15 ms·

Should you Work Hard? (2019)

107 points by axiomdata316 6y ago

lqet 6y ago
For me, there is a difference between working "hard" and working "deep". Working "hard" means being busy, typically more than 8 hours a day. Example: answering mails, writing some sort of report, dealing with customers, driving a truck, sitting at a cash register all day. Working "deep" means being extremely focused on a challenging thing until it is done. This can be writing code, but also theoretical writing or building something with your hands, even repairing something. After a "hard" day, I am completely exhausted and my mind is blank. After a "deep" day, I am satisfied and euphoric.
- jaynetics 6y ago
  > After a "hard" day, I am completely exhausted and my mind is blank. After a "deep" day, I am satisfied and euphoric. Maybe this is the reason for the ubiquity of over-engineering and other patterns of over-complication - quite a few people enjoy deep work, but the vast majority of jobs in software development, or writing, or even a fair few in science, turn out to be only hard work when done with optimal efficiency.
  - nisa 6y ago
    I disagree. A few days a week of deep work every week can spare you from months of hard work with optimal efficiency :)
    - dasil003 6y ago
      Yes! But only if you think of deep work as holistic problem solving rather than fetishizing some technical aspect (which is hard to avoid for certain flavor of programmerly personality).
    - wpietri 6y ago
      I think this is true, but only if you have sufficient control over the context. I've been very careful about how I choose my jobs. But a lot of developers end up in situations where the truly deep work can only be done in coordination with a bunch of others. Assuming typically bad management, this means that the only thing left is hard work. The first time I saw this pattern was with a place that used their master database as the central integration point for a lot of different code bases. They could have simplified things greatly, but that would have required multiple teams to simultaneously change how they used particular tables in their code. The database was controlled by a central group of database administrators who were very busy and had different incentives than the teams they supported. Getting all these people on board for a change was possible only if it rose to an executive level. Which if it could be achieved at all, required lots of politicking. So in practice, every team had to make up for the garbage architecture through hard work. Which however much they meant well, tended to reinforce the problems.
      - nisa 6y ago
        I wrote this because I'm in a place were we all do almost nothing but "hard work" - most this hard work is the result of bad decisions and every effort to improve has gone stale because everyone is so busy chasing bugs and stupid assumptions in the architecture but it's been the idea of management and while first not realizing what I'm up to I've quickly came to learn that trying to criticize the architecture is met with silence as it's the child of management and co-workers that are there much longer than me. We use ant with a lib-folder - worked on maven in my spare time - nobody cares. Worked on automated tests - nobody is willing to discuss this or do the required changes like fixing Angular timeouts and assigning some unqiue-id's to elements that tests don't break. We misuse the API from the parent project we are building a plugin for - some calls take 3s or more instead of feasible 100ms if correctly implemented. We have a useless PHP addon that constantly breaks for "performance" but it's slower than doing it in Java correctly. Brought all of this up. It's not even a topic.
        wpietri 6y ago
        That sucks and I'm sorry to hear it. People who study the Challenger accident talk about "normalization of deviance". When things are bad once, people react. But if they're bad regularly, people just get used to it. Bad is the new normal. And that's very hard to change. I think the only times I've seen significant progress had 2 common elements. One is a fucking disaster. Something has to blow up so badly that the grand poobahs feel the pain, and make sure everybody beneath them does too. The other is a bubble of sanity. Maybe it's one team that has a few people like you, enough to say, "Well in this team, for this product, we're going to do it fucking right." And then that team has to show that doing it right produces great results, results that prevent the fucking disaster from ever happening again. So for your sake, I hope you either change your organization or change your organization. You deserve better.
  - waynesonfire 6y ago
    yep.. and we see posts of people moving monoliths to microservices and vice-versa as a result. You either find meaning in that or there a salary premium and lots of vacation time for the mindless work. Otherwise, you're probably working "hard"
  - _benj 6y ago
    I disagree with this statement, and I'd argue that most people haven't actually experience "deep work" (which btw, the book with that title change the way I see and experience work deeply) Deep work has nothing to do with over-engineering and everything to do with non-distracted focused time doing something that actually releases dopamine and feels good. Deep != complex
- wpietri 6y ago
  That definitely has resonance for me. When I think back to the times I was putting in a lot of extra hours, I wasn't getting results in proportion to the time spent. Partly because being tired your capacity declines. Partly because, in retrospect, we were all performing hard work as a way of impressing clients, bosses, and each other. And partly out of some phenomenon related to "revenge bedtime procrastination" [1] where I just ran out of self-discipline and would secretly take the breaks I should have been taking anyhow. Some years back I hired movers. Previously my experience moving had been the casual thing with friends and family. We took our time, joked around, took breaks, kept entertained. But these movers were relentless. They never rushed and never seemed stressed, but if there was work to do they were on it until the work was 100% done. And when there wasn't work to do, they were perfectly chill. I keep coming back to the memory as how I want to work. No bullshit, hard work when it's time to work, and really letting go of it at quitting time. It's harder to achieve for software, but I will keep iterating in that direction. [1] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201123-the-psychology-behind-revenge-bedtime-procrastination https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201123-the-psychology...
  - antisthenes 6y ago
    > They never rushed and never seemed stressed, but if there was work to do they were on it until the work was 100% done. And when there wasn't work to do, they were perfectly chill. That only works because their job is perfectly defined. The scope is finite and always in sight. I'm not quite convinced this would work for creative work or a project that's somewhat open-ended in features and/or scope. To give an example of this: I can do this type of no-bullshit relentless work when I exercise in a gym. 1.5hrs of a strict routine with a fixed number of reps. And a hard stop after that. Never found the same type of ability for deep work.
    - wpietri 6y ago
      For me, the right approach is what you'll see in Lean processes. You pick the next few clear steps and break them down into small units of work, each of which delivers value. Then you knock them off at a solid pace. We managed that here: https://williampietri.com/writing/2015/the-big-board/ https://williampietri.com/writing/2015/the-big-board/ And that's despite the fact that it was a startup. It helped that my cofounder had 3 kids under the age of 5. He came in on time and he left on time. We all busted ass while we were there, but when we left, we mostly left. One real test for me was when I had to take weeks off to help a sick relative. Even though I was the technical cofounder and had been involved in every bit of the code, I got maybe two calls where they really needed me. It was a sign that we're built a real cross-functional team.
