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I think this is exactly what Carmack is talking about: athlete engineers. It's a bit hard to see this with engineers, as you don't necessarily know how much som

by baby 3y ago

I think this is exactly what Carmack is talking about: athlete engineers. It's a bit hard to see this with engineers, as you don't necessarily know how much someone contributes to something, but if you look at Academia you will clearly see that the best and most productive researchers are the one that work nonstop. If you want to be good, achieve, and be able to compete, you will have to work your ass off. He's just right, and if you think he's not and you want to achieve something then you will learn some harsh lessons. On the other hand, should everyone aim at being a competitive engineer? No. There's plenty of other things that life can offer. But in America, what's the default? Making people work as much as possible. Cross the Atlantic pond and your mind will be blown at how many holidays per year workers get.

ronsor 3y ago
Meanwhile, cross the Pacific pond and you'll be begging to come back to America. It's not an America-exclusive issue: I'd wager most societies now have ended up valuing success and work over all else, even if it's detrimental.
- tchaffee 3y ago
  Asia has a huge problem with the last couple of generations and quiet quitting. Valuing work over everything has never been sustainable because the rewards aren't what most humans deeply value.
ramraj07 3y ago
This is not an America thing. Even in Spain which by all accounts of my friends is considered the most laid back place in the planet, top academic labs do the grind you mention. This is not new either. Top Academia has been like this for a century. I’m not completely sure if this is a good or a bad thing. Perhaps it’s a necessity. Maybe it’s not. But it is universal.
mkoubaa 3y ago
I really like the term "athlete engineer". Thank you for that.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Maybe sherpa engineer? An athlete actually rests so their muscles can grow. A sherpa just goes non stop lugging shit up and down the mountain. Also unless you run brain scans and video feeds of someone and their screen 24/7 you don’t really know the hours they do even if they are in their office chair.
  - brightlancer 3y ago
    > Also unless you run brain scans and video feeds of someone and their screen 24/7 you don’t really know the hours they do even if they are in their office chair. IME most people don't know how many hours they actually worked vs hours they were in their chair. Most folks also overestimate their productivity from "multi-tasking", despite the overwhelming research showing productivity losses.
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      Conversely no one knows the productivity gains and work related work going on in the brain while walking the dog and yelling hi to a neighbour.
      - brightlancer 3y ago
        > Conversely no one knows the productivity gains and work related work going on in the brain while walking the dog and yelling hi to a neighbour. It would be hard to quantify, but it could be done There are different arguments for "Folks should be allowed more time off, e.g. walk the dog" and "Folks can multi-task while working, e.g. walk the dog and talk on conference calls." My argument (and I think your comment) was related to the latter, that human beings are more likely to overestimate their productivity, which various studies have shown.
jodrellblank 3y ago
> "If you want to be good, achieve, and be able to compete, you will have to work your ass off. He's just right," Terence Tao on hard work[1]: "One needs to do a serious amount of reading and writing, and not just thinking, in order to get anywhere serious in mathematics; contrary to public opinion, mathematical breakthroughs are not powered solely (or even primarily) by “Eureka” moments of genius, but are in fact largely a product of hard work, directed of course by experience and intuition. (See also “the cult of genius“.)" Computer Scientest who developed error correction codes Richard Hamming said something like "I stormed into the supervisor's office and demanded to know how John Tukey could be the same age as me and know so much. 'You would be surprised how much you'd know if you worked as hard as he works' said the supervisor. I slunk out of the office and since then tried to work harder, and it helped me know a lot more". Nobel Prize winning physicist Paul Dirac, from Wikipedia: "Dirac himself wrote in his diary during his postgraduate years that he concentrated solely on his research, and stopped only on Sunday when he took long strolls alone." and later in his life "Korean physicist, Y. S. Kim, who met and was influenced by Dirac, also says: "It is quite fortunate for the physics community that Manci [Mrs Dirac] took good care of our respected Paul A. M. Dirac. Dirac published eleven papers during the period 1939–46. Dirac was able to maintain his normal research productivity only because Manci was in charge of everything else". Nobel Prize winning physicist Gerard 't Hooft[2] on learning physics: "You won’t get your Nobel Prize for free, and remember, all of this together takes our students at least 5 years of intense study (at least one reader was surprised at this statement, saying that (s)he would never master this in 5 years; indeed, I am addressing people who plan to spend most of their time to this study)" > "But in America, what's the default? Making people work as much as possible. Cross the Atlantic pond and your mind will be blown at how many holidays per year workers get." And how much less money they/we earn. Americans in tech scoff at the idea of doing a Tier 1 helpdesk job because it's not enough money to get out of bed for, when it's paying almost double the average UK household income. [1] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/work-hard/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/work-hard/ [2] https://goodtheorist.science/ https://goodtheorist.science/
jmilloy 3y ago
The argument for shorter work weeks isn't that it would make these top athlete engineers more (or at least not less) productive, but that it does do for the bulk of average engineers. I think Carmack is arguing against a straw man if he thinks people are claiming that the best way to make the most obsessive engineers the most productive is to work less.
jodrellblank 3y ago
> "if you look at Academia you will clearly see that the best and most productive researchers are the one that work nonstop." Price's Law[1]: "Derek de Solla Price, a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist, discovered something about his peers in academia. He noticed that there were always a handful of people who dominated the publications within a subject. Price recognized a pattern which was later named after him. 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work. Only a handful of people produce half of the results in any given field or company. You may have observed this phenomena throughout your experiences in life. You are working on a team, and there are the superstars who do most of the work or seem to produce most of the outcomes and then there is everyone else." [1] https://expressingthegeniuswithin.com/prices-law-and-how-it-applies-to-everything/ https://expressingthegeniuswithin.com/prices-law-and-how-it-...
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  I thought everyone knew this? It was obvious the first couple of times I had to do a group project at school.
  - jodrellblank 3y ago
    Presumably your school project group contained many people who didn't want to be there, weren't interested in the task and had nothing important riding on the outcome. How did you conclude from that experience that academic research environments where the people chose to be there, were interested in the subject enough to make it the main work of their daily lives, relied on their income for their survival, and were not working in forced groups, would show the same pattern?
sabas123 3y ago
> but if you look at Academia you will clearly see that the best and most productive researchers are the one that work nonstop. And those researchers (at least those I know personally) get health issues due to the complete asinine work load. Including a well respected professor just getting straight up heart problems every time he would get onto his old campus. We should seriously reconsider what we glorify in academia before it gets to late.

