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Work at work, enjoy life outside of work. Have real weekends and evenings and use them to reset your brain. Allowing your brain to reset is an essential part of

Work at work, enjoy life outside of work. Have real weekends and evenings and use them to reset your brain. Allowing your brain to reset is an essential part of being productive. Your short term memory gets in the way of solving problems sometimes. And your brain actually does useful things while you sleep. I've lost count of how solutions to seemingly tricky issues just pop in my head after a good night sleep or after a long weekend. And you can learn on the job. No need to do that outside work hours. And trying to learn stuff when you are tired after a long day is hard. It makes you more tired, you learn slower, it's frustrating, and you are setting yourself up for being less productive the next day because of it. Make time for learning stuff, demand time for it even and put it in your calendar or just sneak it in. Get your boss to support you. Try working smarter, not harder. If it feels like monkey work automate it. It's more fun and you get more productive by doing less. Frees up some time to do more interesting things. If your work is not interesting to you, you are in the wrong job anyway. But assuming it is, you should make the most of it in terms of making it rewarding (and not just in the money sense).

wahnfrieden 4y ago
Sounds like massive cope. If we don’t like work perhaps we can change it without waiting on favors to be handed down to us. Your boss won’t help unless market conditions force their hand. The work conditions you mentioned (free weekday nights and the weekend) were fought for by organized workers and are very new, why stop there? I don't think we'll even keep those conditions if that's what we're satisfied with. We already see that in tech with Slack, uncompensated on-call, salaried overtime expectations set during hiring or onboarding, the expectation that prospective hires spend their free time on training projects, etc
- AndrewKemendo 4y ago
  100% this The idea that work is “over there” and life is “over here” is not only unique historically, it’s also the reason workers have no power. By failing to demand that companies and organizations adjust to us and telling them “this is how we are going to live and companies need to fit into that” then we tacitly let them collude to keep labor power down. If you are alienated from your work, and accept and lean into that alienation, then you have no personal drive to make work serve you and your community rather than you serving it. It’s a race to the bottom of alienation and the paved path of capitalism is basically scraping the bottom at this point.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  If you are a good, productive engineer, your boss will bend over backwards to not lose you. Or they should be. Your negotiation power is a lot stronger than you think. Plenty of jobs out there and it never hurts to remind them that they are replacable. I've enjoyed the work conditions I mention throughout my career. I'm 48 now. But of course I work in a part of the world where this stuff was sorted out decades ago. 40 hour work weeks, 26 days of vacation per year, etc. Here in Germany, many companies even have policies that state people should not be sending emails or replying to those in their spare time. Such a simple thing. Easy to implement too. Just don't reply outside of work hours. Of course, I'm a startup CTO so I have none of that because I work for myself. But I still take my weekends and evenings because I'm simply less productive and creative when I'm tired and stressed out which is a different way of saying I'm useless when I'm like that. I need my brain to work properly to be effective. So I use my time wisely. And working on weekends or evenings simply isn't a good use of my time. So, I rarely do that. Being a wage slave is a choice. If you don't like your life, change it. Lots of people are not capable of reflecting on what they do or why they do it and afraid to change or challenge things. They just do the same thing day after day because that just is what they do; no matter how much it sucks. Change starts with you wanting things to change and then acting to make that happen.
  - deprecative 4y ago
    > Being a wage slave is a choice. If you don't like your life, change it. It's incredibly unfortunate that instead of using a shred of empathy to see that your situation isn't the situation of nearly everyone else in the industry, or alive for that matter. "If you don't like your life, change it" screams "I have no idea what I am talking about" because you're failing to see that situations elsewhere are different. Take a software job in the US. You're working a minimum of 45 hours per week for 40 hours pay. If you have to work overtime you do so for free. If you get sick you have a mandated PTO allowance of 0. You might get two weeks. Your salary will be somewhere in the ballpark of $70k. Is that good? Yes. Is it enough? No. Not even close. If you change employer or region is any of that going to change? No. It won't. So, what's left? Easy: be born into wealth and retire on it. Just change your life, bro.
    - 4y ago
hiepph 4y ago
I learned a tip to not feel "guilty" for resting in the evening or at weekends: resting is also a part of the work. It allows the body to prepare energy for the next working session, much like exercising.

wahnfrieden 4y ago

Sounds like massive cope. If we don’t like work perhaps we can change it without waiting on favors to be handed down to us. Your boss won’t help unless market conditions force their hand. The work conditions you mentioned (free weekday nights and the weekend) were fought for by organized workers and are very new, why stop there? I don't think we'll even keep those conditions if that's what we're satisfied with. We already see that in tech with Slack, uncompensated on-call, salaried overtime expectations set during hiring or onboarding, the expectation that prospective hires spend their free time on training projects, etc

AndrewKemendo 4y ago
100% this The idea that work is “over there” and life is “over here” is not only unique historically, it’s also the reason workers have no power. By failing to demand that companies and organizations adjust to us and telling them “this is how we are going to live and companies need to fit into that” then we tacitly let them collude to keep labor power down. If you are alienated from your work, and accept and lean into that alienation, then you have no personal drive to make work serve you and your community rather than you serving it. It’s a race to the bottom of alienation and the paved path of capitalism is basically scraping the bottom at this point.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
If you are a good, productive engineer, your boss will bend over backwards to not lose you. Or they should be. Your negotiation power is a lot stronger than you think. Plenty of jobs out there and it never hurts to remind them that they are replacable. I've enjoyed the work conditions I mention throughout my career. I'm 48 now. But of course I work in a part of the world where this stuff was sorted out decades ago. 40 hour work weeks, 26 days of vacation per year, etc. Here in Germany, many companies even have policies that state people should not be sending emails or replying to those in their spare time. Such a simple thing. Easy to implement too. Just don't reply outside of work hours. Of course, I'm a startup CTO so I have none of that because I work for myself. But I still take my weekends and evenings because I'm simply less productive and creative when I'm tired and stressed out which is a different way of saying I'm useless when I'm like that. I need my brain to work properly to be effective. So I use my time wisely. And working on weekends or evenings simply isn't a good use of my time. So, I rarely do that. Being a wage slave is a choice. If you don't like your life, change it. Lots of people are not capable of reflecting on what they do or why they do it and afraid to change or challenge things. They just do the same thing day after day because that just is what they do; no matter how much it sucks. Change starts with you wanting things to change and then acting to make that happen.
- deprecative 4y ago
  > Being a wage slave is a choice. If you don't like your life, change it. It's incredibly unfortunate that instead of using a shred of empathy to see that your situation isn't the situation of nearly everyone else in the industry, or alive for that matter. "If you don't like your life, change it" screams "I have no idea what I am talking about" because you're failing to see that situations elsewhere are different. Take a software job in the US. You're working a minimum of 45 hours per week for 40 hours pay. If you have to work overtime you do so for free. If you get sick you have a mandated PTO allowance of 0. You might get two weeks. Your salary will be somewhere in the ballpark of $70k. Is that good? Yes. Is it enough? No. Not even close. If you change employer or region is any of that going to change? No. It won't. So, what's left? Easy: be born into wealth and retire on it. Just change your life, bro.
  - 4y ago

hiepph 4y ago

I learned a tip to not feel "guilty" for resting in the evening or at weekends: resting is also a part of the work. It allows the body to prepare energy for the next working session, much like exercising.