People can be overworked in all kinds of jobs. Who are you the complaint police?
So you actually have 62 hours of personal time every week to the 40 you spend at work. In other words, you could be getting 22 more hours of productive work done in your free time than you get done at work every week.
This suggests that it isn't really a time problem.
Wherever the cut-off happens to be, software developers are far past it.
.. unless they're recommending some action be taken, of course. And this blog post isn't. It's not a demand for policy, it's just talking about life.
Maybe that's part of the problem. Not that everyone is entitled to talk about their subjective experience, but that everyone feels entitled to talk about their subjective experience -- and many are socially blind and comically out of touch when doing so. That's where memes like "first world problems" came from...
Everybody should be able to talk about their subjective experience. But many should have the social awareness, grace, and decency, not to.
Those who disagree still laugh and sneer at the richer 0.1% people when they say something comically out of touch with everyday life. But they just can't fathom that they themselves can be a richer 1% of people for a huge majority, and that their complaints can sound comically out of touch to most.
It's not like there aren't real problems to complain about that are shared among people and don't make someone look like self-absorbed (health issues, family issues, divorce, financial trouble, trauma, and so on).
60+ hour weeks can really mess with your health, no matter what you're doing. I definitely have different injuries than I had when I did intense physical work. But working more than 40 hours is still not healthy. You're trading pulled muscles and joint stress for carpel tunnel syndrome and cardiovascular disease.
I will say that there is a significant reduction in stress and jump in wellbeing between 30k and 40k. Beyond that, there is very little actual difference. As my income increases, all it does is reduce my time until retirement.
Household income is not the same as one person's wage. The media household income includes tons of couples where both are working.
And while "income is not the same thing as wealth", still making 80k in income (not wealth) puts you at the top 13%. You get into 1% of USA is 300K.
As for the world, 80K (net) income put you at 0.1% globally.
I think this approach to suffering is problematic. Feelings are not a contest. When I talk about things that hurt me, I don't care if someone else thinks that I'm "self-absorbed." The point of expressing myself and being vulnerable about things I'm dealing with is not to make me look good.
It's to sort out my thoughts so I can better understand what I'm feeling, it's to connect with other people who understand me and can offer solutions, it's to find other people who are going through the same things so I don't feel like I'm alone, and it's to show other people who are going through the same things that they're not alone.
Expressing yourself to other people is healthy, even for rich 0.1% people. It only becomes an issue when it causes you to stop caring about other people or dismissing their problems as irrelevant. I don't see any obvious indication in this post that OP has done that. OP can simultaneously say, "this is a hard thing I'm struggling with" and "other people have it worse" at the same time. They're not exclusive concepts.
And not to poke fun, but the framework you propose is honestly just silly if you start to break it down: is it uncouth for the middle-class to complain about rising health care costs, given that many US prisons don't even offer adequate health care at any cost? Is it a problem for the homeless to complain about eating food out of trash cans when poorer people in other countries are mixing dirt into their flour? You mention divorce as a shared issue, but really that just shows how out-of-touch you are with the plight of modern sex-slaves in ISIS controlled territories.
Getting to the point where I was willing to change required going several layers deeper than I had gone before, though, and there were some very painful realizations along the way. Just a mild warning for anyone who might want to do the same thing.
P.S. I truly enjoy weekends now. I previously felt much the same way about them as the author.
I am now working my dream job, which is solidly blue collar. It pays well enough, I still use my mind, and it is mostly not dull or repetitive. (I've worked a few of those, too, both white and blue collar.)
There are a lot more of those kinds of blue collar jobs than many middle management types realize. Most of my old coworkers are long gone from my social circle, but in retrospect, that always happened when I went from one company to the next anyway.
1) this is my own experience when I went on paternity leave for a month. Despite having a lot going on in my home life it took me over a week to let go of work and focus on my family.
I've also found that once you fulfill the basics in Maslow's, you can be less happy or satisfied. Before you were too focused on just surviving so the idea of contentment and satisfaction wasnt much of a thing.
I envy the mindless jobs. Those people always seem so much more high energy when I meet them. It's the mind workers who look like zombies so frequently.
There is also a certain level of knowing that you are privileged without understanding what exactly that means in how your life is different from people who are less fortunate.
I'm sure I'm guilty of that more often than I'd like to admit.
Even meaningless work can be a real job. Some people enjoy working their asses off in the hot sun. Some enjoy sitting at a desk hacking code. Just because one job isnt like another doesn't mean it is less real.
Sitting for 40-50 hours a week and staring at a monitor is physically difficult, ask anyone with 20+ years of that under their belt.
I have been working since the early 90s, mostly in 40-hour-a-week office jobs. I spend a lot more time now trying to mitigate the physical effects and I wish I could tell 20-year-old me to pay more attention to staying on top of good fitness, health, posture, etc, instead of assuming it would always be so easy.
