15 ms·

Time Millionaires

60 points by ccity88 5y ago

jmkd 5y ago
We are born into a system we didn't choose. We can however choose to embrace it, to reject it or to manipulate it to our own ends if we spot inefficiencies to exploit. This may not seem fair to those who embrace it, but Gavin's point is that the system doesn't present him with a fair choice. We may not agree, but philosophically this seems to be a sound position, especially since the cost of rejecting the system is extremely high.
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  Lord knows the rich manipulate the system as they choose.
- bko 5y ago
  If you go to a store and don't feel the prices are "fair", is it okay to "manipulate" the system by stealing? > We may not agree, but philosophically this seems to be a sound position, especially since the cost of rejecting the system is extremely high. Why doesn't he just work a part time job if he wants more leisure time? He's a software engineer. He could easily make enough to get by with a very light workload without being dishonest with an employer
  - throwaway4aday 5y ago
    It seems a lot of people are filling in blanks left in the article. This is an important quote >And his boss? “My boss is happy with the work I’m doing,” he says. “Or more accurately, the work he thinks I’m doing.” This indicates that Gavin is accomplishing all of the tasks that his employer expects him to accomplish. If he's able to do this between the hours of 8:30am and 11am then how is it different from someone who takes from 9am to 5pm to do the same work? It sounds to me like Gavin has already taken an easier, perhaps lower paying position that is not very demanding on his skills and so he is able to complete all of his assigned tasks in a short amount of time and then play hooky for the rest of the day. If he instead were to work the whole day it's likely he could complete 3 times as many tasks, do you think his employer would willingly pay him 3 times as much though?
    - bko 5y ago
      You're still being dishonest. If someone pays you to work 9-5 and you don't work those hours you're being dishonest and in breach of contract. It's especially true since he goes out of his way to pretend he's working by playing a black screen video to keep his computer on. He can try to negotiate something based on output, but what he's doing is a dick move
- gus_massa 5y ago
  He can opt out of the system and go to the middle of the forest and plow a small field. Most of the good patches are taken, but he can go to another country with less population density. Anyway, I don't expect this solution to consume less time.
vertis 5y ago
A lot of the HN are familiar with balancing work for employers with time clawed back for side projects and startups. We do this a lot more on the level though, by only taking a enough contract work to make ends meet rather than what I can only argue is somewhere between contract violation and fraud. This person is to be despised. Not because they don't want to work, but because they want to cheat the system. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They're making it worse for everyone that would like to work from home rather than a crowded office post-pandemic every time they get caught (or flaunt it in a news article). This article will get pointed at when managers want to bring employees back into the office. If you want a better work-life balance then that's a fair decision to make, but not at the expense of everyone else.
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  I completely agree. The article makes it seem so extreme. There's a way to do this without stealing from a company.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  how did the Guardian get Gavin as a source? Why would he want to reveal his secret to anyone? How did he think to contact someone at the Guardian to say hey should you be writing an article on me? How did he become a software engineer from these other jobs. These other jobs seem like a weird combination to me, how long did he last in them? What does his resume look like that he can get employed. How does someone who likes to shirk off consider getting a job as a software engineer considering the extra hours of interviewing, take home projects etc. you have to do? When and why did he learn to become a software engineer, it was only after he started working as one that he realized he could really shirk off? Finally how did he manage to stay employed when pretty much everywhere nowadays does some sort of standup where everyone sees you had a ticket that was supposed to take 2 hours and then you took a day, and then the next, and then the next. At some point fairly quickly it becomes obvious you real slow.
  - gus_massa 5y ago
    From the article: > When he worked in a call centre, he would mute the phone, rather than answer it. Call center employees are heavily monitored, and have a lot of metrics, like number of subscriptions or whatever is relevant. Color me skeptical.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
