13 ms·

Stop Glorifying Hard Work and Long Hours

477 points by Ataub24 13y ago

Nursie 13y ago
I certainly don't. Other than for the sheer technical joy of it, I thought we were in this game because we can get paid enough to enjoy the other parts of life?
rfnslyr 13y ago
When I worked at a large corporation, I nearly automated all of my work and I was called lazy. I'd do about an hour work a day, customize an existing script to process new data, then read for the remaining 6 hours. Co-workers called me a lazy nerd and proceeded to copy paste words into excel for 8 hours. Now I get to wake up at 12, smoke a joint, have a beer, take a shower, go for a walk with my dog, and then work on whatever the hell interests me that particular day. I dictate my own hours, rates, and clients. Meanwhile my friends in law firms and other similar disciplines talk about how much and how hard they work. I don't get it. Congrats busting your ass for a year doing 60 hour work weeks for $20/hr? They haven't gone out in weeks. They have nearly no friends beyond their immediate work circle. No interests. Nothing. I think somewhere down the line we got lost, or fucked by the previous generation, probably a combination of both. Work has consumed life. I don't know too many people with external interests beyond work. You get the odd hardcore cyclist, the casual musician, the nerd etc, but most people just go home, crack open a beer and watch some TV. Work should be about providing a means for you to live your life. The moment I finished my work, it left my head entirely. The way it should be. My goal has always been to leave the office as early as humanly possible while still completing the work I had to do that day. We've grown into a culture where the following happens: do decently in highschool -> pick a degree that you hope will pay out but don't really care about -> office life. It's saddening. Our lives are WAY too goddamn short to be spending 1/3rd of it sleeping, and another 2/3rds working with the occasional weekend.
- jmduke 13y ago
  See, I think there's an ideal that lies in between "work the bare minimum to support yourself" and "work your entire life to the exclusion of other activities." If I was in your position, I would have tried to get a raise instead of lingering in my mainly automated position -- ideally into another position I can automate. I don't want work to vanish from my head as soon as I leave my office, because that means it didn't particularly affect me in any way. I don't think this is a particularly 'right' way to handle this. Some people want different things out of their work, and I think that's normal. You mentioned you're freelancing now -- are you doing stuff based off of what you were working on earlier, or did you switch paths?
  - rfnslyr 13y ago
    The work I did does not even remotely tie into what I am doing now nor did it warrant a second thought beyond the office. It was a contractor position. I had to import data sets into excel from other documents. All I did was export the previous doc into a CSV file and write a script to import it into excel. It was piss easy. Then I shipped off that data set to whatever team needed it. That's all I did. It was menial. Right now I'm doing iOS development. I get to take my laptop to the park, or anywhere outside and it's goddamn amazing. Last night I worked all day on an isolated beach on an island right across from my city. Possibly the most fun I've had in months to be honest. Freelancer is the new bohemian. In all honesty though, that job instilled severe depression in me. Did about 6 months there and literally almost killed myself until I seeked help and my contract was up.
    - jmduke 13y ago
      I'm honestly fascinated by that kind of work -- not that its interesting, but the fact that it exists is just strange to me. Right now I'm doing iOS development. I get to take my laptop to the park, or anywhere outside and it's goddamn amazing. Last night I worked all day on an isolated beach on an island right across from my city. Possibly the most fun I've had in months to be honest. Sounds like you're living the dream. Good luck with your continued success!
      - 13y ago
- muratmutlu 13y ago
  Have you ever read Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh? Sounds very similar to your story, he automated his work using a script, I think he even stopped going into the office
  - rfnslyr 13y ago
    I have not but I'll add it to my reading list. Funny you should say that. The way it worked at my place, is we had a few managers on each floor. Each floor has over 300 people. A lot of people had no idea who they report to, what they're supposed to do, they just kind of asked random people for work. One of the contractors was hired shortly before the hiring manager quit. He had an office. He came in every day, opened his macbook and worked on his own projects for three months before somebody finally asked him who he was. Nobody questioned him because nobody had an idea who to even talk to about such issues, nor did they care. We have armies of developers that essentially do nothing.
    - infinite8s 13y ago
      Wow,how does that the even happen? And how could that contractor in good conscience bill your company for his own personal work.
  - canvia 13y ago
    Great book. Highly recommend reading it.
- npsimons 13y ago
  There's a difference between an obsession, your life's work, and something you do to make a living. It can be nice if they cross paths, but as you say, far too many people confuse working long hours with being "productive" or "responsible" or "hard-working". I think a big test is: how do you feel after a day of work? If you just feel like vegging in front of the TV, you might want to reconsider how you spent the day.
- cowsandmilk 13y ago
  your mention of lawyers reminds me of the Kia Motors outside counsel technology audit[1]. Many lawyers waste ridiculous amounts of time doing busywork. In my day job, I spend many hours visiting customers and spend much of that time adding automation for them, simple bash scripts that allow them to do things much more quickly. Yesterday, I taught someone the rename command[2]. Previously, they had been spending an doing it manually with the mv command. I am constantly reminded about the amount of low-hanging fruit there is out there for automation that is currently handled extremely manually, sometimes by some very well-paid people. [1] http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202585496232 http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?i... [2] http://linux.die.net/man/1/rename http://linux.die.net/man/1/rename
  - rfnslyr 13y ago
    A few of my friends who are aspiring lawyers are terribly depressed because of their current work. They honestly thought they were going to walk straight into 100,000k/year jobs. Now they're pushing paperwork all day for a third of that salary :\
  - dfc 13y ago
    Try this rename script if you really want to profit: http://plasmasturm.org/code/rename/ http://plasmasturm.org/code/rename/ The -z flag is phenomenal. The only thing I wish it had was a -R for recursive.
  - antitrust 13y ago
    > I am constantly reminded about the amount of low-hanging fruit there is out there for automation that is currently handled extremely manually, sometimes by some very well-paid people. On the other hand, they have job security that way. I've seen the same thing, and encountered huge amounts of pushback from the same people. If I automate, they no longer have 80 hours of work to do every week. How are they gonna get promoted then? By being competent or something? That, like, never happens.
- noomerikal 13y ago
  I think some of this stems from our feeling the need to compete early on in high school to get acceptance into a "good" college. Later on in life this is merely repeated in different forms at work. E.g., "I want to get ahead and get that VP spot, I need to outsmart or outwork everyone else." "Crap someone just stepped into our space and is eating our lunch, we need to move our roadmap up by 3 months."
  - antitrust 13y ago
    And also fear of getting blamed when something goes wrong. If something goes wrong and you were working 80-hour weeks, you can say, "We did everything possible and still the ship sank." If you were out having fun most of the time and the ship sank, most of the people standing around are going to blame you for laziness and inattention.
- nether 13y ago
  > When I worked at a large corporation, I nearly automated all of my work and I was called lazy. I'd do about an hour work a day, customize an existing script to process new data, then read for the remaining 6 hours. Co-workers called me a lazy nerd and proceeded to copy paste words into excel for 8 hours. Oh my god, I'm dealing with this now. I made a Python program that automated a lot of our Excel work. It reduced hours of tedium to seconds. Showing it to my manager, the reception was chilly at best. There was some disbelief that a program could parse dozens of slightly inconsistent worksheets (that made it a bit harder, but recognizing the patterns wasn't complex) but mostly deep annoyance at taking on a project he would have never approved. He seemed to think the program needed more vetting even after I'd fed huge amounts of our past analysis into it and verified it reproduces the correct results. He didn't want to see the proof that it worked, he just insisted that the spreadsheets were too complex and that some of the numbering schemes we use were too subjective to define by logic (they weren't). This is at a workplace where a coworker likes to type in hundreds of sums from a hand calculator into Excel instead of dragging a row. I might have to wait a decade or two for them to retire if anything is to improve.
  - hluska 13y ago
    That sounds like a horrible environment!! If you live within 500 km of me, I'll buy the first round...
  - Arnor 13y ago
    It's time to leave that company. They don't deserve you.
    - antitrust 13y ago
      Or time to talk with the boss' boss and remind him that time is money, and you can save him money. The incompetence of the people around you isn't your moral responsibility.
      - rfnslyr 13y ago
        People don't care. I've tried. They want job security and nothing more. We have an $88 million dollar budget for a shitty mobile app at a bank. Yes. That's right. You read that. 88 MILLION for a mobile banking app. You know why? Team of manager salaries. They employee salaries. Contractor salaries. There over 500 people working on this thing. I suggested in a meeting "Why not hire an agency that will do this at a fraction of the cost?" I got a lot of angry glares. Why not? Because half our building worth of employees would be pointless.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  Fetishizing hard work is a purely American phenomenon. Like many other parts of American culture, it has to do with the country's Puritan roots. Back in England, the Puritans were entirely city people. Even those who lived on the countryside were not farmers. So when they came to America, they had to work extra hard to learn farming and adopt that lifestyle, which was made even more difficult by the fact that the soil in the Massachusetts area was hard, rocky and not very fertile. What is interesting however was that they refused to pick up the farming habits, tools and techniques developed by the settlers who had arrived earlier. Puritans would often complain about the inexplicable justice of "heathen" Americans who were seemingly lazy and were laying around all day, doing maybe a little bit of work here and a little bit there, while still managing to bring in bountiful harvests. Meanwhile, Puritans were breaking their backs from sunrise to sunset working the land and had little to show for it. This behavior came to be known as the "Puritan work-ethic" but in reality it had nothing to do with ethic and everything to do with necessity combined with pure ignorance (i.e. refusing to use more efficient farming techniques). The history is actually very interesting and has many parallels to your story. You, too, were using superior techniques (i.e. automation) while your coworkers, out of ignorance, shunned it and instead stubbornly continued to do their work manually. (Another thing that is fascinating was that Puritans were responsible for the banning of many celebrations and holidays, presumably because they themselves had no time to celebrate or take days off from their inefficient work.)
  - workhere-io 13y ago
    Fetishizing hard work is a purely American phenomenon True, if by "American" you mean "American, German, Swiss, Austrian, Swedish, Japanese, Victorian British, and Protestant". (I'm sure I left out a few, actually).
    - glogla 13y ago
