6 ms·

The following high-paying or high status (or both) careers seem to necessitate a very heavy workload: law, finance, academia, business or strategy consulting, V

The following high-paying or high status (or both) careers seem to necessitate a very heavy workload: law, finance, academia, business or strategy consulting, VC-funded start-ups, medicine, certain media jobs, certain software development jobs. Although the author talks about competition, it’s hard for me to escape the conclusion this is the major factor in the long hours work culture. If you want a high paying or high status job, it’s not clear to me how you escape the requirement for very hard work.

onion2k 4y ago
If you want a high paying or high status job, it’s not clear to me how you escape the requirement for very hard work. Just tell people you work really hard but don't actually do it. You'd be surprised how many seemingly hard-working and successful people use this strategy. Some of them even believe themselves.
- analog31 4y ago
  The work knows. That's actually the problem. Your work is constantly decaying. You have to beat the rate of decay. Decay can take the form of materials and equipment (often homemade) deteriorating, forgetting what you've read or done (your lab notes are never good enough). Also, you're paying an opportunity cost for taking more time to finish, and you face a constant risk of getting scooped, your professor dying, getting knocked off your horse by personal / health issues, etc. Klausewitz wrote that the only rational strategy in war is to make the maximum possible use of force. Your graduate research project is like that. Of course you also have to be cognizant of wearing out your mental equipment.
  - lumost 4y ago
    This makes sense if you are working on a problem in relative isolation, that's relatively well known, and who's research has low optionality to other work. However, there are many problems that are either utterly unknown, impractical to work on outside of a major collaboration, or option well into multiple papers. It would seem that in academia, focusing on the latter will yield better long term career results. If you're a PhD student in a large collaboration, then you can't get scooped. If you are working on a problem no one knows/cares about, then getting scooped is a low risk, if you're working in an area where scooping is common - but you have good equipment/infrastructure - then you can re-use the work for something else. In hindsight, almost all of my professors work was either part of a collaboration or focused on "high option" research. The few theoreticians and others working on areas which could be scooped seemed to either pick up more teaching/administrative work - or focus on "conservative" research.
  - jltsiren 4y ago
    There are many kinds of research. Sometimes you need long hours of mindless grinding to get the job done. Sometimes taking a long walk and letting your mind wander is a more productive use for your time. And sometimes you need to return to the work for 10-15 minutes at random hours when the computer finishes whatever it was doing. If your work is cognitively demanding, there are maybe 20-30 productive hours in a week. If you try working harder, the chances are the marginal value of the extra hours becomes negative in the long term. You can get more productive hours by also doing less demanding work, but then there is a risk that the low-value work will take priority and reduce the time you can spend on demanding tasks. Especially when there are external deadlines involved. Getting scooped is something many people are afraid of but which rarely happens in practice. Except maybe if you are working on some ultra-fashionable topics. I can't remember a single instance of it happening to anyone in my 15 years of string algorithms, space-efficient data structures, and their applications in bioinformatics. If someone manages to solve a problem another person was working on using the same approach as that person, it's typically years after the original person gave up.
    - analog31 4y ago
      I'm thinking about biochemistry in particular. There was also little or no scooping in my own field, experimental atomic spectroscopy. Maybe some fields are more cutthroat than others.
  - Hermitian909 4y ago
    > The work knows. That's actually the problem. Your work is constantly decaying. You have to beat the rate of decay. It's my experience that while not easy this is relatively straightforward for many valuable types of technical work. The key I've found is that most people are incapable of making themselves seriously work through a textbook. Work through 10-15 good sized textbooks in your field and you are pretty much immediately near the top of your field in the professional world. Most of the churn in skills is happening at much lower levels of abstraction. If you have the fundamentals to understand the higher abstractions backing these changes making a switch is much easier. As a concrete example, I'm at a big tech company using Typescript (TS). While I have less experience with TS than most of my coworkers many already consider me "one of the local experts". This is because: 1. I was previously aware of the challenges Racket trying to add types back in... I think the early 2000s? Forever ago. Anyway I could guess at the limitations TS would have as a result (e.g. when a type inference might fail). 2. I read a book about TS 3. I read the TS docs and changelogs (2) and (3) to roughly 12 hours total. I've had plenty of conversations with people who are much more "guru-ish" than I am and they report similar results e.g. a database expert who has spent 20 years almost exclusively leveraging knowledge discovered in the 80s despite keeping up to date with the field. I don't think this holds in Academia, but most of us aren't there.
nradov 4y ago
