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The reality is that some people can just do more per day than others. It's very common in academia that many professors spend their entire lifetime in 60-80hr w

• jll29 6y ago
  The trick is that if coding is your passion it doesn't feel like work, more like oxygen...
  • rubicon33 6y ago
    Unfortunately for some of us, passions fade. I still love coding, but it's not the kind of thing I'm likely to enjoy spending 16 hours a day doing anymore. I've been there, done that, seen it all (server, web, mobile, firmware, games). It's routine now, but not something I can lose myself into like I used to be able to. I get bored far faster.
    • halfdan 6y ago
      It's interesting. I'm still in a state where I enjoy it most of the time and I could certainly spend an entire day coding... But I'm running super low on good ideas. Ideas used to pop into mind all the time, now it's like once a year and I quickly abandon it.
      • JulianWasTaken 6y ago
        Maintain an open source project, it'll help that passion fade somewhat quickly. (I kid, but more seriously, it did indeed help dampen some of my own passion for quite awhile. And then a bit of resurgence...)
      • rubicon33 6y ago
        That's how it started, for me at least. When I first began programming it was like my mind was a nuclear reactor. I LOVED it. New ideas were popping into my head all the time, and solutions to problems were quick. I'll never forget when I was in the first few months, and learned about POLYMORPHISM. At the time, it utterly blew my mind, and I found so many sweet use cases for it and felt like a GOD of programming. Fast forward 10 years and yea, it gives me a chuckle to remember those days. I miss how excited my mind was, and how eager to code I was. Now, I'm critical of code, less open to learning new things, and new ideas are few and far between. It sucks but as far as I can tell, that's just life. We aren't programmed to constantly lose ourselves in any one thing. If we did, our ancestors may not have survived. Our primitive brain found great utility in "moving on" to the next thing, the next opportunity, etc.
    • retsi 6y ago
      This is what real experience sounds like.
      • wolco2 6y ago
        I have 20 years+ experience. It doesn't have to be like this. I know exactly what happened. Changing languages and domains every few years can wear you out. If you were lucky enough to pick one language that madw it 20 years you can spend your time deep diving different domains. Bonus if the language becomes unpopular with developers but still need with business. Bonus points for picking a fun language you like. A real pain is leetcode.
        • rubicon33 6y ago
          You do have a point. I would certainly agree that your best shot at maintaining your passion would be to stick with 1 or 2 languages and get really good at them. Constantly context switching does wear on a person. With that said, there are some caveats... 1) Businesses need to find that language useful and important. In other words, there must be opportunities to make money using that language. 2) The language must support great depth of work. For instance, learning Objective-C or Swift could become dry over the years as you master the iOS SDK. There's a lot there to cover, for sure, but I imagine after 10 years you might arrive at the same endpoint: Somewhat deflated, certainly less passionate. 3) The language must resonate with you. Everybody has a language or a programming style they enjoy. Personally, I love classic, imperative, low level stuff. C, C++, even Java. Not really a big fan - despite years of professional work - of declarative UI, or functional programming. I'm curious since you have 20 years - what language / domain have you been focussed on? How did it work for you?
          • wolco2 6y ago
            I got into php in the very beginning. Kept learning everything else but found the limitations a fun challenge and being able to rapidly produce something kind of works with my matra of wanting to do a bit of everything. I started with C/C++ so php was natural fit. A good question would be if starting out today what language would I pick? I'm tempted to pick php but I would probably go for react. The market is huge career-wise, the language is fun to develop in and the community is strong.
    • jokethrowaway 6y ago
      I've been writing code for 15 years and I definitely experienced what you mention - but changing the topic made me find my passion back. Sure, sometimes I was depressed, sometimes I had enough and wanted to follow some other passion outside of coding, sometimes my eyes wanted to give up - but if I'm healthy and the problem is interesting, I can still get stuck to the creative process. My dad has been a developer for 40+ years and he stills get excited about random, incredibly complicated projects (that don't even pay that well) or new technologies. Maybe you just need to find something else you enjoy coding.
    • firecall 6y ago
      This is burnout. :-)
  • rorykoehler 6y ago
    I could but I need to move
• yowlingcat 6y ago
  > The reality is that some people can just do more per day than others. Is that really the reality? As far as I can tell, the reality is quite the opposite -- that sustainable levels of work across all knowledge work industries drop off a cliff past 8 hours a day, and for deep work 4 hours a day. Working on a side project after work possible for short sprints at a time, but somewhat impossible if you have an engaging day job where you are making good forward progress on your career. On the other hand, if your day job is well paid but rather dull (quite common in tech), working on a side project is a nice way to retain creative and intellectual fulfillment, agency, and ownership in some capacity in one's life -- it can be an artistic outlet and worthwhile in itself. Beyond that, it can be nice transition to a startup. But I think this idea that some people "can just do more per day" makes the fallacy of thinking progress happens a day at a time. When it comes to side projects or new companies in incubation, that's not always the case. Explaining it away with an argument that is biologically untenable seems questionable to me.
  • jokethrowaway 6y ago
    It's the reality, I witnessed it and experienced it when coding my own business. Sure, you may not do your finest work, but you can get a lot done. If you're happy trading off your health for a shot at success, it's something that's on the table. It gets harder when you start having a family or if you have other obligations. You make a great point that just doing tasks is not necessarily going to make or break a company, there are tons of other factors.