manigandham 5y ago
I'm glad to see this large-scale shift in attitudes. Many have realized during this pandemic that decades of work can amount to nothing when you lose your health or wealth in an instant, and all you have to show for it is hours in the office. Time is freedom, pursue and protect it at all costs.
- zh3 5y ago
  "Some people work really hard all their lives, and all they have to show for it at the end is money".
- skrebbel 5y ago
  This article is about someone lying to their team about how much they work, earning top dollar (pound?) but not working more than a few hours a day. How is that a positive shift in attitudes?
  - manigandham 5y ago
    The shift is about prioritizing your time and freedom, not overworking yourself on an endless tasklist that ultimately doesn't matter. I don't agree with the lying but it happens all the time, remote and in-office, as a symptom of clock-watching micromanagement by employers. That needs to go, and employees switching from actually putting in those long unproductive hours to quitting for better conditions is a positive move.
  - bruce343434 5y ago
    Apparently they get enough done to suffice?
    - skrebbel 5y ago
      It's called an abuse of trust. Estimating programming effort is extremely hard, even for people who are about to do the actual work. It's even harder to estimate for your boss. A boss that trusts their team will not blink when something that sounds easy turns out to take long. You're advocating for a culture where everybody's forced to estimate their work and is held accountable when they go over. I thought we all got past that?
bruce343434 5y ago
This seems to be a manifestation of the growing "anti work" movement. I'm wondering if we, in the face of growing inequality, will have a worker's uprising in the somewhat near future, such as a renewed form of communism. Throughout history the power/wealth distribution seems to ebb and flow and perhaps it's time for a correction.
- throwaway4aday 5y ago
  To my mind, it's only anti-work as in it's opposed to the current way we structure employment. We still use systems that were designed to manage manual labour and I think we've known for a long time that this is a bad fit for knowledge work or work that has been highly automated. It breeds a culture of "looking busy" which is a detriment to both the employee and employer. I think we desperately need new paradigms that are better suited to these types of work.
- imtringued 5y ago
  There is no anti work movement. Ignore the shirker. What I predict is that aggregate demand isn't going up exponentially anymore because of the aging population. Why is that a problem? Because productivity is growing exponentially as well. The economists of the early 20th century expected that we will simply work less as the robots do more. The problem with the protestant work ethic is that there is no need for more and more work. If you work a fixed 40 hour work week and your output is growing exponentially your consumption has to grow exponentially as well. This isn't happening so either people spend an increasing amount of money on limited housing or they do increasingly less productive work in the service sector. Lots of people compete for "limited" full time jobs that keep an entire human busy. E.g. 10 people consume as much as 8 people can produce. The obvious solution would be a 32 hour work week but instead 8 people work 40 hours and 2 people work 0 hours. The first 8 will become increasingly competitive to avoid becoming the bottom 2. Of course this is overly simplified. Some people actually consume everything they produce and therefore shouldn't be bound by work hour restrictions. The hustle culture is just the boring result of a prisoners dilemma.
fxtentacle 5y ago
I'm not surprised. I've rejected quite a few job offers over the years because the company had very precise expectations of how much I should work and at what level, but when I asked for a fair compensation of my time, they weaseled out and claimed that it would disturb the balance of salaries within their company. If someone asks me to work at 20% of a fair salary, I have two options: a) laugh at their face and reject the offer or b) accept and only work 20% of the time. I always went with a) because I never had a shortage of work offers. But I can understand why someone who needs the money will choose b). In a way, this is a fight against the immoral behavior of big corporations.
grecy 5y ago
