You seem to be a young fella, so let me tell you this:
Every time you do coder.Health-- for bank.Money++, you have the problem that you are never able to do coder.Health++ for bank.Money-- afterwards.
Never sacrifice health for money. Never. Every idea that needs to be worked on more than 50 hours a week is an idea not worth working on.
I know how it is, I've been there myself. You'll be reluctant to listen now. But maybe in a year you'll come back and remember this comment.
Some of the happiest and most satisfied people I know are academics who work 80+ hours a week because they love what they do. You don't need to sacrifice health to work more than 50 hours a week. And realistically there is no long term health damage from what he is doing. And yes you can trade money for better health, though in the first world you rapidly hit diminishing returns but if your sleep deprivation can make the difference between being able to afford good health care or moving to an area with less pollution it absolutely can trade off like that.
I don't believe you.
Even if they told me themselves I wouldn't believe them.
Even if they were beaming with joy as the black circles in their eyes squinted while swearing there is no better joy than that of labour I would do what one of my ex-employers did and turn off machinery at 17.00 sharp.
There is no happiness in working long hours; there must be no happiness. Happiness must be verboten for anyone who thinks that undermining organized labour gains is "loving what they do".
If you make B2B SASS, and you love your work, there's something wrong with you.
> you have the problem that you are never able to do coder.Health++ for bank.Money-- afterwards.
Can you expound on this for me? This rule is not at all obvious to me. I'm curious what perspective this hails from :)
For example, most of my career, I will take 6+ months off between particularly intense work crunches for contracts/startups/jobs. I find the time off restorative to the point where I get restless for the next crunch.
> I find the time off restorative to the point where I get restless for the next crunch.
That is a sign of addiction, not a sign of balance.
The issues I have with this "crunching it" mentality now (post-burnouts) is that even with some time off afterwards you'll pay the price with physical health.
Just the heart issues alone that you'll get because of the absurd and constant stress levels are now for me an indicator that it's not worth it.
A company doesn't give a damn about you. They are not your family. The first sign of risk they'll ditch you. Devs need to see work as what it is: it's a contract with mutual expectations.
And my recommendation is to self-reflect more on the health part, because we (including me) tend to rationalize that it's worth working more for the sake of building something or for the interesting research parts, or for learning experience or whatever we make up to justify it.
You can do that still with basic income. We just can't because society is fucked up, and research and development isn't paid enough to make a living and a healthy life. I also think that huge parts of the open source community that I identify myself with on a moral level are pretty hypocritical, considering that only the top notch famous "leaders" make enough to have a good balanced life. The 99%+ majority doesn't make enough to even rent a flat, and that's the absurd part of our society. I still can't fathom how the richest companies have money laying around on their bank accounts, and were built on the shoulders of unpaid open source contributors that got nothing in return.
That is something I really don't understand because it's honestly really messed up if you think about it.
Thank you for expounding, but man, I have so many "wait, what? who?" reactions to that narrative.
I'm addicted to coding, not work. I know this because I've tried other jobs, even in late career, and they sucked in comparison and brought me no joy.
"The company" is mine, so yeah, probably it doesn't care about me, but it's definitely not dropping me without consent. :)
48, soon 49, heart still going. Not even sure what that's referring to. I don't feel stressed in these crunches, I feel excited! I build cool shit! They pay me to build cool shit! They pay me way too much to build cool shit!
I guess I don't know what I would balance that excitement with. I have cool hobbies too, and those have their place, but... I just don't resonate with your take and view on the industry.
IF someone hated coding, creating, or the tech industry itself -- then I could squint and get behind your balance suggestions. For them. :)
Thanks for sharing the perspective though. If nothing else, you're fanning my gratitude flame.
Don't get me wrong, I still love to code, and I still work on open source projects and I still believe in a future where sharing of mutual contributions lead to a better outcome for everyone. That's not my point.
I also am building up my own company for the last couple years. But I want it to be a sustainable company that promotes a healthy lifestyle and that doesn't overwork its employees, and one that doesn't aim for 2 years turnover/rehiring of staff...because I think these are the typical effects of a toxic work environment, and reflects the values I don't agree with, both on a personal and a professional level.
In the end we both have a different leading style, I guess!?
If I never sacrificed health for money, I'd be broke and homeless. My job requires that I be in the office 8 hours a day, even if my body doesn't like it
I’d say generally yes, working yourself too hard for some bullshit SaaS isn’t worth it. But there are bigger problems out there. You might still be expending your health but it could be worth it enough for others to justify the effort.
[flagged]
People have been trading off sleep deprivation for productivity for all of human history.
It isn’t always about money, and it isn’t always a choice.
It is a personal decision to build or destroy one’s body, and while your advice is maybe sound in general, we should avoid generalizing for other people.
A little bit of sleep deprivation isn’t life threatening (such as being significantly overweight, or smoking, or consistently eating unhealthy foods). We should avoid over-moralizing to others about the engineering tradeoffs they make in their own lives.
Many a family has been enriched by mothers and fathers overworking themselves to build a better life for their children, for example.
> Never sacrifice health for money. Never. Every idea that needs to be worked on more than 50 hours a week is an idea not worth working on.
If I had taken this advice verbatim in my 20s, I wouldn’t be able to frequently be working 20 hour weeks in my 40s. I would argue that speaking in absolutes like this is actually bad advice.
It is frequently a good thing to work yourself to burnout for a year or three if it means you can work at 20% for the following 20 years.
> It is frequently a good thing to work yourself to burnout for a year or three if it means you can work at 20% for the following 20 years.
Burnout is never a good thing. Go slower. Go well. Thank yourself later.
I disagree. The year or two that ended with me burning out was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
I couldn’t work for two years after it and it was still worth it.
> I disagree. The year or two that ended with me burning out was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
> I couldn’t work for two years after it and it was still worth it.
That sums up kind of the problem I have with that type of survivor's bias.
Question to you:
Was it worth because of the burnout or because of other variables in that specific part of your life?
If the other variables were not the same, would you still recommend it, just for the sake of "recommending the experience of a burnout"?
> People have been trading off sleep deprivation for productivity for all of human history.
I disagree, I believe what we mean when we say "productivity" these days was invented maybe during industrialization, maybe 1800s, and a couple etymology dictionaries I checked seem to agree, that the word being used in an economic sense to mean "production per unit" only started occurring in the 1890s. Also, I believe that the modern sense, meaning, "whether a human's time is spent being productive for the economy," is a mid to late 20th century invention of neoliberalism.
I don't really like hyper-generalizations like "all people have been doing this thing for all of human history," because it's just a silly thing to say on the face of it - the English were doing very different things and had very difference concerns in the year 800, 1100, 1700, 1900, and 2025! But also, the English in 1300 were doing very different things than the indigenous Americans in 1300! That said, one generalization I'm comfortable with is that throughout all of human history, until maybe the 1940s, people have been seeking comfort, leisure, and peace, and only recently have we developed a global society, and at that one that is obsessed with finding economic justifications for everything, including how humans spend their time!
You mention, "it isn't always a choice," and I agree, that is the failure of capitalism - there are people out there destroying their lives, minds, and bodies to scrape out a living. Our global economic system has failed these people - in fact it's sacrificed them on the alter of consumerism.
Many a child had stunted development from mothers and fathers subscribing to the cult of capitalism and overworking themselves and never being at home, with the self-serving justification of "I'm making a better life for my child," when in fact they're not.