[mattgreenrocks]

> If you remove people from the grind for 1-2 days a week

The modern office seems hellbent on killing every last bit of slack in their workers, then wondering why they leave or get burned out.

I realized the other day that a big part of my drive to move towards self-employment is really just a way to carve out time to take adequate care of myself. I have significant doubts that it is possible to continue to advance in tech to staff+ levels, be a good spouse, parent, and friend, and not run myself into the ground with physical/mental issues. And that is sad on multiple levels.

So I respond by easing up on advancing my career, because it gives back to me the least.

[Frost1x]

Pretty much. I often wonder where people find positions claimed on the internet where they're working 2-3 hours a day. I've increasingly throughout my career saw more and more slack evaporate to a point it's almost nonexistent.

I always wondered why people complained about how much time certain aspects took up they could automate away and my question was always: well, once you automate away that nice simple task, what do you do with the extra time? You created more slack and someone's going to come looking to fill that void the second they're aware. And the new task is going to be more difficult until you get to sets of tasks so cognitively intense and complex you can't simply automate them away. Then your day is filled with incredibly challenging stressful work.

I have no issue with doing complex work, I've spent my career doing it. What I have issue with is the amount of such work I can do in any given time span. At some point I need a break where I do something simple and mundane. Continous complex problem solving is the road to burnout. You'll be greeted by more and more failure and lack of visible progress combined with ever increasing stress levels.

If you're an entrepreneur, small business owner, or manager looking to optimize your labor force then you may want the opposite. You want more time to focus on the complex and the more simple you can automate, the better or if you have a workforce, you want your highest comped individuals focusing on the most optimally complex tasks they're capable of handling. You don't want your Fellow level engineer refilling the coffee maker because it's empty or implementing some basic features on some UI, go back to inventing new algorithms, math, or building new technology... but people need those nice relaxing breaks and slack, they can't run at their best constantly.

[ozim]

I think you write about people who mention that they can get 2-3 hours of actual work, which in turn they count as "actually writing code in editor".

I can easily imagine how it goes - because pushing tickets over takes time, bunch of meetings during the day takes time, explaining stuff to junior devs takes time, reviewing pull requests and answering to comments takes time, clarifying things with QA/BA/PO, figuring out which libraries to use by googling takes time.

I saw devs that think these things that I have listed don't feel like "real work" but it is. There is also no way to automate meetings or discussions over PRs.

[namaria]

I think the low hour anecdotes come overwhelmingly from Europe, where 45K is considered a high salary

[eertami]

Europe is a big place, 45k might be a lot of money in Romania, and it is below minimum wage in Switzerland.

Software Engineers will still be pulling 100k+ in Europe with those 2 hour days.

[namaria]

Got any sources? I'd love to work for a place where that is possible (I'm EU located, poorly paid and working my ass off)

[shagie]

> The modern office seems hellbent on killing every last bit of slack in their workers, then wondering why they leave or get burned out.

There's a book to hunt up...

Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

It's written by Tom DeMarco of Peopleware fame.

[namaria]

>I have significant doubts that it is possible to continue to advance [as a worker under capitalism] (...), be a good spouse, parent, and friend, and not run myself into the ground with physical/mental issues.

It's heartbreaking how much human suffering is entirely avoidable in a post scarcity society where it is still artificially enforced to avoid the "moral hazard" of commoners daring not to toil or worry every waking hour