I used to be a Software Engineer, but after only a few years sitting at a desk I realized I wanted time a lot more than I wanted money. So I made a choice and left that life. Since then I've spent 5 years driving through 55 countries (Alaska to Argentina and Around Africa). I've gone on week-long wilderness moose and bison hunting trips near the Arctic Circle, I've played a lot of disc golf, snowboarded many 100 day seasons, hiked for thousands of hours and generally enjoyed a huge amount of "free" time. I've poked lava with a stick, climbed a 20,000ft active volcano, gone skydiving, got lots of SCUBA certificates, had to veer off road not to hit lions and elephants and met all kinds of interesting people all over the world. I've also published a couple of books and achieved a few life goals like speaking on stage at major events, getting published in magazines I highly respect. All of that was only possible because I had the time. Of course, I have way less money than I did before. I've spent 6 years of my adult life living in a tent. I've never owned a new phone (actually I've never really had a phone), no tv, basically never buy anything new at all. I'm also about a thousand times happier than before. We all have a limited number of hours we get to live, and how you spend them is your choice. I find it's most heavily constrained by how you choose to spend money. If you choose to spend less at every opportunity, that means you'll be able to work a lot less. Find ways to find enjoyment and fulfillment that don't cost money - i.e. a walk in the mountains or throwing the Frisbee instead of a day at Disneyland or going to the movies. These days I "work" something like 10-20 hours a week on my own passion projects, which provides enough money for the lifestyle I want to live (for the last 8 years I've earned around $15k-$20k a year, total)
- kubanczyk 5y ago
  What about children, if I'm permitted to ask? While there were many who did exactly this with 0-2 year olds (starting with Tony Halik!), I have trouble imagining this for appoximately 3-14 y.o.?
  - grecy 5y ago
    My brother is doing it now very successfully with a 1 year old and a 4 year old. Kids love spending time with their parents - take them to the park, take them to the beach, walking, playing, being outside. None of those things cost any money. It is simply about being careful how you spend money, because the more you spend, the more you'll have to go to work.
hermitcrab 5y ago
An alternative to doing less of a job you hate is to find a job you like doing. Easier for some people than others, obviously.
known 5y ago
Sounds better than https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori
a_imho 5y ago
minimum wage -> minimum work
- imtringued 5y ago
  True, people's willingness to work tends to correlate with income very well. Today it's the richest members of society that work the most. In my opinion people got it backwards. Hard work doesn't result in high incomes. High incomes result in hard work.
  - a_imho 5y ago
    Hard disagree for all definitions of work I know. Imo nor does not hold for the truly elites (top .1%) neither for the upper middle class (top 10%). Do you mean some millionaire celeb or middle manager is working more than people doing construction?
bojangleslover 5y ago
Give people free money, they will not work. It's just human nature. I put it up there with the law of thermodynamics. I have to actively fight my own lazy tendencies every single day to make sure I don't become Gavin.
sam_lowry_ 5y ago
Along the lines of David Graeber's ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’ in Strike! Magazine http://gesd.free.fr/graeber13.pdf http://gesd.free.fr/graeber13.pdf
hermannj314 5y ago
If you are a 2x or 3x engineer, it makes more sense to work 0.5x or 0.33x hours than to give all your energy to one company. Get a 2nd job before you give one company everything. I recommend you do the same work of the next person on the team and shirk the rest. Any company that despises this practice is trying to get something from you they aren't willing to pay for. I assure you, your company doesn't deliver 3x what it promised in their contracts. If you are salaried, you promise to be available for so many hours a week and do duties as assigned. Perfect. Honor that end of the contract and shirk away. Dont let the capitalists invent a morality to shame you to give them 100% while they are in a meeting with their lawyer on how to incorporate in Luxembourg and strongarm municipalities into giving them handouts.
- gus_massa 5y ago
  This may be difficult to do as an employee, but if you call it "consulting" it may be fine.
mg794613 5y ago
Nice how this article pus together people who want more flexibility in work location with people who hate work and try to work as less as possible. Makes you almost guess where theguardian.com owners stand on this issue.
- jjj123 5y ago
  I think Gavin’s probably an ass but don’t see anything wrong with being anti-work in general. I would be pro work if most work was meaningful, but am generally anti-work because most of it is exploitative and we do far too much of it in the US. I’m not out here stealing from my job like Gavin but my attitude towards work is probably the same as him. Some of us just grin and bear it instead.