Accounting is the same, at least at the big auditing and consulting firms for partners and employees on the partnership track. There are huge volumes of work to grind through, and partners don't want to dilute their profits by hiring more associates.
- formerkrogemp 4y ago
  Partners do like to hire and fire lots of associates so they don't have to pay as many senior associates and management. They sure as hell froze pay and fired a ton of people in 2020 and made everyone else double up. The pay when accounting for inflation in accounting has stayed flat or fallen until just recently. Now they're having a "talent shortage." Go figure. The partners will happily make you work 50-90 hours during busy season which may be once or twice per year. And, don't get me started on the industry wide billing for time and lying on timesheets to meet the budget.
version_five 4y ago
Imo, having worked in academia and industry (and having worked with academics transitioning into industry), phd students and profs have it way easier. (Versus the other careers the parent mentions) Not only are the pace and pressure higher in industry, you're, to a large extent, doing what someone else wants you to do, which makes it much harder to push through. Academy is much more about doing the interesting stuff, even if you're working for a prof. Industry, someone has to do all the shitty, repetitive or uninteresting stuff, and that's mostly what the long hours are made of. Academics (including me) when they transition to industry often come in seeing all that stuff beneath them and think they are there because of their brain. Industry work can be more interesting because you're working on high value problems, but it's way more work.
- andreyk 4y ago
  I think the variance wrt expected work load is way larger in industry though. Plenty of my friends working at FAANG companies have a really chill lifestyle, which is true of very few of my grad school friends. The notion that profs have way less work than industry in particular is crazy to me, their workloads are simply insane (at least for more junior faculty, but often also for senior ones).
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  I’ve worked in industry as a software developer, run a consulting business, founded a startup with seed funding, and been a TT professor. Only the last of these jobs required me to edit a document while my wife was in labor (a thing I have yet to live down.) The challenge in academia is the essentially unbounded nature of the work, and the fact that you’re constantly competing with what appear to be major stakes. Also: my friends in industry have hobbies that don’t involve their work. Even the ones in FAANGs. Seriously I don’t even understand the concept: does going to the gym count?
  - version_five 4y ago
    > required me to edit a document while my wife was in labor Not to be a jerk but, the only thing that required that was you. The big thing I learned in management consulting is that the sun always rises tomorrow no matter what you do. People attach urgency to things, but unless you're a doctor or deployed military or one of the other rare instances where life depends on what you are doing, it really doesn't matter if it's late or not done, and it's important to prioritize the things they do matter.
abirch 4y ago
You're right. It's funny you mention law because my brother-in-law is a partner at a large law firm. He took family time: 3 hours away from work on a Sunday evening for an extended family dinner. The guy works crazy hard. The odd thing is how John Maynard Keynes predicted that we'd have a 15 hour work week. If you translated everyone's salary at the dinner table from a 60 hour work week to a 15 hour work week, they'd be just fine (except for me, I'd need a 20 hour work week). But where are those jobs? It seems like you've got to work crazy hours for a crazy large amount of money.
- Archelaos 4y ago
  It is always instructive to go back to the sources and look at what Keynes actually wrote: "But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!"[1] He is talking not only talking about avarage working hours per worker, but about avarage working hours per person able to work. So let's have a look at the UK (where Keynes lived) of 2021: Gross domestic product: GBP ~2.2 tril.[2] Working age population: 41 mil.[3] Overall weekly hours worked: ~ 1 bil.[4] This means 24.4 hours work per week earning GPB ~1,080 (GBP ~53,650 per year) for each one in the working population. If they had worked only 15 hours with the same productivity, earnings would have been GBP 663 weekly (GBP ~35,500 per year), or a total of GBP ~1,35 tril, which is aprox. the number of 1994/1995. (Or a little less than Greece today.[5]) In other words: if work could be evenly distributed over the population able to work, hourly rates were identical and people were content with the living standard of the mid 1990s (and all else being equal), a 15 hour work week for everyone would be enough for the UK. [1] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/281744/gdp-of-the-united-kingdom/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/281744/gdp-of-the-united... [3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTGBQ647S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTGBQ647S -- One might argue that this number includes a lot of people who are not able to work or still in education and thus are not available for the workforce. On the other side it excludes a lot of people in older age, who might still be able to work. For a lack of better statistics and to make calculation easy, I assume that the two roughly cancel each other out. If you disagree, just use your own estimation and see if the result of the calculation really differs much. [4] Rough estimate from this table of weekly total hours: https://www.statista.com/statistics/280795/overall-weekly-hours-of-work-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/280795/overall-weekly-ho... [5] UK's GDP per capita * (15/24.4) ~= Greece's GDP, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
