36 ms·

People don't work as much as they say

• partido3619463 5y ago
  4 hours a day of real work seems low, but certainly not 40 hours a week.
  • Daishiman 5y ago
    What do you define as "real" work? In most productive days of coding I get 4/5 "real" hours of focused, concentrated work. Very, very rarely would I get more than 6 without finishing the day mentally exhausted. Meetings? Doing more than two back-to-back, hour-long meetings is an ordeal if you want a productive meeting. You can sit there and stare into space for far longer, or just keep minimum attention. But intelligent debate with multiple individuals for longer than that is hard to pull off, especially if you also want to get the productive work as mentioned above. Meetings of the "just being present" and responding various, random emails that need little care? Feel free to spend 10 hours a day on those, for sure.
    • emptysongglass 5y ago
      4 to 5 hours of real, focused, concentrated work is impressive. I take a long time to recover from a meeting and they're usually in the middle of my day, almost every work day, and often there's more than one. They're also exhausting so I'll have lost some vibrancy by the time I do get back in the flow of actual work.
      • Daishiman 5y ago
        4 to 5 hours is achievable and easy if you are aligned with your work and team and find it energizing. With a bad team, bad money, or bad product, downright near impossible to care enough for it.
        • emptysongglass 5y ago
          Meetings themselves are the problem and what I'm suggesting are the problem. I don't think team alignment is related to the disruptive havoc caused by meetings. We have a lot of evidence that it takes a long time for a mind to refocus on a task once disturbed. I say it's impressive you can crank out that level of focused work because I can't get a long stretch of uninterrupted time that you can. Maybe you have fewer meetings?
          • Daishiman 5y ago
            It's two 2-hour work blocks a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Yes, you have to aggressively block other activities. Working in small teams with similar goals and prescheduled sync points has helped a lot.
    • jakey_bakey 5y ago
      But it's like marketing though. You're productive for 50% of the time, but you can't know which 50%. Scheduling one's self 4-day work weeks seems great in theory but you can't force the flow state to happen
  • thunderbong 5y ago
    As a programmer, I've always felt that, on an average, 4 hours of actual work gets done by me on a daily basis. This does not include meetings, communication etc. This is essentially the time spent towards a tangible deliverable.
    • MattPalmer1086 5y ago
      It's still work, even if it's not the work you want to be doing.
• ivraatiems 5y ago
  I can quibble with the specific hours, but this resonates a lot with me. My average day looks something like: Hour 0-0.5: Get ready for the workday - messages, email, write standup report, take a shower. Hour 0.5-1: standup meeting + offline meetings. Hour 1-2: meetings or brain work Hour 2-3: mealtime, active availability Hour 3-5: active availability, light work, meetings Hour 5-7: brain work (I do my best brain work at the end of the day typcially) I'd be curious what others schedules look like.
  • zriha 5y ago
    I have the similar schedule like you do. I even plan a short 0.5 - 1h training between morning and lunch. And like you, I am more productive in the afternoon, at the end of the day.
  • brabel 5y ago
    Let me try as I think I am almost your opposite. Hour 0-0.5: get back to whatever I left the previous day... most productive 0.5 hour of the day with a fresh mind. Hour 0.5-1.5: meetings, status updates, syncing with others... Hour 1.5-3.0: more intense coding. May be bug hunting, new feature, more testing... Hour 3.0-4.0: lunch. Hour 4.0-5.0: typically helping other team members or discussing bugs/new features etc. Or doing "research", keeping up-to-date reading whatever (software related), including HN. Hour 5.0-5.5: coffee break, thinking about personal stuff usually, have a little snack or something. Hour 5.5-7.0: more coding. Much lower productivity though, typically leave things to finish in the 0.5 hour I am most productive the next day. Might read news and non-work related things to give my brain a little break every now and then.
    • ivraatiems 5y ago
      Interesting! Thank you for responding. What's striking to me is that if we break it down, it seems like for you by category it'd be: Hard task/"brain" time: 2-3.5 hours depending on that last section Light task time (including wakeup time): 2-3 hours "Active availability" time: ~1 hour? Personal time: 1.5 hours and for me by category it'd be: Hard task/"brain" time: ~2.5 hours depending on my after-lunch section Light task time (including wakeup time): 3 hours "Active availability" but not working time: 1 hour Personal time: 1 hour So even though it's distributed differently, the amount of time we spend on the types of tasks are pretty similar.
• Avatars 5y ago
  My uncle used to work for McDonnell Douglas and regaled me with stories of people standing around or hanging out in the parking lot, basically getting payed to do jack all. At the time he told me this, almost 40 yrs ago now, they were in a slump and were laying off. Nepotism in the hiring practice was prevalent. I would have fired him, personally. Needless to say one can expect most "industries" to be very similar.
• skybrian 5y ago
  Maybe pair programming doesn't look so bad after all?
  • f6v 5y ago
    Pair programming was definitely more productive for me. But it’s also exhausting to a point where I can’t do more than 3 days in a row.
  • jokethrowaway 5y ago
    I don't see how you can reach this conclusion. You have peer pressure to keep working longer, you get little done and you're wasting your brain power. It makes sense if someone is junior and learning from the other. Otherwise it's just an employers' tool to get people to squeeze in more hours of half-assed work (and then work more alone to actually get something done to have something to show for). Async PRs reviews are way more efficient and less taxing on people.
    • skybrian 5y ago
      When I did it (a long time ago) we worked for seven hours or so and went home tired but feeling like we actually accomplished a full day of work. Peer pressure was more about keeping to the normal schedule and taking breaks than putting in more hours. But the startup died due to not paying enough attention to business issues. Programming productivity isn't everything. Then I went to Google and my productivity got a lot worse, for many reasons but waiting on code reviews was one. To some extent I could compensate by making unrelated changes in parallel, or even working on a stack of patches and fixing up later patches when earlier ones needed to change. It felt like it was fighting a system that wanted to slow me down, though.
• register 5y ago
  I worked really too much today. I had 10 meetings!!
  • andrei_says_ 5y ago
    Somehow I count meetings as … meetings and not work. More like pauses between productive work efforts. Same with communication. Only when I produce something tangible I feel that I’m working. I know this is kind of silly but I feel like sitting in a meeting and getting paid is like cheating. Or replying to an email. In no way I’m suggesting that time and attention are not valuable - it’s just that these activities feel trivially easy compared to the cognitive load of coding.