      I do have some experience with Germans, and I don't think so. Germans are pros. They expect you to be professionals, the expect you to be prepared, on time, and do a good work, and they expect you not to waste anyone's time. This, in the end, makes for a every different business culture than I remember from US -- the meetings are as short as possible. The managers actually listen to their engineers, because their expertise is what they are paying them for, and I have yet to meet a German Pointy Haired Boss, while experience both mine and of my friends with US or US-run corporations is that more than half managers are PHBes. They also don't care what you wear, don't care what you do after work, and the don't want unnecessarily long hours. They are efficient an serious about what they do, but they don't worship work the way USians and Japanese do, for example. (I don't have experience with working with other cultures. Also, I'm not German.) EDIT: But in no way would Germans require you to do more hours just for the sake of more hours. You owe the company you work for your best, professional effort. But you owe them 40 hours, not more.
- wavesounds 13y ago
  Amen Brutha! My last job I had coworkers who would complain to me that they got bored over the week we had off for Christmas vacation. I'm so much happier now that I'm away from that culture and am working with people who love what they do and love doing other things as well.
  - rfnslyr 13y ago
    Same here. How could you possibly be bored with a week off? When I had a weekend off I basically planned all the fun shit by the hour that I was going to do. Shows, beers with friends, trips, bike riding, tons of stuff to do!
    - mhurron 13y ago
      I have this problem, usually on weekends and not weeks off, but not because I live to work. It's because I have a lot I would like to do, and many of these 'little projects' would take more then the time I have on a weekend. So I end up with a backlog of things I'd like to do but don't have the time to do them in. I get bored with lots of things to do but not enough time to start them in. I then curse the need to go to work. Thank god I don't have friends, bastards would be stealing even more of my time.
      - rfnslyr 13y ago
        Exactly. Just need 2-5 close friends and thats all.
- tdees40 13y ago
  So every twenty-two year old I've ever met has told me how boring their entry-level corporate job was and how they just want to get out. Fine. But recognize that your job is boring because entry-level jobs are boring. They just exist to see if you're sane and you'll do work; once you prove yourself you get more interesting jobs. But most twenty-two year olds check out long before that happens.
  - rwallace 13y ago
    My job at age twenty-two wasn't boring. My entry-level job at age seventeen wasn't boring. Granted that I got lucky, it still disproves the notion that this is a cosmic necessity. That having been said, the relevant concept isn't boring, it's inefficient. Cleaning toilets is boring but someone has to do it anyway. What people are complaining about here isn't that they were doing boring but necessary grunt work, it's that they were doing unnecessary grunt work that could have been automated, that their time was being wasted. If your job can be automated, automate it. If your manager reacts negatively (and not by pointing out problems you weren't aware of), that means he's incompetent, dishonest or both. In that case, start looking for another job. Life is too short to work for incompetent, dishonest people.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >I think somewhere down the line we got lost, or fucked by the previous generation, probably a combination of both. I think this book, light as it is, provides a lot of clues to that: http://www.amazon.com/Back-Our-Future-Now-Our-Everything/dp/0345518780/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top http://www.amazon.com/Back-Our-Future-Now-Our-Everything/dp/...
- Dewie 13y ago
  > Work should be about providing a means for you to live your life. I have a problem with the often-used word "recreation": it can be interpreted to mean that your job is your life, and anything you do to rest or unwind from work is just a way to come back to work more refreshed and productive.
seivan 13y ago
It's only ok if you're the founder and developer. But usually I can see myself taking a whole day off, then to spend 16 hours straight coding. It's not by choice, it just happens.
yangez 13y ago
> I have a friend who brags that he busts his * 60 hours a week driving a Coca-Cola delivery truck. Congratulations, I work 35 and make twice as much as he does. This is a straw man. The point is that if you worked 50 vs 35 hours at the same job, you'd simply get more done - even considering diminishing returns. There's a reason many hugely successful people are notorious workaholics - see Elon Musk, Oprah, Marissa Meyer, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, etc. One of the simplest advantages that you can get is to just put in more hours than the next guy. No new-age "find-yourself" touchy-feely work-life balance talk will change that.
- ryguytilidie 13y ago
  But where does that end? We decide the 8 hour work week isn't productive enough, even though worker productivity has skyrocketed, so we go to 10, then we decide 10 hour days are for socialist pussies and go to 12 hour days, then eventually we are calling people lazy for sleeping and ridiculing them for not dragging concrete blocks for a .0000001% holding Elon Musk's Mars Miner corporation. I mean at some point life has to be about being happy versus maximizing the profitability of the company you work for...
  - yangez 13y ago
    I'm not saying everyone has to work long hours. I'm just saying that the few people who do will have an obvious advantage. It's up to each person to figure out if that's what they want.
    - antitrust 13y ago
      Yes, but that advantage is based on appearance and not results. That's contract to every hacker ethic I know.
  - swinnipeg 13y ago
    It doesn't need to end. It is "work life choice" not "work life balance. Choosing to spend more of your time to a task will generally return a better results. Now choose your own adventure and determine where you want those results, friends/startup/employer/family/fitness or whatever else you value.
ryguytilidie 13y ago
I just don't get it at all. Just this morning I quit a job partly because of the hilarious hours and how inflexible our executive team was about them. It's like there's some sort of shame in working a normal workday, eating dinner at a normal hour and having your own life. I really vow to never put my health and well being on the line for a job where if we hit the jackpot I might get like 50 k and every other time I will get nothing. Its one thing if you're a founder and want to spend all your waking hours pursing your dream, but a hiring strategy of "I will only hire people who want to work slave hours on my project for 1/50000th of my equity", is just no.
- ripter 13y ago
  When looking for a job, find out how many people in management have kids. They are likely to work normal hours and not expect you to work insane hours. At least that's been my experience.
  - kamaal 13y ago
    The management is likely to go home and play with their kids while you grind your bones in office.
- grecy 13y ago
  > It's like there's some sort of shame in working a normal workday, eating dinner at a normal hour and having your own life. Agree 100%. At my company I'm constantly being told I must work overtime, weekends, be on-call with a company cell phone etc. When I say no, people all over the company start directly telling me I'm not committed enough to the company, and I'm not "opening doors" for myself. I work my butt off for 35-40 hours per week, and get tons done. That's more than enough.
tehwalrus 13y ago
I believe this is more of a problem in the US than elsewhere, although there is some office in every city where this is the culture (like a game of chicken over who will get up to leave first, that goes on beyond 8pm every evening.) I like to imagine the whole of life as a not-for-profit business; where if you can cover your (living) costs, you've won, and you don't need to work any harder. If you can cover those costs in 2 days per week, great; three days for "side" projects and fun, and two days for relaxing. If you need to save up for a new toy, just work an extra day for a month. This especially makes sense for programmers, who have well-paid telecommutable desk jobs and are in a position to request pro-rata work - "You want to give me a 20% pay rise? great, I'll keep the same salary and work 4 days, thanks."
nkozyra 13y ago
I want headlines to stop telling me what to do.
- Ataub24 13y ago
  Free will #newrules
swamp40 13y ago
Well, there are certainly two camps with regard to this. If you don't feel like going over to Alex's campfire, holding hands and singing Kumbaya - let me invite you over to the other fire for an inspirational moment before getting back to work: "Americans love to fight. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league ball players and the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time." ~ George S. Patton's speech to the Third Army, just before the Normandy landings.
- tsunamifury 13y ago
  Work is not war. Not even close. Executives and wannabe clueless use war metaphors to try to rustle us up for what ends up being a trench digging operation that lasts 40+ years. I understand your naive enthusiasm but work is more of a marathon. Even doing the most glamorous part, founding a company, is an Iron Man race with many stages. Sprinting to the finish line with goofy motivational speeches when you are still 100 miles away is just bad strategy.
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Work is not war in any material sense, but it is war in almost every cultural sense. The cultural norms used by Anglo cultures to make sense of business, at the moment, are those of combat and war.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Oh, I do love a false dichotomy between a zero-sum contest to the death and a hippie commune. Real Americans apparently love the sting and clash of battle, which is why you have most of the rest of the world pissed-off at you.
  - swamp40 13y ago
    ...Sayeth the pot unto the kettle...
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
I used to train 20-somethings fresh out of college into the workforce of running small, project-based consulting teams. (Working with high-performing, motivated, recent college grads is the best job in the world) I found that high-performers want to run hard. Additionally, I found the folks back at HQ were more than willing to load them up with even more work than their 40 hours per week. I kept having to tell the noobs, "Pace yourself. This is a marathon, not a sprint. I want you just as fresh and energetic a year from now as you are today" So I am firmly on the author's side here. But I also think you can go too far. I see a lot of these articles, and I wonder if they're not just telling people what they already want to hear. "Shouldn’t we stop pretending spending 50+ hours a week at the office or jobsite to be a good thing and recognize that real genius is finding a way to streamline the process and get that same job done in 25?" He's creating a false dichotomy: work smart or work long hours. In fact, in many cases it's possible to be the smartest-working person in the shop and still have a lot of work to do. Being smarter doesn't give you a get-out-of-long-hours card. In fact, the drive and dedication that got many people to learn a lot is the exact same drive that will keep them there until late at night. In fact, many of the most valuable things we can do in life need exceptionally smart people working as hard as they can to pull off. Remember, I'm on the author's side! But I also think that there's nothing wrong simply enjoying a project that calls for a lot of work -- as long as you don't do it to excess. I enjoy projects with the occasional crunch time every few months where folks work late and push through something fun. I like hiking up mountains, even though smart people just drive their cars up or look at photos on Facebook. Hard, difficult work to achieve a worthwhile goal is a good thing! Hard work all the time simply because it's expected or because you confuse hours with value is not. Work life balance is important, but we need to be clear that certain parts of life actually require a lot of hard work. The guys studying to be brain surgeons don't sit around talking about how they should take more time out to go fishing. Simply because you make a choice to bust your ass doing something tough doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. It's your choice. Whatever your choice is, it just has to be sustainable and fit your values.
edw519 13y ago
For developers building something, the following are often true: Tweeting != Work TalkingAboutWork != Work Blogging != Work DoingSomethingInYourIDE does not necessarily = Work DoingSomethingInGithub does not necessarily = Work ThinkingButAppearingToBeDoingNothing may = Work Meetings != Work CodeReview may = Work Testing usually = Work DeliveringBuiltSoftware(AndItsPrerequisites) = Work HackerNews definitely != Work