noobermin 4y ago
Tbf everyone works hard though, including poor people who work multiple jobs so I don't think it's merely a "high status" thing. Also, being a grad student is hardly "high status" tbf.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  It's definitely not true that everyone works hard. I've seen some crazy hard workers in low paying jobs, and some extremely lazy workers, same as high paying jobs. I think, though, that in some areas there are just fewer "places to hide" if you're going to fuck around.
billllll 4y ago
I don't think my experiences follow this, I've had very cushy well-paying jobs both in VC-funded startups and FAANG. I think there is this romantic notion that the software industry is this cut-throat free market utopia where the best ideas win, and I just don't think it's so. Most large companies have a sizable monopoly and most VC funded companies of certain size usually have years of runway. In both cases, people can and do coast. Obviously the new economic realities will have something to say about this, but in my experience long hours is not required for high pay and status in software.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Kinda agree, kinda disagree. For VC-funded startups, in the early stages I do think a very high workload is the norm, depending on the job. At most startups, there is simply not enough redundancy early on, especially before product market fit. Note I don't think this applies to everyone, but I've worked in early stage startups, and up to about the size of, say, 20 developers, it was easy to point out 5-10 folks where the company would have really been in deep doodoo if they didn't deliver. Of course, for startups where it's already pretty clear they are the "favorites" (think Stripe, AirBnB a couple years after their founding, etc.), I don't think that's true. And FAANGs are a whole different ball game. They are pretty famous for having a large subset of their dev teams that are more on the 10-4 schedule.
  - greesil 4y ago
    Having worked in both in MANGA and startup land, I can can say that not delivering is a big problem in both places. Culturally, startup land seemed to have a lot of younger people without families, and I suspect that is one important factor why hours are less at big corp. The other factor is you're in demand of you're in the MANGA club, so the boss doesn't have that much leverage.
  - lumost 4y ago
    One of the most painful, obvious, and annoying lessons I learned in my software career is that if you're team needs to grind hard - it's unlikely to be successful. Software is a great business when its working, high margin, low maintenance, and great growth economics. When companies are successful at it, they often are so successful that there is very little internal pressure to produce. No successful company survives as a country club, so there is a high pressure for high quality delivery of some number of projects per year, or at least appreciable progress. There simply isn't any need for the company to push people beyond a 40 hour work week.
crossroadsguy 4y ago
And “work hard” automatically means “long hours” and lack of which is “not hard enough”?
BeetleB 4y ago
An academic position at an average no-name university is not at all "high status", nor does it pay well. But the larger argument I have: It wasn't too long ago that you could have a good work-life balance in academia. The requirements to get tenure continue to increase. A common refrain is "The work I did to get tenure will not get anyone tenure in my department today." Quite a few professors I know said they worked regular 40 hour weeks to get tenure. Fully agree with the author, though: No one is enforcing this from outside. This is a problem created by the academics themselves, and they alone have the power to fix it.
kergonath 4y ago
PhDs really are not high paying or high status jobs. They are most of the time passion projects, however, which makes it very easy for supervisors and the academic system to abuse them and gaslight them into working longer. The best students I have seen rarely stop thinking about their PhD, but they definitely stop working when it’s time.
icelancer 4y ago
>> If you want a high paying or high status job, it’s not clear to me how you escape the requirement for very hard work. This applies to almost everyone, so I agree. The counterexamples everyone brings up are people who are top 5th percentile in office politics / social skills or top 5th percentile in natural gifted ability, or simply luck. For the majority of what you're talking about, it's certainly accurate - very hard work at some point was required. For some reason this is becoming very hard to accept in society, and popular discourse is trending towards "everything is mostly luck."
TrackerFF 4y ago
There's long hours, and hard work. Some of those jobs listed are mostly long hours, not so much hard work. Finance, consulting, and similar are good examples of such - there's A LOT of waiting as the work traverses up and down the hierarchy, combined with the fact that the work often fundamentally revolves around deals/projects with a finite (and quite short) window. Actually doing long hours combined with hard work is not really sustainable. In the end you'll end up with burnouts, resignations, lower quality work, etc. But with that said, lots of sectors are plagued with the mentality of "That is the only way it works, always has been", combined with "if I could/had to do it, others should too". Who knows, maybe change is coming. IIRC, investment banking analysts have gone through their tribulations regarding this. Everyone joining IB knows the hours are long, and the competition is fierce - but still juniors are saying enough is enough.