60 points by ccity88 5y ago

jmkd 5y ago

We are born into a system we didn't choose. We can however choose to embrace it, to reject it or to manipulate it to our own ends if we spot inefficiencies to exploit. This may not seem fair to those who embrace it, but Gavin's point is that the system doesn't present him with a fair choice. We may not agree, but philosophically this seems to be a sound position, especially since the cost of rejecting the system is extremely high.

nickthemagicman 5y ago
Lord knows the rich manipulate the system as they choose.
bko 5y ago
If you go to a store and don't feel the prices are "fair", is it okay to "manipulate" the system by stealing? > We may not agree, but philosophically this seems to be a sound position, especially since the cost of rejecting the system is extremely high. Why doesn't he just work a part time job if he wants more leisure time? He's a software engineer. He could easily make enough to get by with a very light workload without being dishonest with an employer
- throwaway4aday 5y ago
  It seems a lot of people are filling in blanks left in the article. This is an important quote >And his boss? “My boss is happy with the work I’m doing,” he says. “Or more accurately, the work he thinks I’m doing.” This indicates that Gavin is accomplishing all of the tasks that his employer expects him to accomplish. If he's able to do this between the hours of 8:30am and 11am then how is it different from someone who takes from 9am to 5pm to do the same work? It sounds to me like Gavin has already taken an easier, perhaps lower paying position that is not very demanding on his skills and so he is able to complete all of his assigned tasks in a short amount of time and then play hooky for the rest of the day. If he instead were to work the whole day it's likely he could complete 3 times as many tasks, do you think his employer would willingly pay him 3 times as much though?
  - bko 5y ago
    You're still being dishonest. If someone pays you to work 9-5 and you don't work those hours you're being dishonest and in breach of contract. It's especially true since he goes out of his way to pretend he's working by playing a black screen video to keep his computer on. He can try to negotiate something based on output, but what he's doing is a dick move
gus_massa 5y ago
He can opt out of the system and go to the middle of the forest and plow a small field. Most of the good patches are taken, but he can go to another country with less population density. Anyway, I don't expect this solution to consume less time.

vertis 5y ago

A lot of the HN are familiar with balancing work for employers with time clawed back for side projects and startups. We do this a lot more on the level though, by only taking a enough contract work to make ends meet rather than what I can only argue is somewhere between contract violation and fraud. This person is to be despised. Not because they don't want to work, but because they want to cheat the system. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They're making it worse for everyone that would like to work from home rather than a crowded office post-pandemic every time they get caught (or flaunt it in a news article). This article will get pointed at when managers want to bring employees back into the office. If you want a better work-life balance then that's a fair decision to make, but not at the expense of everyone else.

nickthemagicman 5y ago
I completely agree. The article makes it seem so extreme. There's a way to do this without stealing from a company.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
how did the Guardian get Gavin as a source? Why would he want to reveal his secret to anyone? How did he think to contact someone at the Guardian to say hey should you be writing an article on me? How did he become a software engineer from these other jobs. These other jobs seem like a weird combination to me, how long did he last in them? What does his resume look like that he can get employed. How does someone who likes to shirk off consider getting a job as a software engineer considering the extra hours of interviewing, take home projects etc. you have to do? When and why did he learn to become a software engineer, it was only after he started working as one that he realized he could really shirk off? Finally how did he manage to stay employed when pretty much everywhere nowadays does some sort of standup where everyone sees you had a ticket that was supposed to take 2 hours and then you took a day, and then the next, and then the next. At some point fairly quickly it becomes obvious you real slow.
- gus_massa 5y ago
  From the article: > When he worked in a call centre, he would mute the phone, rather than answer it. Call center employees are heavily monitored, and have a lot of metrics, like number of subscriptions or whatever is relevant. Color me skeptical.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

manigandham 5y ago

I'm glad to see this large-scale shift in attitudes. Many have realized during this pandemic that decades of work can amount to nothing when you lose your health or wealth in an instant, and all you have to show for it is hours in the office. Time is freedom, pursue and protect it at all costs.

