[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.

[ianleeclark]

> As someone trained in economics you should already be aware that everyone chilling isn’t a stable equilibrium.

Wow TIL.

> As you can see, the less everyone else works, the more value your extra work is.

It's surprising someone like yourself subscribes to the Labor Theory of Value.