6 ms·

It's weird how we don't want to admit we are overworked. Competition is such a horror show. I really disagree with the whole "procrastination" thing. It's norm

by jokoon 5y ago

It's weird how we don't want to admit we are overworked. Competition is such a horror show. I really disagree with the whole "procrastination" thing. It's normal to feel depressed, it's part of nature of being tired, our brains are fragile and require a lot of energy and sleep. I bet that I would generally would be much happier working at a moderate pace in a farm rather than using my brain to do some other complex thing. I went to do some military training for 2 weeks, it was quite difficult and demanding, but in a way, it has the good stuff of a holiday: you're outside, you use your arms and legs, you have no time to use your brain which often demands more energy. Do you really understand how stressful it is for a brain to perform programming? Our bodies are not made to sustain such mental effort. Brains are small but they consume a lot of energy to function.

nzmsv 5y ago
In before the other comments to this effect: - You are weak - Your grandparents had it worse - Think of the people working for minimum wage - Some of us actually love programming so much we will happily sacrifice our health; this choice is morally superior because we say so - I haven't had a vacation in 20 years and neither should you /sarcasm off
- n8cpdx 5y ago
  I really like society as it is. I, as rare as it is, identify as a neoliberal and I generally am invested in how things are. I like to see people working hard, I work hard myself, and aside from wanting a larger safety net, largely value the idea of a competitive market for labor. Those ideas, I suspect much more prevalent on HN than other sites, lead to defensiveness when antiwork or work-critical ideas are shared. Arguments about grandparents and weakness are generally missing the point or intellectually dishonest, and I know because I’ve made those arguments/comments many times. Looking past that defensiveness, I have a hard time arguing that everything above isn’t right; modern work is taxing and when you’re trying to work 8+ (I naturally tend towards 10+) hours a day, stay healthy, and also pursue hobbies and personal development, it is no surprise that people are breaking down. I want to see more serious engagement with efforts to make work more sustainable for people, ideally without limiting burnout. Maybe the right answer is to just do less, but I want to have my cake and eat it too.
  - _moof 5y ago
    > I like to see people working hard, I work hard myself Yeah, see, this right here is the problem. There's this belief that people objecting to current norms and standards around work constitutes "not working hard," which is a non sequitur. In my experience most people want to work. They just don’t want to do it on the terms currently laid out for them--terms that employers like to pretend are inviolable laws of nature, not choices they make and are responsible for.
  - myself248 5y ago
    I'm not anti-work, I'm anti-toil. The industrial revolution was supposed to free humankind from backbreaking labor and usher in an era of comfortable enlightenment. Instead, we got rampant inequality, environmental devastation, sociological manipulation, and the internet of shit. (Whose true effects we won't see until Cranky Bear decides to show us all at once.) And huge numbers of people still toil 50+ hours a week to keep their head barely above water. Work is fine, but the systems surrounding work have robbed us.
    - goatlover 5y ago
      Before the industrial revolution, inequality was far worse and so was the amount of back breaking labor humans and animals performed. It's true we have a larger negative environmental impact now. Part of that is the huge increase in population made possible by the industrial revolution. Some environmental things like pollution inside cities and rivers has gotten better over time in industrialized countries. The internet is a mixed blessing. It offers a lot in addition to the shit. The problem is the expectation that it would usher in a digital utopia instead of just reflecting society as everyone started to move online. I certainly wouldn't want to go back to manual labor, no electricity or indoor plumbing, lack of refrigeration, much more limited options for travel, news and entertainment, and the lack of modern medicine.
  - courtf 5y ago
    Appreciate this comment, thank you. For many years I had a sort of ruthless determination to get ahead and work hard. It mostly helped me back then, as many obstacles then were the sort that could be brute-forced, and it was addictive in a way as well. I could feel myself improving, could see the progress happening etc. I made lots of money for a while, got myself and my husband ahead in life etc. A few things happened that sort of scuttled my motivation. The intrinsic rewards for the hard work I was doing stopped arriving. In order to keep progressing personally, I would need to engage in ever more competitive search for fun/challenging work. The competitive aspect might have excited me in the past, but I had by then been shafted one time too many by petty politics and discrimination to feel much interest in engaging with that aspect of the industry. I could keep doing senior engineer work, mobile/backend whatever, and occasionally find some new topic to excite me, but often spend most of the time rehashing similar ideas, or cleaning up other people's messes. So I burned out, took some time to address my depression and have gotten myself back together mentally, for the most part (some amount of madness is crucial to hold onto). But even now, when I look at new programming things I could work on, I can't help but see them all as simply paths back into a world that has lost its luster, full of people and situations that waste my time and energy. I can still work hard and build good software, but I just don't see why I should when it will inevitably lead me back to a place that almost destroyed me. Maybe that isn't true, maybe I should be better about forgetting the past and not presuming what my new experiences will look like. I'd love to be that foolish again someday, but I just can't afford to take that kind of risk anymore. My temporary solution has been to work on stuff that isn't programming, to become like a beginner again in some other field. Philosophy, political science, history, anthropology, classic literature and others have been great to explore on my own and I've grown from these explorations. So now I'm getting my rewards from new sources. I still have the urge to make money, like a survival instinct, but I'm fortunate to have a decently stable life raft that I can float on for the time being.