That someone else has it worse doesn't make it invalid.
Try having your entire village razed by US-backed troops, your family killed before your eyes, your daughter raped and dismembered and then yourself sold to slavery and working in a mine 18 hours a day.
See where that goes? Nobody gets to complain about anything unless they're the absolute worst-off person in the world?
Understandably that's just one guys experience though.
"The worst part is there is hardly any time for resting the mind and body. Our jobs can be mentally and physically demanding."
I don't see how any other "too much" job is excluded; you are blaming the author for his background alone.
For your example: If you have to milk "[n] cows every morning at x o-clock", you are done after n cows every day. If you design large software or manage larger projects, you are done once - when it's done. At least I don't take my physicial work home each day, but when working mentally I do this every day in worst case.
I have done a lot from "both" worlds and honestly don't see much of a difference between aching bones and an aching mind for my private life.
Manual labor that has my body feeling ‘used’ at the end of the day makes me feel that I’ve somehow accomplished so much more than if I’ve only used my mind all day and I find myself generally happier on a day-to-day basis when I’ve been doing primarily manual labor all day. But I can’t seem to justify doing manual labor over the long term when I can make so much more money as a programmer using my mind.
Since becoming a father, it also seems to have become harder to be willing to make less money for more general happiness, knowing that I can work remotely, have more free time for my kid, and make a lot more money in the long-run making money with my mind. It’s also hard to find manual labor jobs that don’t expose your body to something that is usually bad for your health over the long term.
I try to find a balance by taking on, and volunteering to help with, major home projects whenever the opportunity arises, and exercising outdoors as much as practical, but I constantly feel like there’s a huge imbalance (I spend ~40 hours a week at my computer).
Working this kind of mental & menial work clearly is missing something important that I'm confident we will one day understand a lot better. Perhaps its simply relative position (keeping up with the Joneses), or maybe its a need for much more movement (it's well understood that zoo animals need to be given very large areas in order to be happy and yet we often sit in spaces that would be illegal to keep animals our size in for the majority of our days)
Maybe it's access to nature itself - I often feel a lot better after taking some time to walk alone in nature, but perhaps this is because of something else than just simply nature itself. On the days where I remember to take a moment to step outside of the office, or just take a break from routine and do something slow-paced for the sake of it, such as taking a detour on the way to somewhere just for the sake of seeing what that way looks like, I find that I feel much happier for the rest of the day. However, this lacks an explanation for why I don't do this often and feel good all the time. My concious brain knows it is a good thing, but my concious brain is rarely in charge.
Maybe it's just that people need tasks on a different scale to those we work on nowadays. This I think hits a lot of people. I used to work at a campsite for a while, where I would spend the day cutting down a tree, or moving a pile of gravel. Whatever I was doing, it would take at most a couple days, and it was usually either just me or me and a couple guys around me. This diversity of tasks and short time to completion really made me feel much better. I also often think that removing tasks such as washing the dishes or repairing clothes meant that we overspecialise, which is removing even more of these such short and easy wins.
Perhaps its also the need to feel useful in a profound way. I often think about how before the internet it was possible to gain a reputation locally for being good at someting. How had the guy who fixed clothes, another who was good at tying ropes, etc. Often these skills would be unrelated to work, and I believe would have an important role in having a self-identity. Nowadays we naturally get fit into a single stereotype by our family and friends based on our line of work, but at work everybody is that way, and so a conflict with our idea of self arises that makes us feel worthless even if we know the work we are doing is useful. Perhaps somehow, we need to feel that we aren't replaceable.
I also think that there is an aspect of physical work just being less tiring, or at least in a different way. When I used to work a manual job, I would feel exhausted after the day, but in a way that meant that the next day I would wake up without feeling drained. I had no trouble getting out of bed or finding the energy to cook, clean etc. The tiredness was in my aching muscles, but it didn't affect my decision making nearly as profoundly. It's nothing like the brain fog that causes me now to come home and need the sensation of something forgettable and mindless like youtube or video games.
It's amazingly adept at this, to the point where usually you don't notice that you didn't actually decide to do that thing. The only time you might notice is in the case of strong addictions, where people try to go cold turkey and describe literally watching themselves in horror as they go back to the think they are actively trying to avoid.
What this leads do is an idea that successful people have which is that less well off people could sort themselves out by doing a particular thing, say, managing their money better. Or maybe its just the people who know many languages and look down on those who know few. Or maybe yourself, trying to stick to a diet plan and not being able to understand how you yourself can want one thing but do another.