- jingw222 6y ago
  I'm 99% with this, except that when you work so hard on the challenging deep work and there's no energy left to be able enjoy the glory of the success.
- AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
  > until it is done This is the key, I think. It's driving a truck vs. delivering goods. Laying stones vs. building a house. Answering emails vs. solving the problem.
Cancan82 6y ago
There are always trade offs in life... so you want to be wealthy and have status at the expense of other things? That CAN be the right answer for some people and they will find meaning in that. It is totally fine to pursue that if your heart tells you that is meaningful. Just make sure your hard work actually moves you towards that goal (working for a paycheck versus working to increase the value of equity in something, for example) But, it is totally fine if you personally prefer to have a quiet family life and spend as much time as you can with your children. If that is what your heart tells you is meaningful - set your life up that way. It’s a personal decision always. Neither is right or wrong. People are different. It’s ok to find something meaningful that others don’t value the same way.
cpursley 6y ago
I have huge respect for employers who've let their staff have this week off (and even through new years). It's great for morale and retention. Plus, it's just the right thing to do.
- Bakary 6y ago
  That's like respecting the local lord for letting the peasants keep slightly more grain this winter
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    Well, guess what, feudal societies got organized that way in middle ages for a reason, and lords not exploiting their peasants was praiseworthy (despite being the most common way). Once we could organize ourselves in highly productive democratic nation-states, then yes, just being a lord became shameful, but it wasn't an option at the time.
    - Bakary 6y ago
      The first step to reform is to not be so alienated that you praise those who profit the most from the status quo for throwing the occasional breadcrumb. Organizing democratic nation-states first came from people questioning the divine rights of kings. In our era, this would be questioning the divine right of "value creators" and the trickling down.
      - marcosdumay 6y ago
        Hum... Organizing democratic nation-states first came by creating nation-states, what could only be done (and was only done) by the king or people supported by him. Only after that people started thinking about democratizing anything.
        Bakary 6y ago
        I still don't understand the underlying argument to be honest.
blunte 6y ago
One mistake many of us make (myself included) is making career choices based on money. Looking back, many of the jobs I took were just for the big pay increase. But unsurprisingly, I wasn't happier. Worse, it became harder and harder to leave a job (or leave this IT career) because the idea of financial setback was bigger with each job. By no means am I rich. In fact, other life things erased my financial gains; so I'm left with less time in my life and few achievements or memories (work related) worth remembering. And while family and children are some of the best things in life, they also tend to be in conflict with hard career work and success. Some people pull it off, but most of us don't. My advice is to try to recognize when one's career is no longer fulfilling; save a little money along the way, and pivot hard in search of work/life satisfaction even if it means a big downgrade in income. And start a family ideally after you have explored the world and some of your dreams.
- redelbee 6y ago
  I never took a job just for the pay increase, but I definitely continued down a career path I knew was the wrong one because of the money. I tried to start multiple companies right out of college and failed at all of them, all while taking any other work I could to pay the bills. Working in a call center was by far the worst of the “other” work I did and it led me to consider getting a “real” job based on my skills and degree. I ended up convincing an advertising agency to hire me and decided to give it my all, despite my misgivings about the industry in general. I worked hard and even enjoyed some of it, and my title/pay/prestige all followed an upward trend as a result. After the first raise I said it would only be another year. Then I got promoted and I decided it would be another year after that. Then I got another raise and a promotion, then we were acquired, then a few more significant yearly raises after that. At some point I tried to convince myself that this was the right path, but I knew it wasn’t. I still wanted to be my own boss and run my own business. Seven years later and it was incredibly difficult to justify leaving all that money. I also hadn’t saved particularly well as I instead grew my lifestyle to match the money. None of it made me happy or gave me satisfaction, and I felt tied down to the job. As a solution my wife and I decided to move back to my hometown and start our own business together, even though we had tried to start another business together right after school. Thankfully this time it worked out, although we still have our disagreements about what the future of the business looks like. My advice to everyone is slightly different: chase the money if the opportunity arises, but don’t change your lifestyle. And keep working on other things on the side if you can. Maybe I wouldn’t have progressed as much in my “real” career had I had other side hustles, but I’m sure it would have been a less painful path than the one I took.
crazypython 6y ago
Cofounding a startup with a significant other you enjoy talking to, working with, and being with could be an interesting way of aligning your work with your family. Paul Graham started YC with his wife who was his cofounder.
- hipshaker 6y ago
  I personally know of acouple who did this. Seems to have paid off as suggested.
- speedgoose 6y ago
  That's a good way to divorce too.
  - bitexploder 6y ago
    High risk, high reward.
- redelbee 6y ago
  I am doing this now with my wife. We are aligned on many areas relating to the business but, as you can imagine, we don’t align perfectly all the time. Usually we can work it out but not always. Example: Our company is a small retail business in my hometown. I want it to be more than that and my wife would be happy if we kept things the same, so long as finances allow (they should, barring some unforeseen catastrophe). So we are aligned on nearly every “important” aspect of the work except this one. It’s tough because one of us either has to become aligned with the other’s views, or has to work without that alignment if that’s not possible. I feel very privileged to have this kind of problem as opposed to not being able to pay the bills etc, but it still feels bad at times. I think that’s life though, where you need some of the bad to appreciate the good.
- tester756 6y ago
  (Family or Friends) + Work? sounds good until it's not I tend to avoid working with people that I know
edwinyzh 6y ago
Someone has no choice but has to work hard, man...
svantana 6y ago
> one of the top five regrets of the dying is "I wish I hadn't worked so hard" One of my pet peeves is this notion that dying regrets is some sort of yardstick for how to live your life. At any age, it's easy to look back and think "why didn't I just...", but life is complex, and actions have unintended consequences. Personally I subscribe to the "que sera sera" philosophy. Control is limited. Life is a rollercoaster, just strap in for the ride.
