Yeah that’s a correct point, bad mental arithmetic there.
There are a few other unrealistic things too, but they fall in the other direction. Like I think it’s almost impossible to spend only 30 mins to leave my front door, get in the car, park at work and get into the building, get all the way to my desk and actually be in work mode. When I used to commute it was more like an hour, in busy traffic.
I have lived a lot of my life not having enough time to cook dinner mainly because I have often had a part time job in addition to a full time job, and was studying for a career change. So for a few years I was just kinda spinning plates. So that’s another way people end up caught out for time.
> in the real world it’s common for people to operate fine on normal weekly work schedules
I think it’s common but also maybe not even the majority of people are this way? There’s no good reason that “40 hours of work plus an arbitrary commute time” is a functional pattern for most people.
I think we have a mix of people who find this totally fine and have some energy left over at the end of the day, with people who are fully drained by their jobs. It’s hard for each cohort to relate to the other.
For some people, almost all leisure time is lost in an impossible quest to relax/recharge “enough” for the next day/week of work. Sometimes that explains the phone use or TV patterns. It’s an attempt to rest (plus their attention-taking and holding techniques work better on us when we are tired). It’s hard to plan on cooking if you know you’ll be in that state.
I tend to believe If you can find the right work and the right hours for you it’s a huge improvement in your life, and if you are on the wrong pattern with those it’s very bad and leads to a spiral. A lot of us have to accept the wrong pattern to make enough money to live and retire and support family.
Super normal. Let’s say at the simplest, you take 30 mins to get ready to leave from waking up, 30 mins from front door to sitting at your desk, 30 mins to get to bed and sleep that’s 2 hours of your 24 just kinda handling the bare functional minumum. Sleep for 8 and now you are left with 12 hours. Work plus breaks at work is probably 8-10 at the best.
So OK, 3-5 hours left over for everything else, assuming perfect execution on the other parts. Do you have family or pets that need something? Do you have dishes and laundry and trash days and bills to pay? Do you want to watch TV, play a game, do any kind of hobby or leaning? Are you sick? Do you have friendships? Are you tired from work being physically or mentally demanding? Do you need to exercise?
All of those things need to be handled in the same few “outside work” hours each day.
To me a direct HR person is much less trustworthy than a manager with whom you’ve established a good track record. The manager’s behavior is incentivized completely differently depending on the company - sometimes it’s legitimate to manage towards the employees success and sometimes lose them. As a manager I had a director say something similar, that we are often just stepping stone on somebody’s career.
Whereas HR is a risk mitigation function whose purpose is to minimize the company’s exposure to lawsuits, and I stay miles away from them unless it’s absolutely necessary to engage. They can do other things on top of that function that are very helpful, but they are not there to help.
There are a lot of fictions at work. Still we all have our own risk profiles, and if we are lucky we can afford the risk of an honest conversation with our boss. That’s not the same as pretending everybody is trustworthy, it’s making a bet based on the specific situation at hand.
If your advice is “young people be careful, managers, supervisors, and HR are not your friends”, I totally agree.
I’m careful like this to a point, but you can establish trust with managers. Most decent cultures don’t favor hoarding good employees how you’ve described.
> It's ridiculous to think that helping you build a successful career, which likely doesn't involve them or your current employer for very long, is something that they would do.
This is a very short term perspective. If I am a good manager to you, you are much more likely to stay because that’s an important relationship & you are benefiting. If it means you move on because I helped you gain the skills/confidence you needed, great, maybe sometime down the road you can help me when I’m looking for me next job or refer my next awesome employee. But who cares, at least neither one of us had to be miserable.
You always have to be _cautious_ but don’t let relentless cynicism keep you from good useful professional relationships that can actually help you.
You’ve only wasted the 4 hours if you didn’t spend them doing something else.
At 50/50 it’s an ok bet if the debugging time is much less than the total human time, even if the loops are long, you might rather 4 hours of deep work on an important human thing or on just relaxing vs babysitting the LLM. Assuming that about half the time that will pay off with a correctly done thing with very little effort, it’s kind of amazing.
Wouldn’t that run afoul of other rules like keeping visual order and tab order the same? Screen reader users are used to skip links & other standard navigation techniques.
But surely it’s debatable whether increased short term revenue benefiting shareholders this year is better or worse than longer term plays with the chance of higher returns later, or that avoiding some sources of revenue for ethical reasons protects the brand’s reputation and image in the market.
> I agree, can these scientists seriously go and do some real work?
This can be said about a lot of individual studies, but it leads to missing the wood for the trees. We need seemingly trivial studies because they accumulate towards a greater understanding of our world and ourselves.
Also you can’t have the big interesting surprise results unless you are testing something where the answer seems obvious. This study seems fine.
All depends on the person, their goals, their expectations, the experiences they want to have.
Agree we should not deceive anybody that doing this would make them rich or have a successful business. Most startups fail, startups by new college grads who never had a job might fail even more than normal startups. But if an adult wants to burn a few years of their 20s this way, fine. Maximizing earning efficiency of earnings in your 20s might not be optimal either. Maybe you hit a local maximum and would have much higher earnings later after discovering something by following your nose for a few years.
- positive affirmation
- thing is not just one thing
- thing is something else
Things don’t feel like how anybody would speak.
Looking at the account I see all comments appear to be AI generated but it makes me wonder if it’s actually just AI translating from
another language or something. Which is kind of a fair enough reason to use AI, in low-stakes comment setting like this.
There are a few other unrealistic things too, but they fall in the other direction. Like I think it’s almost impossible to spend only 30 mins to leave my front door, get in the car, park at work and get into the building, get all the way to my desk and actually be in work mode. When I used to commute it was more like an hour, in busy traffic.
I have lived a lot of my life not having enough time to cook dinner mainly because I have often had a part time job in addition to a full time job, and was studying for a career change. So for a few years I was just kinda spinning plates. So that’s another way people end up caught out for time.
> in the real world it’s common for people to operate fine on normal weekly work schedules
I think it’s common but also maybe not even the majority of people are this way? There’s no good reason that “40 hours of work plus an arbitrary commute time” is a functional pattern for most people.
I think we have a mix of people who find this totally fine and have some energy left over at the end of the day, with people who are fully drained by their jobs. It’s hard for each cohort to relate to the other.
For some people, almost all leisure time is lost in an impossible quest to relax/recharge “enough” for the next day/week of work. Sometimes that explains the phone use or TV patterns. It’s an attempt to rest (plus their attention-taking and holding techniques work better on us when we are tired). It’s hard to plan on cooking if you know you’ll be in that state.
I tend to believe If you can find the right work and the right hours for you it’s a huge improvement in your life, and if you are on the wrong pattern with those it’s very bad and leads to a spiral. A lot of us have to accept the wrong pattern to make enough money to live and retire and support family.