laurent92 5y ago
In 2010 I went to prune trees in Australia. Immediately, my depression stopped. Almost as if using the full body made everything better than using only the brain and speaking to a computer all day.
- marttt 5y ago
  +1, I've been an on-and-off brush cutter and tree planter for several years. I can fully confirm this: physical work outdoors does wonders to mental health. The interesting part is that I can be really exhausted from a day in the woods, struggling to somehow get to the car, etc -- but after 7-8 hours of decent sleep, all of this is gone! No muscle pains next morning, no nothing. It is incredible how well our body can handle and cure physical stress. Coping with mental exhaustion or overwork, however, seems to be way harder for me -- to the point of ruining the next day entirely. A deep explanation of this deviation (our abilities for physical recovery vs mental recovery) would be really interesting.
  - myself248 5y ago
    Concur 100%. I've always made sure my work has some physical component. Even if that's just soldering, I need to use my hands and know that something is different tomorrow because I did this work today. The quickest way to crush someone's spirit is to make them feel that their work is for nothing. Making prisoners break rocks in the prison yard, for instance. Or pushing spreadsheets and git commits endlessly, to no tangible change.
    - marttt 5y ago
      > I need to use my hands and know that something is different tomorrow because I did this work today. Mhm, in physical work, you always see a result -- even if it's a mess or failure. You get direct, no-bullshit feedback every single day. Mental work, in contrast, most typically ends in an abstraction: you work all day long and there is a result, but you can't always see it the way you see a planted tree in the forest. Yup, I'm a primitive creature, devastatingly tied to the simplest of my senses: seeing, hearing, touching.
_moof 5y ago
Indeed. It’s amazing to me that in all the conversations about work/life balance, employers never consider the mind-blowingly innovative option of working less. Instead we all get free subscriptions to meditation apps now. Thanks for the stopwatch. Can I go outside now? I left the software industry for several years to do a job that required getting up and moving around, leaving the building, interacting with people... it was tiring, but in a much different way than programming. A much better way, if that makes any sense. It’s difficult to describe. But I’m convinced that office work is poison at the doses we take it.
- LocalH 5y ago
  >Indeed. It’s amazing to me that in all the conversations about work/life balance, employers never consider the mind-blowingly innovative option of working less. That's because the driving factor (at least in capitalist regions) seem to be to extract as much value from everyone while compensating them as little as possible. "Working less" isn't even on these people's radars. If they had their way, they'd own every minute of their employee's lives.
coldtea 5y ago
>It's weird how we don't want to admit we are overworked. Or that evolution works to make big changes in cycles of 1000s of years, and that 6 million years of hominin evolution out in nature in accordance with pre-electricity natural day cycles (and more malleable schedules), are not compatible with the mandatory: (1) ass in the chair, (2) looking at a screen, (3) working with abstract information, (4) 9 to 5, 5 days a week, (5) inside an interior environment (6) with technical lighting" that's been "the norm" for a large part of the population since the 60s... (or with factory-style work, that's been imposed on populations since the 18th century).
- goodpoint 5y ago
  > (4) 9 to 5, 5 days a week, A lot of people work more than 40 hours a week, plus additional time spent learning and so on...
  - coldtea 5y ago
    Which just makes it worse. And then there are commutes and so on to add to that. But I wanted to state the minimum typical requirement, and show it's bad enough already.
jcims 5y ago
IMHO the problem with programming isn't the total stress on the brain, it's that there is very little observable output of all of that effort. I spent some time working with commercial HVAC and some of the problems there were on par with the most difficult technical problems I've worked through in information systems. The difference is that, with HVAC, all of that effort results in an outcome that connects with the limbic system in a way that doubling throughput or halving latency doesn't.
systemvoltage 5y ago
Unpopular opinion: I'll continue to work hard and have an advantage over others (not literally with my coworkers, but generally in my profession). Competition drives me and it fuels everything I do. Without it, I don't want to live anymore. Working and solving problems is extremely fun for me. Even if I am not writing code, fixing things in the house, personal projects, helping others, just doing something is fun and challenging.
- ramphastidae 5y ago
  I don’t think the downvotes are fair here, but I’d just like to mention that this is basically what everyone in the early stages of burnout says … just be careful not to attach so much of your self-image to your work ethic, because over a long enough timeline, you will get screwed over many times unfairly despite working harder and doing things better than everyone else, and that may deeply shock you based on your opinion above.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    I’ve been doing this for 20 years and haven’t faced burnout. Quite peaceful mentally and physically fit. It is precisely not about self image for me. Competition is inherent to human experience. Watching sports wouldn’t be popular otherwise. A world where everyone not competing to be their best would be an extremely depressing place.