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  Meetings: where minutes are taken and hours are wasted.
  - jasonlotito 13y ago
    Depends on the meetings. And if you are wasting time in meetings, then you are wasting time in meetings.
    - rfnslyr 13y ago
      Not in a very large corporate environment. I have had so many meetings where I didn't say a word, didn't even know anyone there. Manager I talked to like once a month sent me meeting requests and I went. It was pointless. They weren't optional either.
      - jasonlotito 13y ago
        I've never worked in a very large corporate environment. > meeting requests Did you ever reject the request? I'm honestly curious to know what would happen? Did you ever speak up to your manager about this? His manager? I guess the real question is, what did you do to fix this?
        rfnslyr 13y ago
        I'd rather be as much as a ghost as possible in the environment lest I get more shit-work to do. Nothing, I set a world record in Temple Run from all the training I've received at these meetings.
erso 13y ago
I found this post entirely unreadable due to its usage of Helvetica Neue Light #777 body font.
- Ataub24 13y ago
  tumblr default... sorry
lazyjones 13y ago
Work isn't an end in itself, it's a means to an end. If you work hard and achieve your goals quicker (or at all) because of it, that's admirable as long as your trade-offs (spare time, family ...) are made consciously. If not, adjust your goals accordingly. Condemning hard work and long hours without any such considerations, is not constructive. Personally, I don't see a value in working as little as possible just to waste more time watching TV or drinking beer, but if that is what you really want to do, fine ...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- antitrust 13y ago
  > Personally, I don't see a value in...[spending] more time watching TV or drinking beer, but if that is what you really want to do, fine ... That's an entirely separate issue, isn't it?
alekseyk 13y ago
But how else can I show to the management that I'm really not mediocre at what I do because if I don't sit in the chair longer than everybody else doing actual work. /sarcasm.
snambi 13y ago
Absolutely true.
beat 13y ago
In many cases, "work harder" happens because you're too busy to "work smarter". The boss expects 60 hour workweeks for months on end to keep up with a time-wasting process that could be automated if they'd give you a week to do it. But you can't take a week to automate it, because you're too busy doing it. And this is what I hate about corporate work.
gcatalfamo 13y ago
I like hard work sessions. Fuck me, right?
- Ataub24 13y ago
  Nah. Hard work + smart work is great. Just don't tweet about it. Don't glorify it.
  - paranoiacblack 13y ago
    ITT, don't tweet about things you are proud of. It makes us regular people feel bad. ;(
    - silverbax88 13y ago
      If someone is proud enough of not being able to finish their work in a reasonable amount of time, then sure, they should let the world know about it. I know I won't hire them, either.
      - paranoiacblack 13y ago
        Huh? How do you figure that people proud of their work aren't finishing it fast enough. It turns out that when you finish your work, you can work on something else. You don't have to end your work week right then and there.
michaelochurch 13y ago
I feel like most of work life is now driven by silent aspirations (because they're socially unacceptable) rather than immediate industrial need. Bosses want people in for long hours because it makes them feel important. It serves no benefit to the business (in the long term) but it's about emotion and careerism. People in managerial positions don't just want to be rewarded for their work. They want prestige and the root of almost all forms of prestige is nostalgia. Nostalgia (and its attendant fallacies) leads to this long-hours glorification, because people who suffer a lot to push something through, after it succeeds (regardless of whether the suffering contributed) end up remembering the "glory days" of energy drinks and double-all-nighters as if those moments were better than they actually were. Those weren't fun at the time. That's a happy-ending reinterpretation because scary things that end well are often remembered positively. What's missed is that (1) those crunches aren't sustainable, (2) they're only "glory days" for people who get major, career-improving and permanent benefits from the work-- otherwise it's just managerial abuse, and (3) most of those crunch-driven efforts fail and just become miserable death marches that make people really bitter, and the career damage of that can last years. If people actually leave at 5:00, they recover better from those death-march episodes because they haven't let their health and network go to shit.
- antitrust 13y ago
  I find your message to be profound. > They want prestige and the root of almost all forms of prestige is nostalgia. There's something of the hazing cycle in this too. They suffered, so they glorify the suffering, and share it with others. > (2) they're only "glory days" for people who get major, career-improving and permanent benefits from the work-- otherwise it's just managerial abuse In other words, for most people, this is nothing but slavery. Interesting.
Ataub24 13y ago
One more thing about the post I wrote. Jason Kincaid, formerly of TC, had a great tweet about four years ago- "The amount of fun you’re having at a party is inversely proportional to the number of times you’ve tweeted about it.” Some joke and call it Kincaid's Law. I think there is a new wrinkle to it: "The amount of hard/smart work you are doing is inversely proportional to the number of times you’ve tweeted about it.”
wf 13y ago
This seems incredibly one sided to me and I'm surprised at the number of people who are in agreement. I guess if you make the assumption that the person is lazy or inefficient and that's the reason they're working hard then this would make sense. However, I'm 24; I work a day job from 8 to 5; I go to the gym and go home and work on a startup from ~7-12 and do it all over again. And yea, I'm proud of that. Not only that, but I like when I see other people who "#hustle" because it motivates me. I like to know my friends or people I respect are working hard to achieve a goal they're excited about. Also "Working hard vs working smart is something you don't learn till you burn out a few times." What? That is just untrue. I agree after you do something the first time you'll definitely become more efficient at executing it, but if you approach problems practically you can almost always break them down and work them "smart". This post just annoys me.
- Ataub24 13y ago
  sorry man. I hear you. the point isn't to bash working hard- it pushes a bit that you should work hard + smart. it's more of a rant about pushing that out to the twitterz/4sq. I mean how many successful people actually push out how hard they are working and how much shit they are getting done? I can't count any. can't agree on the #hustle comment though. That stuff makes me cringe the f out.
  - wf 13y ago
    I can give you the #hustle, I don't know anyone who does that specifically haha, it also makes me cringe, but the idea of it is what I'm getting at. And, as far as "successful" people who talk about the hard work they're doing, I guess that also depends on what you define as successful, I know people who have day jobs and are doing incredible things on the side and they are happy and motivated doing what they love. I personally count that as success.
- antitrust 13y ago
  > I'm 24; I work a day job from 8 to 5; I go to the gym and go home and work on a startup from ~7-12 and do it all over again. And your life occurs where in that process? Sounds like a path to being a droid.
antitrust 13y ago
Glorify results. Glorify efficient results. And then, going out there and having a life, even if it's sitting home alone drinking tea and ready mystery novels.
paranoiacblack 13y ago
No, you stop glorifying "smart" work and shorter hours. Could it possibly be that people work at different paces, have different work ethic, and have different aspirations, but that they can't be compared at face value purely on the hours worked? Just because you work less hours, doesn't necessarily imply you're doing the work "smarter," it probably just means that you are only doing the required the work. It is possible that I work much "smarter" than you do and still work 50-60 hours work weeks because I am doing twice the required work. This isn't that bizarre if you are really trying to cover a large amount of the material that exists in CS beyond making cool, hip web-apps and mobile sites. In that case, you might NEED to put in extra work since you are possibly taking on two jobs: one as an employee and one as a student. That being said, I recall a lot of people making this argument to me as I progressed through school and every activity I've done. They claimed the exact same thing about being the "real geniuses" (please don't fool yourself here) because they learned how to work "smarter"; which usually came down to putting in ONLY the minimally required hours, constantly calculating their grade to make sure it was high enough for them to fail the tests and still pass with a C, and overall cutting corners. You want to know what I saw happen to those people? Failure. These are the same people who were high school dropouts or got kicked out of college for not doing the work. Here's the thing, in a world where the job market is extremely competitive, your stubbornness to work "unreasonable" hours is purely a weakness and hardly a strength. You can have all of knowledge in the world and truly be a "real genius," but if your boss can't confirm your work ethic, you still don't have a job. Oh, and good luck starting/running a business with your 35 hours work weeks. Finally, you should probably apologize to those of us who are hard workers out there for being purely insulting. As if CEOs and CTOs and great hackers all over the world worked somehow less "smart" than you did because they worked hard hours and slept underneath their desks. Sometimes to excel and to surpass yourself, you have to sacrifice and change the pace of things. Do you really think Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Steve Jobs, etc, got where they were by saying "well, I've done 35 hours of 'smart' work now, I need to stop an meditate?" Well, maybe, but they definitely didn't start like that. And god forbid you have to take care of a family and multiple children. Do you think your spouse is going to be happy with "Oh, I already did my 35 hours of 'smartly' raising the kids and providing for the family, I'm done now." There are reasons that people "glorify" the hard work and long hours they put into things; they are proud of their work. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out. If your twitter friends are "humble brag"-ers, get new friends. But don't pretend everyone who loves to share their hard work is trying to shame you or brag about it.
augbot 13y ago
True True!
mpg33 13y ago
Productivity > Hard Work and Long Hours
sriramk 13y ago
I've seen this promoted in subtle ways. At Microsoft, I once saw a VP talk about how a team had worked nights and weekends to make something extraordinary happen and how he was surprised to get emails from them in the middle of the night. I had a private chat with him later of how this encourages the wrong behavior - the key is that great work got done, not the fact that teams worked late nights or that they were on late night email.
- NegativeK 13y ago
  What was the VP's immediate response to the chat? More importantly, what was the VP's long-term response?
  - sriramk 13y ago
    Immediate response - he admitted it was a mistake. Long term - I didn't stay to find out. I doubt anything changed, since this is so deeply engraved in company culture.
- rwg 13y ago
  At ${PREVIOUS_JOB}, the director of another department tried to recruit me. One of his selling points was that they often worked insanely late nights and slept at their desks. Considering I was already thinking about quitting my job due to long hours and unrealistic expectations, his pitch didn't exactly woo me.
OhHeyItsE 13y ago
I feel like this is pretty widely accepted in the tech/hacker world, right? I've found it's generally the more business-y (creative, PM, etc) types that do the weekend check-in/late night thing. Also - it seems to be magnified in the highly transient NYC/SF environments. Recently relocated young people without families just may not have that much to do outside of work.
T_T 13y ago
"I have a friend who brags that he busts his * 60 hours a week driving a Coca-Cola delivery truck. Congratulations, I work 35 and make twice as much as he does." Is success or contribution measured by your salary? This is only fair if we can all stop drinking beverages delivered to our offices.
knodi 13y ago
Please don't tell me how to work or spend my time doing.
