On censorship

[Locmaar]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

On the other side, sure, there are some kinds of jobs where letting the employees do whatever they want will actually raise the chances of the job getting done, or increase product quality. For some kinds of job, there are a few employees who can slack off for five full days straight, then stay up all weekend in a burst of genius and motivation, and deliver a breakthrough product for Monday morning that will blow away anything that six normal people could have made working all through the week. But if the slacker geniuses weren't allowed to slack off all week, they wouldn't make their breakthrough. So it really pays to set them free.

From my experience the truth is somewhere between these extremes. Wherever there are deadlines to meet, things to wrap, reports to make, presentations to prepare, most people I have worked with (and I have worked with a lot of people), would immediately cease to slack off and jump right in. Which is what I meant by getting the job done. Also, there are some days when my creativity takes some time off and I find it very hard to come up with that one idea I've been circling for days. I don't think it would help me a lot if all I could do with my computer was surfing my employer's intranet. Getting things done seems to be the issue and more employers seem to be getting that and allow for some slacking. The best I have worked with and for even encourage it.

[Student of Trinity]

I think that's probably right, that most people are somewhere in the middle. And the knuckling down and sharpening up for the crunch, I think that's normal, too.

 

In fact, I have an idea that all of modern economics is really about the fact that the potential productivity of any average human is really enormously higher than what they will normally do. The person who normally actually works 30 hours a week, and doesn't put more than 50% of their mental energy into their job even when they're doing it, could potentially work 120 hours per week at full engagement — if they were saving the world or getting rich or whatever it was would motivate them to give it their all. That's a factor of eight up for grabs, and even a small fraction of this untapped productivity is in principle a much bigger deal than all the objectively physical economic factors one can identify.

 

I think that's the ultimate reason why such nebulous psychological issues as fear and confidence are actually so important in modern economies. And I think the explanation (as far as it goes) of a lot of major historical developments has really been, "At this point a lot of people started working harder for a while." Of course the question remains, Why, and why then? But I think productivity surges and slumps must be a big piece of what, for whatever reason, happened.

[waterplant]

Another, more disturbing, aspect of this is the potential for misuse of email and internet material causing damage to the reputation of an institution or company. An example of this is the current situation concerning the Victorian Police Force in Aus. Some tragic consequences for the individuals involved and a very serious undermining of reputation and trust in Victorian police due to the abuse of a 'privilege'.

Anything unregulated is open to abuse and the abusers ruin it for the rest.

[Locmaar]

While this is certainly true, regulated things tend to get abused as well, as people will go looking for loopholes.

[Sarachim]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

In fact, I have an idea that all of modern economics is really about the fact that the potential productivity of any average human is really enormously higher than what they will normally do. The person who normally actually works 30 hours a week, and doesn't put more than 50% of their mental energy into their job even when they're doing it, could potentially work 120 hours per week at full engagement — if they were saving the world or getting rich or whatever it was would motivate them to give it their all. That's a factor of eight up for grabs, and even a small fraction of this untapped productivity is in principle a much bigger deal than all the objectively physical economic factors one can identify.

This idea might not be wrong in principle, but your numbers are absurd. 120 hours a week is a 17-hour day, 7 days a week. There has never been a point in human history when ordinary people worked this much. Even slaves didn't come anywhere close to this, despite having no control over how much time they spent working. Neither do even the most passionate of my world-saving activist friends.

If you decided to try something like this, well, most people would probably find that the productivity benefits of "full engagement" would quickly get canceled out by having no leisure time, no social life, and too little sleep. As JV said, "you need sleep to live." Even if you were a physical and psychological prodigy, and managed to live this way a long time without your work suffering for it, you're still going to turn 40 eventually.

At the other, more serious end of the spectrum, 30 hours of half-speed work seems equally unrealistic. My experience with real jobs isn't very extensive, and it's mostly limited to warehouses and the like where slacking opportunities are limited, but even so this is nowhere close to what I've observed personally. Everybody slacks off a little, but you're suggesting that most people spend nearly half their work hours doing no work at all, and never spend a minute working full speed to catch up.

Okay, so you could make your numbers more conservative and your basic point would still stand. I think the more interesting question isn't "how much more could people work?" but "why should they?" Unless your job is a saving-the-world type of deal, shouldn't your goal be to spend as little time on it as possible?

Quote:

I think that's the ultimate reason why such nebulous psychological issues as fear and confidence are actually so important in modern economies. And I think the explanation (as far as it goes) of a lot of major historical developments has really been, "At this point a lot of people started working harder for a while."

