people make tend to be motivated by an irrational sense of guilt.
- derefr 7y ago
  I've always wondered why, with all the other emotional dispositions that people accuse pharma companies of "medicalizing" in order to sell them a drug treatment for, we've never seen any attempt to medicalize the Puritan work ethic. Maybe it's because it'd mean that pretty much every medical doctor would themselves be technically (or not-so-technically) considered mentally-ill? (Gosh, imagine a world where all the doctors got treatment for their floating guilt, and then suddenly woke up to their severe overwork, and so did a 180 on their previous push to the medical-bar to lower acceptance to increase wages, instead pushing to increase acceptance and lower wages in an attempt to increase the number of doctors a hospital can employ on a given budget, and therefore decrease hours worked per doctor?)
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    I don’t think a puritanical work ethic necessarily is unhealthy, but in your example I would consider the guilt aspect to be. In your example puritanical work ethic + (irrational imo) guilt = you exceed your contractual requirements to deliver work to your employer. Keep the work ethic but take the guilt out and perhaps instead you’d meet but not exceed your contractual obligations to your employer, and then organise the rest of your time around industriously working on something else that you’re personally passionate about. The second example could be unhealthy depending on how you approached it, but I wouldn’t say that it necessarily is, and I would say that it’s a big improvement over the first example.
    - throwawaystress 7y ago
      "Puritanical" is definitely meant to imply unhealthy, which is why it's got such a negative connotation. I think even in your example, you substitute "wasted" productivity (in the sense of going beyond contractual obligations) with other productivity, albeit towards another direction. I think that's what the parent's post is pointing out: this obsession/compulsion with filling in all time with productivity. Why can't time just be "wasted"?
TheFiend7 7y ago
Am I the only one who feels like a 40 hour work week is excessive? I feel like 8 hours of work in a day is eeking out diminishing returns on a persons productivity. Secondly, if you account for "productivity" hours instead of "waking" hours. You spend more of your "productive" capable hours in your life working, by a large margin. Or maybe I was just born with a lazy brain /shrug.
- hnick 7y ago
  Yeah most studies I've seen shared online put us at about 4-5 hours of useful work a day. This seems to be what I settle into at home when left alone too. It can of course go higher when you have a specific goal and you're running on adrenaline or are truly enraptured by what you are working on. But a typical 8 hour day is often packed with chitchat, meetings, administrative busywork and so on to help pad out those hours. I did work one place that stressed to us to allocate no more than 5.5 hours of work-work a day when estimating jobs due to the above, and it seemed roughly accurate.
  - theboulevardier 7y ago
    I agree, I have about 4 - 5 "good hours" a day. But I'm expected to deliver 6 - 6.5 billable hours a day in my job (exluding admin work). It's frustrating as I know that a billable hour before 10am and after 4pm is worth far less than a billable hour between 10am and 3pm. It's especially frustrating when I'm expected to work on something that involves a high cognitive load all day long due to tight deadlines. Account managers, project managers and sales people seem to think that all work is the same and you can work at max capacity all the time, regardless of the complexity of the task.
- denkmoon 7y ago
  As a SWE, I have 20 productive hours a week, approximately. The other 20 are wasted, and I would be better off just not being at work and relaxing. Unfortunately, "that's just not how things work".
  - whatshisface 7y ago

AmericanChopper 7y ago

Personally I think a fair amount of the worst decisions people make tend to be motivated by an irrational sense of guilt.

derefr 7y ago
I've always wondered why, with all the other emotional dispositions that people accuse pharma companies of "medicalizing" in order to sell them a drug treatment for, we've never seen any attempt to medicalize the Puritan work ethic. Maybe it's because it'd mean that pretty much every medical doctor would themselves be technically (or not-so-technically) considered mentally-ill? (Gosh, imagine a world where all the doctors got treatment for their floating guilt, and then suddenly woke up to their severe overwork, and so did a 180 on their previous push to the medical-bar to lower acceptance to increase wages, instead pushing to increase acceptance and lower wages in an attempt to increase the number of doctors a hospital can employ on a given budget, and therefore decrease hours worked per doctor?)
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  I don’t think a puritanical work ethic necessarily is unhealthy, but in your example I would consider the guilt aspect to be. In your example puritanical work ethic + (irrational imo) guilt = you exceed your contractual requirements to deliver work to your employer. Keep the work ethic but take the guilt out and perhaps instead you’d meet but not exceed your contractual obligations to your employer, and then organise the rest of your time around industriously working on something else that you’re personally passionate about. The second example could be unhealthy depending on how you approached it, but I wouldn’t say that it necessarily is, and I would say that it’s a big improvement over the first example.
  - throwawaystress 7y ago
    "Puritanical" is definitely meant to imply unhealthy, which is why it's got such a negative connotation. I think even in your example, you substitute "wasted" productivity (in the sense of going beyond contractual obligations) with other productivity, albeit towards another direction. I think that's what the parent's post is pointing out: this obsession/compulsion with filling in all time with productivity. Why can't time just be "wasted"?

TheFiend7 7y ago

Am I the only one who feels like a 40 hour work week is excessive? I feel like 8 hours of work in a day is eeking out diminishing returns on a persons productivity. Secondly, if you account for "productivity" hours instead of "waking" hours. You spend more of your "productive" capable hours in your life working, by a large margin. Or maybe I was just born with a lazy brain /shrug.

hnick 7y ago
Yeah most studies I've seen shared online put us at about 4-5 hours of useful work a day. This seems to be what I settle into at home when left alone too. It can of course go higher when you have a specific goal and you're running on adrenaline or are truly enraptured by what you are working on. But a typical 8 hour day is often packed with chitchat, meetings, administrative busywork and so on to help pad out those hours. I did work one place that stressed to us to allocate no more than 5.5 hours of work-work a day when estimating jobs due to the above, and it seemed roughly accurate.
- theboulevardier 7y ago
  I agree, I have about 4 - 5 "good hours" a day. But I'm expected to deliver 6 - 6.5 billable hours a day in my job (exluding admin work). It's frustrating as I know that a billable hour before 10am and after 4pm is worth far less than a billable hour between 10am and 3pm. It's especially frustrating when I'm expected to work on something that involves a high cognitive load all day long due to tight deadlines. Account managers, project managers and sales people seem to think that all work is the same and you can work at max capacity all the time, regardless of the complexity of the task.
denkmoon 7y ago
As a SWE, I have 20 productive hours a week, approximately. The other 20 are wasted, and I would be better off just not being at work and relaxing. Unfortunately, "that's just not how things work".
- whatshisface 7y ago