jusben1369 13y ago
One small subset of the discussion that I think is relevant. Anyone ever notice how sometimes your most productive days are when you know you have to cut out early for some important event? "Can't mess around today as I have to leave early" 3pm comes around and you're kind of shocked by how much you got done.
lectrick 13y ago
Work smarter, not harder. I am going to create a startup soon and we're going to work out of my beachfront 2-bedroom FIOS-equipped apt for starters. The schedule will be: 9am-noon: 5 minute standup to spec work for the day, then code. Noon-2pm: Lunch but also surf, bike, boogieboard, suntan, volleyball, just do something fucking outside that involves physical activity. 2-5pm: Code. If you finish early, you get to leave. Basically 2 3-hour spurts of hard work a day. If you finish what you intended to do that day early, you go. I've noticed that I only get 1-2 solid things done a day, anyway, and the rest of the time is mostly wasted (or reading, etc.) Just fitting a healthy schedule to that.
- cafecodelife 13y ago
  Hell yeah man, that sounds like a great plan. I only have a few solid hours of focus and productivity in any given 9 hour work day myself (web developer at a startup). This sounds like the way to do it.
- southphillyman 13y ago
  I'd be interested in you blogging your experience with this.
  - lectrick 13y ago
    I would, once I'm there.
arcosdev 13y ago
Not to mention ...and for what? Most of the time what you're working on isn't worth the agony.
andyhmltn 13y ago
I totally agree with this. I'm part way through 'the 4 hour work week' by Tim Ferris. He's a bit off the deep end with things he says, but the general message he puts out is really good: Why would you slug 8 hours getting hardly anything done because you're so bored/unmotivated when you can walk in at 12 and get more done in a few hours than you would usually? Sadly, most employers see Time = Money. The fact is that that isn't the case at all when people are working 9-5 5 days a week.
rocky1138 13y ago
OT: Anyone else getting garbled output from viewtext.org when attempting to view this page?
3am 13y ago
This struck me as cynical and lazy. I agree narrowly with not "glorifying" hard work. There's no need to make a spectacle. But I believe in what I do, and I believe in its importance. When I automate something, I use the time that I've cleared up to automate something else, improve the automation I've already written, or improve myself. Granted, I'm not talking 100 hour weeks, but 8-10 hour days, then logging in at night after taking the evening for myself and weekends as necessary when there is a legit need. I guess it's a question about how driven one is. It's sad this is on HN, I would probably not hire anyone that was content to automate their work and then phone it in for paycheck. Then again, I have largely stayed out of the large corporate environment, too. YMMV.
mcgwiz 13y ago
This post is annoying in that it conflates and oversimplifies far too much. On the point of humblebragging: I (and 95% of the internet population) agree, humblebragging should not be done (even though the author later goes on to humblebrag that he only works 35 hours per week... hypocritical much?). But on the separate implied point that working 50+ hours a week is mutually exclusive with working smartly, I disagree. That is naive and simplistic. When you have a finite runway (which decreases in length whether you are or are not working) there's a very strong case to be made for sacrificing a degree of your free time in order to maximize the utility of that runway. Separately, one should carefully balance the multitude of competing development concerns to be working as smartly as possible, i.e. YAGNI, refactoring, testing and CI, tight customer feedback loop, etc. Conflating smart work with the need to work long hours betrays the likelihood that the author has never even considered the reality of bootstrapped startups.
riveteye 13y ago
I strongly believe that work is not a job.* Work is what you do in your life every day to create value for yourself and for the people you care about. Your work should make you happy and help you to feel fulfilled. Your work could take 5 hours a week or it could take 60 hours a week. It could make you a ton of money, it could be where you spend your money. Your work could be a volunteer gig at an animal shelter that you do around your 9-5 day job, it could be the all-night code sessions you do as a hobby, it could even be what you do every day as a high-functioning cog in your office cube. It's up to you to find your own glory. (Sort of like http://blog.workisnotajob.com/ http://blog.workisnotajob.com/) (*Sometimes there is value in helping society be society.)
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
silverbax88 13y ago
One hour of focused, efficient, undistracted work will accomplish more than most people sitting at their desks will accomplish in a whole day.
ultimatedelman 13y ago
As the son of a man who loves sending my mom on vacation with her friends so he can get to the office to get work done (because he genuinely loves it), I can tell you this article does not apply to everyone.
samsnelling 13y ago
90 Hours A Week And Loving It!
ivankirigin 13y ago
Many people enjoy working long hours if they feel the work is impactful. Hustle by itself is pretty distasteful though. It is a humblebrag. I actually just published a tangential blog post, mainly focusing on whether more people should work less while focusing on other things in life that matter. http://blog.kirigin.com/10x http://blog.kirigin.com/10x
GoldfishCRM 13y ago
Amen
hayward2 13y ago
Work in itself is not fulfilling unless you are a simpleton. Fulfilling intellectual curiosity, relationships, pleasure, those things are fulfilling. Work is simply a means to those ends. It's amazing how many people don't understand this. I'm not a hacker because I love programming and it's my purpose in life and the reason I live. I program because it's a relatively good career and an efficient way to make money so that one day I won't have to (and while I do, I still get 30+ hours a week to pursue the things that do bring fulfillment). Sure I'd rather be a programmer than a plumber, truck driver, accountant or even another highly paid profession like corporate lawyer, but I'd rather be an independently wealthy intellectual seeker, family man, world traveler, explorer and pleasure-seeker than a programmer...
yankoff 13y ago
I see glorifying of short hours way more often here.
senekisa 13y ago
It is the harsh reality.
megaframe 13y ago
disarm them. Reply to their tweet/post saying you feel sorry they had to work so late, hopefully it will calm down for them soon. When it does they should join you for the exciting/fun/relaxing `insert activity` you're doing right now while they're at work.
delcom5 13y ago
With many (15) years of experience in the industry from junior to now manager I have to say, GettingTheJobDone()works for me. I found some people perform MUCH better at their own schedule, while some just have it in their DNA and enjoy working hard and long hours. Should we, however, abuse that? Absolutely NOT! They are the rare gems I admire.
bjliu 13y ago
on the other hand, there is also a need to "Stop Glorifying Laziness and Distractions"
riggins 13y ago
I'm thinking that of the things that get glorified, hard work is probably one of the better choices. Better than athletes, getting hammered, drugs, 'balling', and Britney Spears.
dholowiski 13y ago
I can speak as someone who has burned out several times - The key to working a normal work-day is to develop a thick skin - to understand that there are things that are possibly important, but just aren't going to get done because you don't have the time to do them. And things might blow up because of these things that don't get done, and that's OK, you're just going to have to live with it. This is not easy and I'm still very bad at it, but I'm working on it.
papsosouid 13y ago
"Work smarter not harder" is a false dichotomy. Someone working hard and smart is going to accomplish more than someone just working smart. And equating "working hard" with "putting in empty meaningless long hours" is ridiculous. Working hard is about effort, not time. As someone who was praised for being smart and developed a habit of putting in very little effort as a result: working hard is great. Work hard. Just don't work hard and stupid.
cafecodelife 13y ago
I like this article. My viewpoint is that it sucks that even if you finish all of your work on Friday at noon, you still have to, due to corporate culture, sit at your desk until 5 or 6pm, regardless of if you are producing or able to produce anything.
cupcake-unicorn 13y ago
This is something that is really important to me. I've even thought of perhaps finding another line of work where this mindset doesn't prevail. I suffer from chronic health issues, and that really helps put things in perspective in a different way. My number 1 commitment is to my health, and working 80+ hours a week is not going to be doing me any favors in that department. Life is short, and it doesn't mean anything to earn all that money if you're not healthy, can't go anywhere to enjoy it, don't see your family, etc. People need to put it in perspective.
chewymouse 13y ago
"I have a friend who brags that he busts his * 60 hours a week driving a Coca-Cola delivery truck. Congratulations, I work 35 and make twice as much as he does." The elitism you're all basking in is embodied by this sentence.
saosebastiao 13y ago
I see this all the time and it just isn't correct. Working long hours isn't about productivity. We know long hours aren't productive. But they are fast. Sometimes 80 hr weeks at 75% productivity really are better than 40 hr weeks at 100%
digisth 13y ago
HBR had an article about this not long ago exploring the "why" (based on several studies on the topic): http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/05/why_men_work_so_many_hours.html http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/05/why_men_work_so_many_hours.h... The takeaway: 'Not only is work devotion a "class act" - a way of enacting class status--it's also a certain way of being a "real" man. Working long hours is seen as a "heroic activity," noted Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and her co-authors in their 1999 study of lawyers. Marianne Cooper's study of engineers in Silicon Valley closely observes how working long hours turns pencil pushing or computer keyboarding into a manly test of physical endurance. "There's a kind of machismo culture that you don't sleep," one father told her. "Successful enactment of this masculinity," Cooper concludes, "involves displaying one's exhaustion, physically and verbally, in order to convey the depth of one's commitment, stamina, and virility."' The above shows that in many cases Long Hours Are Not About Working, but about signaling dedication and toughness (maybe Robert Hanson could write a post about this one.) With that said: as someone who has worked many, many of those long weeks (and still does so on occasion) I do see some truth in there, but it's of course more nuanced. I've seen people work long hours because other things in their lives are going wrong (and they were escaping it), because of management pressure (this was in the lull between the previous boom and the current one), or simply because it was "crunch/launch time" (for real - which is a completely valid reason for a long week.)
kenster07 13y ago
Working hard and working efficiently are not mutually exclusive. I would expect a false dichotomy like this to be posted on mtv news, but definitely not here.
general_failure 13y ago
Well, stop glorifying 'free time'. Many of my friends spend practically all their free time drinking beer and 'chilling out' watching TV. Yeah, I am sure that's more healthy than we working hard learning something new.
- ilyanep 13y ago
  I spend eight hours a day in the office, then I go home and read some textbooks, follow an online class, read a paper, write a blog post, go to the gym, practice saxophone, or hang out with friends. While I find the stuff I do at work enjoyable, I wouldn't do another 6 hours of it a day at the expense of giving up all that other stuff, because it's the other stuff that gets me through the more tedious weeks at work. Fortunately, my employer understands the necessity of doing those other things. Yeah, lots of people waste their free time. I don't think that working 60 hours a week is any less of a waste for those people.
- Aqueous 13y ago
  socializing is important. it is vital to your health. obviously as with anything there's such a thing as too much, but as someone who has been missing work-life balance i can tell just how much i miss hanging out with friends, drinking beer and watching tv.
linuxhansl 13y ago
That! I work fewer hours than most of my peers and I get more done. The reason is not that I am exceptionally smart (I am not), but that I stay relaxed and avoid being burned out.