by baby 3y ago

ronsor 3y ago

Meanwhile, cross the Pacific pond and you'll be begging to come back to America. It's not an America-exclusive issue: I'd wager most societies now have ended up valuing success and work over all else, even if it's detrimental.

tchaffee 3y ago
Asia has a huge problem with the last couple of generations and quiet quitting. Valuing work over everything has never been sustainable because the rewards aren't what most humans deeply value.

ramraj07 3y ago

This is not an America thing. Even in Spain which by all accounts of my friends is considered the most laid back place in the planet, top academic labs do the grind you mention. This is not new either. Top Academia has been like this for a century. I’m not completely sure if this is a good or a bad thing. Perhaps it’s a necessity. Maybe it’s not. But it is universal.

mkoubaa 3y ago

I really like the term "athlete engineer". Thank you for that.

quickthrower2 3y ago
Maybe sherpa engineer? An athlete actually rests so their muscles can grow. A sherpa just goes non stop lugging shit up and down the mountain. Also unless you run brain scans and video feeds of someone and their screen 24/7 you don’t really know the hours they do even if they are in their office chair.
- brightlancer 3y ago
  > Also unless you run brain scans and video feeds of someone and their screen 24/7 you don’t really know the hours they do even if they are in their office chair. IME most people don't know how many hours they actually worked vs hours they were in their chair. Most folks also overestimate their productivity from "multi-tasking", despite the overwhelming research showing productivity losses.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    Conversely no one knows the productivity gains and work related work going on in the brain while walking the dog and yelling hi to a neighbour.
    - brightlancer 3y ago
      > Conversely no one knows the productivity gains and work related work going on in the brain while walking the dog and yelling hi to a neighbour. It would be hard to quantify, but it could be done There are different arguments for "Folks should be allowed more time off, e.g. walk the dog" and "Folks can multi-task while working, e.g. walk the dog and talk on conference calls." My argument (and I think your comment) was related to the latter, that human beings are more likely to overestimate their productivity, which various studies have shown.