    • yowlingcat 6y ago
      > You make a great point that just doing tasks is not necessarily going to make or break a company, there are tons of other factors. Exactly. Doing tasks is literally table stakes -- it's the equivalent of showing up. For any company that banks on its differentiation, making big moves that cement the company require more thought, more depth, more risk. These kinds of simplistic platitudes amount to hierarchical animisms; they have little to do with the very specific things that make up a real high performance organizational culture.
  • 6y ago
• hervature 6y ago
  > The reality is that some people can just do more per day than others. It's very common in academia that many professors spend their entire lifetime in 60-80hr work weeks their entire life. > but the majority of professors would spend most of the midday break meeting each other Spending 60-80 hours in meetings is not "work". Attending lectures is not "work". Work requires either mental or physical effort to which all humans have limits. People in academia like to think they work hard by quoting useless hours like this. But that's like people billing their bosses for the 2 hours they spend in traffic. From my time in academia, my impression is that most grad students have 1 to 2 hours of productive work per day. They will tell you that they spend 10 hours at the office however.
  • jefft255 6y ago
    This is such an ignorant comment. 1) actually paying attention to an advanced academic lecture requires serious mental effort, so by your definition it is work. It is also not useless, unless purely academic work is useless to you 2) I don’t know what kind of experience in academia you have (my guess is not much) but grad school can be very intense in terms of work. Sure you can slack off, but if you want to do well you’ll likely work very hard.
    • hervature 6y ago
      No it is not an ignorant comment. 1) If you missed my quotes around "work" it is because some people describe certain tasks as work equivalent to other tasks. The effort of digesting vs. producing material is about 2 orders of magnitudes for me. I took 60 hours of lectures (time spent in class) during one of my semesters of undergrad. 12 hours of lecture everyday. That is completely sustainable because all you have to do is listen. Reading papers is the same, it's a low effort activity. Something you can do for 12 hours a day. Yes, "advanced academic lecture" is more draining than Harry Potter but less draining than driving a vehicle. 2) Working hard (or long hours in the case of academia) vs. working intelligently are orthogonal. I can't really address the entirety of graduate school because history is going to be much different than engineering. Applied much different than theory. I'll repeat my claim, if you actually take the useful bits of a grad student's day, it often compresses to 1-2 hours. Yes, reading is important. Yes, there are often other teaching commitments that are usually treated like second class citizens. I'm not debating the time spent in an office. Merely, that the "60-80" hour myth really needs to stop.
• yodsanklai 6y ago
  > It's very common in academia that many professors spend their entire lifetime in 60-80hr work weeks their entire life. I would take this with a pinch of salt. Socializing by the pool after the talks isn't hard work. Also, most people only listen to some of the talks. It's not uncommon to see the room half empty the last days of the conference. There are also various social events and so on... While it's true that some professors/researchers are hard-working and driven, it's not the case for all of them, and it varies throughout their career. Their job is also typically not very stressful. Same thing for software engineers. Some people do meaningful work for a few hours a day, and slack the rest of the time and still have good performance reviews. Among the professionals who work a lot, I can think of doctors. My family doctor works very long hours, and he's certainly not slacking.
  • aspaceman 6y ago
    Yeah it very much depends on the faculty member. Keep in mind that some academics truly love this stuff too. They’re enjoying socializing and keeping up on the field and it quickly changes the “work” dynamic when you’re not writing as much code anymore. I think you’re both correct though. I would agree that doctors and lawyers have the most hard working hours. No room for error as the doctor, and just mounds of tedious paperwork as a lawyer.
  • ramraj07 6y ago
    > Also, most people only listen to some of the talks Which is why I explicitly mentioned small conferences. The one I was talking about has 90 attendees total, only one session at a time in the same room, and in snowmass Colorado so if you're outside the conference hotel we can literally see you from up to half a mile away. Almost no one skips a single session in these conferences, especially the professors. For the most part they're paying attention as well, no one's on their laptops or dozing off. Again, I spent a decade in academia, and if you're in fields such as biology and in some top institution, it's very rare that professors up to doing something meaningful have anything less than 60 hour weeks at any point in their career. This is more or less what me and my roommates actively discussed most of the time all through a decade, so I'm not just talking about anecdotal evidence. From what I understand, academia in other fields especially tech related can be less stressful than this. Being a oroefssor in a competitive field is really back breaking - You have to juggle a large number of roles and are constantly responsible for the lives of numerous people and lack many of the protections one would normally expect from any regular job in some ways.
• josephg 6y ago
  I suspect this is works for them because they’re steeped in the field already. So the number of new ideas per hour is way lower for the professors than it’d be for newcomers. And the professors can probably comfortably tune out when they want without getting lost because they have enough background. Learning new things requires physical changes in your brain. Fewer new ideas = less cognitive effort = more energy remaining at the end of the day.
• suifbwish 6y ago
  Once you figure out the correct meth dose almost anything is possible I guess
  • anonyxyz 6y ago
    See PKD
    • mito88 6y ago
      isn't pkd inherited?