Turns out, we are pretty much a function of our environment. We have a concept of something called "willpower" which is something where we can carry on despite our body needing respite, but only a little bit. This I think happens when we are using our conscious mind to complete tasks instead of our autopilot mode. This works, but is quickly draining and really doesn't last that long.
I think this kind of thing is where some of the stigma around mental health comes from. We have this idea that people are at all times acting according to what they simply want to be doing, whereas they are usually acting on autopilot , which is sometimes sort of close to what we want to be doing, but has a tendency in modern times to get stuck in loops of stuff like eat>sleep>work that make us feel worse which causes us to have less energy which causes us to just want more sleeping and eating rather than fixing the problem by breaking out of the cycle.
If we as a society aknowledged better how 99% of our actions are essentially done unconsciously, and then later sort of added together by our self aware part of the brain, I think people would be much more understanding of mental health issues - if someone behaves in a way counter to their own interests, its not because they are stupid, they are literally just unfortunate vitims of a sort of cyclical pattern of their bodies in their local environment.
We are kind of along for the ride in our own bodies a lot more than we might like to think, with only a small ability to push buttons to nudge ourselves in the directions we want
So you literally can't decide to just stop being in the kind of glitches in the autopilot that cause something as big as depression or as small as getting up early when you're tired. You only have a small amount of influence, and you have to spend it in ways that end up multiplying themselves by your autopilot thingy like deciding to give yourself good sleep, or food if you focus your willpower on those kinds of things, you end up with more willpower but sometimes even things as small as this require a lot more energy than you might be able to muster all at once, so you have to do even smaller things to build that up for example in the modern day deciding to interrupt yourself in the middle of a task is incredibly hard you could be working and know that you should be in bed but you just keep going because it takes more mental energy to interrupt yourself than you have and so you end up tired, and have that same low amount of energy the next day
I guess the rambling and wandering nature of my thoughts are visible in the writing itself given I was writing without thinking (ironically)
Source: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/05061...
If you're a developer in the first world, you're incredibly rich and privileged not just by historical standards, but by real world modern standards.
This leads to a bizarre narrative (especially roping in 'historical standards') - "hey, your health care may be dire, your education is haphazard, your food is non-nutritious and repetitive, and your living situation is precarious, but you have TV and better plumbing than a king from 100 years ago".
You seem fixated on this schoolmarmish "gratitude" angle to the point that you don't want to think about not just the future we want to build but the actual prevailing situations in the countries we are living in now. Roping 'global' comparisons into discussions of first world disadvantage represents a subtraction from the level of understanding, not an acknowledgement of "what's real". As a cartoonish and extreme example, you can be a bum on the sidewalk in NY collecting 10x as much as an African subsistence farmer takes in, but your take won't buy you somewhere to live, health care, etc.
Excessive global/historical comparisons generally ignore the fact that you can't travel to the other side of the world (or hop in a time machine) to buy cheap goods and escape the local cost of positional goods. Somewhere in Vietnam, there's a teacher who could teach your kid computer science and math for a fraction of the cost of, say, NY. You could buy a mansion in the south of France circa 1850. So what?
Sure, there are almost certainly some poor people reading HN who have tough lives in places where it's dangerous and/or there may be food scarcity or other serious systemic issues. But by and large we're rich Westerners. You mentioned the proverbial NY bum. Do we have more posts on the front page talking about how to help the bum, or insufficient cubicle walls? That's my point. I'm not saying that these concerns aren't worth some attention. But I think we might be out of balance around here.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4109731-united-states-incom...
But, I have to take a step back and realize how fortunate I am sometimes. I’m not making anywhere near Silicon Valley salary but I never felt like I was in the top n% because I live around a lot of people who I know make more than I do.
Blasphemy! I'd rather cry on the internet and collect sympathy points! Individual worth is derived solely from external validation by the social collective.
Time when you have to do something you don't want to be doing, and time when you are doing something you want to be doing.
Everyone has these two types of time, regardless of what they choose to do during each.
While you may do something you love, if you have to be doing it, it's still work.
A real job can mean a lot of things to different people. For example, I consider my volunteer time as a board member at a non-profit organization to be a real job. Currently, It doesn't directly pay for my financial needs, but it pays in other ways.
I think that it's important to acknowledge, recognize, and respect people for who they are, and what they are experiencing.
The words we choose to use can have a significant impact.
I hope you enjoy your weekend!
Get a real job, try milking a few hundred cows at 6am, work as a cop in a bad city, or outside in construction when its freezing or scorching hot. Not to mention doing it on a 20k wage with a few kids.
I get it, figuring out how to get our software working can require a lot of thinking, but compared to most of the people out there its a sweet gig. Stop complaining.
Edit: I don't want to sound snarky as this is. I realize lots of us do work really hard and don't have much time for anything else, but that's just adult life.