There is a frequent pattern which concerns me of primarily justifying the desire for reduced work hours in terms of the alleged increase in productivity this will bring about (by allowing recharging, preventing burnout, etc.).
I worry that this already concedes too much. This allows for just as much stressful dominance of work over the rest of life, and shame over any deviation from this script, as maximizes productivity.
Even if my shorter-work-hours productivity doesn't match my longer-work-hours productivity, I'd still prefer shorter-work-hours, with no guilt over having those preferences. My goal in life is not to optimize everything I do for maximum benefit of my employer; I have my own priorities and trade-offs to worry about.
This is why I've negotiated for hourly pay at all of the jobs I've had so far.
I feel like this is the most fair way to pay programmers. There is always an infinite list of work to do, so there's always pressure to work more hours. It doesn't matter if I work less hours in a given week, since my employer just pays me less. Also as an added benefit I also get time-and-a-half if I go over 40 hours.
The downside is that I have to punch a time card, clocking out for lunch and for breaks. That doesn't bother me, but it'd be a big adjustment for salaried employees.
I've been working this way for the past ten years and it's fantastic from a work-life balance perspective. I worked an average of 34 hours per week last year.
I prefer a salary as a full-time remote developer. No one looking over my shoulder and checking to see if I'm at my desk. My cumulative hours do not matter--only the quality of my work and meeting deadlines. I've been working remotely for five years and work less than 30 hours per week.
Before I took the plunge and became a full time employee; this was the arrangement I had my with current employer. I was technically a contractor but I had full benefits, paid like an employee, etc. I provided a timesheet before each pay period.
I must say, it was actually really nice. I would just decide to not come in here and there when I needed to. It was nice to have the freedom and feel like you could use it. It's the big thing I miss now that I'm expected to be in 9 to 5.
Downside to this - Do you think about work on your off hours? Do you go read a tutorial on some new tech in the evening? You are then doing "unpaid" training... whereas if you are on salary, you can at least make some claim that the training and thinking you do off the clock is still working...
I have zero desire to program on my own time. Tried it. Felt like bringing work home.
That being said, I avoid my computer like the plague these days. After spending all day sitting on a computer, the last thing I want to do when I get home is to sit and work on another computer.
There are plenty of us that just think of work as, well, work. We just hide that fact because this whole industry pretends "passion" is a prerequisite for doing a good job.
Why would you hide it from your timelog? Reading a tutorial, if relevant for work is work. It's a large part of what we do as programmers. I never had any problems getting paid for a couple of hours spent in the evening or over the weekend on work. Well, to be honest there were clients who wouldn't like it, but those were the ones which didn't want to pay me at all in the first place.
I have to wonder if the mechanism here that leads people report increased productivity isn't being better rested, its that they have set clear boundaries on what they will do and what is realistic, push back accordingly, and are judged by fairer standards.
On the other hand, treating your free time as a potentially infinite bank of extra time leads to overpromising and giving the perception of underdelivery, no matter how much total work gets done.
Don't you know that you're working for the capitalists to maximize their fortunes and appropriate the surplus value of your work till the last drop in your blood?
You're absolutely right, but I'd argue that, by switching to a more balanced life-style, you're still optimizing your life... except instead of optimizing for money-earned by your company, you're maximizing for personal health and satisfaction. And really it's this question of "what are we optimizing for?" (aka "what's do I want to do in my life?") that explains why we buy into the culture of overwork.
As in, if your goal in life is to maximize company and personal profit per time, then by all means, committing to an over kill culture will get you there. If you want to party hard (and I mean hard as in hookers and cocaine in a pent house, not a weekend camping trip to Yosemite or whatever), you will need to work hard. On the other hand, if your goal in life is to live long and healthy and or get really good at your craft, then it makes sense to limit your daily hours and be patient.
If you don't know what your life goals are (and I imagine a lot of young folks are in this category), then you'll readily buy into whatever life-goals are presented to you by whoever person has the most social influence. And the young guys who flaunt the tons of money they have made in a short amount of time through overworking really hard influence us a lot more than the old guys who intentionally don't mention the large sum of money they've made working slowly over time. So we model our lives after those fast burners, and try to replicate their success despite having a different set of physical resources to work with.