As far as I know, the hardest working people in human history were the slaves on Carribbean sugar plantations. They typically worked six days a week on sugar, the seventh on growing their own food, and burned about five thousand calories a day. Now, its true that this was a "major historical development," but that's not the same as saying it was a good one.

[Dintiradan]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

But I think it's one of the big hurdles, in moving from tiny brilliant start up to large scale production company, that there are actually very few people like that. If three of them get together in a garage, they can do wonders; but then they crash and burn when they discover that expanding to 100 staff gets them 97 normal people, instead of 97 more people like them.

This effect comes up again and again, especially in the software industry. Fred Brooks (the patron deity of software engineers) talks about this in The Mythical Man-Month. Essentially, one hundred person companies are less effective than three person companies, not just because those three people were geniuses, but because of communication overhead and the fact that some tasks can't be done in parallel. Joel Spolsky discusses the same phenomenon in this blog post.

As for the later posts: I agree with Sarachim -- there is an upper limit for how hard someone can work. On the other hand, some professions are known to have huge ranges of productivity (the 10:1 productivity ratio in programmers is frequently cited). Most people don't think this is due to the top percentile "working harder", though (though it certainly is a factor).

[Rowen]

One aspect to work is that there must be a distinction between working hard and over working. From what I have seen of people who over work themselves they become less able to keep up the same level of quality work that they had provided previously due to being over worked.

[Alorael at Large]

That's burnout, and companies that try too hard to run a tight ship are probably both more and less likely to cause burnout, depending on the person. The inveterate slacker who will goof off for four hours and who will then have to put in another four to compensate will end up working 12 hours days if there isn't some kind of limitation. Censor! The easily bored type, though, will have nothing to do but work for eight hours straight without the internet to amuse him. Don't censor!

 

Obviously these are silly extreme cases, but I'd bet that the most effective way to manage workforce is to avoid putting hard limits on anything but to also be around and give those little nudges to keep everyone working more often than not.

 

—Alorael, who has had sixteen hour marathons of intense concentration and productivity. He's also had days when he just can't do that, and slacking is a less stress-inducing choice than trying and failing to accomplish something.

[Dintiradan]

Slashdot discussion relevant to the original (now deleted) post.

[Student of Trinity]

The 120-hour full-steam week isn't what anyone could sustain for very many weeks, or what many people are ever motivated to do. But it's possible. And it's what people would do, if they knew that if they could keep it up for a few weeks they would cure cancer, or save a loved one's life, or become very rich, or end a war, or otherwise shatter time and bring back the dead.

 

Obviously, nobody sane is going to do anything close to that just to get a bit more money. And forcing anyone else to do that is a heinous crime (unless, perhaps, it would cure cancer or something like that). But it's the upper limit of what people can do if they really want to, and it's a long way above what people usually do in fact.

[VCH]

My uncles work roughly 15 hours per day, and have done for the last 13 years or more, 365 days a year 7 days a week. But the four of them are 1/4 owners of the company, and the only full time employees as well.

[Sarachim]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

The 120-hour full-steam week isn't what anyone could sustain for very many weeks, or what many people are ever motivated to do. But it's possible. And it's what people would do, if they knew that if they could keep it up for a few weeks they would cure cancer, or save a loved one's life, or become very rich, or end a war, or otherwise shatter time and bring back the dead.

Well, sure, but most of us don't get to do those things. The researcher can only focus his time so narrowly because there are hundreds of people doing the menial jobs that satisfy his more immediate needs. "Rich" is, by definition, exceptional. Saving a loved one's life isn't generally a matter of working longer hours, unless he has been kidnapped by drug traffickers and you are devoting that time to a vigilante rampage.

The things you listed are the accomplishments of years, not weeks. Even then, working as hard as you can without killing yourself does not give very good odds of success, nor does success guarantee that the sacrifice will be worth it. I would say that the reason so few people act this way is not that they are ignorant, lazy, or lack self-confidence, but that they have rationally examined their prospects and decided that a lower-risk, lower-reward life strategy is a better one for them. Most of those people are probably right.

Of course, most people could probably devote a few hours a week to some selfless cause, and that's laudable. Anyone who is destroying their body in an effort to cure cancer is a hero. It's still unrealistic to argue that lack of will is the only thing stopping most people from being supermen.

