[mruts]

It’s fine to have different priorities, but don’t expect to get rewarded for them. In financual firms where I have worked, everyone puts in at the very least 10 hours a day, and at least 8 hours total on the weekend, regardless of whether you have a family or not.

People who give their firm everything they have generally get rewarded for it. Those that don’t in some industries (like finance) are quickly fired. In others, it just means you get passed up for promotion and make less.

Just realize that everything has an opportunity cost and that nothing comes for free (both spending time with your family and spending time at work). Also that people have different priorities so don’t make blanket statements about what people want.

[ianleeclark]

> People who give their firm everything they have generally get rewarded for it.

The first job I got out of college, there was a sea of Solution Architects. They all worked around 60 hours a week, if not more. If a boss said jump, they would always ask how high. If a boss told them they needed to take a red-eye tonight, they always did it. Yet every time I went into the main office, the group was entirely different.

That's an example of a group of people who drank the Kool aid, who were "generally" supposed to be rewarded.

> Just realize that everything has an opportunity cost and that nothing comes for free (both spending time with your family and spending time at work).

It's a sign of a deeply sick culture when everything has a transactional value.

[mruts]

Opportunity cost is a property of time, not culture. Unless we figure out how to live forever or stop time, this will always be the fundamental constraint on life.

[ianleeclark]

> Opportunity cost is a property of time, not culture.

I'm aware, I have a degree in economics. I'm talking about cultural values that force constant optimization onto individuals as being deeply sick.

Regardless of if every action has some minmax strategy, it's not healthy to have individuals constantly running Bayesian analysis into if they should spend time with their family, or take a second job.

[mruts]

Do you have an alterate paradigm?

[ianleeclark]

Letting people breathe

[mruts]

As someone trained in economics you should already be aware that everyone chilling isn’t a stable equilibrium. For example let’s say that everyone only works one day a week. Now I can double my output by working two days. So we can look at the relative productivity gains of working one extra day as a function of how many days on average everyone else works:

1 day: 100% 2 days: 50% 3 days: 33% 4 days: 25% 5 days: 20% 6 days: 16% 7 days: 0%

As you can see, the less everyone else works, the more value your extra work is. I’m not saying that the equilibrium is gonna be 7 days. But it’s not gonna be less than 4, at the very least. This is also the reason why the 20 hour work week will never catch on.

[partyboat1586]

Ah yes the soothing feeling that at any one time no matter what I am doing I am loosing out on doing something else. Such are the inner workings of the ever rational and goal focused financier who embraces this reality in its fullest form and yet still decides it best to prioritise their pride. "Do not fear the doubters" says the fund manager "they are simply jealous of your achievements and commitment to the fund". Of course this is not said out loud but rather communicated subtly through the language and the ideology that underpins the language of finance.