477 points by Ataub24 13y ago

I certainly don't. Other than for the sheer technical joy of it, I thought we were in this game because we can get paid enough to enjoy the other parts of life?

rfnslyr 13y ago

When I worked at a large corporation, I nearly automated all of my work and I was called lazy. I'd do about an hour work a day, customize an existing script to process new data, then read for the remaining 6 hours. Co-workers called me a lazy nerd and proceeded to copy paste words into excel for 8 hours. Now I get to wake up at 12, smoke a joint, have a beer, take a shower, go for a walk with my dog, and then work on whatever the hell interests me that particular day. I dictate my own hours, rates, and clients. Meanwhile my friends in law firms and other similar disciplines talk about how much and how hard they work. I don't get it. Congrats busting your ass for a year doing 60 hour work weeks for $20/hr? They haven't gone out in weeks. They have nearly no friends beyond their immediate work circle. No interests. Nothing. I think somewhere down the line we got lost, or fucked by the previous generation, probably a combination of both. Work has consumed life. I don't know too many people with external interests beyond work. You get the odd hardcore cyclist, the casual musician, the nerd etc, but most people just go home, crack open a beer and watch some TV. Work should be about providing a means for you to live your life. The moment I finished my work, it left my head entirely. The way it should be. My goal has always been to leave the office as early as humanly possible while still completing the work I had to do that day. We've grown into a culture where the following happens: do decently in highschool -> pick a degree that you hope will pay out but don't really care about -> office life. It's saddening. Our lives are WAY too goddamn short to be spending 1/3rd of it sleeping, and another 2/3rds working with the occasional weekend.

jmduke 13y ago
See, I think there's an ideal that lies in between "work the bare minimum to support yourself" and "work your entire life to the exclusion of other activities." If I was in your position, I would have tried to get a raise instead of lingering in my mainly automated position -- ideally into another position I can automate. I don't want work to vanish from my head as soon as I leave my office, because that means it didn't particularly affect me in any way. I don't think this is a particularly 'right' way to handle this. Some people want different things out of their work, and I think that's normal. You mentioned you're freelancing now -- are you doing stuff based off of what you were working on earlier, or did you switch paths?
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  The work I did does not even remotely tie into what I am doing now nor did it warrant a second thought beyond the office. It was a contractor position. I had to import data sets into excel from other documents. All I did was export the previous doc into a CSV file and write a script to import it into excel. It was piss easy. Then I shipped off that data set to whatever team needed it. That's all I did. It was menial. Right now I'm doing iOS development. I get to take my laptop to the park, or anywhere outside and it's goddamn amazing. Last night I worked all day on an isolated beach on an island right across from my city. Possibly the most fun I've had in months to be honest. Freelancer is the new bohemian. In all honesty though, that job instilled severe depression in me. Did about 6 months there and literally almost killed myself until I seeked help and my contract was up.
  - jmduke 13y ago
    I'm honestly fascinated by that kind of work -- not that its interesting, but the fact that it exists is just strange to me. Right now I'm doing iOS development. I get to take my laptop to the park, or anywhere outside and it's goddamn amazing. Last night I worked all day on an isolated beach on an island right across from my city. Possibly the most fun I've had in months to be honest. Sounds like you're living the dream. Good luck with your continued success!
    - 13y ago
muratmutlu 13y ago
Have you ever read Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh? Sounds very similar to your story, he automated his work using a script, I think he even stopped going into the office
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  I have not but I'll add it to my reading list. Funny you should say that. The way it worked at my place, is we had a few managers on each floor. Each floor has over 300 people. A lot of people had no idea who they report to, what they're supposed to do, they just kind of asked random people for work. One of the contractors was hired shortly before the hiring manager quit. He had an office. He came in every day, opened his macbook and worked on his own projects for three months before somebody finally asked him who he was. Nobody questioned him because nobody had an idea who to even talk to about such issues, nor did they care. We have armies of developers that essentially do nothing.
  - infinite8s 13y ago
    Wow,how does that the even happen? And how could that contractor in good conscience bill your company for his own personal work.
- canvia 13y ago
  Great book. Highly recommend reading it.
npsimons 13y ago
There's a difference between an obsession, your life's work, and something you do to make a living. It can be nice if they cross paths, but as you say, far too many people confuse working long hours with being "productive" or "responsible" or "hard-working". I think a big test is: how do you feel after a day of work? If you just feel like vegging in front of the TV, you might want to reconsider how you spent the day.
cowsandmilk 13y ago
your mention of lawyers reminds me of the Kia Motors outside counsel technology audit[1]. Many lawyers waste ridiculous amounts of time doing busywork. In my day job, I spend many hours visiting customers and spend much of that time adding automation for them, simple bash scripts that allow them to do things much more quickly. Yesterday, I taught someone the rename command[2]. Previously, they had been spending an doing it manually with the mv command. I am constantly reminded about the amount of low-hanging fruit there is out there for automation that is currently handled extremely manually, sometimes by some very well-paid people. [1] http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202585496232 http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?i... [2] http://linux.die.net/man/1/rename http://linux.die.net/man/1/rename
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  A few of my friends who are aspiring lawyers are terribly depressed because of their current work. They honestly thought they were going to walk straight into 100,000k/year jobs. Now they're pushing paperwork all day for a third of that salary :\
- dfc 13y ago
  Try this rename script if you really want to profit: http://plasmasturm.org/code/rename/ http://plasmasturm.org/code/rename/ The -z flag is phenomenal. The only thing I wish it had was a -R for recursive.
- antitrust 13y ago
  > I am constantly reminded about the amount of low-hanging fruit there is out there for automation that is currently handled extremely manually, sometimes by some very well-paid people. On the other hand, they have job security that way. I've seen the same thing, and encountered huge amounts of pushback from the same people. If I automate, they no longer have 80 hours of work to do every week. How are they gonna get promoted then? By being competent or something? That, like, never happens.
noomerikal 13y ago
I think some of this stems from our feeling the need to compete early on in high school to get acceptance into a "good" college. Later on in life this is merely repeated in different forms at work. E.g., "I want to get ahead and get that VP spot, I need to outsmart or outwork everyone else." "Crap someone just stepped into our space and is eating our lunch, we need to move our roadmap up by 3 months."
- antitrust 13y ago
  And also fear of getting blamed when something goes wrong. If something goes wrong and you were working 80-hour weeks, you can say, "We did everything possible and still the ship sank." If you were out having fun most of the time and the ship sank, most of the people standing around are going to blame you for laziness and inattention.
nether 13y ago
> When I worked at a large corporation, I nearly automated all of my work and I was called lazy. I'd do about an hour work a day, customize an existing script to process new data, then read for the remaining 6 hours. Co-workers called me a lazy nerd and proceeded to copy paste words into excel for 8 hours. Oh my god, I'm dealing with this now. I made a Python program that automated a lot of our Excel work. It reduced hours of tedium to seconds. Showing it to my manager, the reception was chilly at best. There was some disbelief that a program could parse dozens of slightly inconsistent worksheets (that made it a bit harder, but recognizing the patterns wasn't complex) but mostly deep annoyance at taking on a project he would have never approved. He seemed to think the program needed more vetting even after I'd fed huge amounts of our past analysis into it and verified it reproduces the correct results. He didn't want to see the proof that it worked, he just insisted that the spreadsheets were too complex and that some of the numbering schemes we use were too subjective to define by logic (they weren't). This is at a workplace where a coworker likes to type in hundreds of sums from a hand calculator into Excel instead of dragging a row. I might have to wait a decade or two for them to retire if anything is to improve.
- hluska 13y ago
  That sounds like a horrible environment!! If you live within 500 km of me, I'll buy the first round...
- Arnor 13y ago
  It's time to leave that company. They don't deserve you.
  - antitrust 13y ago
    Or time to talk with the boss' boss and remind him that time is money, and you can save him money. The incompetence of the people around you isn't your moral responsibility.
    - rfnslyr 13y ago
      People don't care. I've tried. They want job security and nothing more. We have an $88 million dollar budget for a shitty mobile app at a bank. Yes. That's right. You read that. 88 MILLION for a mobile banking app. You know why? Team of manager salaries. They employee salaries. Contractor salaries. There over 500 people working on this thing. I suggested in a meeting "Why not hire an agency that will do this at a fraction of the cost?" I got a lot of angry glares. Why not? Because half our building worth of employees would be pointless.
enraged_camel 13y ago
Fetishizing hard work is a purely American phenomenon. Like many other parts of American culture, it has to do with the country's Puritan roots. Back in England, the Puritans were entirely city people. Even those who lived on the countryside were not farmers. So when they came to America, they had to work extra hard to learn farming and adopt that lifestyle, which was made even more difficult by the fact that the soil in the Massachusetts area was hard, rocky and not very fertile. What is interesting however was that they refused to pick up the farming habits, tools and techniques developed by the settlers who had arrived earlier. Puritans would often complain about the inexplicable justice of "heathen" Americans who were seemingly lazy and were laying around all day, doing maybe a little bit of work here and a little bit there, while still managing to bring in bountiful harvests. Meanwhile, Puritans were breaking their backs from sunrise to sunset working the land and had little to show for it. This behavior came to be known as the "Puritan work-ethic" but in reality it had nothing to do with ethic and everything to do with necessity combined with pure ignorance (i.e. refusing to use more efficient farming techniques). The history is actually very interesting and has many parallels to your story. You, too, were using superior techniques (i.e. automation) while your coworkers, out of ignorance, shunned it and instead stubbornly continued to do their work manually. (Another thing that is fascinating was that Puritans were responsible for the banning of many celebrations and holidays, presumably because they themselves had no time to celebrate or take days off from their inefficient work.)
- workhere-io 13y ago
  Fetishizing hard work is a purely American phenomenon True, if by "American" you mean "American, German, Swiss, Austrian, Swedish, Japanese, Victorian British, and Protestant". (I'm sure I left out a few, actually).
  - glogla 13y ago
    I do have some experience with Germans, and I don't think so. Germans are pros. They expect you to be professionals, the expect you to be prepared, on time, and do a good work, and they expect you not to waste anyone's time. This, in the end, makes for a every different business culture than I remember from US -- the meetings are as short as possible. The managers actually listen to their engineers, because their expertise is what they are paying them for, and I have yet to meet a German Pointy Haired Boss, while experience both mine and of my friends with US or US-run corporations is that more than half managers are PHBes. They also don't care what you wear, don't care what you do after work, and the don't want unnecessarily long hours. They are efficient an serious about what they do, but they don't worship work the way USians and Japanese do, for example. (I don't have experience with working with other cultures. Also, I'm not German.) EDIT: But in no way would Germans require you to do more hours just for the sake of more hours. You owe the company you work for your best, professional effort. But you owe them 40 hours, not more.
wavesounds 13y ago
Amen Brutha! My last job I had coworkers who would complain to me that they got bored over the week we had off for Christmas vacation. I'm so much happier now that I'm away from that culture and am working with people who love what they do and love doing other things as well.
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  Same here. How could you possibly be bored with a week off? When I had a weekend off I basically planned all the fun shit by the hour that I was going to do. Shows, beers with friends, trips, bike riding, tons of stuff to do!
  - mhurron 13y ago
    I have this problem, usually on weekends and not weeks off, but not because I live to work. It's because I have a lot I would like to do, and many of these 'little projects' would take more then the time I have on a weekend. So I end up with a backlog of things I'd like to do but don't have the time to do them in. I get bored with lots of things to do but not enough time to start them in. I then curse the need to go to work. Thank god I don't have friends, bastards would be stealing even more of my time.
    - rfnslyr 13y ago
      Exactly. Just need 2-5 close friends and thats all.
tdees40 13y ago
So every twenty-two year old I've ever met has told me how boring their entry-level corporate job was and how they just want to get out. Fine. But recognize that your job is boring because entry-level jobs are boring. They just exist to see if you're sane and you'll do work; once you prove yourself you get more interesting jobs. But most twenty-two year olds check out long before that happens.
- rwallace 13y ago
  My job at age twenty-two wasn't boring. My entry-level job at age seventeen wasn't boring. Granted that I got lucky, it still disproves the notion that this is a cosmic necessity. That having been said, the relevant concept isn't boring, it's inefficient. Cleaning toilets is boring but someone has to do it anyway. What people are complaining about here isn't that they were doing boring but necessary grunt work, it's that they were doing unnecessary grunt work that could have been automated, that their time was being wasted. If your job can be automated, automate it. If your manager reacts negatively (and not by pointing out problems you weren't aware of), that means he's incompetent, dishonest or both. In that case, start looking for another job. Life is too short to work for incompetent, dishonest people.
coldtea 13y ago
>I think somewhere down the line we got lost, or fucked by the previous generation, probably a combination of both. I think this book, light as it is, provides a lot of clues to that: http://www.amazon.com/Back-Our-Future-Now-Our-Everything/dp/0345518780/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top http://www.amazon.com/Back-Our-Future-Now-Our-Everything/dp/...
Dewie 13y ago
> Work should be about providing a means for you to live your life. I have a problem with the often-used word "recreation": it can be interpreted to mean that your job is your life, and anything you do to rest or unwind from work is just a way to come back to work more refreshed and productive.