- Throwawayjedi 6y ago
  > one of the top five regrets of the dying is ”I wish I hadn’t worked so hard” I look forward to contributing to the reversal of that
- patatino 6y ago
  Not only people dying are saying that but also people at the age of 60-70. Some of them still working but now their children are adults and they missed too much and regret it.
  - mrmonkeyman 6y ago
    Lots of people have worked too little and end their lives in debt with nothing to show for it. This is not a good thing. It does not mean they had excellent quality time with the family (usually not). Sometimes a little hard work would be best, but it is seldom admitted by those who need it the most.
  - llaolleh 6y ago
    This reminds me of what my first told me. He was in his 50s and decided not to have children. He said, "I don't get it man. These people, they work all the time. What's the point of having kids when you are never going to spend time with them??"
    - p1esk 6y ago
      You must be in your 70s then. What do you think about working hard?
xyzelement 6y ago
> the problem is that they worked too hard on things that, at the end of the day, weren't as important to them as they thought. It's as simple as that. You have to work on the right stuff, and very often it's a matter of perspective. One angle - if you can look at work as play, then it changes everything. You're engaged in a challenging exercise and looking for ways to take it to the next level while learning a lot in the process. If you can engage that way, with each task being a stepping stone rather than a chore, then it's a totally different mindset. The other thing - it's easy to say "I wish I didn't work as hard" and somehow imagining the more leisurely version of yourself having the same lifestyle, but obviously what we have (eg, financial security for our family) is an outcome of the work we do. It feels to me like "I wish I didn't work as hard" is a lament of a well-off person who somehow doesn't connect their situation to the work. A person who actually sees the direct connection between their hours worked and family safety would never say this. Life is a trade-off and we have roles to play. Sure it's great to see your kid 24/7 but do you want to do that living under the bridge in poverty? There's of course a balance to strike between the two but the acceptable range is actually pretty narrow.
sdevonoes 6y ago
Don't work hard for others (i.e., as an employee). Work hard for yourself and the ones you love (i.e., your own company, your own side project, your family)... for whatever definition of "working hard" you have. Now, if you love your employer, sure work hard for them.
Bakary 6y ago
This story about alignment reminds of past discussions about stress and status. There's the infamous Whitehall study and Sapolsky's research linking perception of status as the driver of stress in workers rather than the effort expended at work. In a sense, people who are aligned have a completely different relationship towards work to the point where it probably can't be considered the same thing. I don't mean that just sociologically, but physically and physiologically in terms of the long term costs to their bodies and minds as well. I may be misremembering the exact argument, but some insightful commenter here once mentioned a while ago that although Hannibal Barca would in all likelihood have had a stressful life, his relationship to that stress would probably be much different from what we imagine due to our perspective as worker bees whose relationship to work isn't defined by autonomy, glory, or decisions that really have an impact. When I see Altman's quote: >It's not entirely clear to me why working hard has become a Bad Thing in certain parts of the US.... I think people who pretend you can be super successful professionally without working most of the time (for some period of your life) are doing a disservice. It strikes me that for a person to be confused by this, they would have to be completely isolated from the working reality of most people. I'm not familiar with Altman's life, but if I had to guess he was never in a position where the long-term connection between effort and gaining autonomy/mastery/meaning was broken.
czep 6y ago
The author makes some thoughtful points, but I'd like to address part of the quote from Sam Altman: > It's not entirely clear to me why working hard has become a Bad Thing in certain parts of the US. I am shocked because this sentiment is entirely clear to me: most people must work hard to survive and their work will likely never be rewarding, financially or personally. Meanwhile, inherited wealth allows a class of people to "work hard" with zero downside risk, all the while claiming they have earned their due. The fact that someone as wise and reflective as Sam Altman cannot understand this is puzzling. He says earlier "I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful." Again, I cannot fathom how one can fail to observe how class privilege bestows automatic success to certain people regardless of the speed at which they move. Trust funds accumulate, there is never concern over making rent or providing food, and they can easily take low-paying internships or found a startup without any personal risk whatsoever. People without this kind of leverage do not have the luxury of seeking "alignment" in their jobs. They do the actual hard work at the firms owned by the warrior class of inherited wealth, and are then admonished for not working hard enough to enrich the owners further.
- deleted 6y ago
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- dasil003 6y ago
  I don't think Sam Altman would consider such a person successful. We all know the stereotype of the trust fund kid who is lazy and ineffectual. There's a lot of emotional baggage around rich people, but if you strip it down to individual situations it's pretty simple. I've worked for people ranging from small business owners scraping out $50k a year all the way up to billionaires. How hard they work has no correlation to the money they have. I don't resent a boss with money, I resent a boss who isn't working as hard as me, and most founders/business owners I've worked for have worked harder than everyone else.
  - djrobstep 6y ago
    > I resent a boss who isn't working as hard as me In a modern economy most "business owners" are passive shareholders who literally do nothing for that money. I am a partial business owner of many enormous corporations via my retirement account. I don't do any work for any of them, and yet, they continually send me money. Strange!
mikesabbagh 6y ago
Don't put all your eggs in one basket. I noticed that I work enough to impress my manager, sometimes not much happen in a day and on other days I work extra hours. I do this to make sure my boss is happy. I also work on my side project, and this is what keeps me awake at night because of the excitement and the joy I get. The thing is, you must be really lucky to have daily joy and excitement from 1 source. I think u always need a side project to keep u balanced and dream
- egfx 6y ago
  I have the exact opposite problem. I have multiple side projects and no job. No one wants to hire me because of my side projects because they’re full scale products.
  - mikesabbagh 6y ago
    haha, Just make sure u have a skill that is in demand. I had similar issue, started looking for job postings and saw the skills that pay good. then spend time to learn it as much as possible, then fake it until you make it :)
    - egfx 6y ago
      I’m actually an experienced frontend engineer. This time it’s different. You reach the point where you’re on the outside because you bring too much to the position beyond what the hiring manager is looking for and you become a liability and a risk for a company at that point.