    • watwut 5y ago
      Write down notes from meeting for yourself and try to remember what was said - the tl;Dr. It will make you feel more like working. But also, I found that actually useful in the long term. I did that as experiment and then then some months later I found myself using all that stuff. Not everything was useful, but a good chunk of it was.
    • f6v 5y ago
      > I know this is kind of silly but I feel like sitting in a meeting and getting paid is like cheating. Or replying to an email. I felt disturbance in the force. As if all the product managers in the world screamed at the same time.
• lordnacho 5y ago
  My view is as a coder if there is real hard work needed, essentially debugging something vexing or a large re-architecting, it needs to be done in an undisturbed 3 hour window, of which I can realistically fit two in a day. Minor coding tasks like documenting and preparing a commit can be done in any amount of time, but crucially it is time that is allowed to be broken up by meals or meetings. Casual skimming over the code for ideas is also in this category, eg scanning for random TODOs that can be checked off. I try to gather all my regular calls on the same day, that way I get it out of the way with the least amount of context switching.
  • alex952 5y ago
    2 3 hour long windows in a day? That’s impressive. Most weeks I can fit one of those in. Workings consultancy is not the best for focus work.
    • lordnacho 5y ago
      I don't normally have two long things to do in a day, I just have a max capacity of 2x hard things, if that day is not broken up by something. Long term doing 2 hard things a day for a whole week would probably not be sustainable, either you run out of motivation or you run out of hard tasks. One of the things you do under "hard tasks" is simplify your code so that subsequent tasks fall under "easy tasks". You trade your "must not disturb" time for "can be stopped and started".
• beebeepka 5y ago
  Eh, I know it's just an expression but I automatically distrust awfully presumptuous stuff like "as much as you think". The author doesn't have the slightest idea what I think, yet he proclaims to know better and tries to correct me. Rant aside, it is my experience that the vast majority of people are useless bums. Pretty sure that's nurture as opposed to nature, though. If it weren't learned behaviour, people wouldn't be performing all these rituals in the hopes of obscuring their very uselessness. That said, I manage 4-6 productive hours a day. Used to be half that at the start of my dev career. Sometimes I do 10, even 12 hours if I have the energy and motivation.
  • phist_mcgee 5y ago
  • acosmism 5y ago
    I think you should push for 14 hours like the rest of us
• morsch 5y ago
  "The details of this are somewhat career specific, and my experience is mostly with a mix of software development, writing, coaching, and consulting." Somewhat career specific is a colossal understatement.
  • joe-collins 5y ago
    I think every service industry worker is laughing their ass off at this post. That is, if they can get past the tears and fury at the injustice of the world that allowed this post to exist.
    • stavros 5y ago
      I don't share your sarcasm. Working with your body and working with your mind aren't that different, it's just that the mind gets tired quicker. It's very hard to be doing concentrated thinking for 6 hours straight.
      • mrweasel 5y ago
        Exactly, but if it has to be an us vs. them kinda thing, I’d like to throw in: people who’re working with their body at least have the luxury of being able to remove themselfs from work when they get home. Leaving work as a developer, researcher, whatever, means that your stupid brain brings problem home and distracts you when you should spend time with your family.
        • tardigr8 5y ago
          I envy people who enjoy and make a living from social interaction or physical work. I may be wrong, but looking from the outside it looks to me like they are improving themselves as a person and earning a living at the same time. I need to set aside time to improve my social and physical well being, outside of working time. Don’t get me wrong I work with interesting people that I love, but we don’t improve our social abilities together
• nnoitra 5y ago
  Is this true for everyone or is this a special specimen "Most days I can do somewhere between one and two hours of hard thinky work."? 5 - 10 hours of deep work per week required to get a Phd from Imperial. That's impressive.
  • f6v 5y ago
    PhD studies can be very different. Wet-lab students who do experiments can spend 12 hours a day in a lab cutting mice. But that’s somewhat mechanical work where you repeat the protocol. PhD students are also less experienced and spend a lot of time making mistakes and learning. When I got my fist full-time developer job I spent day and night working as well. After 5-7 years, I was something like the author because I could do non-trivial tasks quickly. It felt like the code was writing itself in the back of my mind while I was drinking coffee or browsing HN.
  • ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    Like the author says, I think this is pretty normal. Deep work in a flow state is easily 10x more productive than when you're messing around. 10hrs of deep work a week is also a significant amount of time. I doubt most people spend that much time doing deep work each week.
  • SaberTail 5y ago
    My PhD, in physics, was a mix. When I was building the physical apparatus itself and plumbing it up, I was working 70 hour weeks because it was more or less mindless physical labor. When I was writing software to operate the experiment or analyze data, I settled into more of a few hours a day of deep work pattern. Part of that might be the nature of science; after I implemented an idea, it might be hours before the experiment fully responded to my changes or the computers finished crunching numbers. And I needed that feedback to inform what I'd do next. Writing my dissertation was somewhere in the middle. The actual writing required focus, but a lot of it was tracking down references or making figures, which required some thought but not too deep. That's probably the closest I came to a 40 hour week. Based on other replies, it sounds like other people have experienced similar relationships of the nature of the work to their capacity to do it.
• mkl95 5y ago
  I spend a significant part of my day working synchronously (engineering / product / etc. meetings, mandatory unplanned calls to fix some crappy system that is failing in production...) as opposed to working asynchronously (reviewing someone else's PR while they work on something else, reading some spec, etc.). I work as much as it seems, but I do it in a wildly inefficient way due to my employer's work-hard-not-smart culture. The fact we work 50 hour weeks to do things we could do in 35-40 is hilarious and infuriating at the same time.
  • mbrodersen 5y ago
    Seriously find a better job.
  • basq 5y ago
    Hey, at least you have a paycheck. There are tons of people out there who work 50-hour weeks (artists, musicians) who get less than a decimal of that pay, none of the benefits, and all of the stress.
    • eru 5y ago
      Artists and musicians specifically get a lot of social prestige. Similarly for actors. That's part of why many people are willing to have a go at these careers despite the well-known abysmal earning expectations. It's just a lot of very willing supply and rather limited demand that depresses monetary earnings for labour in these sectors. Compare also pay and conditions for programmers in the games industry vs those working on in-house corporate CRUD applications.