seivan 13y ago

It's only ok if you're the founder and developer. But usually I can see myself taking a whole day off, then to spend 16 hours straight coding. It's not by choice, it just happens.

yangez 13y ago

> I have a friend who brags that he busts his * 60 hours a week driving a Coca-Cola delivery truck. Congratulations, I work 35 and make twice as much as he does. This is a straw man. The point is that if you worked 50 vs 35 hours at the same job, you'd simply get more done - even considering diminishing returns. There's a reason many hugely successful people are notorious workaholics - see Elon Musk, Oprah, Marissa Meyer, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, etc. One of the simplest advantages that you can get is to just put in more hours than the next guy. No new-age "find-yourself" touchy-feely work-life balance talk will change that.

ryguytilidie 13y ago
But where does that end? We decide the 8 hour work week isn't productive enough, even though worker productivity has skyrocketed, so we go to 10, then we decide 10 hour days are for socialist pussies and go to 12 hour days, then eventually we are calling people lazy for sleeping and ridiculing them for not dragging concrete blocks for a .0000001% holding Elon Musk's Mars Miner corporation. I mean at some point life has to be about being happy versus maximizing the profitability of the company you work for...
- yangez 13y ago
  I'm not saying everyone has to work long hours. I'm just saying that the few people who do will have an obvious advantage. It's up to each person to figure out if that's what they want.
  - antitrust 13y ago
    Yes, but that advantage is based on appearance and not results. That's contract to every hacker ethic I know.
- swinnipeg 13y ago
  It doesn't need to end. It is "work life choice" not "work life balance. Choosing to spend more of your time to a task will generally return a better results. Now choose your own adventure and determine where you want those results, friends/startup/employer/family/fitness or whatever else you value.

ryguytilidie 13y ago

I just don't get it at all. Just this morning I quit a job partly because of the hilarious hours and how inflexible our executive team was about them. It's like there's some sort of shame in working a normal workday, eating dinner at a normal hour and having your own life. I really vow to never put my health and well being on the line for a job where if we hit the jackpot I might get like 50 k and every other time I will get nothing. Its one thing if you're a founder and want to spend all your waking hours pursing your dream, but a hiring strategy of "I will only hire people who want to work slave hours on my project for 1/50000th of my equity", is just no.

ripter 13y ago
When looking for a job, find out how many people in management have kids. They are likely to work normal hours and not expect you to work insane hours. At least that's been my experience.
- kamaal 13y ago
  The management is likely to go home and play with their kids while you grind your bones in office.
grecy 13y ago
> It's like there's some sort of shame in working a normal workday, eating dinner at a normal hour and having your own life. Agree 100%. At my company I'm constantly being told I must work overtime, weekends, be on-call with a company cell phone etc. When I say no, people all over the company start directly telling me I'm not committed enough to the company, and I'm not "opening doors" for myself. I work my butt off for 35-40 hours per week, and get tons done. That's more than enough.

tehwalrus 13y ago

I believe this is more of a problem in the US than elsewhere, although there is some office in every city where this is the culture (like a game of chicken over who will get up to leave first, that goes on beyond 8pm every evening.) I like to imagine the whole of life as a not-for-profit business; where if you can cover your (living) costs, you've won, and you don't need to work any harder. If you can cover those costs in 2 days per week, great; three days for "side" projects and fun, and two days for relaxing. If you need to save up for a new toy, just work an extra day for a month. This especially makes sense for programmers, who have well-paid telecommutable desk jobs and are in a position to request pro-rata work - "You want to give me a 20% pay rise? great, I'll keep the same salary and work 4 days, thanks."

nkozyra 13y ago

I want headlines to stop telling me what to do.

Ataub24 13y ago
Free will #newrules

swamp40 13y ago

Well, there are certainly two camps with regard to this. If you don't feel like going over to Alex's campfire, holding hands and singing Kumbaya - let me invite you over to the other fire for an inspirational moment before getting back to work: "Americans love to fight. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league ball players and the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time." ~ George S. Patton's speech to the Third Army, just before the Normandy landings.

tsunamifury 13y ago
Work is not war. Not even close. Executives and wannabe clueless use war metaphors to try to rustle us up for what ends up being a trench digging operation that lasts 40+ years. I understand your naive enthusiasm but work is more of a marathon. Even doing the most glamorous part, founding a company, is an Iron Man race with many stages. Sprinting to the finish line with goofy motivational speeches when you are still 100 miles away is just bad strategy.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Work is not war in any material sense, but it is war in almost every cultural sense. The cultural norms used by Anglo cultures to make sense of business, at the moment, are those of combat and war.
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
Oh, I do love a false dichotomy between a zero-sum contest to the death and a hippie commune. Real Americans apparently love the sting and clash of battle, which is why you have most of the rest of the world pissed-off at you.
- swamp40 13y ago
  ...Sayeth the pot unto the kettle...

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

I used to train 20-somethings fresh out of college into the workforce of running small, project-based consulting teams. (Working with high-performing, motivated, recent college grads is the best job in the world) I found that high-performers want to run hard. Additionally, I found the folks back at HQ were more than willing to load them up with even more work than their 40 hours per week. I kept having to tell the noobs, "Pace yourself. This is a marathon, not a sprint. I want you just as fresh and energetic a year from now as you are today" So I am firmly on the author's side here. But I also think you can go too far. I see a lot of these articles, and I wonder if they're not just telling people what they already want to hear. "Shouldn’t we stop pretending spending 50+ hours a week at the office or jobsite to be a good thing and recognize that real genius is finding a way to streamline the process and get that same job done in 25?" He's creating a false dichotomy: work smart or work long hours. In fact, in many cases it's possible to be the smartest-working person in the shop and still have a lot of work to do. Being smarter doesn't give you a get-out-of-long-hours card. In fact, the drive and dedication that got many people to learn a lot is the exact same drive that will keep them there until late at night. In fact, many of the most valuable things we can do in life need exceptionally smart people working as hard as they can to pull off. Remember, I'm on the author's side! But I also think that there's nothing wrong simply enjoying a project that calls for a lot of work -- as long as you don't do it to excess. I enjoy projects with the occasional crunch time every few months where folks work late and push through something fun. I like hiking up mountains, even though smart people just drive their cars up or look at photos on Facebook. Hard, difficult work to achieve a worthwhile goal is a good thing! Hard work all the time simply because it's expected or because you confuse hours with value is not. Work life balance is important, but we need to be clear that certain parts of life actually require a lot of hard work. The guys studying to be brain surgeons don't sit around talking about how they should take more time out to go fishing. Simply because you make a choice to bust your ass doing something tough doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. It's your choice. Whatever your choice is, it just has to be sustainable and fit your values.

edw519 13y ago

For developers building something, the following are often true: Tweeting != Work TalkingAboutWork != Work Blogging != Work DoingSomethingInYourIDE does not necessarily = Work DoingSomethingInGithub does not necessarily = Work ThinkingButAppearingToBeDoingNothing may = Work Meetings != Work CodeReview may = Work Testing usually = Work DeliveringBuiltSoftware(AndItsPrerequisites) = Work HackerNews definitely != Work

rfnslyr 13y ago
Meetings: where minutes are taken and hours are wasted.
- jasonlotito 13y ago
  Depends on the meetings. And if you are wasting time in meetings, then you are wasting time in meetings.
  - rfnslyr 13y ago
    Not in a very large corporate environment. I have had so many meetings where I didn't say a word, didn't even know anyone there. Manager I talked to like once a month sent me meeting requests and I went. It was pointless. They weren't optional either.
    - jasonlotito 13y ago
      I've never worked in a very large corporate environment. > meeting requests Did you ever reject the request? I'm honestly curious to know what would happen? Did you ever speak up to your manager about this? His manager? I guess the real question is, what did you do to fix this?
      - rfnslyr 13y ago
        I'd rather be as much as a ghost as possible in the environment lest I get more shit-work to do. Nothing, I set a world record in Temple Run from all the training I've received at these meetings.

erso 13y ago

I found this post entirely unreadable due to its usage of Helvetica Neue Light #777 body font.