      - gonzo41 6y ago
        Part of me wants you to go on r/cscareerquestions and ask them all honestly about how to sandbag your resume :P.
ensiferum 6y ago
Working some number of hours doesn't necessarily mean working "hard". IMHO it's all about the intensity and effort level required wether it's pjysical or mental. Once you repeatedly reach your boundaries and push there and even beyond are you really putting in "hard work". And that's where it gets uncomfortable. In physical exercise and work on this is felt through lactic acid physical exhaustion muscle soreness etc. office jobs and other non physical activities (for example learning math or a new language) will result in mental tiredness and exhaustion.
georgeplusplus 6y ago
I gave up working hard. I paid for college out of my own pocket and took out student loans. I lived outside the city and paid rent for a very modest apartment with multiple roommates to keep cost low while my friends were living inside the city paying top dollar at luxury apartments. Well looks like I was the dumb one for doing that, college debt will soon be forgave. What’s the point of working hard when there’s no reward?
- aaron-santos 6y ago
  Have you considered cultivating intrinsic motivation?
  - georgeplusplus 6y ago
    I’m not familiar with the term but Motivation is the reason for acting a particular way. Intrinsic is value within the self. Therefor any kind of motivation is intrinsic since motivation is produced by the self so you’ll have to elaborate for me by what you mean.
inoffensivename 6y ago
I'm on a personal mission to reduce the average American working week
- AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
  Oh, it's easy. Just buy more Chinese goods.
- SyzygistSix 6y ago
  I am on the same mission. I talk about it with everyone I can. And try to be a good example as well.
bassman9000 6y ago
If you don't work hard, someone will. If you can offer something better in return, good. So it's either working smart, or working hard. And I suspect the people that have achieved the former also do the latter.
mkl95 6y ago
I used to work really hard. I then requested a small raise of my below-market-average salary, and I found out the people in charge of the company have decided to freeze salaries for the time being. I no longer work that hard.
- nyghtly 6y ago
  When this happened to me at a previous job, I immediately started looking for a new one.
BrandoElFollito 6y ago
I am French and got a top education by French standards (two Grandes Ecoles (the equivalent of Ivy League in the US) and a PhD). I worked really hard to get it, especially to get into the first school due to the completely crazy and unique French system (prépas - two years of suffering taken from your young life). My son who is 14 had very, very average marks last year. He is a very bright and capable boy so I was really dissapointed. This year he is top of his class with an average mark of 18/20. As you can imagine, I am all happy and everything and I told him that I am proud etc. - all the right things a parent says. To what he told me that the marks in the class he is in this year decide which high school he will be admitted in. And he wants to be admitted to the best one. So he obviously started to work hard to get good marks. That lead to the best high school. Where he will be probably average until the marks start to have a meaning again etc. I was initially bemused at this approach, so far from the work ethics his father tried to instill in him. And then, after some thinking, I think he is right (which is a major change in the way I was thinking). Grades are nothing more than a gateway to the future and ultimately do not mean anything more. So "hard work" when it makes sense to do so.
- jmchuster 6y ago
  So I'll push one step beyond that, and say that it's important to be able to pace your work to achieve the level of result that you want. By the end of my time in college, I could almost tell how much effort I needed to put in for each 0.1 out of 4.0 of my GPA. The mirror, then, is that I also need to instill in my kids a sense of high standards.
deleted 6y ago
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hyko 6y ago
Should you optimise your life based on what you’ll think at the end of it? Do your regrets really matter that much when weighing how to spend your life?
- mbrodersen 6y ago
  Yes of course. Only at the end of your life can you truly evaluate what was worth doing and what wasn’t.
  - hyko 6y ago
    I don’t find this to be a compelling argument. Sure, the old person might be saying “I wish I’d worked less”...it doesn’t follow that working less will actually make you any happier for most of your life. Constructing your life so you’ll be happy on that deathbed seems like a gross misapplication of life’s potential.
philmcp 6y ago
It's has always amazed me that 99% of jobs are for 5 days per week. As someone who has tried to "build something on the side" for years, I've always wanted a job which was contracted for 4 days per week so I could dedicate some time to my side projects, whilst getting some stable income. I'm certainly not rich but I don't need a 5 day salary to survive. I'd much prefer to get paid less and work less but this doesn't seem to be an option I've even went as far as building a website listing jobs with 4-day work weeks: https://www.28hrworkweek.com/ https://www.28hrworkweek.com/ /rant
- Sytten 6y ago
  I agree 100%, I just signed up on your website. I would go even as far as saying 3-4 days should/will become the norm as time goes on. There is no particular reason we are stuck at 5 days/40 hours except that workers stopped asking for more time off (probably goes with the reduction of union power and globalization since the '80).
- nyghtly 6y ago
  This is one of the goals that led me to software engineering the first place. Not to secure a job with a good salary, but to secure a job with a good enough salary at 4 days per week. Side note: why are you classifying a 4 day work week as 28 hours? Wouldn't it be 32?
  - philmcp 6y ago
    Totally agree with you, I'm also in software partly for this reason In the UK the typical work day is 7 hours (9-5pm with an hour unpaid break). I'll be honest though, I've had a few people ask me this same question, so the name may change pre-launch
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
sktrdie 6y ago
Am I the only one that thinks career is NOT the main thing in my life? I work just enough to not make it impact my life (freelance). Sometimes I work 5 hours a day, others 2, others 8. If it reaches the point where I feel stressed I downgrade immediately or take a day off. I chose programming specifically so I can do this (pays and is flexible enough). Career is there just as something (i) I can keep busy with, (ii) sort of like, and (iii) gives me some income. The rest of the day is what really matters to me and I try to concentrate on that. Hobbies, family, friends etc. That's what really matters to me. To think of it differently imagine if you didn't have to work to make a living; what would you do? I try to ask myself that question and do those things even if sometimes I have to tradeoff. Your deep passions and skills might not be aligned with what society wants and is willing to pay for.
sunstone 6y ago
Perhaps the final word on this goes to Ronald Reagan,"No one ever died from hard work, but why take the chance?".
- mbrodersen 6y ago
  People die every day from stress caused by overwork. In Japan it is so common that they even have a word for it.
loopz 6y ago
If you work harder, and resent people not doing the same work, are you truly successful?
mbrodersen 6y ago
Working hard is a tool. A tool that may or may not be the right tool to use in a given situation. The problem with working hard is that it will burn you out long term. So be careful (and think long term/strategically) before you do it.