      • Broken_Hippo 5y ago
        Artists and musicians specifically get a lot of social prestige. Similarly for actors. No, they - in general - do not. A few get this. A few more lucky folks make a living off of it. In the case of an artist, you are probably doing commissions and spend a lot of time on social media, in the post office, and such things just to tread water. Comic artists and animators you've never heard of go about their day in invisibility while they destroy their wrists, elbows, and shoulders for your enjoyment. (a number of these are contract jobs, too, which means no benefits). Most musicians are pretty local or fly under the radar. Band teachers are usually musicians, and i'm pretty sure there isn't a lot of prestige there. Lots of "musicians" are working in such jobs, many are touring local circuits, picking music for commercials, and things like that. The most common sort of artist or musician, though, is the unknown one. There are way more artists and musicians than we have space for in our minds. I'm not sure what sort of prestige you think folks are getting. Even worse, I'm not sure why that would be a substitute for decent pay. Supply and demand obviously aren't the constraints on wages people make them out to be.
• jakey_bakey 5y ago
  I feel this. I am automatically suspicious of anyone who has to drop the number of hours they worked a certain day, or frequently flexes that they are still working at a late hour. Why do you need us to know?
  • NicoJuicy 5y ago
    It explains why I'm up later.
• hyldmo 5y ago
  I have an extension in VS Code that tracks time spent coding, and sends me a weekly summary. While I’m unsure how accurate the time algorithm is, on my “home office with no meetings” days it says I get around 5 hours of code time, which sounds about accurate. Interestingly it claims the the global average is 52 minutes, which I can definitely get on days with many interruptions.
  • nunodonato 5y ago
    Can you share that?
    • cercatrova 5y ago
      I believe it's this one, searching online https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=softwaredotcom.swdc-vscode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=software...
  • mejutoco 5y ago
    How do you measure if you are coding in the extension? I wonder if it counts activity (keystroke, mouse) or uf having the window focused (while grabbing a quick coffee, for instance) counts.
    • capableweb 5y ago
      I'm not the parent you're replying to, but get similar stats on the average. I use RescueTime together with Neovim, and it works by activity. So if I leave for a coffee it stops logging the time I spend, and the window needs to be in focus. I also have the browser extensions setup, as to separate the time spent in editor compared to in browsers. The git repository is also logged, so I can see how much time is spent with what repository (normally use multiple repos at the same time). Not affiliated with RescueTime in any way, just a happy user.
• tardigr8 5y ago
  Working 80 hours a week is unhealthy and a bad idea. I don’t think there is any solid argument against that. Until recently I was a dev manager for about 20 devs (not all direct). I did work 80 hours a week, still do. I know I am unhealthy. I don’t like doing things that are not technical. I get uncomfortable and bored quickly. My work gives me complex tech problems constantly. So I feel better working. But I attribute this to an unhealthy grip on life that stemmed from somewhere. All my devs wanted to also work 80 hours a week. I had to keep on top of their own hours to tell them to go home and find a girlfriend. DONT work crazy hours because someone else in your sphere is doing it. Only do it if you can honestly say you are unhealthily obsessed with it and can’t actually have a normal life.
  • peakaboo 5y ago
    Kudos on the self insight there buddy. Not everyone bothers to self reflect about why they do the things they do. But they should.
  • underwater 5y ago
    80 hours a week is the equivalent of 8am to 10pm six days a week. That sounds completely unrealistic. Either the work is trivial, you're destroying your health, or you're over estimating the time you're actually spending.
    • tluyben2 5y ago
      I would not call it trivial, but I found that, as a manager, you often have to be a psychologist and spend very large amounts of your time listening to the more personal issues of your colleagues. When I was manager over 400 people (there were managers between me and them but I was ‘the top level’), I spent 80+ hours a week doing my work; 60+ was easily absorbed by motivating people and listening to their stories about imminent divorces, dying parents, spouses or kids, and so on. Then 20 or so hours to do my actual work. It is not for me… I do not want such a position again. I did 80+ hours as well when I was just writing code and managing servers; about 40/60 respectively. It was more than 80 hours and I missed things, but I was young and made up for it. I would not want to do that again either.
• int0x80 5y ago
  I spend most of my time thinking what needs to be done, and how to do it. Then I make the simplest possible prototype/POC and re-check my ideas. Then I think about use cases (test cases, actually) and keep iterating making small modifications (usually) to the code and finding more edge cases. My point is, the actual amount of time actually doing code-writing is very small, most time is spent figuring things out (thinking on the high level design/algorithm), writing out the ideas as code is usually the least part of the work. Finally I do cleanups/refactor, which are quite simple to do, but take non trivial amounts of time, including writting more documentation (e.g. code comments and descriptions for the PR for reviewers and for later reference).
• sdze 5y ago
  I am now in 2 projects in parallel and most of the work time is consumed by meetings. Meetings eat up so much energy that I have none left to utilize the time-slots in between meetings to get things done.
  • jaggederest 5y ago
    Yeah mentally I estimate the dead time created around meetings as 2x the length of the actual meeting. A "quick checkin" actually kills an hour, an all-hands meeting may well write off the entire day.
• globular-toast 5y ago
  Some people do work a solid 8 hours or whatever per day. Mostly those in more manual jobs as they basically sell their bodies. But in our line of work it's not quite like that. I both work less than 8 hours a day, or more, depending on how you define "work". The thing is, I'm not paid for my body or my labour. I'm paid for my mind. My employer pays for me to engage myself with the business. My mind never fully disengages. When I start work on Monday I don't "start again" like a rebooted machine. In addition, the mind never fully switches off, even when sleeping. I'll often crack a problem in my sleep and realise it during my morning cleaning cycle. So no, I might not "work" as much as you think I should, but if you find that surprising then I'm probably far more engaged than you would imagine too. There are, of course, those who don't work much and aren't as fully engaged. That will always happen. It's important to measure the value people are delivering (and help them improve) but it can't be done using any single metric and certainly not "hours worked".
• saurik 5y ago
  > Most days I can do somewhere between one and two hours of hard thinky work. Wow. Once I start doing this kind of work I both have a hard time stopping (as I find working on such problems addictive, both in good ways and in bad) and feel like it takes at least a couple hours of loading state into my brain before I could even begin to be working "at speed" on a hard problem, which means I actively try to schedule my life such that I either can spend a solid zero hours in a day working on hard mental tasks ;P or make myself ready to work until dawn (at which point I simply feel bad I am still awake sometimes more than truly feel like I am ready to stop).
  • ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    I think I work pretty much the same. Usually get next to nothing done, or am extremely productive for most/all of the day.
  • scrollaway 5y ago
    I'm in the same boat as you, and yet my hours look like the post author's. One scenario that leads to this is that I simply have other shit to do, and need to hard stop my focus on something that I far too often want to keep working on. This is partly a delegation problem (I'm trying to free up time by delegating certain things), and partly just a problem of growing up: What interrupts me might sometimes be other work or menial tasks, but it's often also just social life or having to go to to the ice rink. I'm super happy with my current work-life balance, though a bit unsatisfied at how often I have to context switch. I wish I could just schedule as well as you do, unfortunately when it comes to social engagements for example I'm often more restricted...
  • bregma 5y ago
    That's great until a PM schedules a quick meeting to make sure your progress is tracking their spreadsheet line. And there are 4 or 5 PMs. You end up with your days split into 6 or 7 segments between quick standups and triage meetings and status meetings and emergency customer calls where you're brought in "just in case" and because it takes at least a half hour of concentration just to get back into the zone, your week has passed without you spending any productive time doing hard thinky work. And you can't even explain at the PM's next quick progress meeting that you're behind because her quick status meeting has set you back a week, because to her reporting status at a meeting of 15 people is how things progress.
• vorhemus 5y ago
  I don't think people who say they work 14 hours a day are lying. They just count in everything that is somehow related to their job, like reading about their business in the newspaper or thinking about work in the shower. And that's the crux of the matter, in jobs that don't have clearly assigned shifts or where attendance is measured, the boundaries between work and leisure become blurred. And then again, comparisons of who works how long are completely useless.
  • thrown_22 5y ago
    I can double my work if I start responding to all the pointless emails I get in my mail box. I have more important things to do, like doing actual work.
  • tamrix 5y ago
    Almost anyone that brags to others about how many hours they work typically count checking their emails while watching TV as work.
    • mbrodersen 5y ago
      I never understood people who bragged about working long hours. Why on earth do they believe that working long hours is something to be admired? I care about what people achieve. Not how many hours they spend achieving it. People can be super busy, spinning their wheels, without achieving much. I see that all the time. I call it “being incompetent”. Not something to be proud of.
    • shiftpgdn 5y ago
      That is working though.
      • ghiotion 5y ago
        Exactly. I spent a decade plus in a job where emails came in routinely until 9-10 at night and often the CEO would send out something on the weekend. Even if I wasn't required to respond or the response was short, this is _absolutely_ work. Over and above that, spending a decade being literally unable to get away from work in that way is like arsenic poisoning. It was like "I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm dead." It's insidious and terrible.
• orzig 5y ago
  Valuable prospective, but (as is the gist of half my comments here): People are even more different than you think. RescueTime wrote a similar post, but +100 data: https://rescuetime.wpengine.com/work-life-balance-study-2019/ https://rescuetime.wpengine.com/work-life-balance-study-2019... Look at the second histogram. The average is roughly aligned with OP’s summary, but there is huge variance. These comments have already devolved into people telling each other they are lying, or about to burn out - all I ask is humility in the face of our messy shared reality. Thank you for listening to my TED Talk, I guess
  • jvanderbot 5y ago
    I think that you are right to point out the large variance, but you could have also have said that the 90th percentile was approx 7 hrs of work per workday, and 75th was probably 5-6
  • Noumenon72 5y ago
    And that's a self-selected group of people who have enough trouble focusing on work that they went to find an app to monitor whether they're focusing.
  • KnobbleMcKnees 5y ago
    I think you're completely right, however I'd love to see a graph of average work time claims on HN plotted against this. There's no denying that there are far more people claiming they work 60-80 hour weeks than would collate with the data that you and OP have provided. I think these people are generally overworked but are also poor assessors of their own performance, taking worst cases as averages and calling a day in which you finish at 5pm but answer a slack message at 9pm, a 12 hour day. Not to be too sardonic, but: I'm on call frequently but I don't tell people I've been working for 24 hours because I got a page at midnight, even if it can feel a bit like that by the end of the next day.
    • tardigr8 5y ago
      We tracked work hours using a custom desktop app in our team (made by the team over several iterations to make it not burdensome), and insisted that devs log time against the downtime category (only during work hours of course). Some of the more senior devs were very honest about their downtime. Some days they would log 4 out of 8 hours downtime. Usually after a strenuous week or late night deploy. Examples of this are shooting the breeze for an hour, going on a wiki binge etc.. We were all surprised by the actual numbers coming through and the numbers in the various categories. Emails and project admin would average 20% of total team time. “Firefighting” which was attending to unscheduled troubleshooting was 15%. If you don’t believe someone who says they work X hours per week, you are probably right. We found there is a lot of minutiae, and a lot of down time when tired. Which we didn’t realize until we spent the time to log it. If you do work long hours, I can heartily recommend implementing an easy time tracking system for yourself with categories. From our experience, it reduced the hours you worked, forced you to get some sleep and exercise, and made you more productive in the hours you do work.
• jokethrowaway 5y ago
  I think it varies by person a lot but how little people work in general affect people expectations in the workforce. Especially in a market where firing people is hard (because hiring them is expensive) there is going to be a certain leniency towards performance. When I work for myself I can literally code all day, if I'm working for a client I'll work as much as it's reasonable to hit deliverables, keep the managers happy and keep a good reputation in the company. My prices when working per projects were always too cheap because I found features to be simple to implement; I then switched to what's expected in the industry and charge per day and I make way more, working way less. Similarly, I know people who can work all day and some who can't and will burn out if they do. The 10x developers exist, but you won't find them at big corp making bank (or if you find them, they'll likely slack like everyone else), they'll be building their own startups and making bank with that. We're all wired differently.
