In most places around the planet, if given the option, most people will work to live, not live to work.
That purpose and passion will mean nothing when the time to lie down on the place of eternal rest comes.
Lack of imagination and vision? Maybe, I rather have it that way.
> and another group who earns less, works hard, but does something they find very meaningful and important to their ethics
It is very rare, in my experience, to find this in tech careers. I don't know why - perhaps its something structural about the uses to which technology is put, and the disconnect with personal values and/or work ethic.
2. Tech work is very lonely while requiring communication skills. You sit there all day long staring at the screen, once in a while replying to official-sounding Slack messages from people you wouldn't recognize in real life. In contrast, there are jobs where you're in a small group, and while your hands are busy, there are endless opportunities for conversation.
3. Your effort has zero correlation with reward - the effects of your work are often extremely abstract, especially if you're doing background work that doesn't pump out features, and managers rarely reward effort with salary bumps.
Working hard becomes ... acceptable if you have some sort of individually desirable outcome. That can be results, values - it also can be money.
Working 100 hour weeks for minimum wage as a quasi-appliance? Very few outcomes are worth that. That's 'Factory worker, ca. 1890' territory.
Working 80 hours a week for little pay, but with a goal that supersedes your own ego? Sure, there are people like that. 'Médecins Sans Frontières' come to mind.
Working 60 hour weeks for a small wage, with own agency? Now we are looking at a different equation. That's every small business owner, ever, and most good team leads.
Working 40 hour weeks at a sensible rate, desirable outcomes, taking charge, with agency? People will kick in your door to work for you.
Now add relational positioning ('yeah, my job is bullshit, but I could earn less for more meaningful work'), and it gets chaotic pretty quickly. Humans often sacrifice 'meaning' for being 'ahead of that other guy'. That's why 100k Jira clicking jobs exist with people still being happy about it.
Work is an amazing place to bond with people, if you all enjoy the work and find value in it. I'm still friends with a bunch of folks I met in 2007 when we all managed the 3rd level infra for a bank. We meet for beers, we go to each other's houses, we're best men at each other's weddings. Just yesterday evening I inter-continentally called one of them for a catchup.
Can it be toxic? Of course! Is it always toxic? Don't be silly.
I enjoy working hard on problems that most would label as miserable. Not just computer problems. The money is genuinely not that important to me. A Porsche would only get me into trouble faster. I don't desire that kind of status game energy in my life anymore. I used to but not anymore. I've been inside these fancy houses. It's not appealing to me at all. Infrasonic room modes are not my jam.
Solving problems in 2 days that an entire development team couldn't solve in 2 months is far more of an adrenaline rush for me. No amount of money can buy this. You have to bust your ass and live it every day to be able to do it. Disrupting an entire entrenched power hierarchy with one cheeky pull request is peak happiness for me. I enjoy getting management riled up regarding the apparent productivity disparity between their full-time W2 employment pool and the one cowboy 1099 who works barely 3 hours per week.
So while I find it significantly more satisfying to have actual work to work on, I don’t blame myself for being lasy when the real issue is the extreme amount of organisational dysfunction above that I have no control over.
This is a very interesting take and I think you're on to something. Might all this friction simply be a matter of not understanding or not agreeing with the decisions being made?
So I don't sweat about getting work out as fast as possible when immense waste happens that I don't have control over. If I was in a very small company where I had reason to care and control over things, I'd be far more incentivized to work harder.
The culturally assigned meaning to work seems more like a social coercion.
If given the choice, including choice in mind, then people will likely choose community and play.
People also love type 2 fun. It's not fun in the moment, but you're happy that you did it.
If your work is type 1, more power to you. A lot more falls under type 2's umbrella. I find writing to be type 2 more often than not. Making complicated designs is often not fun in the moment. I like exercise, but sprint workouts are type 2.
The work experience I've had was that CEO's/Founders are genuine retarded when it comes to knowing things about their own company, let alone the industry.
When there's a gap, they hire someone to do the work for them.
This doesn't apply to all leaders, but definitely to most.
If you’re a startup founder, and your employees aren’t working hard, it is a failing of the founder to pick the right people and create the right environment, but that covers less than 1% of the economy. The other 99% aren’t working hard because they just want to go home and be with the people they love instead of generating shareholder value. No amount of goal sharing will change that.
> A clearly understood goal > A common set of values in pursuit of that goal
The only time when i have seen this to be true is when people don't have to work for money and when they believe that their basic needs (maslow's hierarchy's bottom 2 layers) have been taken care of forever (FIRE). That's when they truly work for a shared set of goals/values
In the charity/non-profit space a lot of organizations are led and operated by retirees and others for whom money is a solved problem. And they are rife with infighting, politics and dispute.
i work for a community-focused nonprofit, but the middle managers are ineffectual and problematic, and the c-levels aren't clueful enough to realize the toxicity being created below them (plus are too obsessed with bolstering their own careers to care).
i'm tired of it, despite truly believing in the org's mission.
Edit: and no one likes to work hard for peanuts or under threat of being fired
Working fast and avoiding work means short time-to-market.
It is culturally important (at this point in time) to be "working hard" and "busy".
lol, no offense, but if you helped found the company this pretty much excludes any impartial view of what your employees actually might feel, and i say this as a founder myself.
it's a wonderful thing to have a team that is on board with you and the mission, but at the end of the day they just want to go home and relax and you want to work on your baby.
that's not to say people are lazy by any means, just don't drink the coolaid too hard. even if i'm working for someone else i'm using my hard work to optimize my free time not putting in extra work unless i'm getting paid for it.
People hate work that feels undervalued, that's not clearly defined, that feels like an endless churn with no end in sight, when harder work does not turn into better results for them.
AI it feels like is making the latter far more common than the former.
What people love is purpose and agency. They love to do what they feel is right, and / or what they enjoy doing. They love to feel that they make a difference. This is why volunteers work hard. This is why the gamedev industry, known for low pay and long hours, never experiences a lack of applicants. This is why I prefer to work for startups.
It looks easy: just give your employees a purpose, and let them go on! But if your purpose, as a founder, or as a CxO, is to make the most money until it becomes clear that what you're doing is humbug, the people you will attract will likely be inspired by a similar purpose.
royal__•2h ago
samrus•1h ago
Perhaps everyone would work just as hard but normal companies just dont foster that by, as the author says, "spending more time strategizing against their employees than their competitors".
Maybe your thinking is subject to a survivor bias, where you think only the people you see working hard are capable of hard work, when the rest were too but had it crushed by their employers