[practicalpants]

At risk of sounding belittling to those spend their life giving their labor to someone else, I think we can't go on indefinitely because we aspire to get something better out of our lives, and somewhere perhaps deep in our minds or hearts we know we need better.

After all this whole concept of spending a career at someone else's company only started in the late 20th C when the industrial rev created the modern corporation.

[WalterBright]

> spending a career at someone else's company

The nice thing about working for someone else's company is you work 40 hours, then it leaves your mind for the rest of the time. If there's some problem at work, it's usually "not in my job description." Like, printer doesn't work? Call the Department of Inhuman Resources. Not your problem.

If you work for yourself, it's 24/7. No vacations, either. All problems are your problem. Printer quit? Whatcha gonna do about it? It isn't for everyone.

[imgabe]

Maybe it's better to have problems you care about. Solving problems that aren't directly related to your well-being is unnatural. That's not how humans evolved. Until fairly recently in human history, if you had a problem in your work (which was probably farming), it was a direct threat to your survival that demanded your attention. You cared deeply about it and solving it in the best way possible mattered immensely.

I'm not saying we should go back to being one problem away from death, but also solving problems that just fundamentally don't matter to us personally doesn't seem to be great either.

[WalterBright]

Back when I had a bunch of employees, I was awake many nights worrying about meeting payroll.

But working for someone else - payroll was not my department.

[samatman]

The grass is always greener, right? But this is pretty idealistic.

Picture changes drastically if you have an abusive boss or a toxic work culture. There have to be a bunch of people on HN who physically cringed when they saw 40 hours, some have even talked themselves into being macho about it.

[epicureanideal]

> There have to be a bunch of people on HN who physically cringed when they saw 40 hours

I'm one of them.

[WalterBright]

Nobody is making you work for an abusive boss. Quit.

[mancerayder]

The people in the 40 hours, though, dream of the working for yourself, at least you're the cause of success and failure instead of an unpredictable re-org, a new boss, a rapid company expansion or shrinking, a colleague who wants your throat, etc.

But a 24/7 stress of self-employment is not for the faint of heart either. What's the compromise?

[lelandbatey]

The compromise is to work somewhere, usually somewhere small, where you don't have unpredictable re-orgs, new bosses all the time, rapid company expansions/shrinkages, colleagues who want your throat, etc. It especially helps if it's somewhere there's mutual trust between everyone to say "hey, I think this is the most important thing so I'm going to take X days/weeks and work on this. Things will be better/more efficient/more profitable/easier in Q ways as a result." And then you do it, and things are better, and the business chugs along.

Such places don't exist forever, and they don't tend to be massive growth situations. But they are probably what many people yearn for.

[garrickvanburen]

I was my worst boss. For a long time. Took 5(+?) yrs to recover.

[WalterBright]

> at least you're the cause of success and failure

If only most people realized that :-)

[blaser-waffle]

> The nice thing about working for someone else's company is you work 40 hours

What in modern society (or even this website) makes you think it's only 40 hours?

Or that you can just go "not my problem boss" -- in an At Will state that can literally get you fired on the spot.

> If you work for yourself, it's 24/7. No vacations, either. All problems are your problem. Printer quit? Whatcha gonna do about it? It isn't for everyone.

Bullocks. You set the hours as a contractor -- literally, in the contact. This is standard freelance stuff.

[baumy]

> What in modern society (or even this website) makes you think it's only 40 hours?

The jobs I've held for the entirety of my so-far 8 year career, where I can count on my hands the number of times I've worked more than 40 hours in a week.

> Or that you can just go "not my problem boss" -- in an At Will state that can literally get you fired on the spot.

The fact that I've done that, many times, and not gotten fired. If you are skilled and a good performer, you have a lot of leverage, doubly so in the current job market.

> Bullocks. You set the hours as a contractor -- literally, in the contact. This is standard freelance stuff.

What happens when a client decides not to pay you? What happens when you can't find enough work to make whatever amount you want to make? How do you establish a reliable client base that won't saddle you with those first 2 problems in the first place? That's just the tip of the iceberg of problems you'll have to deal with on your own if you go the freelance route, which a salaried job will abstract away from you. Not everyone wants to deal with those issues; I certainly don't.

[WalterBright]

> What in modern society (or even this website) makes you think it's only 40 hours?

Rush hour times makes it pretty obvious. Another thing is I've worked as both employer and employee. People leave after 8 hours.

> You set the hours as a contractor -- literally, in the contact.

Your 40 hour employee contract says 40 hours, literally. Why are you able to stand up for yourself as a contractor (who can be shown the door any second) but not as an employee?

