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by jpmattia 4062 days ago
> do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?

Knock it down to 14h, and I can think of 2 people. I worked for both, and both fell into the category of having moved to the US from another country. My career took me elsewhere, but they were both great to work for.
2 comments
harryf 4062 days ago
In my experience people who work long hours are often too tired to be objective about the quality of the work they are delivering or their own efficiency .

It's worth watching this talk from the Leading @ Google series - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tke6X2eME3c

The short version is, despite the information-age, we still think about this stuff in an industrial-age terms; that productivity is directly proportional to time spent. In fact it's highly non-linear for most forms of information-age value creating activitie.

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ukigumo 4062 days ago
I agree with you completely. Even our work schedules are still based on the mandated daylight times which were created so that factories wouldn't have to keep their lights on for too long.
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ukigumo 4062 days ago
I'm an expat myself so I'm curious about this.. Were their visas tied to their work contract? Did they have their families living with them?

As an anecdote, when I first moved abroad I was single and didn't speak the local language (Dutch) so I didn't really have any incentive to interact socially outside of work and I ended up spending way too many hours in the office but just about managing to do my job competently because I was pretty sad and demotivated all the time and often doubted my decision to move abroad.

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jpmattia 4062 days ago
> Were their visas tied to their work contract?

No, they held US citizenship. They were just hardworking immigrants.

I'm the grandson of immigrants, which makes me positively lazy by comparison. I pretty much have to knock off after 12 hours these days.

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