jodrellblank 3y ago

> "If you want to be good, achieve, and be able to compete, you will have to work your ass off. He's just right," Terence Tao on hard work[1]: "One needs to do a serious amount of reading and writing, and not just thinking, in order to get anywhere serious in mathematics; contrary to public opinion, mathematical breakthroughs are not powered solely (or even primarily) by “Eureka” moments of genius, but are in fact largely a product of hard work, directed of course by experience and intuition. (See also “the cult of genius“.)" Computer Scientest who developed error correction codes Richard Hamming said something like "I stormed into the supervisor's office and demanded to know how John Tukey could be the same age as me and know so much. 'You would be surprised how much you'd know if you worked as hard as he works' said the supervisor. I slunk out of the office and since then tried to work harder, and it helped me know a lot more". Nobel Prize winning physicist Paul Dirac, from Wikipedia: "Dirac himself wrote in his diary during his postgraduate years that he concentrated solely on his research, and stopped only on Sunday when he took long strolls alone." and later in his life "Korean physicist, Y. S. Kim, who met and was influenced by Dirac, also says: "It is quite fortunate for the physics community that Manci [Mrs Dirac] took good care of our respected Paul A. M. Dirac. Dirac published eleven papers during the period 1939–46. Dirac was able to maintain his normal research productivity only because Manci was in charge of everything else". Nobel Prize winning physicist Gerard 't Hooft[2] on learning physics: "You won’t get your Nobel Prize for free, and remember, all of this together takes our students at least 5 years of intense study (at least one reader was surprised at this statement, saying that (s)he would never master this in 5 years; indeed, I am addressing people who plan to spend most of their time to this study)" > "But in America, what's the default? Making people work as much as possible. Cross the Atlantic pond and your mind will be blown at how many holidays per year workers get." And how much less money they/we earn. Americans in tech scoff at the idea of doing a Tier 1 helpdesk job because it's not enough money to get out of bed for, when it's paying almost double the average UK household income. [1] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/work-hard/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/work-hard/ [2] https://goodtheorist.science/ https://goodtheorist.science/

jmilloy 3y ago

The argument for shorter work weeks isn't that it would make these top athlete engineers more (or at least not less) productive, but that it does do for the bulk of average engineers. I think Carmack is arguing against a straw man if he thinks people are claiming that the best way to make the most obsessive engineers the most productive is to work less.

jodrellblank 3y ago

> "if you look at Academia you will clearly see that the best and most productive researchers are the one that work nonstop." Price's Law[1]: "Derek de Solla Price, a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist, discovered something about his peers in academia. He noticed that there were always a handful of people who dominated the publications within a subject. Price recognized a pattern which was later named after him. 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work. Only a handful of people produce half of the results in any given field or company. You may have observed this phenomena throughout your experiences in life. You are working on a team, and there are the superstars who do most of the work or seem to produce most of the outcomes and then there is everyone else." [1] https://expressingthegeniuswithin.com/prices-law-and-how-it-applies-to-everything/ https://expressingthegeniuswithin.com/prices-law-and-how-it-...

jiggawatts 3y ago
I thought everyone knew this? It was obvious the first couple of times I had to do a group project at school.
- jodrellblank 3y ago
  Presumably your school project group contained many people who didn't want to be there, weren't interested in the task and had nothing important riding on the outcome. How did you conclude from that experience that academic research environments where the people chose to be there, were interested in the subject enough to make it the main work of their daily lives, relied on their income for their survival, and were not working in forced groups, would show the same pattern?

sabas123 3y ago

> but if you look at Academia you will clearly see that the best and most productive researchers are the one that work nonstop. And those researchers (at least those I know personally) get health issues due to the complete asinine work load. Including a well respected professor just getting straight up heart problems every time he would get onto his old campus. We should seriously reconsider what we glorify in academia before it gets to late.