107 points by axiomdata316 6y ago

lqet 6y ago

For me, there is a difference between working "hard" and working "deep". Working "hard" means being busy, typically more than 8 hours a day. Example: answering mails, writing some sort of report, dealing with customers, driving a truck, sitting at a cash register all day. Working "deep" means being extremely focused on a challenging thing until it is done. This can be writing code, but also theoretical writing or building something with your hands, even repairing something. After a "hard" day, I am completely exhausted and my mind is blank. After a "deep" day, I am satisfied and euphoric.

jaynetics 6y ago
> After a "hard" day, I am completely exhausted and my mind is blank. After a "deep" day, I am satisfied and euphoric. Maybe this is the reason for the ubiquity of over-engineering and other patterns of over-complication - quite a few people enjoy deep work, but the vast majority of jobs in software development, or writing, or even a fair few in science, turn out to be only hard work when done with optimal efficiency.
- nisa 6y ago
  I disagree. A few days a week of deep work every week can spare you from months of hard work with optimal efficiency :)
  - dasil003 6y ago
    Yes! But only if you think of deep work as holistic problem solving rather than fetishizing some technical aspect (which is hard to avoid for certain flavor of programmerly personality).
  - wpietri 6y ago
    I think this is true, but only if you have sufficient control over the context. I've been very careful about how I choose my jobs. But a lot of developers end up in situations where the truly deep work can only be done in coordination with a bunch of others. Assuming typically bad management, this means that the only thing left is hard work. The first time I saw this pattern was with a place that used their master database as the central integration point for a lot of different code bases. They could have simplified things greatly, but that would have required multiple teams to simultaneously change how they used particular tables in their code. The database was controlled by a central group of database administrators who were very busy and had different incentives than the teams they supported. Getting all these people on board for a change was possible only if it rose to an executive level. Which if it could be achieved at all, required lots of politicking. So in practice, every team had to make up for the garbage architecture through hard work. Which however much they meant well, tended to reinforce the problems.
    - nisa 6y ago
      I wrote this because I'm in a place were we all do almost nothing but "hard work" - most this hard work is the result of bad decisions and every effort to improve has gone stale because everyone is so busy chasing bugs and stupid assumptions in the architecture but it's been the idea of management and while first not realizing what I'm up to I've quickly came to learn that trying to criticize the architecture is met with silence as it's the child of management and co-workers that are there much longer than me. We use ant with a lib-folder - worked on maven in my spare time - nobody cares. Worked on automated tests - nobody is willing to discuss this or do the required changes like fixing Angular timeouts and assigning some unqiue-id's to elements that tests don't break. We misuse the API from the parent project we are building a plugin for - some calls take 3s or more instead of feasible 100ms if correctly implemented. We have a useless PHP addon that constantly breaks for "performance" but it's slower than doing it in Java correctly. Brought all of this up. It's not even a topic.
      - wpietri 6y ago
        That sucks and I'm sorry to hear it. People who study the Challenger accident talk about "normalization of deviance". When things are bad once, people react. But if they're bad regularly, people just get used to it. Bad is the new normal. And that's very hard to change. I think the only times I've seen significant progress had 2 common elements. One is a fucking disaster. Something has to blow up so badly that the grand poobahs feel the pain, and make sure everybody beneath them does too. The other is a bubble of sanity. Maybe it's one team that has a few people like you, enough to say, "Well in this team, for this product, we're going to do it fucking right." And then that team has to show that doing it right produces great results, results that prevent the fucking disaster from ever happening again. So for your sake, I hope you either change your organization or change your organization. You deserve better.
- waynesonfire 6y ago
  yep.. and we see posts of people moving monoliths to microservices and vice-versa as a result. You either find meaning in that or there a salary premium and lots of vacation time for the mindless work. Otherwise, you're probably working "hard"
- _benj 6y ago
  I disagree with this statement, and I'd argue that most people haven't actually experience "deep work" (which btw, the book with that title change the way I see and experience work deeply) Deep work has nothing to do with over-engineering and everything to do with non-distracted focused time doing something that actually releases dopamine and feels good. Deep != complex
wpietri 6y ago
That definitely has resonance for me. When I think back to the times I was putting in a lot of extra hours, I wasn't getting results in proportion to the time spent. Partly because being tired your capacity declines. Partly because, in retrospect, we were all performing hard work as a way of impressing clients, bosses, and each other. And partly out of some phenomenon related to "revenge bedtime procrastination" [1] where I just ran out of self-discipline and would secretly take the breaks I should have been taking anyhow. Some years back I hired movers. Previously my experience moving had been the casual thing with friends and family. We took our time, joked around, took breaks, kept entertained. But these movers were relentless. They never rushed and never seemed stressed, but if there was work to do they were on it until the work was 100% done. And when there wasn't work to do, they were perfectly chill. I keep coming back to the memory as how I want to work. No bullshit, hard work when it's time to work, and really letting go of it at quitting time. It's harder to achieve for software, but I will keep iterating in that direction. [1] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201123-the-psychology-behind-revenge-bedtime-procrastination https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201123-the-psychology...
- antisthenes 6y ago
  > They never rushed and never seemed stressed, but if there was work to do they were on it until the work was 100% done. And when there wasn't work to do, they were perfectly chill. That only works because their job is perfectly defined. The scope is finite and always in sight. I'm not quite convinced this would work for creative work or a project that's somewhat open-ended in features and/or scope. To give an example of this: I can do this type of no-bullshit relentless work when I exercise in a gym. 1.5hrs of a strict routine with a fixed number of reps. And a hard stop after that. Never found the same type of ability for deep work.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    For me, the right approach is what you'll see in Lean processes. You pick the next few clear steps and break them down into small units of work, each of which delivers value. Then you knock them off at a solid pace. We managed that here: https://williampietri.com/writing/2015/the-big-board/ https://williampietri.com/writing/2015/the-big-board/ And that's despite the fact that it was a startup. It helped that my cofounder had 3 kids under the age of 5. He came in on time and he left on time. We all busted ass while we were there, but when we left, we mostly left. One real test for me was when I had to take weeks off to help a sick relative. Even though I was the technical cofounder and had been involved in every bit of the code, I got maybe two calls where they really needed me. It was a sign that we're built a real cross-functional team.
jingw222 6y ago
I'm 99% with this, except that when you work so hard on the challenging deep work and there's no energy left to be able enjoy the glory of the success.
AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
> until it is done This is the key, I think. It's driving a truck vs. delivering goods. Laying stones vs. building a house. Answering emails vs. solving the problem.