• altacc 5y ago
  I'd add a 4th point: accept a wider definition of work when counting your hours. A lot of us are lucky enough to have knowledge based jobs, which require mental tasks of solution design and decision making that are hard to quantify. I regularly get ideas when walking, cooking, driving, etc... and then spend time thinking through a work problem and taking notes. Several times a day I go for a short walk to clear my head of distractions and regain focus, That would be hard to quantify to a theoretical bad manager who wanted you to count hours but for many it is an essential part of knowledge work.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• jug 5y ago
  While this blog post and reading about his opinions may be interesting, ultimately it's an opinion piece and I strongly dislike when people write opinion pieces and make it sound like they did a study in the title! For all we know, he may be completely wrong! Maybe he is the outlier and people generally, in fact do perform more "focused work" than two hours a day... Maybe he isn't overly enthusiastic about his work place, maybe he is in a remote work environment where he isn't inspired to work more efficiently through his peers. Maybe there is a little of everything and he's just trying to warrant this one hour focused work days through "insights". The reason I'm questioning this is because I have procastrination issues at work and take several short mental breaks, but even I, once I get going and in "the zone" (often later in the work day), I can often do focused work at least twice as long as him. He really gives nothing to go by as for his bold title, which I ask why it's not at least the more undeniably accurate: "I don't work as much as you think".
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    The OP does mention "being in the zone" as a possibility. He just says that it's rare, inherently not applicable to many kinds of work, and requires optimal conditions that generally don't apply. It's very much the exception, not the rule.
• Klaster_1 5y ago
  The article resonated with my experience as as software developer. At my first place, a small outsourcing shop, employees were required to log daily activities so hours per day roughly fit to 8 and 40 per week. From the beginning and unlike most of coworkers, I measured my time precisely with https://github.com/Klaster1/timer-5 https://github.com/Klaster1/timer-5 and soon understood that doing 8 hours per day doesn't happen much and often involves staying late, so instead I simply adjusted the reported numbers to look plausible. In four years, I only received positive feedback on my productivity. What was the management thinking, I have no idea, just like the article says, this was a farce all around. When I changed the company, the habit to measure productivity stuck. Nowadays, I start working somewhere at 9 and finish at 18, and result is still the same - honest 8 hours of work activity per day happen at best once a month, the average week sums to 30-34 hours. Code-related activities never take more than 3-4 hours per day, that includes both coding and reviews. I get the impression that some of my colleagues might spend more time on the job, but low productivity was never a topic of my performance reviews, management seems content with what they get.
  • zo1 5y ago
    Perspective from the management side at a consulting place: We don't want or need you to log your time to the minute. It's counter-productive and a waste of time. It needs to just be representative and not dishonest (please read that sentence twice). An hour long meeting booked, that ended up taking 45mins? It's an hour. It's the same reason we don't expect you to stop recording time when you to down the hall to make a coffee or take a bathroom break. The numbers only really makes sense at the aggregate level, and going to a higher level of detail is not reliable because of all the noise and different ways people measure their time.
    • denton-scratch 5y ago
      My experience with timesheets is that they must add up to the hours you're paid for (full-time salaried work, not hourly consulting). That more-or-less guarantees that timesheets are made-up. My first salaried job was as a salesman; we incurred expenses, which we could claim back. It was explained to us that the system was there to ensure that we weren't out-of-pocket; claims didn't have to actually be true, but you did have to have incurred the expense. I fairly soon realised that this was a lie; the expenses system was really a salary-augmentation scheme, and you were expected to inflate your claims. Everyone was at it.
• lnsru 5y ago
  Work is not work. That’s a single data point. I can mention few cases I experienced: student learning last week for exam. 100 hours week is nothing unusual here. Of course it’s not sustainable and does not take longer than few weeks. PhD student writing paper for most important conference of the year - 80 hours week. Working for your own startup 60 hour a week is imho absolutely normal. These are cases for personal gain. Now let’s talk about salaried jobs when one gets paid for sitting in the office or be green in Teams all day. And that’s the case where 10 hours each week of actual work is absolutely sufficient. I am pretty sure that productive hours are proportional to gain. Why should I do 50 hours a week for the Big Corp when my salary will be exactly the same as after productive 15 hours weekly!? There are individuals, that like what they do, so they enjoy daily tasks and are productive closer to 40 hours weekly. Luckily I know few such people, they are very inspiring.
• nathias 5y ago
  People don't understand what to call work, some include all of the dependancies others think those are just free. For me to work 8h means I'm generally working towards some goal, this includes getting a coffee and resting.
• andreisbc 5y ago
  The pandemic enabled me to work 3 full time jobs as a software dev 12h a day and I'm making tons of cash and I love it. Burned down a little but I have ways to keep that under control.
  • Toutouxc 5y ago
    12 hours a day doesn't sound like three full-time (emphasis on "full-time") jobs. Three full-time jobs is 120 hours a week or more than 17 hours every single day, which would leave you with less than 7 hours for food, hygiene, sleep and spending all that cash you're making.
• yodsanklai 5y ago
  There are definitely people who can work and focus for 8+ hours a day. I can think of my dentist and family doctor. Waiting room is full from morning to evening. Some of my colleagues work hard. I can see their screen in the open space. They are machines. Never a distraction on the screen. The article should be "some people don't work so much, I'm one of them".
  • learc83 5y ago
    My wife is an ER physician. It’s a demanding job that requires a ton of focus, so most of her colleagues only work about 30 hours a week. She’s also worked as a general pediatrician seeing lower acuity patients/well visits. From talking to her, good deal of that job is essentially running on autopilot. That’s why you can do it 8 hours a day.
    • m_fayer 5y ago
      Yeah, I think we really need to look at the qualitative aspect of the work being done when having these discussions. A pediatrician may really be working 8 or more hours a day, where 90% of patients are utterly cut-and-dry AND often having pleasant encounters with cute snotty kids and their parents. It doesn't stretch the imagination why this is possible for 8 hours straight. The "machine-like" programmers that GP mentioned are likely working from cut-and-dry requirements and executing the same code patterns over and over with a stack they know like the inside of their eyelids. Doing this can be pleasurable in a similar way to playing puzzle games. I can see why it would be possible for 8 hours straight. Pleasant, meditative physical work - what's called "artisanal" anything these days (cooking, carpentry, etc.) - sure. Then there's programming in a challenging heterogenous environment. Perhaps the requirements are unclear, the stack is new or undependable, you're often interrupted, or have to switch between different kinds of work throughout the day, or your technical abilities are so stretched that absolute and sustained focus is required. Then, good luck getting to those 8 hours in a sustainable fashion. There are many jobs that are acknowledged to be so difficult when in "go" mode that no one expects 40 weekly hours. This just hasn't penetrated into tech and adjacent industries, that's why we have to engage in these charades.