by jokoon 5y ago

nzmsv 5y ago

In before the other comments to this effect: - You are weak - Your grandparents had it worse - Think of the people working for minimum wage - Some of us actually love programming so much we will happily sacrifice our health; this choice is morally superior because we say so - I haven't had a vacation in 20 years and neither should you /sarcasm off

n8cpdx 5y ago
I really like society as it is. I, as rare as it is, identify as a neoliberal and I generally am invested in how things are. I like to see people working hard, I work hard myself, and aside from wanting a larger safety net, largely value the idea of a competitive market for labor. Those ideas, I suspect much more prevalent on HN than other sites, lead to defensiveness when antiwork or work-critical ideas are shared. Arguments about grandparents and weakness are generally missing the point or intellectually dishonest, and I know because I’ve made those arguments/comments many times. Looking past that defensiveness, I have a hard time arguing that everything above isn’t right; modern work is taxing and when you’re trying to work 8+ (I naturally tend towards 10+) hours a day, stay healthy, and also pursue hobbies and personal development, it is no surprise that people are breaking down. I want to see more serious engagement with efforts to make work more sustainable for people, ideally without limiting burnout. Maybe the right answer is to just do less, but I want to have my cake and eat it too.
- _moof 5y ago
  > I like to see people working hard, I work hard myself Yeah, see, this right here is the problem. There's this belief that people objecting to current norms and standards around work constitutes "not working hard," which is a non sequitur. In my experience most people want to work. They just don’t want to do it on the terms currently laid out for them--terms that employers like to pretend are inviolable laws of nature, not choices they make and are responsible for.
- myself248 5y ago
  I'm not anti-work, I'm anti-toil. The industrial revolution was supposed to free humankind from backbreaking labor and usher in an era of comfortable enlightenment. Instead, we got rampant inequality, environmental devastation, sociological manipulation, and the internet of shit. (Whose true effects we won't see until Cranky Bear decides to show us all at once.) And huge numbers of people still toil 50+ hours a week to keep their head barely above water. Work is fine, but the systems surrounding work have robbed us.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    Before the industrial revolution, inequality was far worse and so was the amount of back breaking labor humans and animals performed. It's true we have a larger negative environmental impact now. Part of that is the huge increase in population made possible by the industrial revolution. Some environmental things like pollution inside cities and rivers has gotten better over time in industrialized countries. The internet is a mixed blessing. It offers a lot in addition to the shit. The problem is the expectation that it would usher in a digital utopia instead of just reflecting society as everyone started to move online. I certainly wouldn't want to go back to manual labor, no electricity or indoor plumbing, lack of refrigeration, much more limited options for travel, news and entertainment, and the lack of modern medicine.
- courtf 5y ago
  Appreciate this comment, thank you. For many years I had a sort of ruthless determination to get ahead and work hard. It mostly helped me back then, as many obstacles then were the sort that could be brute-forced, and it was addictive in a way as well. I could feel myself improving, could see the progress happening etc. I made lots of money for a while, got myself and my husband ahead in life etc. A few things happened that sort of scuttled my motivation. The intrinsic rewards for the hard work I was doing stopped arriving. In order to keep progressing personally, I would need to engage in ever more competitive search for fun/challenging work. The competitive aspect might have excited me in the past, but I had by then been shafted one time too many by petty politics and discrimination to feel much interest in engaging with that aspect of the industry. I could keep doing senior engineer work, mobile/backend whatever, and occasionally find some new topic to excite me, but often spend most of the time rehashing similar ideas, or cleaning up other people's messes. So I burned out, took some time to address my depression and have gotten myself back together mentally, for the most part (some amount of madness is crucial to hold onto). But even now, when I look at new programming things I could work on, I can't help but see them all as simply paths back into a world that has lost its luster, full of people and situations that waste my time and energy. I can still work hard and build good software, but I just don't see why I should when it will inevitably lead me back to a place that almost destroyed me. Maybe that isn't true, maybe I should be better about forgetting the past and not presuming what my new experiences will look like. I'd love to be that foolish again someday, but I just can't afford to take that kind of risk anymore. My temporary solution has been to work on stuff that isn't programming, to become like a beginner again in some other field. Philosophy, political science, history, anthropology, classic literature and others have been great to explore on my own and I've grown from these explorations. So now I'm getting my rewards from new sources. I still have the urge to make money, like a survival instinct, but I'm fortunate to have a decently stable life raft that I can float on for the time being.