Cancan82 6y ago

There are always trade offs in life... so you want to be wealthy and have status at the expense of other things? That CAN be the right answer for some people and they will find meaning in that. It is totally fine to pursue that if your heart tells you that is meaningful. Just make sure your hard work actually moves you towards that goal (working for a paycheck versus working to increase the value of equity in something, for example) But, it is totally fine if you personally prefer to have a quiet family life and spend as much time as you can with your children. If that is what your heart tells you is meaningful - set your life up that way. It’s a personal decision always. Neither is right or wrong. People are different. It’s ok to find something meaningful that others don’t value the same way.

cpursley 6y ago

I have huge respect for employers who've let their staff have this week off (and even through new years). It's great for morale and retention. Plus, it's just the right thing to do.

Bakary 6y ago
That's like respecting the local lord for letting the peasants keep slightly more grain this winter
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  Well, guess what, feudal societies got organized that way in middle ages for a reason, and lords not exploiting their peasants was praiseworthy (despite being the most common way). Once we could organize ourselves in highly productive democratic nation-states, then yes, just being a lord became shameful, but it wasn't an option at the time.
  - Bakary 6y ago
    The first step to reform is to not be so alienated that you praise those who profit the most from the status quo for throwing the occasional breadcrumb. Organizing democratic nation-states first came from people questioning the divine rights of kings. In our era, this would be questioning the divine right of "value creators" and the trickling down.
    - marcosdumay 6y ago
      Hum... Organizing democratic nation-states first came by creating nation-states, what could only be done (and was only done) by the king or people supported by him. Only after that people started thinking about democratizing anything.
      - Bakary 6y ago
        I still don't understand the underlying argument to be honest.

blunte 6y ago

One mistake many of us make (myself included) is making career choices based on money. Looking back, many of the jobs I took were just for the big pay increase. But unsurprisingly, I wasn't happier. Worse, it became harder and harder to leave a job (or leave this IT career) because the idea of financial setback was bigger with each job. By no means am I rich. In fact, other life things erased my financial gains; so I'm left with less time in my life and few achievements or memories (work related) worth remembering. And while family and children are some of the best things in life, they also tend to be in conflict with hard career work and success. Some people pull it off, but most of us don't. My advice is to try to recognize when one's career is no longer fulfilling; save a little money along the way, and pivot hard in search of work/life satisfaction even if it means a big downgrade in income. And start a family ideally after you have explored the world and some of your dreams.

redelbee 6y ago
I never took a job just for the pay increase, but I definitely continued down a career path I knew was the wrong one because of the money. I tried to start multiple companies right out of college and failed at all of them, all while taking any other work I could to pay the bills. Working in a call center was by far the worst of the “other” work I did and it led me to consider getting a “real” job based on my skills and degree. I ended up convincing an advertising agency to hire me and decided to give it my all, despite my misgivings about the industry in general. I worked hard and even enjoyed some of it, and my title/pay/prestige all followed an upward trend as a result. After the first raise I said it would only be another year. Then I got promoted and I decided it would be another year after that. Then I got another raise and a promotion, then we were acquired, then a few more significant yearly raises after that. At some point I tried to convince myself that this was the right path, but I knew it wasn’t. I still wanted to be my own boss and run my own business. Seven years later and it was incredibly difficult to justify leaving all that money. I also hadn’t saved particularly well as I instead grew my lifestyle to match the money. None of it made me happy or gave me satisfaction, and I felt tied down to the job. As a solution my wife and I decided to move back to my hometown and start our own business together, even though we had tried to start another business together right after school. Thankfully this time it worked out, although we still have our disagreements about what the future of the business looks like. My advice to everyone is slightly different: chase the money if the opportunity arises, but don’t change your lifestyle. And keep working on other things on the side if you can. Maybe I wouldn’t have progressed as much in my “real” career had I had other side hustles, but I’m sure it would have been a less painful path than the one I took.

crazypython 6y ago

Cofounding a startup with a significant other you enjoy talking to, working with, and being with could be an interesting way of aligning your work with your family. Paul Graham started YC with his wife who was his cofounder.

hipshaker 6y ago
I personally know of acouple who did this. Seems to have paid off as suggested.
speedgoose 6y ago
That's a good way to divorce too.
- bitexploder 6y ago
  High risk, high reward.
redelbee 6y ago
I am doing this now with my wife. We are aligned on many areas relating to the business but, as you can imagine, we don’t align perfectly all the time. Usually we can work it out but not always. Example: Our company is a small retail business in my hometown. I want it to be more than that and my wife would be happy if we kept things the same, so long as finances allow (they should, barring some unforeseen catastrophe). So we are aligned on nearly every “important” aspect of the work except this one. It’s tough because one of us either has to become aligned with the other’s views, or has to work without that alignment if that’s not possible. I feel very privileged to have this kind of problem as opposed to not being able to pay the bills etc, but it still feels bad at times. I think that’s life though, where you need some of the bad to appreciate the good.
tester756 6y ago
(Family or Friends) + Work? sounds good until it's not I tend to avoid working with people that I know

edwinyzh 6y ago

Someone has no choice but has to work hard, man...

svantana 6y ago

> one of the top five regrets of the dying is "I wish I hadn't worked so hard" One of my pet peeves is this notion that dying regrets is some sort of yardstick for how to live your life. At any age, it's easy to look back and think "why didn't I just...", but life is complex, and actions have unintended consequences. Personally I subscribe to the "que sera sera" philosophy. Control is limited. Life is a rollercoaster, just strap in for the ride.