Ataub24 13y ago
tumblr default... sorry

lazyjones 13y ago

Work isn't an end in itself, it's a means to an end. If you work hard and achieve your goals quicker (or at all) because of it, that's admirable as long as your trade-offs (spare time, family ...) are made consciously. If not, adjust your goals accordingly. Condemning hard work and long hours without any such considerations, is not constructive. Personally, I don't see a value in working as little as possible just to waste more time watching TV or drinking beer, but if that is what you really want to do, fine ...

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
antitrust 13y ago
> Personally, I don't see a value in...[spending] more time watching TV or drinking beer, but if that is what you really want to do, fine ... That's an entirely separate issue, isn't it?

alekseyk 13y ago

But how else can I show to the management that I'm really not mediocre at what I do because if I don't sit in the chair longer than everybody else doing actual work. /sarcasm.

snambi 13y ago

Absolutely true.

beat 13y ago

In many cases, "work harder" happens because you're too busy to "work smarter". The boss expects 60 hour workweeks for months on end to keep up with a time-wasting process that could be automated if they'd give you a week to do it. But you can't take a week to automate it, because you're too busy doing it. And this is what I hate about corporate work.

gcatalfamo 13y ago

I like hard work sessions. Fuck me, right?

Ataub24 13y ago
Nah. Hard work + smart work is great. Just don't tweet about it. Don't glorify it.
- paranoiacblack 13y ago
  ITT, don't tweet about things you are proud of. It makes us regular people feel bad. ;(
  - silverbax88 13y ago
    If someone is proud enough of not being able to finish their work in a reasonable amount of time, then sure, they should let the world know about it. I know I won't hire them, either.
    - paranoiacblack 13y ago
      Huh? How do you figure that people proud of their work aren't finishing it fast enough. It turns out that when you finish your work, you can work on something else. You don't have to end your work week right then and there.

michaelochurch 13y ago

I feel like most of work life is now driven by silent aspirations (because they're socially unacceptable) rather than immediate industrial need. Bosses want people in for long hours because it makes them feel important. It serves no benefit to the business (in the long term) but it's about emotion and careerism. People in managerial positions don't just want to be rewarded for their work. They want prestige and the root of almost all forms of prestige is nostalgia. Nostalgia (and its attendant fallacies) leads to this long-hours glorification, because people who suffer a lot to push something through, after it succeeds (regardless of whether the suffering contributed) end up remembering the "glory days" of energy drinks and double-all-nighters as if those moments were better than they actually were. Those weren't fun at the time. That's a happy-ending reinterpretation because scary things that end well are often remembered positively. What's missed is that (1) those crunches aren't sustainable, (2) they're only "glory days" for people who get major, career-improving and permanent benefits from the work-- otherwise it's just managerial abuse, and (3) most of those crunch-driven efforts fail and just become miserable death marches that make people really bitter, and the career damage of that can last years. If people actually leave at 5:00, they recover better from those death-march episodes because they haven't let their health and network go to shit.

antitrust 13y ago
I find your message to be profound. > They want prestige and the root of almost all forms of prestige is nostalgia. There's something of the hazing cycle in this too. They suffered, so they glorify the suffering, and share it with others. > (2) they're only "glory days" for people who get major, career-improving and permanent benefits from the work-- otherwise it's just managerial abuse In other words, for most people, this is nothing but slavery. Interesting.

Ataub24 13y ago

One more thing about the post I wrote. Jason Kincaid, formerly of TC, had a great tweet about four years ago- "The amount of fun you’re having at a party is inversely proportional to the number of times you’ve tweeted about it.” Some joke and call it Kincaid's Law. I think there is a new wrinkle to it: "The amount of hard/smart work you are doing is inversely proportional to the number of times you’ve tweeted about it.”

wf 13y ago

This seems incredibly one sided to me and I'm surprised at the number of people who are in agreement. I guess if you make the assumption that the person is lazy or inefficient and that's the reason they're working hard then this would make sense. However, I'm 24; I work a day job from 8 to 5; I go to the gym and go home and work on a startup from ~7-12 and do it all over again. And yea, I'm proud of that. Not only that, but I like when I see other people who "#hustle" because it motivates me. I like to know my friends or people I respect are working hard to achieve a goal they're excited about. Also "Working hard vs working smart is something you don't learn till you burn out a few times." What? That is just untrue. I agree after you do something the first time you'll definitely become more efficient at executing it, but if you approach problems practically you can almost always break them down and work them "smart". This post just annoys me.

Ataub24 13y ago
sorry man. I hear you. the point isn't to bash working hard- it pushes a bit that you should work hard + smart. it's more of a rant about pushing that out to the twitterz/4sq. I mean how many successful people actually push out how hard they are working and how much shit they are getting done? I can't count any. can't agree on the #hustle comment though. That stuff makes me cringe the f out.
- wf 13y ago
  I can give you the #hustle, I don't know anyone who does that specifically haha, it also makes me cringe, but the idea of it is what I'm getting at. And, as far as "successful" people who talk about the hard work they're doing, I guess that also depends on what you define as successful, I know people who have day jobs and are doing incredible things on the side and they are happy and motivated doing what they love. I personally count that as success.
antitrust 13y ago
> I'm 24; I work a day job from 8 to 5; I go to the gym and go home and work on a startup from ~7-12 and do it all over again. And your life occurs where in that process? Sounds like a path to being a droid.

antitrust 13y ago

Glorify results. Glorify efficient results. And then, going out there and having a life, even if it's sitting home alone drinking tea and ready mystery novels.

paranoiacblack 13y ago

No, you stop glorifying "smart" work and shorter hours. Could it possibly be that people work at different paces, have different work ethic, and have different aspirations, but that they can't be compared at face value purely on the hours worked? Just because you work less hours, doesn't necessarily imply you're doing the work "smarter," it probably just means that you are only doing the required the work. It is possible that I work much "smarter" than you do and still work 50-60 hours work weeks because I am doing twice the required work. This isn't that bizarre if you are really trying to cover a large amount of the material that exists in CS beyond making cool, hip web-apps and mobile sites. In that case, you might NEED to put in extra work since you are possibly taking on two jobs: one as an employee and one as a student. That being said, I recall a lot of people making this argument to me as I progressed through school and every activity I've done. They claimed the exact same thing about being the "real geniuses" (please don't fool yourself here) because they learned how to work "smarter"; which usually came down to putting in ONLY the minimally required hours, constantly calculating their grade to make sure it was high enough for them to fail the tests and still pass with a C, and overall cutting corners. You want to know what I saw happen to those people? Failure. These are the same people who were high school dropouts or got kicked out of college for not doing the work. Here's the thing, in a world where the job market is extremely competitive, your stubbornness to work "unreasonable" hours is purely a weakness and hardly a strength. You can have all of knowledge in the world and truly be a "real genius," but if your boss can't confirm your work ethic, you still don't have a job. Oh, and good luck starting/running a business with your 35 hours work weeks. Finally, you should probably apologize to those of us who are hard workers out there for being purely insulting. As if CEOs and CTOs and great hackers all over the world worked somehow less "smart" than you did because they worked hard hours and slept underneath their desks. Sometimes to excel and to surpass yourself, you have to sacrifice and change the pace of things. Do you really think Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Steve Jobs, etc, got where they were by saying "well, I've done 35 hours of 'smart' work now, I need to stop an meditate?" Well, maybe, but they definitely didn't start like that. And god forbid you have to take care of a family and multiple children. Do you think your spouse is going to be happy with "Oh, I already did my 35 hours of 'smartly' raising the kids and providing for the family, I'm done now." There are reasons that people "glorify" the hard work and long hours they put into things; they are proud of their work. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out. If your twitter friends are "humble brag"-ers, get new friends. But don't pretend everyone who loves to share their hard work is trying to shame you or brag about it.

augbot 13y ago

True True!

mpg33 13y ago

Productivity > Hard Work and Long Hours

sriramk 13y ago

I've seen this promoted in subtle ways. At Microsoft, I once saw a VP talk about how a team had worked nights and weekends to make something extraordinary happen and how he was surprised to get emails from them in the middle of the night. I had a private chat with him later of how this encourages the wrong behavior - the key is that great work got done, not the fact that teams worked late nights or that they were on late night email.

NegativeK 13y ago
What was the VP's immediate response to the chat? More importantly, what was the VP's long-term response?
- sriramk 13y ago
  Immediate response - he admitted it was a mistake. Long term - I didn't stay to find out. I doubt anything changed, since this is so deeply engraved in company culture.
rwg 13y ago
At ${PREVIOUS_JOB}, the director of another department tried to recruit me. One of his selling points was that they often worked insanely late nights and slept at their desks. Considering I was already thinking about quitting my job due to long hours and unrealistic expectations, his pitch didn't exactly woo me.

OhHeyItsE 13y ago

I feel like this is pretty widely accepted in the tech/hacker world, right? I've found it's generally the more business-y (creative, PM, etc) types that do the weekend check-in/late night thing. Also - it seems to be magnified in the highly transient NYC/SF environments. Recently relocated young people without families just may not have that much to do outside of work.

