There comes a time in everyone's career when they realize that the "emergency situation" they are in never really ends. There is always a fire to put out. There is always a P0 bug that will sink the entire company if not fixed. There is always a release that absolutely cannot be delayed for any reason, and everyone must work nights and weekends to get it out.
The best you can do is learn to tune out management bullshit and identify what is really important. There is no point losing sleep over the rest. It will be there to work on tomorrow, and the day after.
This was an eye opening moment when it happened to me. Almost nothing has the impact it purports to have. Percentage-wise, very few things are the emergency/fire that people make them out to be, at least in the grand scheme of things.
I think part of it is that people get too wrapped up in their local world and don't see the big picture. For instance "If we don't get this widget added to the thingamabob in the next 3 days the company will go under!" when the thingamabob is just a minor piece of the puzzle for the larger company. Part of it though is driven from the top.
The one downside to having had this realization is it goes both ways. It also means that very few things you do have impact in a positive way as well. For some people this can be motivation killing.
not everybody gets sucked into firefighting to 'save the company'.
if the fire started due to something you helped create and you have even a smidgen of impostor syndrome, fighting fires is about about saving yourself and cleaning up the messes you've made. the only way to prevent this is to build a team with a strong sense of collective ownership/responsibility and a healthy attitude towards mistakes.
Professional engineers are incentivized to make mistakes because sprinting is more important than quality, and quality is not measured by the management. They care about check boxes of features.
If quality mattered, the best engineers would be making the fewest mistakes because mistakes are way more expensive than getting it right
I'm in this stage right now. I'm being moved from an engineering to being trained for an "architect" role, and it sucks. I look at my todo list and most of it involves emailing somebody about something, or preparing a presentation for some council. It feels like I can't actually do anything.
Like when I was an engineer, boom move get things done produce actual results, something would be deployed and value would be delivered, now, if I want to get something done, engage with two or three other teams to do something, talk with their team leads, then the actual engineers, then have a meeting to actually discuss requirements, and what should be a simple program that takes 3 api calls, turns into a 3 month long project.
I don't know your team, so I don't know the skills/views/dynamics, but is there a way to cut through red tape?
Do all of the meetings/emails have to happen serially and in that order? If so, why?
Maybe look up what Amazon does with its 2-pagers and 6-pagers. See if you can do something similar where you are.
If it's really such a simple solution and that's obvious early, can you propose the obvious solution when you see it and get reactions?
If you're the only architect, you may have to define some of this stuff and make your changes part of the corporate culture.
If you have any PM buddies (whichever type of P), ask them for advice. A lot of this is their bread and butter, and if they already know your org, they'll have special insights.
> when they realize that the "emergency situation" they are in never really ends.
At least in my experience I've noticed some things.
1. Management is incentivized to create the illusion of crisis to squeeze marginal extra labor out of you. They will be promoted away before burnout burns them.
2. Many of the crises are self inflicted by our response to previous crises. The only way to avoid the nausea of the merry go round is to get off it entirely.
3. You will futiley destroy yourself if you try to rail against the times you live in. You have to let the system fail for it to rectify. Martyring yourself will only extend the suffering as the system has no sentience nor conscience about what it's doing to people who care about reality.
When every system is *critical system for somebody* and the downtime means loss of capacity, then people are actually hurt, and there are real problems when these things do go down. So you become numb, like a triage nurse, to real suffering because you’re in a system that doesn’t actually give people the resources to fix these things.
Most of the harms in the world are when large systems filled with a lot of people, who have no alternative, break in ways that don’t have compensatory measures. It’s coming for the food supply soon too.
I’ve been in senior leadership positions in very large organizations multiple times, and I promise you that there are critical workloads not just in tech, but in medicine, defense, etc. who only have one or two poorly paid people who are there to make sure that whatever the system is, doesn’t break. And when it does? Welp tough break.
The reality is there should be many people as back up and as compensatory measures however, companies are not incentivized to pay for those back ups because in “normal” times everything looks fine. It’s not broken right now so we don’t need extra support. We’ve all heard the story.