[Slawbug]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

The 120-hour full-steam week isn't what anyone could sustain for very many weeks, or what many people are ever motivated to do. But it's possible. And it's what people would do, if they knew that if they could keep it up for a few weeks they would cure cancer, or save a loved one's life, or become very rich, or end a war, or otherwise shatter time and bring back the dead.

This. Five out of the last seven summers, I have disappeared from the internet and worked 15 to 19 hours per day (what rare breaks there are I haven't included in those hours) for two months straight, with five 24-hour periods off during those two months (and the last two summers, I worked during parts of those days off too). That ends up being very slightly less than SoT's assertion, but only because of the five days off, so for as much as 2 weeks at a time it almost precisely meets his description. The work is pretty demanding both mentally and physically. Each summer, 120 to 160 other adults have done it with me, and another 400-600 have applied and been rejected, even though the money sucks. Why? Because of what SoT says above. It isn't a cult, but it is such a critically meaningful and developmentally provocative experience for people that it might as well shatter time and bring back the dead.

[Student of Trinity]

I didn't say that it was common for a few weeks of mad work to achieve tremendous things, only that if you somehow knew they would, you'd do those mad weeks. Maybe there are more opportunities to make that kind of difference than most of us realize. Even if there aren't, the point remains that there's a lot of untapped time and talent in the human race, and somehow managing to extract even a little bit more of it can have a huge effect.

 

Building up your own company is one of the things that apparently can motivate people to extraordinary output.

 

What exactly is it that you do in the summers, Slarty?

[cfgauss]

Originally Posted By: Sarachim

This idea might not be wrong in principle, but your numbers are absurd. 120 hours a week is a 17-hour day, 7 days a week. There has never been a point in human history when ordinary people worked this much.

Someone's never been to grad school!

There's a reason grad students have a very high going totally crazy rate. (~100%)

[Slawbug]

The amount of time grad students work varies widely depending on what kind of school they are in and for academic grad school, I imagine it also varies based on field. I went to a hardcore research university and I didn't know any grad students who worked that much on a regular basis, and very few who worked more than 50 or 60 hours per week. Medical residents, now that's a different story.

 

SoT -- I work at an unusually intensive short term treatment program for severely emotionally disturbed children.

[Student of Trinity]

How well does it work for the kids? I ask because this is the kind of thing that would be worth doing even if it didn't actually produce much in the way of apparent lasting benefit, but it'd be nice to think that it somehow helped them make some kind of progress.

[Slawbug]

In the short term, i.e., during the summer, it often works wonders. In the long term, it varies, and according to the professors who do studies on these children, the single most important factor is the outside environment: gains made are most likely to be maintained, compared to data from before the summer, when caretakers and referring schools/agencies are invested and available, and they are least likely to be maintained in the opposite situation, or when the kid lives around heavy gang activity, etc.

 

Having worked with them (and in some referring agencies and schools) for six years now, I've seen enough kids maintain significant gains over time that I'm sold on it. Of course, it was seeing the changes that happen, often quite suddenly, in situ that sold me first.

 

But as I see it, the point of the program isn't change in specific ways of adapting to the world, so much as expansion of worldview. When it comes to coping with trauma, the best thing kids have going for them is their resilience and openness to different experiences, but their biggest problem is their lack of different experiences. If things have always sucked because of factors X Y and Z, well, as a kid it doesn't really occur to you that things can really be different. Intellectually you might realize that, you might see that other people don't have those factors in play, but it just doesn't seem like a real possibility. So seeing that things can be different FOR YOU, even if just for a few brief days and only after you struggle and writhe for two months, well, that plants a seed.

[*i]

Quote:

The amount of time grad students work varies widely depending on what kind of school they are in and for academic grad school, I imagine it also varies based on field. I went to a hardcore research university and I didn't know any grad students who worked that much on a regular basis, and very few who worked more than 50 or 60 hours per week.

Slarty is correct. There is a bit of variability with graduate student. Looking back on graduate school, I probably worked (including time for classes and homework when I had been taking those) between 50-60 hours per week. Some weeks more, some less. When I was in the terminal phase of my thesis, I was working around 12 hours per day, 6 days a week with around four on either Saturday or Sunday. This is still a far cry from 17 hours per day, all the time.

I've known students who work less, and some that work (timewise) a bit more. Note that time worked in this endeavor does not necessarily correlate well with actual productivity. A fellow grad student worked a lot more than everyone else, yet, he seemed to be unable to accomplish as much as the rest of us. In this we have a case where working harder does not necessarily produce results, working smarter does.