T_T 13y ago

"I have a friend who brags that he busts his * 60 hours a week driving a Coca-Cola delivery truck. Congratulations, I work 35 and make twice as much as he does." Is success or contribution measured by your salary? This is only fair if we can all stop drinking beverages delivered to our offices.

knodi 13y ago

Please don't tell me how to work or spend my time doing.

jusben1369 13y ago

One small subset of the discussion that I think is relevant. Anyone ever notice how sometimes your most productive days are when you know you have to cut out early for some important event? "Can't mess around today as I have to leave early" 3pm comes around and you're kind of shocked by how much you got done.

lectrick 13y ago

Work smarter, not harder. I am going to create a startup soon and we're going to work out of my beachfront 2-bedroom FIOS-equipped apt for starters. The schedule will be: 9am-noon: 5 minute standup to spec work for the day, then code. Noon-2pm: Lunch but also surf, bike, boogieboard, suntan, volleyball, just do something fucking outside that involves physical activity. 2-5pm: Code. If you finish early, you get to leave. Basically 2 3-hour spurts of hard work a day. If you finish what you intended to do that day early, you go. I've noticed that I only get 1-2 solid things done a day, anyway, and the rest of the time is mostly wasted (or reading, etc.) Just fitting a healthy schedule to that.

cafecodelife 13y ago
Hell yeah man, that sounds like a great plan. I only have a few solid hours of focus and productivity in any given 9 hour work day myself (web developer at a startup). This sounds like the way to do it.
southphillyman 13y ago
I'd be interested in you blogging your experience with this.
- lectrick 13y ago
  I would, once I'm there.

arcosdev 13y ago

Not to mention ...and for what? Most of the time what you're working on isn't worth the agony.

andyhmltn 13y ago

I totally agree with this. I'm part way through 'the 4 hour work week' by Tim Ferris. He's a bit off the deep end with things he says, but the general message he puts out is really good: Why would you slug 8 hours getting hardly anything done because you're so bored/unmotivated when you can walk in at 12 and get more done in a few hours than you would usually? Sadly, most employers see Time = Money. The fact is that that isn't the case at all when people are working 9-5 5 days a week.

rocky1138 13y ago

OT: Anyone else getting garbled output from viewtext.org when attempting to view this page?

3am 13y ago

This struck me as cynical and lazy. I agree narrowly with not "glorifying" hard work. There's no need to make a spectacle. But I believe in what I do, and I believe in its importance. When I automate something, I use the time that I've cleared up to automate something else, improve the automation I've already written, or improve myself. Granted, I'm not talking 100 hour weeks, but 8-10 hour days, then logging in at night after taking the evening for myself and weekends as necessary when there is a legit need. I guess it's a question about how driven one is. It's sad this is on HN, I would probably not hire anyone that was content to automate their work and then phone it in for paycheck. Then again, I have largely stayed out of the large corporate environment, too. YMMV.

mcgwiz 13y ago

This post is annoying in that it conflates and oversimplifies far too much. On the point of humblebragging: I (and 95% of the internet population) agree, humblebragging should not be done (even though the author later goes on to humblebrag that he only works 35 hours per week... hypocritical much?). But on the separate implied point that working 50+ hours a week is mutually exclusive with working smartly, I disagree. That is naive and simplistic. When you have a finite runway (which decreases in length whether you are or are not working) there's a very strong case to be made for sacrificing a degree of your free time in order to maximize the utility of that runway. Separately, one should carefully balance the multitude of competing development concerns to be working as smartly as possible, i.e. YAGNI, refactoring, testing and CI, tight customer feedback loop, etc. Conflating smart work with the need to work long hours betrays the likelihood that the author has never even considered the reality of bootstrapped startups.

riveteye 13y ago

I strongly believe that work is not a job.* Work is what you do in your life every day to create value for yourself and for the people you care about. Your work should make you happy and help you to feel fulfilled. Your work could take 5 hours a week or it could take 60 hours a week. It could make you a ton of money, it could be where you spend your money. Your work could be a volunteer gig at an animal shelter that you do around your 9-5 day job, it could be the all-night code sessions you do as a hobby, it could even be what you do every day as a high-functioning cog in your office cube. It's up to you to find your own glory. (Sort of like http://blog.workisnotajob.com/ http://blog.workisnotajob.com/) (*Sometimes there is value in helping society be society.)

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

silverbax88 13y ago

One hour of focused, efficient, undistracted work will accomplish more than most people sitting at their desks will accomplish in a whole day.

ultimatedelman 13y ago

As the son of a man who loves sending my mom on vacation with her friends so he can get to the office to get work done (because he genuinely loves it), I can tell you this article does not apply to everyone.

samsnelling 13y ago

90 Hours A Week And Loving It!

ivankirigin 13y ago

Many people enjoy working long hours if they feel the work is impactful. Hustle by itself is pretty distasteful though. It is a humblebrag. I actually just published a tangential blog post, mainly focusing on whether more people should work less while focusing on other things in life that matter. http://blog.kirigin.com/10x http://blog.kirigin.com/10x

GoldfishCRM 13y ago

Amen

hayward2 13y ago

Work in itself is not fulfilling unless you are a simpleton. Fulfilling intellectual curiosity, relationships, pleasure, those things are fulfilling. Work is simply a means to those ends. It's amazing how many people don't understand this. I'm not a hacker because I love programming and it's my purpose in life and the reason I live. I program because it's a relatively good career and an efficient way to make money so that one day I won't have to (and while I do, I still get 30+ hours a week to pursue the things that do bring fulfillment). Sure I'd rather be a programmer than a plumber, truck driver, accountant or even another highly paid profession like corporate lawyer, but I'd rather be an independently wealthy intellectual seeker, family man, world traveler, explorer and pleasure-seeker than a programmer...

yankoff 13y ago

I see glorifying of short hours way more often here.

senekisa 13y ago

It is the harsh reality.

megaframe 13y ago

disarm them. Reply to their tweet/post saying you feel sorry they had to work so late, hopefully it will calm down for them soon. When it does they should join you for the exciting/fun/relaxing `insert activity` you're doing right now while they're at work.

delcom5 13y ago

With many (15) years of experience in the industry from junior to now manager I have to say, GettingTheJobDone()works for me. I found some people perform MUCH better at their own schedule, while some just have it in their DNA and enjoy working hard and long hours. Should we, however, abuse that? Absolutely NOT! They are the rare gems I admire.

bjliu 13y ago

on the other hand, there is also a need to "Stop Glorifying Laziness and Distractions"

riggins 13y ago

I'm thinking that of the things that get glorified, hard work is probably one of the better choices. Better than athletes, getting hammered, drugs, 'balling', and Britney Spears.

dholowiski 13y ago

I can speak as someone who has burned out several times - The key to working a normal work-day is to develop a thick skin - to understand that there are things that are possibly important, but just aren't going to get done because you don't have the time to do them. And things might blow up because of these things that don't get done, and that's OK, you're just going to have to live with it. This is not easy and I'm still very bad at it, but I'm working on it.

papsosouid 13y ago

"Work smarter not harder" is a false dichotomy. Someone working hard and smart is going to accomplish more than someone just working smart. And equating "working hard" with "putting in empty meaningless long hours" is ridiculous. Working hard is about effort, not time. As someone who was praised for being smart and developed a habit of putting in very little effort as a result: working hard is great. Work hard. Just don't work hard and stupid.

cafecodelife 13y ago

I like this article. My viewpoint is that it sucks that even if you finish all of your work on Friday at noon, you still have to, due to corporate culture, sit at your desk until 5 or 6pm, regardless of if you are producing or able to produce anything.

cupcake-unicorn 13y ago

This is something that is really important to me. I've even thought of perhaps finding another line of work where this mindset doesn't prevail. I suffer from chronic health issues, and that really helps put things in perspective in a different way. My number 1 commitment is to my health, and working 80+ hours a week is not going to be doing me any favors in that department. Life is short, and it doesn't mean anything to earn all that money if you're not healthy, can't go anywhere to enjoy it, don't see your family, etc. People need to put it in perspective.

chewymouse 13y ago

"I have a friend who brags that he busts his * 60 hours a week driving a Coca-Cola delivery truck. Congratulations, I work 35 and make twice as much as he does." The elitism you're all basking in is embodied by this sentence.

saosebastiao 13y ago

I see this all the time and it just isn't correct. Working long hours isn't about productivity. We know long hours aren't productive. But they are fast. Sometimes 80 hr weeks at 75% productivity really are better than 40 hr weeks at 100%

digisth 13y ago

HBR had an article about this not long ago exploring the "why" (based on several studies on the topic): http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/05/why_men_work_so_many_hours.html http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/05/why_men_work_so_many_hours.h... The takeaway: 'Not only is work devotion a "class act" - a way of enacting class status--it's also a certain way of being a "real" man. Working long hours is seen as a "heroic activity," noted Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and her co-authors in their 1999 study of lawyers. Marianne Cooper's study of engineers in Silicon Valley closely observes how working long hours turns pencil pushing or computer keyboarding into a manly test of physical endurance. "There's a kind of machismo culture that you don't sleep," one father told her. "Successful enactment of this masculinity," Cooper concludes, "involves displaying one's exhaustion, physically and verbally, in order to convey the depth of one's commitment, stamina, and virility."' The above shows that in many cases Long Hours Are Not About Working, but about signaling dedication and toughness (maybe Robert Hanson could write a post about this one.) With that said: as someone who has worked many, many of those long weeks (and still does so on occasion) I do see some truth in there, but it's of course more nuanced. I've seen people work long hours because other things in their lives are going wrong (and they were escaping it), because of management pressure (this was in the lull between the previous boom and the current one), or simply because it was "crunch/launch time" (for real - which is a completely valid reason for a long week.)

kenster07 13y ago

Working hard and working efficiently are not mutually exclusive. I would expect a false dichotomy like this to be posted on mtv news, but definitely not here.

general_failure 13y ago

Well, stop glorifying 'free time'. Many of my friends spend practically all their free time drinking beer and 'chilling out' watching TV. Yeah, I am sure that's more healthy than we working hard learning something new.

ilyanep 13y ago
I spend eight hours a day in the office, then I go home and read some textbooks, follow an online class, read a paper, write a blog post, go to the gym, practice saxophone, or hang out with friends. While I find the stuff I do at work enjoyable, I wouldn't do another 6 hours of it a day at the expense of giving up all that other stuff, because it's the other stuff that gets me through the more tedious weeks at work. Fortunately, my employer understands the necessity of doing those other things. Yeah, lots of people waste their free time. I don't think that working 60 hours a week is any less of a waste for those people.
Aqueous 13y ago
socializing is important. it is vital to your health. obviously as with anything there's such a thing as too much, but as someone who has been missing work-life balance i can tell just how much i miss hanging out with friends, drinking beer and watching tv.

linuxhansl 13y ago

That! I work fewer hours than most of my peers and I get more done. The reason is not that I am exceptionally smart (I am not), but that I stay relaxed and avoid being burned out.