onion2k 4y ago

If you want a high paying or high status job, it’s not clear to me how you escape the requirement for very hard work. Just tell people you work really hard but don't actually do it. You'd be surprised how many seemingly hard-working and successful people use this strategy. Some of them even believe themselves.

analog31 4y ago
The work knows. That's actually the problem. Your work is constantly decaying. You have to beat the rate of decay. Decay can take the form of materials and equipment (often homemade) deteriorating, forgetting what you've read or done (your lab notes are never good enough). Also, you're paying an opportunity cost for taking more time to finish, and you face a constant risk of getting scooped, your professor dying, getting knocked off your horse by personal / health issues, etc. Klausewitz wrote that the only rational strategy in war is to make the maximum possible use of force. Your graduate research project is like that. Of course you also have to be cognizant of wearing out your mental equipment.
- lumost 4y ago
  This makes sense if you are working on a problem in relative isolation, that's relatively well known, and who's research has low optionality to other work. However, there are many problems that are either utterly unknown, impractical to work on outside of a major collaboration, or option well into multiple papers. It would seem that in academia, focusing on the latter will yield better long term career results. If you're a PhD student in a large collaboration, then you can't get scooped. If you are working on a problem no one knows/cares about, then getting scooped is a low risk, if you're working in an area where scooping is common - but you have good equipment/infrastructure - then you can re-use the work for something else. In hindsight, almost all of my professors work was either part of a collaboration or focused on "high option" research. The few theoreticians and others working on areas which could be scooped seemed to either pick up more teaching/administrative work - or focus on "conservative" research.
- jltsiren 4y ago
  There are many kinds of research. Sometimes you need long hours of mindless grinding to get the job done. Sometimes taking a long walk and letting your mind wander is a more productive use for your time. And sometimes you need to return to the work for 10-15 minutes at random hours when the computer finishes whatever it was doing. If your work is cognitively demanding, there are maybe 20-30 productive hours in a week. If you try working harder, the chances are the marginal value of the extra hours becomes negative in the long term. You can get more productive hours by also doing less demanding work, but then there is a risk that the low-value work will take priority and reduce the time you can spend on demanding tasks. Especially when there are external deadlines involved. Getting scooped is something many people are afraid of but which rarely happens in practice. Except maybe if you are working on some ultra-fashionable topics. I can't remember a single instance of it happening to anyone in my 15 years of string algorithms, space-efficient data structures, and their applications in bioinformatics. If someone manages to solve a problem another person was working on using the same approach as that person, it's typically years after the original person gave up.
  - analog31 4y ago
    I'm thinking about biochemistry in particular. There was also little or no scooping in my own field, experimental atomic spectroscopy. Maybe some fields are more cutthroat than others.
- Hermitian909 4y ago
  > The work knows. That's actually the problem. Your work is constantly decaying. You have to beat the rate of decay. It's my experience that while not easy this is relatively straightforward for many valuable types of technical work. The key I've found is that most people are incapable of making themselves seriously work through a textbook. Work through 10-15 good sized textbooks in your field and you are pretty much immediately near the top of your field in the professional world. Most of the churn in skills is happening at much lower levels of abstraction. If you have the fundamentals to understand the higher abstractions backing these changes making a switch is much easier. As a concrete example, I'm at a big tech company using Typescript (TS). While I have less experience with TS than most of my coworkers many already consider me "one of the local experts". This is because: 1. I was previously aware of the challenges Racket trying to add types back in... I think the early 2000s? Forever ago. Anyway I could guess at the limitations TS would have as a result (e.g. when a type inference might fail). 2. I read a book about TS 3. I read the TS docs and changelogs (2) and (3) to roughly 12 hours total. I've had plenty of conversations with people who are much more "guru-ish" than I am and they report similar results e.g. a database expert who has spent 20 years almost exclusively leveraging knowledge discovered in the 80s despite keeping up to date with the field. I don't think this holds in Academia, but most of us aren't there.

nradov 4y ago

Accounting is the same, at least at the big auditing and consulting firms for partners and employees on the partnership track. There are huge volumes of work to grind through, and partners don't want to dilute their profits by hiring more associates.