  • 5y ago
• polote 5y ago
  Honestly it depends. Work can means a few different things. I doubt a farmer is working less than what he says. When Musk says he works 100h a week, that's probably even less than the reality, he is probably working 7*(24 - 7hour sleep) per week. Not all work needs 100% focus. When you are CEO and you go in the kitchen and you smalltalk with employees, is it work or not work ? Imagine if the CEO didn't do it, people would say the CEO is not talking with employees. But if the question is : Do people lie ? Yeah of course, like for any other subject
  • j2bax 5y ago
    How much of that 100+ hours includes surfing the internet and posting memes to Twitter? Not criticizing him, everyone needs time to unwind…
    • manmal 5y ago
      I‘m not trying to defend Musk, but his Twitter activities are highly efficient marketing.
    • polote 5y ago
      Probably not much, but in any case, this is part of why he is successful in business, so you can't remove it as non work.
• i_like_waiting 5y ago
  It's quite an unpopular opinion, but it heavily depends on person. When I was starting my startup, it was usually solid work from 9/10 to 22:00/ 23, 7 days a week. The big difference is, that in those moments, work was well diversified, so when I felt exhausted by creative part, I went to repetitive tasks, then to investigate how legal part works, then to emails etc. It's mostly about having a right tactics. In current work, there are still people who think that boss will give them 20% more career progression, when they work 20% more than contractual hours. Being quite productive in areas they already know. So it is possible but I don't believe it's most viable strategy. I prefer much more to work on personal coding projects after work, trying new methods, not on stuff I already know very well.
  • Noumenon72 5y ago
    It may only be unpopular on Hacker News. I saw an engineering account poll their followers on Twitter and this kind of opinion was a tiny minority. I would most likely be finding a way to think eight hours a day even if I weren't at work.
• nhoughto 5y ago
  Motivation isn’t fungible and I’ve been in a place where the given schedule is true of me, but that’s not a good place for me, that’s me unhappy and clock watching, a sign of bad times. I want to do more, solve more, continue . The end of day comes around quick.
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I’ve been reading some variant of this, for many years. One of the reasons that I hated being a manager, was because the job involved a lot of sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen. I couldn’t work on my own projects (because I was on paid work time), and it would have been irresponsible, in the extreme, to put myself into the critical path (because it was no guarantee that I would be able to reliably work). I sometimes tasked myself with projects for work, but they were almost always ignored by my company, and that hurt. I’ve heard that being a soldier in a combat zone is long hours of idleness, punctuated by short periods of terror and stress. That pretty much describes my time as a manager, without the “terror” part (and the bullets and explosions). It sucked. I now work at home, on my own technical tasks. I get a lot done. My personal productivity is through the roof. I take a lot of breaks. Sometimes, I even nap. But I don’t have a time clock. I will often start coding, at 6AM (sometimes, before I even get in the shower, after my morning exercise), and will continue to code, until I hit the sack. I often test my software, while I’m sitting in bed, and will enter issues, from my iPad. When I have a problem that I’m chasing, or I am in the middle of a big implementation phase, I can work for many hours, straight. I will barely come up for air, and I feel absolutely exhausted, when I finally step back (nap time!). I’m not particularly concerned about a measured life. I get a lot done; far more than I ever did, when I was being paid. And I’m having a blast.
  • dgb23 5y ago
    I feel you in terms of the hacker lifestyle you’re describing. I often work from home too (1-3d/w). Fully emersed and free, getting a lot done. But I‘ve found going for a >1h walk a day really helps. The body feels more awake, my eyes are more relaxed, my thoughts are reordered and some new inspirations and ideas emerge.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      I start each day, with a 2-mile walk (not today. Lots of snow, but I’ll be getting my exercise, later). I use the time to triage my day. Works a charm.
  • bikingbismuth 5y ago
• denton-scratch 5y ago
  > between one and two hours of hard thinky work Bertrand Russell once observed that philosophy is really hard; even very good philosophers only spend a few minutes per year doing it.
• denton-scratch 5y ago
  > part of his skill was in lying to management I once worked in the warehouse at a (unionized) manufacturer of printer's ink. I was told-off by the Father of Chapel (the union organizer) for working too hard. This was unskilled labour; so the skill I had to master was how to avoid being fired by management for laziness, while not getting told-off by the FoC for excessive zeal.
• NicoJuicy 5y ago
  I do believe you can work 18 hours a day, since that's what I'm doing lately. But i don't think you can repeat it successfully every day. Since the biggest problem is being able to focus. I normally start with something very trivial that takes like 3 minutes and low effort and then I hope to be "launched". If it was a difficult/stressing day at work, it won't work.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• rob_c 5y ago
  Again, think of ant colonies, it's not far off
• dgb23 5y ago
  The author makes a good point but for me personally those numbers are off. I have a suspicion that the amount of healthy and productive work depends much on the work environment, the agency and social relationships one has there. If you’re a well paid wage slave then you have different engagement than an autonomous, respected worker. Excuse the platitude but you get the drift. Discipline is freedom and empathy is purpose.
• yobbo 5y ago
  Yep. Anyone claiming to be working more than 40 hrs is implicitly revealing that their job doesn't require much thinking. It is possible in crunch time to work harder on difficult problems, but not for longer than a few weeks at a time followed by a few weeks of rest. Regardless how you account for the time.
  • Noumenon72 5y ago
    I arrange my work so that it doesn't require much sitting and thinking. Instead I come up with a way that I can write code to visualize what's going on, iteratively test solutions, or read to select from approaches on the Web. I guess you're right, when it comes to something I would have to invent from scratch I panic about having to think for myself.
• twirlock 5y ago
• mark_l_watson 5y ago
  Like the author, I am usually good for two periods of about 90 minutes a day of extreme thinking work. I feel fine about this because in a sense I am always working, even if I just have a few peak periods a day. When I have a job, just about 100% of my intellectual life is thinking about the tech that can help my employer. If I want to read a tech article after dinner, it is just about always about something that might help the business. I maintain work/life balance by taking a year off work between jobs. In these down time periods I both research a broad spectrum of things that interest me, and that is when I write my books.