The problem I see is that the world is increasingly filled with these unsustainable debt fueled “critical services”, and humans live within dozens of these large complex systems with no direct alternatives. The workers there are holding on by threads because no company can maintain their business in an environment of forever margin chasing (rat race) and all profits go to insulating owners from downside risks rather than making systems more robust to shocks. So the workers are blown out, owners have half a foot out the door in case of emergency and customers and users are just along for the ride.
For a while I worked in a government role that was very close to the political layer of government - one or two people separate you and many elected politicians.
The emergencies and surprises never stopped. Timelines would change quickly - “start working on it but no deadline” would regularly turn into “this is due at the end of the month” and then “Can you have this done in two weeks” and then “what can we accomplish by the end of the week” and then “this needs to be complete in the system by 4pm tomorrow” sometimes all within a few days. Sudden weekend work including absolutely ridiculous requests that I can’t talk about was pretty normal. Many people involved essentially volunteered large portions of their non-work time to the government because their positions did not include overtime compensation and they thought if they put in the work eventually they’d climb to a position where it would be worth it.
Every meeting was a potential crisis, and the bosses between you and the politicians were no better because of downhill shit theory. Some of the non political leadership were helicoptered political allies instead of technical specialists in the thing we were supposedly supposed to be doing.
I realized about 6 months in that even though in meetings they kept saying “we know workloads are higher than normal but we think we’ll get back to a more reasonable period soon” was just lip service, and that we were actually just in a permanent state of crisis of after crisis handed down to us by politicians who would take days off to go golfing. All this at wages that were not comparable to private industry but on the other hand less worries about tracking hours for billing like I would have had to do outside the public service.
I am glad to have left it behind. My health, both mental and physical, suffered even though I couldn’t tell at the time when I was going through it. There is no reason to live your life that way.
Absolutely. I have so many emergencies coming my way that I reach a point of paralysis. I'm not going to work 65 hour weeks anymore. So I have reached the point where if everything is an emergency then nothing is an emergency. If they want to give me resources to help out on their emergency then cool, otherwise take a number.
Having to be an IC and leadership and attend 5+ meetings a day is an impossible ask for someone that is not young and hungry anymore. When someone asks for things now I always lead with "sure, but its only me, no other resources so it is probably going to take a while"
What I've found in my experience is I started putting up boundaries instead of being a "yes" man and those I've worked with have responded pretty positively to it. Most of the time they're just trying to figure out their own emergencies so as long as they have something to tell their boss it's cool – "We won't be able to meet with xyz until Thursday since they have limited resources" "Okay, update us on what happens Thursday then".
As a (middle) manager: I sincerely hope many employees learn this. The best processes, systems and tools have people engaged deeply enough that they care about and work on future performance, UI/UX, efficiency, etc of that processes / system / tools. There’s nothing I like more than kindly being put in place for having unrealistic expectations. However, it is of my opinion that most don’t learn this. Those that do turn into MVPs. Not everyone is a MVP. And that’s not bad. I do think we can teach all people to speak out concerns in a positive way. It’s up to management to listen and take that to heart. That’s good culture. In my open office I hear chit chat comments and worse all the time, but constructive feedback a lot less.
Work in state government. If production crashed on Friday night, the issue would probably not be even noticed or looked into until the following Monday.
I realized it that the emergency was a gimmick whan they started wanting me to schedule a few extended trips, 11,000 miles flying in coach each way, to train my replacements.
I've been in security longer than most job applications ask for.
Every security solution is just the same Black Box with a one-trick-pony in it.
After the 40th one, they all kinda blur together after awhile. They all have accounts and permissions and reporting and maintenance and update processes and a way to store the data they create...and a single line on a single tab on a single webpage that 'does the trick'.
I'm with the OP. I'm tired of installing SIEMs when the leadership undergoes an upheaval and the new CISO comes in with some form of "Everything you have is CRAP! My stuff is awesome! Warm up the forklift!"
It's all the same alchohol lubricated meetings in a bar with the same deep fried taquitos and the same fidget spinners emblazoned with the product name, usually a VERBNOUN.