This (lack thereof) personal life strategy will work for a tiny population of the folks who adopt it, and having known only success, they will have some level of contempt for the large majority who couldn't do it. As for the large majority who fail, they'll either figure out how to be patient and lead a balanced life (like the writer of this blog), or wind up with some sort of kidney disease in their 30s. And that's really just life when you throw out all the frivolous junk of "optimized load times", "brand adherence", "platform agnosticism", "shipping deadlines", etc., it is about finding out what for yourself what you can and what you're going to optimize for in your short several decades on this relatively eternal planet.
You can't look at yourself solely as an individual (unless you only depend on yourself), but have to look at yourself in the larger picture of our ecosystem. If your 'shorter-work-hours' results in everyone else needing to put in 'longer-work-hours' to satisfy global needs and/or demands, then there is an argument that you are a free-rider.
Instead, the totality of 'work-hours' needs to be examined in detail and we need to think about whether the distribution is 'fair' and how we can reduce 'work-hours' across the board, for all individuals.
Bullshit. Everyone else doesn't "need" to put in longer hours so I can have a reasonable schedule, and it's in no way my fault if they decide to do that.
I'm not a "free-rider". If my employer isn't satisfied with what I can do in a 40-hour week, then they shouldn't be paying me. I will absolutely not work 60-hour weeks on a regular basis.
If my individual interests clash with those of the "ecosystem", then my individual interests take precedence. If I don't look out for my work-life balance and overall happiness, then who will?
You examine yourself in a vacuum. Does your food come free? Does your water? At the current time, someone must do some work in order for you to remain living. Some of those people who do that work are not afforded the work-life balance others are able to achieve.
Considering the vast majority of humans are doing "work" that doesn't help anyone get food or water I think this argument is a little specious. Who defines the necessary attributes of this environment?
I'm not sure that(vast majority)'s accurate. I'd guess many people go to a food distribution center daily, or at least weekly, to select and transport food for their family and friends. Many work in the food and beverage service industry, either serving or preparing food for consumption. Many are employed by manufactured foods factories. Transport trucks that go from production sites to distribution and/or manufacturing centers don't drive themselves yet. There are also those who actually work on raw production.
Most of the jobs you're listing here are hourly jobs with 40 hour workweeks; or they're at least paid overtime.
The salaried workers doing 60-70 hour weeks every week are not doing anything related to providing food or beverages. They're programmers, advertisers, sales, lawyers, etc. Not exactly life giving jobs.
I'm sure some Coca Cola, Nabisco, and McDonalds employees work 60+ hour weeks but they're not serving food, they're maximizing profits for the company.
We could all be well fed and hydrated without a single person working 60+ hours a week.
Your work-centric worldview and live-to-work attitude are at best shortsighted and bland. I suggest that you broaden your horizon and look at the bigger picture and derive meaning of your life away from work and career because as you're aging, these matters become more and more less relevant and less enticing.
Your simplistic worldview ignores facts: humans need large amounts of food and water to survive and thrive. Those things don't get to your body for free [as in 'effort']. At least, not on the scale that humans are currently occupying the planet.
To remain at our current level requires tremendous physical labor and organization of process just to deliver the required nutrients to every person, every day (and we still fail to achieve 100% distribution). There is a base level of effort required to sustain our current state. To believe otherwise is foolish delusion.
If you supply your own nutrients and use no product of another, you may exempt yourself from the previous analysis. Otherwise, I suggest we figure out how to achieve the above with as little 'work-hours' as possible.
The current world food production is enough to feed 10 billion people (50% more than the current world population) a diet of 4000 calories/day (double the recommended amount for a woman, >50% more than for a man) [1]. And that's not including fruits & vegetables, only staple grains.
People go hungry because of distribution problems, not because we don't produce enough food. Southern Nigeria exports food to the rest of Africa while people starve in Northern Nigeria because the roads are not good enough to transport food. The Red Cross sends enough food into Somalia to feed the whole country, but it is all appropriate by warlords at gunpoint. Americans grow fat on fast food while peasants elsewhere starve because many of the calories we produce are used to feed animals. That's not even talking about the millions of tons of corn that are poured into our gas tanks through ethanol subsidies.