• longnguyen 5y ago
  I used to work pretty long hours (worked 2 jobs - back when I had first kid and was still under mortgage). Now I spend more time with my kids and try to work as little as I can (optimize "productivity pulse", while minimize total time on computer) This is my data of 2018 and 2019 respectively: - https://www.dropbox.com/s/s8881zv58wzve33/2018.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/s8881zv58wzve33/2018.png?dl=0 - https://www.dropbox.com/s/55v7g4cn7ol0ix2/2019.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/55v7g4cn7ol0ix2/2019.png?dl=0 Some personal observations: - On average, I achieve 75% productivity pulse - There are some crazy days where I worked over 15 hrs, with maybe 10 ~ 11hrs being productive (read: code) - Since I was moonlighting, I was most productive on the morning (9am - noon) and after 10pm (kids went to sleep) - I don't meditate much, but working out really really help!
• jimmyvalmer 5y ago
  tldr; Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work. Office Space (1999)
• toss1 5y ago
  Excellent distillation of the problem. What strikes me most is that it reminds me of reading about studies of hunter-gatherer societies who pretty much spent 4 hours 'working' each day. Seems like these limits might be fairly hard-wired. And, sure, I can do massive crunch-time sprints with the best of them, but only for limited times. And management guidance & feedback that aligns with these realities is critical to prevent the environment from becoming toxic.
• Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Rule of a thumb: If a person brags how much he/she works, he/she likely doesn't work a lot. Double, if the same person also an activist fighting for equality and 'fair' compensation. In such cases you're likely dealing with a hypocrite who should be terminated on the spot.
• walnutclosefarm 5y ago
  The author's analysis is so entirely subjective as to what constitutes "work" as to be meaningless. I certainly believe that most creative workers cannot spend 8 hours a day being creatively productive, although even there the variation is enormous. I used to observe a factor of 5 or more difference in productivity between the most productive and least productive of my engineering team, and a lot of that was due to the ability of some to stay focused and fully absorbed in creation for hour after hour, whereas the average engineer simply stopped producing much after a couple of hours. Interestingly, a lot of this was attention span limited. Take the person who was good for 2 hours of productive coding on a product, and give them two significantly separate areas of responsibility, and their productivity would close to double, as they could pull off a mid-day switch and be fully energized for a second shift at the creative keyboard. But just because you're not doing the highest value / highest drain portion of your job constantly, doesn't mean you're not working. Good managers know to balance workload and expectations. And as others have noted, this varies enormously from one profession to the next. The nurses in the hospital where I worked as CTO worked 12 hour shifts, and nobody in their right mind would make the argument that they weren't working the entire time. Most worked three 12 hours shifts per week, so they had a short work week, but the doctors they worked with routinely worked 12 hrs/day, often 5 days per week, and then spent part of their 2 "off" days working as well. My daughter-in-law, who teaches elementary school, has no "own time" between 8:00 AM and 4:00PM, other than a half hour break when her students are at lunch, and then works a couple of hours most evenings in addition. It's a rare week during the school year when she doesn't have 45 hours per week in which she is completely "owned" be the job - which is to say, working.
  • dpark 5y ago
    > the doctors they worked with routinely worked 12 hrs/day, often 5 days per week, and then spent part of their 2 "off" days working as well. I have a lot of trouble believing this. You’re claiming that 60 hours minimum was standard for doctors yet somehow the nurses had enough sway to get away with 36 hours. Ignoring how much of that as “active work”, I have trouble believing they are even in the facility for that many hours. Maybe residents, because they do get worked to death, but post residency I can’t imagine you could keep doctors while working them like this. > My daughter-in-law, who teaches elementary school, has no "own time" between 8:00 AM and 4:00PM, other than a half hour break when her students are at lunch, and then works a couple of hours most evenings I think you missed part of the article. Much of a teacher’s day is not hard mental work. Especially for established teachers who have done the work to build lesson plans already.
• karmasimida 5y ago
  > Most days I can do somewhere between one and two hours of hard thinky work. Writing, programming, etc. Good days or easy tasks it might be three. It’s rarely four, and over a week almost never averages more than two. too accurate
• bloqs 5y ago
  No, the productivity pareto principle here is very clear, 20% do 80% of the work. This is unbelievably consistent across human organisations. This percentage applies roughly to many things, including sexual partners at college, money earned, academic success, and health issues.
• drakonka 5y ago
  I am sure this is true for many people, but it doesn't resonate with me at all. I usually end up working way more hours (focus working, not browsing HN or Reddit between PRs) than I'm supposed to. It is so easy for me to get sucked into a task and not be able to put it down until I'm done, and then get sucked into the next task even if it it's after-hours. And once I have momentum it is very difficult for me to stop until I feel some sense of completion, even though the task is expected to be spread out across several days. I think it is a sign of workaholism and it's something I am trying to work on.
• beepbooptheory 5y ago
  Have spent a lot of my life doing manual labor, and still slightly in that boat now but do have a proper office job (receptionist). it was incredible for me to experience my first office job and realize this general fact. Not only was my body not sore everyday, but my day was suddenly largely my own, my "labor" was suddenly not defined necessarily by constant action. I dont even really have to think as much as I did working in a kitchen, say. Its just important to realize that this relationship with labor is a privilege, because trust me, its not "everyone". If that privilege is obtained because you provide something more "skilled", ok, I guess I understand that. There is still an instinctual level where it still feels unjust to me. But thats just my emotions, I understand economics trumps them.
  • wpietri 5y ago
    It's a huge privilege! In high school and college I worked a bunch of random jobs, including factory worker, McDonald's cook, and convenience store cashier. It helped me really appreciate the cushiness of office jobs. But in some ways, it's the source of ongoing frustration. Office culture IME is not very interested in getting direct work done. When I was on the McDonald's breakfast shift, I had a solid block of hours where people knew not to bother me unless something was literally on fire. I could get into a glorious flow state. Even managers, even visiting execs knew to button their lips until the time was right. But these days? There are so many people who are happy to put 30 minutes on my calendar or interrupt me on Slack. They mean well; they just don't know anything else. How I wish they did!
    • Ntrails 5y ago
      The only thing in an office that gets close to the buzz/flow of a busy service, is dealing with an outage/incident. I miss elements of it, for sure. I do not miss working hard for 50+ hours a week at less than minimum wage (woo salaried).
  • Strs2FillMyDrms 5y ago
    I was at a construction site as field architect and the field work of a manager is nothing compared to that of the actual workers. So.. I tried coding at work, as I had a "lot" of spare time... and it was impossible. The stressful state of mind makes it impossible to make anything related to coding... the sun, the heat, the stress. Non skilled jobs, that are also menial and with this constant uncertain output, are a doom to those who work them(jobs) because they offer aboslute no progress to those who's lives depend on them. Intellectual and economical progress. Yet I've found people obsessed with field work..