> Every security solution is just the same Black Box with a one-trick-pony in it.
This is a cultural problem in the information security space and one reason why I've left that space. I call this "checkbox compliance" culture. Most customers want a box they can rack, check the box on a compliance audit, and move on. Very few companies actually give a shit about security as a practice or philosophy, and don't actually do any of the work to build security into their products and systems.
The epitome of this is that many companies operate devices at their border that strip encryption via using a company-provided CA to man-in-the-middle all traffic across their network to do DPI, and then re-encrypt (hopefully) to the ultimate target. From the perspective of the employee, the primary attacker on the network is the company's own infosec team, because the policies and compliance checkboxes are achieved in the worst possible iteration of how you might meet compliance without any regard to /security/.
This is a fixable situation, but it's a hard thing to fix because like most cultural issues, it's ultimately some kind of tragedy of the commons.
Completely agreed. I also see it as a side effect of leadership that's not IT savvy. The person setting policy, if they don't understand the problem and risks, often picks solutions that make it 'somebody's elses problem'.
'I don't know Security, so I'm going to pay an MSSP to do it for me.'
This is not a bad thing, per se, it just means that their controls are ceded to a company who has marketing, shareholders, management layers, and _they_ want to optimize _their_ costs....so the protection of your organization will be 1/n of the response team's attention...where N is the number of other companies they're responsible for monitoring.
It's POSSIBLE that you'll get better support by letting an expert multiply their skills across a larger population of targets...it's just not LIKELY.
> I have similar issues with the agile methodology and its 2-week “sprints”.
Why are we sprinting… ALL. THE. TIME. Can’t we at least mix in some brisk walks every now and then a la high intensity interval training?
Following the fitness metaphor, the concept of periodization is an overwhelmingly common training strategy. Periodization turns fitness plans into smaller cycles that include active and passive periods of rest.
It’s recognized that these rest periods are where performance improves - the grind that came before was simply tearing the body down to induce the body to rebuild itself fitter and stronger than before. These rest periods are not a vacation, but rather a reduction in intensity and training load and often include cross-training and other activities that give the athlete a mental and physical break.
I’ve always been surprised some enterprising Agile consultant hasn’t jumped on the same concept to push the concept of recovery sprints, like like an Ironman triathlete will have a recovery week baked into their plan. I’ve heard of sprints that might be focused on technical debt or experimentation, but nothing about a reduction in velocity or anything like that. I think it would be an interesting experiment to try to help mitigate the endless grind.
Additionally, two-week sprints weren’t originally the norm. I left software for a while when four weeks was the most common sprint length and when I came back , everything seemed to have settled on two weeks as the magic number. I never got an explanation why.
I left silicon valley because of agile development. Sprinting all the time was the thing that lead to my burnout, and when we finally released our app, the company was pivoting and 'going epic mode'. I quit then.
In retrospect it would've been fine if I had taken a more relaxed attitude towards it all. Sprints don't mean you have to literally sprint. Epic mode is just a narrative. Work at your pace and it'll be fine.
You are right but to expand on it, hard work with an arbitrary often impossible deadline without working OT definitely contributes. One can only run on the treadmill for so long before something breaks.
I don't think you can really have a generic "this is why you're burnt out" or "that's not real burn out => look over here!".
There could be many reasons why someone is in a burnt out state - from lack of control, to being over-worked, being constantly over stimulated, emotional trauma or any number of other reasons.
It's something unique to the individual and is not always obvious.
I think they’re pointing out that if you feel like what you’re doing really matters then burn out doesn’t happen. Assuming there aren’t factors outside work.
I strongly believe burnout is a for of depression.
I personally think all organizations want to be cults with unthinking followers. I read every inbound piece from "management" like they are propaganda leaflets with an implied threat of violence. It helps.
I have worked for a small software development company in a small town for a small salary for over 10 years now. We are very chill. We are not venture funded. I think most participants in HN could also do this if they can tolerate making much less money than you would make in the city (with much lower cost of living), and if the other things that come with city life are not that important to you.