Throwawayjedi 6y ago
> one of the top five regrets of the dying is ”I wish I hadn’t worked so hard” I look forward to contributing to the reversal of that
patatino 6y ago
Not only people dying are saying that but also people at the age of 60-70. Some of them still working but now their children are adults and they missed too much and regret it.
- mrmonkeyman 6y ago
  Lots of people have worked too little and end their lives in debt with nothing to show for it. This is not a good thing. It does not mean they had excellent quality time with the family (usually not). Sometimes a little hard work would be best, but it is seldom admitted by those who need it the most.
- llaolleh 6y ago
  This reminds me of what my first told me. He was in his 50s and decided not to have children. He said, "I don't get it man. These people, they work all the time. What's the point of having kids when you are never going to spend time with them??"
  - p1esk 6y ago
    You must be in your 70s then. What do you think about working hard?

xyzelement 6y ago

> the problem is that they worked too hard on things that, at the end of the day, weren't as important to them as they thought. It's as simple as that. You have to work on the right stuff, and very often it's a matter of perspective. One angle - if you can look at work as play, then it changes everything. You're engaged in a challenging exercise and looking for ways to take it to the next level while learning a lot in the process. If you can engage that way, with each task being a stepping stone rather than a chore, then it's a totally different mindset. The other thing - it's easy to say "I wish I didn't work as hard" and somehow imagining the more leisurely version of yourself having the same lifestyle, but obviously what we have (eg, financial security for our family) is an outcome of the work we do. It feels to me like "I wish I didn't work as hard" is a lament of a well-off person who somehow doesn't connect their situation to the work. A person who actually sees the direct connection between their hours worked and family safety would never say this. Life is a trade-off and we have roles to play. Sure it's great to see your kid 24/7 but do you want to do that living under the bridge in poverty? There's of course a balance to strike between the two but the acceptable range is actually pretty narrow.

sdevonoes 6y ago

Don't work hard for others (i.e., as an employee). Work hard for yourself and the ones you love (i.e., your own company, your own side project, your family)... for whatever definition of "working hard" you have. Now, if you love your employer, sure work hard for them.

Bakary 6y ago

This story about alignment reminds of past discussions about stress and status. There's the infamous Whitehall study and Sapolsky's research linking perception of status as the driver of stress in workers rather than the effort expended at work. In a sense, people who are aligned have a completely different relationship towards work to the point where it probably can't be considered the same thing. I don't mean that just sociologically, but physically and physiologically in terms of the long term costs to their bodies and minds as well. I may be misremembering the exact argument, but some insightful commenter here once mentioned a while ago that although Hannibal Barca would in all likelihood have had a stressful life, his relationship to that stress would probably be much different from what we imagine due to our perspective as worker bees whose relationship to work isn't defined by autonomy, glory, or decisions that really have an impact. When I see Altman's quote: >It's not entirely clear to me why working hard has become a Bad Thing in certain parts of the US.... I think people who pretend you can be super successful professionally without working most of the time (for some period of your life) are doing a disservice. It strikes me that for a person to be confused by this, they would have to be completely isolated from the working reality of most people. I'm not familiar with Altman's life, but if I had to guess he was never in a position where the long-term connection between effort and gaining autonomy/mastery/meaning was broken.

czep 6y ago

The author makes some thoughtful points, but I'd like to address part of the quote from Sam Altman: > It's not entirely clear to me why working hard has become a Bad Thing in certain parts of the US. I am shocked because this sentiment is entirely clear to me: most people must work hard to survive and their work will likely never be rewarding, financially or personally. Meanwhile, inherited wealth allows a class of people to "work hard" with zero downside risk, all the while claiming they have earned their due. The fact that someone as wise and reflective as Sam Altman cannot understand this is puzzling. He says earlier "I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful." Again, I cannot fathom how one can fail to observe how class privilege bestows automatic success to certain people regardless of the speed at which they move. Trust funds accumulate, there is never concern over making rent or providing food, and they can easily take low-paying internships or found a startup without any personal risk whatsoever. People without this kind of leverage do not have the luxury of seeking "alignment" in their jobs. They do the actual hard work at the firms owned by the warrior class of inherited wealth, and are then admonished for not working hard enough to enrich the owners further.

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dasil003 6y ago
I don't think Sam Altman would consider such a person successful. We all know the stereotype of the trust fund kid who is lazy and ineffectual. There's a lot of emotional baggage around rich people, but if you strip it down to individual situations it's pretty simple. I've worked for people ranging from small business owners scraping out $50k a year all the way up to billionaires. How hard they work has no correlation to the money they have. I don't resent a boss with money, I resent a boss who isn't working as hard as me, and most founders/business owners I've worked for have worked harder than everyone else.
- djrobstep 6y ago
  > I resent a boss who isn't working as hard as me In a modern economy most "business owners" are passive shareholders who literally do nothing for that money. I am a partial business owner of many enormous corporations via my retirement account. I don't do any work for any of them, and yet, they continually send me money. Strange!

mikesabbagh 6y ago

Don't put all your eggs in one basket. I noticed that I work enough to impress my manager, sometimes not much happen in a day and on other days I work extra hours. I do this to make sure my boss is happy. I also work on my side project, and this is what keeps me awake at night because of the excitement and the joy I get. The thing is, you must be really lucky to have daily joy and excitement from 1 source. I think u always need a side project to keep u balanced and dream

egfx 6y ago
I have the exact opposite problem. I have multiple side projects and no job. No one wants to hire me because of my side projects because they’re full scale products.
- mikesabbagh 6y ago
  haha, Just make sure u have a skill that is in demand. I had similar issue, started looking for job postings and saw the skills that pay good. then spend time to learn it as much as possible, then fake it until you make it :)
  - egfx 6y ago
    I’m actually an experienced frontend engineer. This time it’s different. You reach the point where you’re on the outside because you bring too much to the position beyond what the hiring manager is looking for and you become a liability and a risk for a company at that point.
    - gonzo41 6y ago
      Part of me wants you to go on r/cscareerquestions and ask them all honestly about how to sandbag your resume :P.