I agree. That is why I focused on the 'get to' and not the 'produce for' aspect. However, there is still labor involved in producing food and those who actually produce it (as opposed to those who only claim to [ie. corporations]) are often exploited.
humans need large amounts of food and water to survive and thrive
So, are you shooting for a subsistence income level for ALL humans?
I don't know why we should work for 60 hrs/w with no OT compensation to feed the planet when the 1% of Earth's population are hoarding over 35% of global wealth if not more.
Maybe you should talk to them and convince them to give some of that wealth back to the poor so they don't starve to death?
"Wealth" is what enables those putting in "effort" to trade for others' "effort" in order to sustain oneself. Although nobody can eat "wealth" or his employer's bank credits, one can absolutely trade "wealth" for "efforts". This is the point of currency. Your strawman that "wealth" cannot be eaten is completely false.
No, you as an individual don't 'need' to do that. What does 'need' even mean? Require to survive?
Making societally optimal decisions is a crazy burden to try to put on a single person. As single entities we don't have near the amount of information or power required to act on that impetus with any weight.
Society as a whole needs to establish norms, and perhaps regulations, to ensure it doesn't fall apart. Individuals should consider those norms in their decisions (and fight to make them better). But slapping someone with the responsibility to be a single person acting alone to maximize happiness for their collective is asking them to be impotently act on shoddy heuristics.
How will my working 60 hours on something improve the work life balance of people in extremely poor bargaining positions?
It seems to me it might even make their bargaining position worse. There is less need for people who can accomplish the task the more any given individual can accomplish on their own and the more people there are who can accomplish that task. Monopolising the potential pool of work is a bad thing just to get more money that I don't need.
Yes, let someone else do more work. Perhaps someone who wouldn't have chance to work otherwise. And in my free time maybe I'll spend some of that money I make, and that will create even more jobs - providing people in other parts of society with a better bargaining position as well as those who share in the pool of work; the pool of mutually beneficial need; that I enjoy....
The idea that if I work 60 hours at some esoteric piece of technology the work life balance of people who don't have the leverage to achieve a comparably small working week will get better strikes me as nuts. There's no plausible mechanism connecting the two being shown.
It has always bothered me that it's so common for people (including me) to say something like, "Man I've been working since 7:30 this morning" as a way of bragging "oh look at me I have such good work ethic, I'm so much better than people who work less than me."
But what really bothers me about it is that it's so hard to NOT work that much when other people ARE working that much. Like sometimes I'll come into work in the morning and there will be pages upon pages of conversation from the night before on HipChat. I have to now read all that stuff and try to understand the context or I'll fall behind just because I didn't want to stay up until midnight working.
I recently took a vacation. Only 4 days. I had a lot of fun but I couldn't help but feel regret for taking a vacation when I got back and realized how far behind I was because of how much stuff has moved on in just 4 days.
So am I part of this cult? Yes, absolutely. Luckily for me I'm not super deep into it: I still go to the gym and play piano. But I know I have a problem because every time I think about having kids, this resentment wells up inside of me because I know having a kid will make me less competitive at work. That can't be healthy... but I'm competitive and I fear getting left behind because my co-workers might choose NOT to start a family and instead stay up until midnight working.
I've been there. I'm officially topped out in my career field for the next 20(ish) years because of children. Anyone who moves past my current point either has no obligations, or have children who are out of the house as adults already. I made the choice to not let that stuff bother me. I miss out on some choice assignments. I miss out on some really interesting work. I miss many late-night brainstorming sessions and conversations with coworkers that are intellectually and professionally stimulating.
But I also got to take my kid to the circus for the first time last fall, I took two weeks' vacation this spring to just monkey around with the 2 year old for a while because the weather was supposed to be nice and trees were starting to leaf out, and tonight we have a play-date at a local jungle-gym while I know some of the other individuals at my level will be here until 8 or 9 working on a new center (and big-time resume boost).