There are some opportunities that I think are only available in the FANGs. If your passion is in that domain, then you may have to stick it out. This is the only reason that I can see for doing the corporate grind. I don't have an addiction to money. There is no stuff that I could buy with more money that would be worth the corporate grind.
Software development skills are important enough that you will be in demand no matter where you go. Especially if you're feeling like the author of this article (over it), consider what's really important to you. You may have more options than you think.
And all the talk about "diversity" and "diversity of opinions" being cherished is nonsense, they want a hivemind singularly focused on executing leadership's various whims.
I think that really is super dependent on your workplace, and probably your field.
In higher education, I can tell you, they do not value diversity of opinion, but they get it in spades. Every decision is questioned, argued, analyzed, and beat to death. Leadership hates it, but I love it. It's one of the closest environments to that 'value diversity of opinion' statement that I've ever been a part of.
Diversity of opinion is allowed, but not diversity of worldview. If a dissenting worldview is expressed it is quickly removed from the discussion and the dissenter is eliminated.
That may be part of it, but I think the main reason is that higher ed is process-oriented to a fault.
You need five people to sign off on what you're doing, and John is out until next Tuesday, so he can't sign it. When he gets back, he notices that Christine missed something on the form, so he waits five days and kicks it back. Repeat this until you give up.
I was recently berated and given negative performance ratings for rolling something out 2 weeks late. The reason I rolled it out 2 weeks late was because we were in holiday season and the company CTO had asked people to exercise caution during holidays. But lo and behold, my management didn't like that I was cautious. They gave me a negative rating.
I asked, "Why was the 2 weeks so important? Are there any customers waiting for it? Is the company going to lose money? Why is the CTO saying one thing and you are saying something different?"
There was no clear answer to it. Turns out, the managers have designed a game where they assign percentage points for things completed by the end of the quarter. My manager was getting lower points because I was exercising caution - as requested by the CTO.
It is these BS management games that made me realize that the industry is broken beyond repair. I no longer hustle to make managers look good.
Quiet quitting on exploitation is a fair trade. I ain't sacrificing my personal life for BS games.
We're always getting mixed signals... "if you need to delay, delay. you're the best judge of that." And "we have commitments we have to hit at the end of the quarter."
Half of us can discern corporate messaging and half of us cannot (let us say).
The cynic, the street smart corporate bilinguist hears those two messages and understands plainly that only the latter is true.
The person who takes things at face value is perplexed: They have been told not to hurt themselves, but also told that if they hurt themselves the company will be pleased. How bizarre, to be told opposing requirements, and that half of people are not also perplexed.
> The cynic, the street smart corporate bilinguist hears those two messages and understands plainly that only the latter is true.
It is true that the only message you need to follow is the one said by your own manager (and their manager). But remember, if you follow the manager's message and something fails, this manager will throw YOU under the bus.
The real street smart corporate bilinguist recognizes that blindly following your management makes you vulnerable to become the sucker, fall-guy, doesn't-really-need-promotion-guy.
If your management is dishonest, the only real game out there is a game of dishonesty.
I didn't tell them directly since I knew I was being targeted. But I left breadcrumbs of truth within the team so that next time, someone else identifies this same pattern and calls them out again.
How do you make the leap from this one company doing stupid management nonsense - 100% accurate in this case, it sounds like - to "the industry is broken beyond repair?"
Don't know if this person worked at FB, but FB literally has its walls covered in propaganda posters, designed to "inspire" but I find them to be disturbing.
i once worked in a small company that had a new ceo. he read about the posters at facebook and decided to invent some of his own, so he came up with a stupid phrase and got designers to mock a bunch up and print them out (if i remember correctly, it was some variant of "Keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times" and had pictures of rollercoasters).
the posters were very effective at getting us to stop taking the new ceo seriously.
I hate these much less than I expected to honestly. In the context of Facebook they feel a bit dishonest, but the messages they convey are pretty nice.
I suspect they all could be British English, since the variations are less pronounced that one might think:
re: Focused - to quote Wiktionary:
"The spelling focused is much more common in the US but also more common in the UK and Australia.
