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Humans are not designed to: 1) Stay long hours sitted, immobile. It ruins your health. 2) To provide a steady high quality output in creative disciplines (wri

• alexandros 15y ago
  It seems to me that Arrington does not realise that managing coders is not the same as managing journos on a blog. Maybe writers can churn and churn while working miserable hours for years on end. It does not work that way in coding. One hour of coding without thinking carefully can have a large negative contribution to your company's ability to meet its goals, by way of causing bad architectural decisions, bugs, and/or downtime.
  • dgalling 15y ago
    I highly doubt writers can work the same way. Anyone doing any type of creative work needs these types of breaks. Similarly, one article published without adequate editing/fact-checking can do wonders to destroy the credibility of a blog...
    • duck 15y ago
      I agree, but maybe this would explain why most TechCrunch articles are so bad.
    • bh42222 15y ago
      Similarly, one article published without adequate editing/fact-checking can do wonders to destroy the credibility of a blog... Try reading an article on anything you are an expert in, from any newspaper.
      • zecho 15y ago
        To be fair, newspapers aren't written for experts. That doesn't excuse a lot of crap from newspapers, but they're writing for an audience that isn't necessarily well-versed in all the subjects, for better or worse.
        • khafra 15y ago
          The point isn't that they should pander to experts. The point is that they're wrong more often than they're right; seriously, factually, inarguably incorrect.
        • runjake 15y ago
          I don't think he's referring to the fact that newspapers aren't written for an expert audience. I think he's referring to their routine inaccuracies and errors. That's what I get from it, being a expert who's cringed at quite a few press articles.
          • zecho 15y ago
            The errors aren't acceptable, but the inaccuracies are almost always because reporters try to dumb down a concept so much, that the concept loses all nuance. It's basically if Simple English Wikipedia were the norm.
      • realitygrill 15y ago
        aka the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect
    • electromagnetic 15y ago
      From experience creative writing (IE Fiction, journal-columns (life blogging), reviews, even a lot of non-fiction) are hard to force. It takes a lot of breaks and 'spur of the moment' events to the point I use my iPhone for writing so when I get that urge it doesn't matter if I'm on lunch at my day job or waiting at a bus stop, or as often the case, on the toilet. Newspaper journalism I believe can be forced. IMO it's like high school essay writing, you find your source and you just learn to churn. With some newspapers this can be so bad that you notice the 'filler' attempts where about 2/3 of the way through they go into "summary" mode and simply pad the ending of the article with the exact same info they had in the first 1/3. By 'from experience' I mean I've worked as a reviewer, I've got my own personal blog (one of my pieces actually hit the front page of HN back in the 1Q of 2011 IIRC, and a few have popped up other places) and I'm now pushing through for a novel - I've had one short story published and a lot of editor comments (which is great, I've never received a form rejection letter, even from places that are notorious for them; my problem is that with a short story I see little point of struggling to edit it on the chance someone might say yes, when I might as well learn my mistake and write something else because there's always the chance a story will grab an editor and they'll say 'hell, I can fix the mistakes' - and having worked as a reviewer I trust editors to fix problems I don't know are problems) Like the guy who posted the automated sports writer, it's not difficult to take the stats and say "Campbell scored a last minute goal winning the game" when campbell was the last person to score and it happened in the last minute of play. It's merely filtering data and rewriting a standard comment. It's not far from news of a house fire: did the house burn down? yes/no; if no make 'devastating' comment. was people caught inside? yes/no; if yes did they survive? yes/no; if no make 'tragedy' comment; if yes did they escape? yes/no; if yes make 'valiant escape' comment / if no make 'heroic rescue' comment. It's quite different when you have to write 200 words from a basic formula with 20 keywords, compared to writing 80,000 words from a basic formula with 20 keywords. Yes Star Wars and Harry Potter might have same basic principles (orphan, living with aunt and uncle, special powers, special connection to main antagonist). However, I'm never failed to be amused when someone says it's unoriginal or a rip off, but those same people will read article after article on their sports teams and not think it's ripped off when the articles a probably written by an intern in a coat closet switching words on a template. But simply Vader being or not being Luke's father would have made a major story diversion (IE Luke wouldn't have gone to Endor to confront his father, Vader wouldn't have turned good and killed the emperor, etc.)