formerkrogemp 4y ago
Partners do like to hire and fire lots of associates so they don't have to pay as many senior associates and management. They sure as hell froze pay and fired a ton of people in 2020 and made everyone else double up. The pay when accounting for inflation in accounting has stayed flat or fallen until just recently. Now they're having a "talent shortage." Go figure. The partners will happily make you work 50-90 hours during busy season which may be once or twice per year. And, don't get me started on the industry wide billing for time and lying on timesheets to meet the budget.

version_five 4y ago

Imo, having worked in academia and industry (and having worked with academics transitioning into industry), phd students and profs have it way easier. (Versus the other careers the parent mentions) Not only are the pace and pressure higher in industry, you're, to a large extent, doing what someone else wants you to do, which makes it much harder to push through. Academy is much more about doing the interesting stuff, even if you're working for a prof. Industry, someone has to do all the shitty, repetitive or uninteresting stuff, and that's mostly what the long hours are made of. Academics (including me) when they transition to industry often come in seeing all that stuff beneath them and think they are there because of their brain. Industry work can be more interesting because you're working on high value problems, but it's way more work.

andreyk 4y ago
I think the variance wrt expected work load is way larger in industry though. Plenty of my friends working at FAANG companies have a really chill lifestyle, which is true of very few of my grad school friends. The notion that profs have way less work than industry in particular is crazy to me, their workloads are simply insane (at least for more junior faculty, but often also for senior ones).
matthewdgreen 4y ago
I’ve worked in industry as a software developer, run a consulting business, founded a startup with seed funding, and been a TT professor. Only the last of these jobs required me to edit a document while my wife was in labor (a thing I have yet to live down.) The challenge in academia is the essentially unbounded nature of the work, and the fact that you’re constantly competing with what appear to be major stakes. Also: my friends in industry have hobbies that don’t involve their work. Even the ones in FAANGs. Seriously I don’t even understand the concept: does going to the gym count?
- version_five 4y ago
  > required me to edit a document while my wife was in labor Not to be a jerk but, the only thing that required that was you. The big thing I learned in management consulting is that the sun always rises tomorrow no matter what you do. People attach urgency to things, but unless you're a doctor or deployed military or one of the other rare instances where life depends on what you are doing, it really doesn't matter if it's late or not done, and it's important to prioritize the things they do matter.

abirch 4y ago

You're right. It's funny you mention law because my brother-in-law is a partner at a large law firm. He took family time: 3 hours away from work on a Sunday evening for an extended family dinner. The guy works crazy hard. The odd thing is how John Maynard Keynes predicted that we'd have a 15 hour work week. If you translated everyone's salary at the dinner table from a 60 hour work week to a 15 hour work week, they'd be just fine (except for me, I'd need a 20 hour work week). But where are those jobs? It seems like you've got to work crazy hours for a crazy large amount of money.

Archelaos 4y ago
It is always instructive to go back to the sources and look at what Keynes actually wrote: "But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!"[1] He is talking not only talking about avarage working hours per worker, but about avarage working hours per person able to work. So let's have a look at the UK (where Keynes lived) of 2021: Gross domestic product: GBP ~2.2 tril.[2] Working age population: 41 mil.[3] Overall weekly hours worked: ~ 1 bil.[4] This means 24.4 hours work per week earning GPB ~1,080 (GBP ~53,650 per year) for each one in the working population. If they had worked only 15 hours with the same productivity, earnings would have been GBP 663 weekly (GBP ~35,500 per year), or a total of GBP ~1,35 tril, which is aprox. the number of 1994/1995. (Or a little less than Greece today.[5]) In other words: if work could be evenly distributed over the population able to work, hourly rates were identical and people were content with the living standard of the mid 1990s (and all else being equal), a 15 hour work week for everyone would be enough for the UK. [1] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/281744/gdp-of-the-united-kingdom/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/281744/gdp-of-the-united... [3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTGBQ647S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTGBQ647S -- One might argue that this number includes a lot of people who are not able to work or still in education and thus are not available for the workforce. On the other side it excludes a lot of people in older age, who might still be able to work. For a lack of better statistics and to make calculation easy, I assume that the two roughly cancel each other out. If you disagree, just use your own estimation and see if the result of the calculation really differs much. [4] Rough estimate from this table of weekly total hours: https://www.statista.com/statistics/280795/overall-weekly-hours-of-work-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/280795/overall-weekly-ho... [5] UK's GDP per capita * (15/24.4) ~= Greece's GDP, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

noobermin 4y ago

Tbf everyone works hard though, including poor people who work multiple jobs so I don't think it's merely a "high status" thing. Also, being a grad student is hardly "high status" tbf.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
It's definitely not true that everyone works hard. I've seen some crazy hard workers in low paying jobs, and some extremely lazy workers, same as high paying jobs. I think, though, that in some areas there are just fewer "places to hide" if you're going to fuck around.