The Oxford English Dictionary describes the spelling focussed as irregular."
Speaking a native British English speaker, I'd agree. I focused looks OK, but focussed looks weird to me.
Prioritization:
The 's' versus 'z' debate is perhaps a little more complicated than often presented. There are some words which always were historically spelt with a 'z', but since the interpretation that 'z' is American have started to be spelt with an 's' in English.
In particular the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) tends to favour 'z' spellings for a number of words over the 's' spellings - I think 'nationalization' is a particular example.
When I worked at FB, I felt like I was treated most like a human vs. a work robot at other jobs. Experience is dependent on which org you join, and the hedonic treadmill will always exist in capitalism.. but these articles on their posters are silly.
If you believe soviet style communist dictatorship is the only alternative to the current state of capitalistic exploitation in the West, propaganda already defeated you as a force for change.
Please stop talking like this. You're not in a crusade against a monolithic force. You're raging against a billion individuals playing, generally speaking, within the rules that governments set for them.
You reach for false dichotomies very easily. You may not like what I'm saying but don't ask me to shut up. Why do you immediately denounced me as being in a quixotesque saga? What are you afraid of thinking?
Actually, I think it's more of a "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you" culture - which is pretty bad, too, especially when they spend all their time praising "teamwork".
The worst is when you are trying to escape the hustle and changing your attitude to take it at your own pace at work but there is that one team member that buys into the hustle culture, sending emails at night, ticking things off their check list like their life depended on it, promoting the race to the bottom.
Because management is going to use their "commitment" to try to make you feel bad for not working harder. (You don't have to accept the guilt package they try to drop on you, of course. But they may also tie things like raises and promotions to it, which is harder to ignore.)
Interesting. In my several decades of working in this industry, I've very rarely seen anyone get meaningful raises anyway. You get a raise by taking a job at another company.
But true, if you're worried about getting promotions, then that's an issue.
I have the fantasy of working in the software industry but that we're ants: there's a single correct goal that we all share. What would it be like to work in this industry where our goals aligned and our communication flawless?
What would we have built in the same time, with the same piles of sand?
One way to keep my sanity is to take a look at the big picture every six months or so. You quickly see that basically nothing has changed but there was a ton of noise in between. The same works for news. Ignore news for 3 months. When you read them again you also see that almost nothing substantial has changed.
I enjoy my job and the lifestyle it provides. But as other have said, I tune out the "emergencies" and people panicking over it. It's all BS and I think it's important to recognize that. You're going to die in a short period of time. Do your best while at your job, and pretend to give a shit while you're there. But make sure to budget time for your family and yourself.
There's always someone trying to light a fire under your ass. Fear politics is how we got a police force at war with citizens due to moral panics. Would be authoritarians thrive on that shit. Salespeople want you to panic and close to escape the danger. Leadership wants you to exhaust yourself for their cause.
The real trick is realizing that's bullshit 99% of the time. Special forces train you to take control of your fight or flight reflex. You need to decide when to unleash the adrenaline. If you lose that control, you're in the whirlwind... Being grounded and tuning out the noise so you can navigate properly is a fundamental life skill.
> I’m not against hustle, but when the hustle becomes an end in-and-of-itself, rather than a means to an end, that is alarming.
Is it possible to hustle all the time & not burn out? Yes, but it takes a special type of person who values the hustle, in and of itself, which is rare.
It's important to realize that there's no right or wrong with what you choose to value.
And, as an employee, changing your org's values is probably an impossible task.
Instead, get clear on what your values are. Then, find an environment where you're surrounded with people who share your values. You'll be much happier.
> Instead, get clear on what your values are. Then, find an environment where you're surrounded with people who share your values. You'll be much happier.
This is a nice thought in theory but if your values include something along the lines of "treat people like they have families and lives and don't use them like a resource until they burn out", that eliminates a surprisingly large number of companies.
Having worked at a few big tech companies at different stages in their lifecycle, I think I'm starting to see where the sweet spots for joining are where they are more likely to align with the ways I want to work (if not all of my values). Equally I'm also starting to learn when it's time to jump from the ship.