zh3 5y ago
"Some people work really hard all their lives, and all they have to show for it at the end is money".
skrebbel 5y ago
This article is about someone lying to their team about how much they work, earning top dollar (pound?) but not working more than a few hours a day. How is that a positive shift in attitudes?
- manigandham 5y ago
  The shift is about prioritizing your time and freedom, not overworking yourself on an endless tasklist that ultimately doesn't matter. I don't agree with the lying but it happens all the time, remote and in-office, as a symptom of clock-watching micromanagement by employers. That needs to go, and employees switching from actually putting in those long unproductive hours to quitting for better conditions is a positive move.
- bruce343434 5y ago
  Apparently they get enough done to suffice?
  - skrebbel 5y ago
    It's called an abuse of trust. Estimating programming effort is extremely hard, even for people who are about to do the actual work. It's even harder to estimate for your boss. A boss that trusts their team will not blink when something that sounds easy turns out to take long. You're advocating for a culture where everybody's forced to estimate their work and is held accountable when they go over. I thought we all got past that?

bruce343434 5y ago

This seems to be a manifestation of the growing "anti work" movement. I'm wondering if we, in the face of growing inequality, will have a worker's uprising in the somewhat near future, such as a renewed form of communism. Throughout history the power/wealth distribution seems to ebb and flow and perhaps it's time for a correction.

throwaway4aday 5y ago
To my mind, it's only anti-work as in it's opposed to the current way we structure employment. We still use systems that were designed to manage manual labour and I think we've known for a long time that this is a bad fit for knowledge work or work that has been highly automated. It breeds a culture of "looking busy" which is a detriment to both the employee and employer. I think we desperately need new paradigms that are better suited to these types of work.
imtringued 5y ago
There is no anti work movement. Ignore the shirker. What I predict is that aggregate demand isn't going up exponentially anymore because of the aging population. Why is that a problem? Because productivity is growing exponentially as well. The economists of the early 20th century expected that we will simply work less as the robots do more. The problem with the protestant work ethic is that there is no need for more and more work. If you work a fixed 40 hour work week and your output is growing exponentially your consumption has to grow exponentially as well. This isn't happening so either people spend an increasing amount of money on limited housing or they do increasingly less productive work in the service sector. Lots of people compete for "limited" full time jobs that keep an entire human busy. E.g. 10 people consume as much as 8 people can produce. The obvious solution would be a 32 hour work week but instead 8 people work 40 hours and 2 people work 0 hours. The first 8 will become increasingly competitive to avoid becoming the bottom 2. Of course this is overly simplified. Some people actually consume everything they produce and therefore shouldn't be bound by work hour restrictions. The hustle culture is just the boring result of a prisoners dilemma.

fxtentacle 5y ago

I'm not surprised. I've rejected quite a few job offers over the years because the company had very precise expectations of how much I should work and at what level, but when I asked for a fair compensation of my time, they weaseled out and claimed that it would disturb the balance of salaries within their company. If someone asks me to work at 20% of a fair salary, I have two options: a) laugh at their face and reject the offer or b) accept and only work 20% of the time. I always went with a) because I never had a shortage of work offers. But I can understand why someone who needs the money will choose b). In a way, this is a fight against the immoral behavior of big corporations.