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
  It depends on the age. At 20 something I could easily pull 16 hours of straight hard coding. Now? Forget about it.
  • maerF0x0 5y ago
    So could I. The caveat being that I was only a fraction as productive. roughly guessing, 16 hours was probably worth about 3 of today's. most of the difference is just the ability to go more directly to the right solution or implementation versus when i was younger I often found out late that something was off and had to change _everything_ to cascade the refactor.
• fleddr 5y ago
  Knowledge work is not "work" in the traditional sense. If your job is to stamp forms, you can probably be productive the entire day. Not so much when your job is cognitively demanding, then the job is "thinking deeply", and the human species simply cannot sustain that for so long. As you get more experienced, you may require less deep thinking to do your job, which boost productivity. However in our current world all fields are changing so rapidly that this is mostly wishful thinking. The other factor is of course whether you're allowed to be productive. Even a day with "just" 3 or 4 meetings is practically destroyed from a productivity point of view, and this doesn't even account for email and chat. So even if willing to be more productive, you just can't. This particular problem never seems addressed, quite the opposite: "we need to collaborate more". No, we don't. When you have 5 tasks and each task depends on others and requires a lot of collaboration then it's a crappy task, from a productivity point of view. Aside from the distractions of professional communication, we should be honest about the additional distractions from personal devices. When I started work, nobody had a smartphone. Just a workstation with restricted internet. So there were few temptations. Now it's unstoppable. It's right there in your pocket, begging for attention. Add in email, which the average person checks once every 6 minutes, and the conclusion is that we have near-zero concentration time. It's a sad thing. If we would control distractions and carve out very clean packages of work, knowledge workers could probably switch to 4 hour workdays, 6 as a transition. The rest is fluff anyway. Why not double the work packages then, to meet 8 hours? Because our species simply can't. But anyway, it won't happen. Let's just keep telling ourselves we work 10-12 hours whilst we piss our life away to a collective illusion.
• pmichaud 5y ago
  I guess I'll add my anecdote. For me this really depends on whether I'm "into it" or not. When I'm doing what I need to do but my heart isn't in it, I mostly match the "a few hours of real work per day" descriptions, doing my tasks in between some reading and chatting or whatever. Push it too hard, and I start getting into burn out territory. But when I'm excited and really enjoying myself, watch out, I'm a fucking productivity monster. I can work cheerfully and with high energy basically nonstop, like I have to force myself to eat and sleep. I can do this many months in a row--empirically for the better part of a year before I chill out and go back to baseline. During these times taking a break is just annoying, I really want to be working, my mind is still there more or less no matter what I'm doing. - One thing that may be interesting to note is that the degree to which I can do this partially depends on the type of work. I've done lots of different types of work in my life. Here's a tiered list in order of how nonstop I can go when I'm into it: * S Tier -- I go from the moment I wake until I drop from exhaustion, cheerful, high energy the whole time * programming -- one exception that drops this to A tier sometimes is if the work is particularly intellectually demanding, like tricky math / comp sci stuff, like when I'm trying to do some kind of novel game dev or something * physical labor (eg. house construction) * A Tier -- I can only do something like 10 hours/day of the main event, rubber-on-road work, while the rest of the time is spent thinking about and planning the main event stuff * art -- stopping this one feels more like fatigue, like the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. I have to reset by low effort learning or browsing-with-intent-to-learn other artwork * writing -- this feels different, where after some thousands of words the "spirit isn't with me" anymore, like I know what I would write, but the verve is gone somehow, even though I have plenty of energy for outlining and planning * B Tier -- I can do this similarly to S tier, wall to wall, high intensity work, but only for about a week to 10 days at a time. * people stuff (eg. group facilitation, mediating conflict, personal coaching)
  • maerF0x0 5y ago
    aside fun on S, A, B... https://gaming.stackexchange.com/a/172006/46542 https://gaming.stackexchange.com/a/172006/46542
• dqpb 5y ago
  > Most days I can do somewhere between one and two hours of hard thinky work. He then goes on to list all the hours of other stuff he does. So it sounds like his main point is that he doesn’t spend 40 hours per week on pure “hard thinky work”. I don’t see why that matters. All the other inter-personal and logistical work is also work. More importantly, he doesn’t mention any of the time outside of work that he spends mulling things over in the back of his mind. That’s also work.
• karaterobot 5y ago
  I like working all day. When I was a consultant, there was basically no other option that didn't involve outright lying to and stealing from clients. Not working while being paid to work made me feel anxious, and wasn't relaxing at all. Now that I'm not a consultant for a larger company, I can definitely get away with taking significant breaks during the day. But, the bigger problem to me is not having the opportunity to get as much work done as I want: endless meetings, requests for feedback, Slack conversations, etc., make it hard to actually get as much done as I've planned to get done. This is the "maker's hours" problem.
• Grustaf 5y ago
  People keep repeating this but it's really pretty silly. When people say they work 8 hours they don't mean they are 100% focused on doing revolutionary innovative work for 8 hours. Not all work is like factory work where you can do more or less the same thing all day, and that's fine. And for what it's worth, plenty of people, including myself, can regularly do 10+ hour days of productive work. It's definitely not impossible.
• dgeiser13 5y ago
  People who talk about how much they work don't work as much as they say.
• twistedpair 5y ago
  Funny, I find the opposite. Maybe it's a desire to feel efficient, but if asked "how long did that take you", I feel like saying ⅔N hours rather than N hours. Then again, I'm a full time employee, so I'm not billing by the hour, like lawyers that get $100 for responding to your email.
• Vixel 5y ago
  I dont even have the energy to make it through this article
• neptunedesert 5y ago
  Great article. I relate to the author's points. Worth a careful read.
• deepsun 5y ago
  > Despite having over 10 years of experience, some of my colleagues feel the need to explain basic concepts that I already know. I'm assigned the easiest tasks. No one comes to me for help, although I'm the most knowledgable. No one takes my opinions into consideration. I'm a white straight guy with 18 years of experience (although Slavic), but exactly the same things happen all the time in office. Not saying his story might be different, but often people attribute struggles to race/gender/nationality, while it's actually just competition or just how things are.