* inception: this is any point at which the whole company can fit around a board room table. The environment is intimate and people are passionate and engaged.
* Post-IPO: as in, immediately post-IPO. This is the calm after the storm as, immediately pre-IPO, there will be a focus on pure profit and growth of value without growth of business, which means a lot of crunch and a lot of burnout. This does mean likely not getting the kind of stock offering that they might have given previously.
For jumping ship:
* Pre and/or post merger: mergers are horrible and lead to similar behaviours as IPO but with headcount reductions, culture clashes, and lots of wife reaching decisions without consultation. You'll also see an exodus of colleagues at both ends.
* Pre-IPO: if you've already banked your shares, don't stay to tighten the purse strings and burn out, similar to my comments on post-IPO.
A tl;dr would be: I like working at a company when the focus is on growth rather than profits because that's when people are working most to create new things and please customers.
My reflection is this is a symptom of North American work culture. In the end, it manifests stress, lost time to decompress and a significant impact on your health.
After traveling to LaTam, we have it all backwards. Focus on happiness, family and health are where energy needs to be invested, before anywhere else.
Correct! When I moved out to a certain part of Europe and saw how life is much more than a hustle, it filled me with a renewed energy and perspective towards life.
While agile methodologies have a place, I agree with the author about this 'sprinting' nonsense.
Not everything can be timeboxed in a couple weeks. Combine that with the daily reports... that sort of stuff works very well if you are working on your 78th Web CRUD app. It doesn't work so well when you are doing something much more complex. "Oh that's what POCs are for!" - yes but they are, once again, aggressively timeboxed.
If the 'agile' industry wanted to design the Space Shuttle, it would have to fit in a POC, rather than taking a realistic amount of time to allow for proper design.
The sad truth is that no manager gets promoted by quoting that their project will take 2 years. They will say 6 months, with one shoddy demo at 3 months full of smoke and mirrors, and that buys them time to file "bugs" and "improvements" that will stretch the time it will take to 2 years anyway. By which time they are already going to be at another company.
Managing your attitude and stress levels is critical in the tech industry. I would argue getting invested is actively bad.
Not giving a shit and getting the job done is better than caring too much and constantly battling to "improve" things.
I can't handle giving a shit. It burns me out. The best i can do is a "good job" on what i feel like is a reasonable workload.
My grandmother used to say "The graveyards are full of indispensable people." It's true. You leave a void quickly filled after you die. You might as well enjoy the ride.
In my experience actual reality is somewhat different – at least at large Internet apps companies.
In high-functioning successful team, everyone is spending significant time in
1. discovery – learning things about the constantly evolving product/functional domain and the tech, and
2. ideation – figuring out what's important and how to solve it,
3. and some non-trivial amount of time in large team collaboration related activities.
But the problem is these activities (and their taxonomies) are not made explicit – their purpose is not explicitly stated; instead people participate in packaged rituals that are supposed to produce results. But because they do it without understanding it, they could feel like a cog in the machine.
But there's also another big part of the reality – those who work themselves too hard and get themselves burnt out are also chasing personal career promotion goals and not succeeding at it.
Then, there are some who don't even have that objective but have a broken work habit and get burnt out.
Of course there are other things at the worst end of the spectrum – bad manager, bad CEO, bad business, bad co-workers, bad vendor-partners etc – that can make things toxic and they get burnt out.
I view my work at AWS as being paid to deal with meetings and other people. Hadnt I bills to pay and mouths to feed, I'd be doing this "work" for free. Well, almost, I'd be coding all day, but I wouldn't set foot on a single meeting.
Maybe it's a matter of perspective? It sure helps that I am working on interesting projects. Maybe the diff is that this is how I am having fun.
Enjoy it while you can. I love computer science and programming. But there’s so much CRUD apps you can work on before it stops being exciting. Now, I just do my job in the work hours, then move to personal stuff in my spare time. Unless it’s for myself, I wouldn’t work on anything if not for the money.
I know people are different, but I'm like you in that programming is fun for me.