grecy 5y ago

I used to be a Software Engineer, but after only a few years sitting at a desk I realized I wanted time a lot more than I wanted money. So I made a choice and left that life. Since then I've spent 5 years driving through 55 countries (Alaska to Argentina and Around Africa). I've gone on week-long wilderness moose and bison hunting trips near the Arctic Circle, I've played a lot of disc golf, snowboarded many 100 day seasons, hiked for thousands of hours and generally enjoyed a huge amount of "free" time. I've poked lava with a stick, climbed a 20,000ft active volcano, gone skydiving, got lots of SCUBA certificates, had to veer off road not to hit lions and elephants and met all kinds of interesting people all over the world. I've also published a couple of books and achieved a few life goals like speaking on stage at major events, getting published in magazines I highly respect. All of that was only possible because I had the time. Of course, I have way less money than I did before. I've spent 6 years of my adult life living in a tent. I've never owned a new phone (actually I've never really had a phone), no tv, basically never buy anything new at all. I'm also about a thousand times happier than before. We all have a limited number of hours we get to live, and how you spend them is your choice. I find it's most heavily constrained by how you choose to spend money. If you choose to spend less at every opportunity, that means you'll be able to work a lot less. Find ways to find enjoyment and fulfillment that don't cost money - i.e. a walk in the mountains or throwing the Frisbee instead of a day at Disneyland or going to the movies. These days I "work" something like 10-20 hours a week on my own passion projects, which provides enough money for the lifestyle I want to live (for the last 8 years I've earned around $15k-$20k a year, total)

kubanczyk 5y ago
What about children, if I'm permitted to ask? While there were many who did exactly this with 0-2 year olds (starting with Tony Halik!), I have trouble imagining this for appoximately 3-14 y.o.?
- grecy 5y ago
  My brother is doing it now very successfully with a 1 year old and a 4 year old. Kids love spending time with their parents - take them to the park, take them to the beach, walking, playing, being outside. None of those things cost any money. It is simply about being careful how you spend money, because the more you spend, the more you'll have to go to work.

hermitcrab 5y ago

An alternative to doing less of a job you hate is to find a job you like doing. Easier for some people than others, obviously.

known 5y ago

Sounds better than https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori

a_imho 5y ago

minimum wage -> minimum work

imtringued 5y ago
True, people's willingness to work tends to correlate with income very well. Today it's the richest members of society that work the most. In my opinion people got it backwards. Hard work doesn't result in high incomes. High incomes result in hard work.
- a_imho 5y ago
  Hard disagree for all definitions of work I know. Imo nor does not hold for the truly elites (top .1%) neither for the upper middle class (top 10%). Do you mean some millionaire celeb or middle manager is working more than people doing construction?

bojangleslover 5y ago

Give people free money, they will not work. It's just human nature. I put it up there with the law of thermodynamics. I have to actively fight my own lazy tendencies every single day to make sure I don't become Gavin.

sam_lowry_ 5y ago

Along the lines of David Graeber's ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’ in Strike! Magazine http://gesd.free.fr/graeber13.pdf http://gesd.free.fr/graeber13.pdf

hermannj314 5y ago

If you are a 2x or 3x engineer, it makes more sense to work 0.5x or 0.33x hours than to give all your energy to one company. Get a 2nd job before you give one company everything. I recommend you do the same work of the next person on the team and shirk the rest. Any company that despises this practice is trying to get something from you they aren't willing to pay for. I assure you, your company doesn't deliver 3x what it promised in their contracts. If you are salaried, you promise to be available for so many hours a week and do duties as assigned. Perfect. Honor that end of the contract and shirk away. Dont let the capitalists invent a morality to shame you to give them 100% while they are in a meeting with their lawyer on how to incorporate in Luxembourg and strongarm municipalities into giving them handouts.

gus_massa 5y ago
This may be difficult to do as an employee, but if you call it "consulting" it may be fine.

mg794613 5y ago

Nice how this article pus together people who want more flexibility in work location with people who hate work and try to work as less as possible. Makes you almost guess where theguardian.com owners stand on this issue.

jjj123 5y ago
I think Gavin’s probably an ass but don’t see anything wrong with being anti-work in general. I would be pro work if most work was meaningful, but am generally anti-work because most of it is exploitative and we do far too much of it in the US. I’m not out here stealing from my job like Gavin but my attitude towards work is probably the same as him. Some of us just grin and bear it instead.