> in an At Will state that can literally get you fired on the spot

Only if they are looking for an excuse to get rid of you anyway. And contractors are easy to fire on the spot, there are no legal restrictions on that.

Also, if you're a contractor, you spend a lot of time looking for contracts. 24/7.

[mylons]

i realize this is my problem, but lately i can’t leave it at 40 hours. i sometimes wake up completely absorbed with things i think are bad decisions and that deeply frustrate me at work. or i’ll think about the lack of prestige and recognition i’m getting.

[xenihn]

Everyone I know who has their own business (or businesses) does less than ten hours a week of "real" work. You only work 24/7 if you don't delegate responsibilities properly, or if your company is mainly just you.

[whimsicalism]

> After all this whole concept of spending a career at someone else's company only started in the late 20th C when the industrial rev created the modern corporation.

Psh, what preceded that was far worse and also involved a lifetime of laboring for someone else's benefit.

[josephg]

So? The fact that slavery- and slavery-adjacent relationships were common through a lot of human history doesn't make them acceptable now.

My take on this is that there's some part of our minds that knows we don't have to be servants to our companies. And knowing that, yet subjugating ourselves anyway creates an itch. That itch grows a little every day we wake up to an alarm and haul ourselves into the office for useless meetings. We know deep down this isn't an acceptable road for our lives. But we're here anyway, with a story that somehow justifies closing jira tickets - day in, day out.

Coincidentally, depression is an evolved mechanism for stopping you from doing something that you know deep down is unhealthy for your soul but habitual. It works by every day making it harder to do the thing you know you shouldn't do. The longer you resist it, the deeper depression burrows, until you finally can't bring yourself to make pleasantries with your spouse - or, in this case, haul yourself into the office.

For my money, burnout is a depression symptom which grows out of a long term, habitual suppression of your will. "I want X, but I can't have it because of <habitual rationalisation>". After growing up being told we can do anything, we aren't adapted for existence as a few pixels in a giant org chart. Burnout is a healthy backstop to force you to pursue the life you need, even if each day you can convince yourself you don't want it.

[whimsicalism]

> So? The fact that slavery- and slavery-adjacent relationships were common through a lot of human history doesn't make them acceptable now.

I was only responding to the implicit claim of the grand parent.

FWIW, I think "that's how it always has been" has no impact on the morality of something, so I am inclined to agree with you.

But we don't need to paint a rosy picture of a lost past to critique the status quo.

[omnomnomnom69]

Your take on depression is extremely interesting and makes a lot of sense to me due to my own experiences which I will not elaborate on. What research are you basing this on?

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

In some colonies. Oppression and servitude was not a universal constant.

[whimsicalism]

Not merely in colonies. Feudalism was the law of the land for essentially most of the world

The yeoman artisan period has always been more myth than reality.

[arvinsim]

By the looks of it, we are going back to feudalism soon.

[cma]

It surely goes back much farther:

“…man never regards what he possesses as so much his own, as what he does; and the labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits…In view of this consideration, it seems as if all peasants and craftsman might be elevated into artists; that is, men who love their labour for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character, and exalt and refine their pleasures. And so humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, though beautiful in themselves, so often serve to degrade it…But, still, freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition, without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human nature, can never succeed in producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness…

…we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.” ― Wilhelm von Humboldt

[ballenf]

And that’s why we feel ownership over the code we’re paid to write. The gardens were hired to tend.

[TimTheTinker]

Actually the concept was alive and well long before that.

Mid- and post-industrial revolution Europe had many large companies with many employees. In fact, the British East India Company (founded in the year 1600) was the first company to sell shares of ownership to raise enough capital to buy/build the necessary supplies to do large-scale business (in their case, mostly ship construction).

Of course, modern labor laws were created in response to the horrible human rights abuses committed by business owners against their employees beginning at that time.

The opposition of "big capital" vs "labor" (and hence the philosophy built on that dichotomy that underpins Marxism) didn't really exist prior to these large industrial revolution companies.

Prior to that, small businesses (and banks/lenders) were the bread and butter of economic society.

[WalterBright]

Heck, back in ancient Egypt, a whole town was built to house the craftsmen working for the Pharaoh building his pyramid. And that was only a small part of the logistics and network needed to make it all work.

[alfiedotwtf]

Maybe practicalpants is advocating getting rid of capitalism and going back to serfdom?

Luckily Marxism hasn't really been taken seriously by economists since it couldn't resolve it's main tenant (labour theory of value) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_problem

[setr]

I mean before that you largely had a job that was assigned at birth, and you kept at it till you were down and out, with no real expectation of changing that state. The notion of significant social mobility is itself fairly novel to post-revolution.

You weren’t beholden to someone else’s corporation, but you were to someone else’s land or tribe/community.