Except when I'm doing it as paid work for someone else. That drains the fun out of it for me. As a result, I have to have my fun by programming when I'm off work, too.
I'm jealous of older generations that were at least compensated for their hard work. We're expected to hustle all the time, for no benefit in our personal lives.
Software engineering is a "high earning job", yet the basic shit it affords you isn't even to the level of "low" and "middle" paying jobs of the past. You can grind yourself to the bone for years and still not be able to afford to buy a home and raise a family.
I think it depends where you live. Its relatively easy to land a 100k plus job after a couple years in software in the US. If the argument is things are just way more expensive now, then preach on, its insanity how much a trip to the grocery store costs now.
An average programmer in Poland earns 18k PLN net monthly, which is around 14k PLN after taxes. This is 5 times the minimal salary - UoP after taxes equals to ~2709 PLN monthly. You can earn 6k even at an internship outside of Warsaw. This allows you to live in really comfortable conditions, no matter what city you're in.
In my opinion, Poland is one of best countries to be a programmer in Europe, due to the possibilities of overseas remote work, low costs of living and very low taxes. As for Germany - well, maybe someone else can chip in
There is a third option that most people don’t seem to know about, which is to slow down to speed up. I find there are many instances where if I slow down I not only accomplish more, but the things I work on are more important. It can be really hard to get in this mindset, and even harder to know if you need to actually be putting in more effort/hours. But by and large, taking breaks and getting enough sleep can actually be a superpower.
>> As far as I'm concerned, it always was and always shall be "work faster or die". I was unaware that we were given a third choice?
Yeah, it turns out you get to define things in your life, including your pace at work. Be productive but don't burn yourself out. Most likely nothing will happen. Worst case you dodge a bullet and find a more reasonable company. Either way you will be working at your pace.
You're going to die regardless, how hard you work between now and then is only relevant to the lifestyle you want. If one can work less and be content with their lifestyle all the power to them.
> Just observe the colorful language from Bezos’ 2016 letter to shareholders: “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.” Is it just me, or is this just another way of saying: work hard or you will die.
The reason this author is confused/upset by the Bezos quote is because they are talking about the same sport but a different class.
If an olympic champion told you about their training and diet regiment, you'd say "this sounds horrible" but what you'd mean is "it's not for me, because I am not training for the olympics." On the flip-side if your goal was to be an olympic champ too, your reaction would be "this is what it takes, good to know."
Bezos wasn't setting himself up for an easy 9-5 and he wasn't building a me-too company. He was building Amazon into.. well.. what it is, an absolute champion across multiple industries. And perhaps doing that requires what he describes.
If you're not looking to build an Amazon and you're not looking to be a part of the culture that can do it, then of course "this sounds horrible." And that's OK, just realize you're saying that because "it's not for me, because I don't care about that." It could very well be for other people - and those people might have greater wealth and work engagement than you do as a result. And that's OK too.
Why are we sprinting? To win. The business world is Darwinian. Sit back and relax, and someone else who is more motivated will eat your lunch. Why do we want to win? To make money so we can have what we want. If you don't feel like you're getting somewhere, maybe you're applying force to the ground in the wrong way.
Then look at apex predators. They spend most of their time resting. Their efforts in hunting are extremely focused. Lions are not 'griding' yet they dominate the savannah.
Slow and steady wins the race, and the majority of startups fail.
I agree that a balance needs to be struck and something needs to be done, but I'd favor a healthy cadence for my team than have them burn out and quit, leaving me holding the bag.
is my command of english off? this sentence is a lyrical way to write "this journey which only 1 percent have" finished ... not this journey is 1 percent finished ... ;D
I remember a phrase I heard on my martial arts class after many years of training: "Don't be afraid of bitter work" It really hit home when our main motto was and is "We Wei" Effortless effort.
You're allowed to take a felt and mark up those posters. Management will be disappointed if a bit of humour never surfaced. Especially on April fools day.
The best you can do is learn to tune out management bullshit and identify what is really important. There is no point losing sleep over the rest. It will be there to work on tomorrow, and the day after.