> For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity.
You're right, it's probably actually much less. Go count how many people are browsing Facebook/etc at the start of the day, lunch, and at the end of the day. Even out of what's becoming an increasingly normal 45 hour workweek (9-6), lots of people are probably working 35 at best.
> For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of people who work longer hours and do it successfully. And most of the really successful people out there will mention that they worked insanely hard at some point. Are they all lying? All wrong?
You're comparing the outliers to the average. Some people will have an almost-linear relationship between hours worked and productivity. For most people, it'll be logarithmic.
Further, lots of bias going on here:
* You remember the successful people who worked hard more, because it furthers the idea that hard work == success
* No one's going to tell you they became successful without working hard. It's a slap in the face to everyone else, and few people are honest/tactless enough to admit they became successful without working hard.
* Most successful people would probably rationalize their success as the result of hard work (and obviously that might be true to some degree)
> The article itself mentions people doing extra hours of coding on personal projects, and we all know some people who have started companies that way. What, do these projects simply not exist? How does that make any sense?
One is self-driven and you can drop it at anytime if things get in the way (children, etc.). The other is imposed on you externally and you can't really go from working 70 hours a week to 40 hours a week. Well, you can - but it almost always involves changing jobs.
> Why does everyone on HN just assume they know better than those people themselves, and set off to make them feel bad and exploited?
Because it's downward pressure on our value as laborers. I mean - that's the real story. If you have to work twice as hard to earn 50% of the salary, your value as a laborer has just been divided by 4.
Very few people want to feel like they're becoming worth less over time. This of course can be offset if the output of your labor has more value to you (e.g. people go to work at non-profits, etc), but in general it's easy to pinpoint why most people resist this kind of pressure.
> How on earth would a uni student in CS don't know about piping commands?
Beyond the obvious ones, lots and lots of valid reasons this could happen:
1. Student is entirely new to programming as a concept and just started in university. Not every fresh CS student has been programming since birth.
2. Student uses the shell entirely for basic commands and honestly doesn't even realize it can be used for more advanced things
3. Student is really interested in the "Science" part of CS and isn't planning on being a developer. Plenty of brilliant CS minds are awful at the programming part but extremely adept at, say, consensus protocols.
Your basic first year CS curriculum might offer a crash course in things like basic shell scripting, but it's certainly not a given. Computer Science is a very broad field and it's arguably a huge waste of time for them to teach you how to pipe commands when they could be teaching you something you can't pick up in 10 minutes, like automata theory.
> Shouldn't one be aware of situation and local law?
Er, how? Again, there are tons of laws on the books. Are you going to memorize them all?
Further, some of the laws are incredibly vague. For example, did you know that it is arguably illegal to boycott a business in Thailand?
> Section 117 Whoever, instigates or causes a strike, lockout, or concerted cessation of trade or business with any person for the purpose of bringing about any change in the Laws of the Country, coercing the Government or intimidating the public, shall be punished with imprisonment not exceeding seven years or fine not exceeding fourteen thousand Baht, or both.
> Whoever, with the knowledge of the above purpose, takes part or assists in the said strike, lock-out, or concerted cessation of trade or business with any person shall be punished with imprisonment not exceeding three years or fine not exceeding six thousand Baht, or both.
Are you assisting in a "concerted cessation of business" by actively avoiding an establishment you don't agree with? Are you guilty of "taking part" by liking a Facebook post from a group of workers on strike?
Maybe!
Sure, it's unlikely you'd be prosecuted. But as the article shows, it's always an option if they don't like you or need a sacrificial lamb!
99.9% of modern software does not require that level of cleverness. Also, the fast inverse square root code is a poor example as it's:
1) A very small amount of code
2) Isolated from everything else
3) Conceptually easy to understand what it's accomplishing (even if the implementation itself is interesting and non-obvious)
Most people would kill for a colleague who wrote code like that.
No, instead what you most often get out of people like the OP is mentioning (because I too have worked with and been burned by them) is some weird pseudo-ORM they wrote from scratch because they don't like how Hibernate handles joins.
Naturally, there's no documentation or even comments because it should be obvious why paxos was poorly implemented in this weird pseudo-ORM framework. And of course, the entire codebase was rewritten overnight to use this new framework as well.
> Polls suggest they have a lot of support, but their leaders seem to have decided not to use their voice.
Is that really true? Just off the top of my head, Lindsey Graham has been pretty vocal the last few months. I would paint him as a poster boy of the American moderate right (holding fairly conservative positions but clearly opposed to the more extreme American right).
If you mean the actual leadership, e.g. Paul Ryan, well I think it's obvious why they've stayed silent.
I think those moderate voices are just being drowned out.
You know what really sucks about this, beyond the obvious?
He's right that ideological diversity is low at companies like this (I say as an employee of another large tech company). Try saying that you're opposed to gun control at a major tech company and you're likely to similarly have people shout you down or deride you.
He chose such a poor central thesis (innate biological differences) that it completely overshadows what's actually a poignant argument: That we're effectively unable to have rational conversations about a wide swath of topics relating to modern politics.
You're right, it's probably actually much less. Go count how many people are browsing Facebook/etc at the start of the day, lunch, and at the end of the day. Even out of what's becoming an increasingly normal 45 hour workweek (9-6), lots of people are probably working 35 at best.
> For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of people who work longer hours and do it successfully. And most of the really successful people out there will mention that they worked insanely hard at some point. Are they all lying? All wrong?
You're comparing the outliers to the average. Some people will have an almost-linear relationship between hours worked and productivity. For most people, it'll be logarithmic.
Further, lots of bias going on here:
* You remember the successful people who worked hard more, because it furthers the idea that hard work == success
* No one's going to tell you they became successful without working hard. It's a slap in the face to everyone else, and few people are honest/tactless enough to admit they became successful without working hard.
* Most successful people would probably rationalize their success as the result of hard work (and obviously that might be true to some degree)
> The article itself mentions people doing extra hours of coding on personal projects, and we all know some people who have started companies that way. What, do these projects simply not exist? How does that make any sense?
One is self-driven and you can drop it at anytime if things get in the way (children, etc.). The other is imposed on you externally and you can't really go from working 70 hours a week to 40 hours a week. Well, you can - but it almost always involves changing jobs.
> Why does everyone on HN just assume they know better than those people themselves, and set off to make them feel bad and exploited?
Because it's downward pressure on our value as laborers. I mean - that's the real story. If you have to work twice as hard to earn 50% of the salary, your value as a laborer has just been divided by 4.
Very few people want to feel like they're becoming worth less over time. This of course can be offset if the output of your labor has more value to you (e.g. people go to work at non-profits, etc), but in general it's easy to pinpoint why most people resist this kind of pressure.