ensiferum 6y ago

Working some number of hours doesn't necessarily mean working "hard". IMHO it's all about the intensity and effort level required wether it's pjysical or mental. Once you repeatedly reach your boundaries and push there and even beyond are you really putting in "hard work". And that's where it gets uncomfortable. In physical exercise and work on this is felt through lactic acid physical exhaustion muscle soreness etc. office jobs and other non physical activities (for example learning math or a new language) will result in mental tiredness and exhaustion.

georgeplusplus 6y ago

I gave up working hard. I paid for college out of my own pocket and took out student loans. I lived outside the city and paid rent for a very modest apartment with multiple roommates to keep cost low while my friends were living inside the city paying top dollar at luxury apartments. Well looks like I was the dumb one for doing that, college debt will soon be forgave. What’s the point of working hard when there’s no reward?

aaron-santos 6y ago
Have you considered cultivating intrinsic motivation?
- georgeplusplus 6y ago
  I’m not familiar with the term but Motivation is the reason for acting a particular way. Intrinsic is value within the self. Therefor any kind of motivation is intrinsic since motivation is produced by the self so you’ll have to elaborate for me by what you mean.

inoffensivename 6y ago

I'm on a personal mission to reduce the average American working week

AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
Oh, it's easy. Just buy more Chinese goods.
SyzygistSix 6y ago
I am on the same mission. I talk about it with everyone I can. And try to be a good example as well.

bassman9000 6y ago

If you don't work hard, someone will. If you can offer something better in return, good. So it's either working smart, or working hard. And I suspect the people that have achieved the former also do the latter.

mkl95 6y ago

I used to work really hard. I then requested a small raise of my below-market-average salary, and I found out the people in charge of the company have decided to freeze salaries for the time being. I no longer work that hard.

nyghtly 6y ago
When this happened to me at a previous job, I immediately started looking for a new one.

BrandoElFollito 6y ago

I am French and got a top education by French standards (two Grandes Ecoles (the equivalent of Ivy League in the US) and a PhD). I worked really hard to get it, especially to get into the first school due to the completely crazy and unique French system (prépas - two years of suffering taken from your young life). My son who is 14 had very, very average marks last year. He is a very bright and capable boy so I was really dissapointed. This year he is top of his class with an average mark of 18/20. As you can imagine, I am all happy and everything and I told him that I am proud etc. - all the right things a parent says. To what he told me that the marks in the class he is in this year decide which high school he will be admitted in. And he wants to be admitted to the best one. So he obviously started to work hard to get good marks. That lead to the best high school. Where he will be probably average until the marks start to have a meaning again etc. I was initially bemused at this approach, so far from the work ethics his father tried to instill in him. And then, after some thinking, I think he is right (which is a major change in the way I was thinking). Grades are nothing more than a gateway to the future and ultimately do not mean anything more. So "hard work" when it makes sense to do so.

jmchuster 6y ago
So I'll push one step beyond that, and say that it's important to be able to pace your work to achieve the level of result that you want. By the end of my time in college, I could almost tell how much effort I needed to put in for each 0.1 out of 4.0 of my GPA. The mirror, then, is that I also need to instill in my kids a sense of high standards.

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hyko 6y ago

Should you optimise your life based on what you’ll think at the end of it? Do your regrets really matter that much when weighing how to spend your life?

mbrodersen 6y ago
Yes of course. Only at the end of your life can you truly evaluate what was worth doing and what wasn’t.
- hyko 6y ago
  I don’t find this to be a compelling argument. Sure, the old person might be saying “I wish I’d worked less”...it doesn’t follow that working less will actually make you any happier for most of your life. Constructing your life so you’ll be happy on that deathbed seems like a gross misapplication of life’s potential.

philmcp 6y ago

It's has always amazed me that 99% of jobs are for 5 days per week. As someone who has tried to "build something on the side" for years, I've always wanted a job which was contracted for 4 days per week so I could dedicate some time to my side projects, whilst getting some stable income. I'm certainly not rich but I don't need a 5 day salary to survive. I'd much prefer to get paid less and work less but this doesn't seem to be an option I've even went as far as building a website listing jobs with 4-day work weeks: https://www.28hrworkweek.com/ https://www.28hrworkweek.com/ /rant

Sytten 6y ago
I agree 100%, I just signed up on your website. I would go even as far as saying 3-4 days should/will become the norm as time goes on. There is no particular reason we are stuck at 5 days/40 hours except that workers stopped asking for more time off (probably goes with the reduction of union power and globalization since the '80).
nyghtly 6y ago
This is one of the goals that led me to software engineering the first place. Not to secure a job with a good salary, but to secure a job with a good enough salary at 4 days per week. Side note: why are you classifying a 4 day work week as 28 hours? Wouldn't it be 32?
- philmcp 6y ago
  Totally agree with you, I'm also in software partly for this reason In the UK the typical work day is 7 hours (9-5pm with an hour unpaid break). I'll be honest though, I've had a few people ask me this same question, so the name may change pre-launch
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sktrdie 6y ago

Am I the only one that thinks career is NOT the main thing in my life? I work just enough to not make it impact my life (freelance). Sometimes I work 5 hours a day, others 2, others 8. If it reaches the point where I feel stressed I downgrade immediately or take a day off. I chose programming specifically so I can do this (pays and is flexible enough). Career is there just as something (i) I can keep busy with, (ii) sort of like, and (iii) gives me some income. The rest of the day is what really matters to me and I try to concentrate on that. Hobbies, family, friends etc. That's what really matters to me. To think of it differently imagine if you didn't have to work to make a living; what would you do? I try to ask myself that question and do those things even if sometimes I have to tradeoff. Your deep passions and skills might not be aligned with what society wants and is willing to pay for.

sunstone 6y ago

Perhaps the final word on this goes to Ronald Reagan,"No one ever died from hard work, but why take the chance?".

mbrodersen 6y ago
People die every day from stress caused by overwork. In Japan it is so common that they even have a word for it.

loopz 6y ago

If you work harder, and resent people not doing the same work, are you truly successful?

mbrodersen 6y ago

Working hard is a tool. A tool that may or may not be the right tool to use in a given situation. The problem with working hard is that it will burn you out long term. So be careful (and think long term/strategically) before you do it.