laurent92 5y ago

In 2010 I went to prune trees in Australia. Immediately, my depression stopped. Almost as if using the full body made everything better than using only the brain and speaking to a computer all day.

marttt 5y ago
+1, I've been an on-and-off brush cutter and tree planter for several years. I can fully confirm this: physical work outdoors does wonders to mental health. The interesting part is that I can be really exhausted from a day in the woods, struggling to somehow get to the car, etc -- but after 7-8 hours of decent sleep, all of this is gone! No muscle pains next morning, no nothing. It is incredible how well our body can handle and cure physical stress. Coping with mental exhaustion or overwork, however, seems to be way harder for me -- to the point of ruining the next day entirely. A deep explanation of this deviation (our abilities for physical recovery vs mental recovery) would be really interesting.
- myself248 5y ago
  Concur 100%. I've always made sure my work has some physical component. Even if that's just soldering, I need to use my hands and know that something is different tomorrow because I did this work today. The quickest way to crush someone's spirit is to make them feel that their work is for nothing. Making prisoners break rocks in the prison yard, for instance. Or pushing spreadsheets and git commits endlessly, to no tangible change.
  - marttt 5y ago
    > I need to use my hands and know that something is different tomorrow because I did this work today. Mhm, in physical work, you always see a result -- even if it's a mess or failure. You get direct, no-bullshit feedback every single day. Mental work, in contrast, most typically ends in an abstraction: you work all day long and there is a result, but you can't always see it the way you see a planted tree in the forest. Yup, I'm a primitive creature, devastatingly tied to the simplest of my senses: seeing, hearing, touching.

_moof 5y ago

Indeed. It’s amazing to me that in all the conversations about work/life balance, employers never consider the mind-blowingly innovative option of working less. Instead we all get free subscriptions to meditation apps now. Thanks for the stopwatch. Can I go outside now? I left the software industry for several years to do a job that required getting up and moving around, leaving the building, interacting with people... it was tiring, but in a much different way than programming. A much better way, if that makes any sense. It’s difficult to describe. But I’m convinced that office work is poison at the doses we take it.

LocalH 5y ago
>Indeed. It’s amazing to me that in all the conversations about work/life balance, employers never consider the mind-blowingly innovative option of working less. That's because the driving factor (at least in capitalist regions) seem to be to extract as much value from everyone while compensating them as little as possible. "Working less" isn't even on these people's radars. If they had their way, they'd own every minute of their employee's lives.

coldtea 5y ago

>It's weird how we don't want to admit we are overworked. Or that evolution works to make big changes in cycles of 1000s of years, and that 6 million years of hominin evolution out in nature in accordance with pre-electricity natural day cycles (and more malleable schedules), are not compatible with the mandatory: (1) ass in the chair, (2) looking at a screen, (3) working with abstract information, (4) 9 to 5, 5 days a week, (5) inside an interior environment (6) with technical lighting" that's been "the norm" for a large part of the population since the 60s... (or with factory-style work, that's been imposed on populations since the 18th century).

goodpoint 5y ago
> (4) 9 to 5, 5 days a week, A lot of people work more than 40 hours a week, plus additional time spent learning and so on...
- coldtea 5y ago
  Which just makes it worse. And then there are commutes and so on to add to that. But I wanted to state the minimum typical requirement, and show it's bad enough already.

jcims 5y ago

IMHO the problem with programming isn't the total stress on the brain, it's that there is very little observable output of all of that effort. I spent some time working with commercial HVAC and some of the problems there were on par with the most difficult technical problems I've worked through in information systems. The difference is that, with HVAC, all of that effort results in an outcome that connects with the limbic system in a way that doubling throughput or halving latency doesn't.

systemvoltage 5y ago

Unpopular opinion: I'll continue to work hard and have an advantage over others (not literally with my coworkers, but generally in my profession). Competition drives me and it fuels everything I do. Without it, I don't want to live anymore. Working and solving problems is extremely fun for me. Even if I am not writing code, fixing things in the house, personal projects, helping others, just doing something is fun and challenging.

ramphastidae 5y ago
I don’t think the downvotes are fair here, but I’d just like to mention that this is basically what everyone in the early stages of burnout says … just be careful not to attach so much of your self-image to your work ethic, because over a long enough timeline, you will get screwed over many times unfairly despite working harder and doing things better than everyone else, and that may deeply shock you based on your opinion above.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  I’ve been doing this for 20 years and haven’t faced burnout. Quite peaceful mentally and physically fit. It is precisely not about self image for me. Competition is inherent to human experience. Watching sports wouldn’t be popular otherwise. A world where everyone not competing to be their best would be an extremely depressing place.