Re:Why are we still working this hard?
by mike_hearn on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @03:54PM
(#50458530)
A lot of people aren't working hard. They might sit at their desk from 9-5 but total effort put in is probably only around 15hrs a week of solid work.
It's hard to see this if you're a typical HN reader because we're all a pretty motivated lot who tend to enjoy what we do, and what we do is fairly concrete. But survey the typical office and you will be blown away by how little effort people are putting in. And of the "work" that is getting done a lot of it is never used, or the sort of thing whose quality can't be easily evaluated so it trends towards the min viable product.
I used to work at a company where a significant fraction of the workforce just spent all day producing "decks" (PowerPoints). They hardly sent emails or wrote documents - even things you'd expect to be a Word file were decks - and on the few occasions I gently enquired about how long they'd been working on their current "project" (a deck) I'd always regret it, because the answer would be something like several weeks. Total output from those weeks: a dozen badly made slides that said very little, and which could have been an email.
And that was in fintech! Go look at the public sector, academia or NGOs and be amazed at the endless armies of people who can spend an entire year on making a single PDF that your average hyped-up Valley engineer would produce in a week.
These people are all technically working a 40 hour week but in reality a lot of their time is spent on YouTube, napping, walking the dog, taking care of kids, listening to podcasts, researching their next vacation etc. Their managers don't hold their feet to the fire because they're doing the same things, and the company produces enough profits that nobody is really motivated to do layoffs.
It's hard to see this if you're a typical HN reader because we're all a pretty motivated lot who tend to enjoy what we do, and what we do is fairly concrete. But survey the typical office and you will be blown away by how little effort people are putting in. And of the "work" that is getting done a lot of it is never used, or the sort of thing whose quality can't be easily evaluated so it trends towards the min viable product.
I used to work at a company where a significant fraction of the workforce just spent all day producing "decks" (PowerPoints). They hardly sent emails or wrote documents - even things you'd expect to be a Word file were decks - and on the few occasions I gently enquired about how long they'd been working on their current "project" (a deck) I'd always regret it, because the answer would be something like several weeks. Total output from those weeks: a dozen badly made slides that said very little, and which could have been an email.
And that was in fintech! Go look at the public sector, academia or NGOs and be amazed at the endless armies of people who can spend an entire year on making a single PDF that your average hyped-up Valley engineer would produce in a week.
These people are all technically working a 40 hour week but in reality a lot of their time is spent on YouTube, napping, walking the dog, taking care of kids, listening to podcasts, researching their next vacation etc. Their managers don't hold their feet to the fire because they're doing the same things, and the company produces enough profits that nobody is really motivated to do layoffs.