• kristofferR 15y ago
  This may be slightly off topic, but for solving #1 a standing desk is a great idea. My energy levels have improved dramatically and I've also lost some weight since I got my standing desk.
  • nik_0_0 15y ago
    If the human body isn't built for sitting 8 hours a day, I'm damn sure its not made for standing 8 hours a day (not mine at least!)
    • regularfry 15y ago
      It's not made for being immobile. With a standing desk, I find I move around more.
      • stevejalim 15y ago
        Agreed. It's not simply a question of standing over sitting; it's about moving. I have a motorised desk (essentially the GeekDesk v2) and shift two or three times a day from sitting to standing to standing while leaning on a sitting stool (which you can do even if you don't have a robo-desk). Plus I move around frequently (kitchen, bathroom, fetch water, etc) and - don't knock it till you've tried it - have a dartboard for when I'm taking screen breaks.
        • fedd 15y ago
          > kitchen, bathroom, fetch water, etc & smoke! Anyone dares to admit?
          • fosk 15y ago
            Body isn't build for smoking too.
    • tdfx 15y ago
      I've found that by standing at my desk I walk around MUCH more when I stop to think about a problem. Instead of leaning back in my chair and staring into space, I'll pace around the room and return. It doesn't seem like much, but it adds up very quickly.
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• pelemele 15y ago
  If someone has to stay long hours on a regular basis someting is wrong... http://www.despair.com/incompetence.html http://www.despair.com/incompetence.html
• rapind 15y ago
  I respect your opinion Antirez, but I hear so much speculation about work habits that I have to ask you: Is this your opinion / experience, or is it based on some specific research / study you can point to? As a fellow developer I'd love this to be true, however a meme / fad started during my working career in rich cultures stating that hard work isn't rewarding or is unnecessary. I question this. My father taught me to work hard, as his father taught him, etc, and this basically states that my father was being scammed. Doesn't every generation at some point rebel against the previous generation's beliefs? Could it be that the whole work less theme (apparently based on science?) is simply rebellion? All I know is that I plan to teach my kids that working hard for something is itself a reward. That you can't appreciate anything you didn't work for, and the harder you work for it, the more you appreciate it. I also expect this will help them survive in a hyper competitive global workplace. Maybe if we consider maintaining physical fitness to be part of our daily work, then I'd be on board with these thoughts. I.e. 4-5 hours at a desk being creative, and 3+ hours of some sort of physical exertion.
  • antirez 15y ago
    This is my opinion and is based solely on my experience after 15 years of being in the industry, including one successful startup built by me and a friend of mine with a decent "exit" sold to Telecom Italia, and a successful open source software (Redis). Additionally I used to work in different places in the past with many programmers, so what I say is also based on how the success of programmers I know first hand correlates with the amount of work they do. I also follow two companies here in Sicily that I built in the past, one has six programmers. So all the above is my "data source", that is not statistically significant. I don't really think a programmer working 8 hours is going to be less successful of one working 12 hours per day: it is either good enough to be outstanding with the 8 hours, or will fail even with the 12 hours, since the productivity gained by experience, skills, understanding of the problem is the kind of 10x or 100x gain, while from 8 to 12 hours the difference is little (and, again, not sustainable for long time IMHO). Startups are built by programmers, so I think the same applies to them as well, mostly. In other words I could say that the output of a programmer correlates more strongly with the work it did to learn writing code, than the work it does writing actual code. Another important thing is that having fun is not lost time if you want to build a startup. Recently startups are a lot more about providing an "experience" to the user, and enriching yourself in your free time can be very useful to provide something that people want.