billllll 4y ago

I don't think my experiences follow this, I've had very cushy well-paying jobs both in VC-funded startups and FAANG. I think there is this romantic notion that the software industry is this cut-throat free market utopia where the best ideas win, and I just don't think it's so. Most large companies have a sizable monopoly and most VC funded companies of certain size usually have years of runway. In both cases, people can and do coast. Obviously the new economic realities will have something to say about this, but in my experience long hours is not required for high pay and status in software.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Kinda agree, kinda disagree. For VC-funded startups, in the early stages I do think a very high workload is the norm, depending on the job. At most startups, there is simply not enough redundancy early on, especially before product market fit. Note I don't think this applies to everyone, but I've worked in early stage startups, and up to about the size of, say, 20 developers, it was easy to point out 5-10 folks where the company would have really been in deep doodoo if they didn't deliver. Of course, for startups where it's already pretty clear they are the "favorites" (think Stripe, AirBnB a couple years after their founding, etc.), I don't think that's true. And FAANGs are a whole different ball game. They are pretty famous for having a large subset of their dev teams that are more on the 10-4 schedule.
- greesil 4y ago
  Having worked in both in MANGA and startup land, I can can say that not delivering is a big problem in both places. Culturally, startup land seemed to have a lot of younger people without families, and I suspect that is one important factor why hours are less at big corp. The other factor is you're in demand of you're in the MANGA club, so the boss doesn't have that much leverage.
- lumost 4y ago
  One of the most painful, obvious, and annoying lessons I learned in my software career is that if you're team needs to grind hard - it's unlikely to be successful. Software is a great business when its working, high margin, low maintenance, and great growth economics. When companies are successful at it, they often are so successful that there is very little internal pressure to produce. No successful company survives as a country club, so there is a high pressure for high quality delivery of some number of projects per year, or at least appreciable progress. There simply isn't any need for the company to push people beyond a 40 hour work week.

crossroadsguy 4y ago

And “work hard” automatically means “long hours” and lack of which is “not hard enough”?

BeetleB 4y ago

An academic position at an average no-name university is not at all "high status", nor does it pay well. But the larger argument I have: It wasn't too long ago that you could have a good work-life balance in academia. The requirements to get tenure continue to increase. A common refrain is "The work I did to get tenure will not get anyone tenure in my department today." Quite a few professors I know said they worked regular 40 hour weeks to get tenure. Fully agree with the author, though: No one is enforcing this from outside. This is a problem created by the academics themselves, and they alone have the power to fix it.

kergonath 4y ago

PhDs really are not high paying or high status jobs. They are most of the time passion projects, however, which makes it very easy for supervisors and the academic system to abuse them and gaslight them into working longer. The best students I have seen rarely stop thinking about their PhD, but they definitely stop working when it’s time.

icelancer 4y ago

>> If you want a high paying or high status job, it’s not clear to me how you escape the requirement for very hard work. This applies to almost everyone, so I agree. The counterexamples everyone brings up are people who are top 5th percentile in office politics / social skills or top 5th percentile in natural gifted ability, or simply luck. For the majority of what you're talking about, it's certainly accurate - very hard work at some point was required. For some reason this is becoming very hard to accept in society, and popular discourse is trending towards "everything is mostly luck."

TrackerFF 4y ago

There's long hours, and hard work. Some of those jobs listed are mostly long hours, not so much hard work. Finance, consulting, and similar are good examples of such - there's A LOT of waiting as the work traverses up and down the hierarchy, combined with the fact that the work often fundamentally revolves around deals/projects with a finite (and quite short) window. Actually doing long hours combined with hard work is not really sustainable. In the end you'll end up with burnouts, resignations, lower quality work, etc. But with that said, lots of sectors are plagued with the mentality of "That is the only way it works, always has been", combined with "if I could/had to do it, others should too". Who knows, maybe change is coming. IIRC, investment banking analysts have gone through their tribulations regarding this. Everyone joining IB knows the hours are long, and the competition is fierce - but still juniors are saying enough is enough.