As with everything, it's all about identifying and sticking to your priorities. You'll lose in some aspects professionally, but work isn't everything.
What did it for me was volunteering at a nursing home. Listen to the folks in those places. Do they talk about the choice work assignments they had? Do they talk fondly about the long hours they worked? The money they made? The stuff they bought?
When people are at the end of their lives, what do they talk about, what do they remember as the happy times, the times that were worth savoring and experiencing. Just google it. People specifically say that time spent at work, though not a total loss, was not typically worth remembering. Those extra 30 minutes a day at the desk or shovel? Not worth it. Harvard ran a study for about 70 years on their business school grads. It's admittedly biased towards rich WASPy males, but it's the best we have thus far for study. The results: When controlling for drinking and smoking, LOVE is the single greatest factor for a happy, long, and fulfilling life. FULL STOP. Love wins the game of life; bet on love.
So, when you prioritize your life, keep the end in mind. Memento Mori. Your family, friends, travel, dinners, those are the things that matter. Yes, you have to work, but do not think that work will love you.
> I miss out on some choice assignments. I miss out on some really interesting work. I miss many late-night brainstorming sessions and conversations with coworkers that are intellectually and professionally stimulating.
That's not very nice of them, actually. Have you tried raising the point (civilly, of course) that it might be more convenient to switch to midday brainstorming instead of late night? A good employer ought to play to everyone's strengths.
"Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day."
Consider re-framing. I choose not to be overly competitive at work because I'd rather be competitive at things that matter.
Very few of us are changing the world. Relatively few of us are really making it better. I'd rather push hard on things that do those things (or, failing that, make me better, and work doesn't).
It's important to recognize that there are many competitions in which being ahead has negative value.
When I was a teenager, I occasionally indulged in drinking competitions. If I challenged you to a drinking competition today, would you accept? Would you feel bad that I was ahead of you because I drank more? Would you find it hard to not start drinking at 7:30 in the morning to keep up? Would you resent the idea of having kids because it would mean drinking less?
Working is like drinking: fine in moderation, an unwise thing to turn into a competition, poisonous and destructive in prolonged excess. Anytime you find yourself tempted to get into a working competition, think of it as being tempted to get into a drinking competition.
And I might I say that a lot of this overwork in the open office culture of today is catalyzed by constant interruptions, pointless context thrashing, and endless meetings cough Agile: you're doing it wrong(tm) cough.
>>it's so hard to NOT work that much when other people ARE working that much.
End result of work matters here. If you are ridiculously rich and able to afford luxurious lifestyle as a result of your hard work. People around you who don't work the same hours as you do and are not as rich, will look like people who can only blame themselves for not getting far in life. These kind of social pressures simply keep going up after a while. Having a family kind of amplifies it. You are eventually going to run into rich people in your social circles, and comparisons will be inevitable.
Very few people work like mad because they love to. Generally there is no way out.
I think the cult of work has a different meaning for me. I've found that work is the one place where I am respected by many, and appreciated for output and creativity. Thus, I am drawn towards it to satisfy my own desire to have worth. I value it more than almost any other activity in my life, and that causes me to work more often than not, simply because it's the way I can feel better about myself?
Having a bad day? I can help another team's project and clear tons of their roadblocks. I now feel successful.
It's less subordination, or the other aspects for me. It's validation of self. I've spent my entire life working on technology, and I know it better than I know anything else.
That's where I need to escape. I am in the process of trying to create new hobbies to gain value in, because even though I don't think there is a problem with me working constantly, it clearly is a problem to my family and friends who don't see me as often as they could.
There is an even more interesting, medical story hidden in this article.
Hyperthyroidism is thought to be affected, even caused, in some cases, by an abundance of stress. Having your beard turn gray and "ultra fine" are literally direct results of having too much thyroid hormones in your bloodstream. There aren't other pathologies that would lead to such a symptom, especially when presented suddenly, and ephemerally.
In other words, this guy might have had a temporary case of hyperthyroidism that could be directly attributed to a period of high stress.
Disclaimer: This is not medical advice or advice of any kind, and I'm not a doctor.
> Having your beard turn gray and "ultra fine" are literally direct results of having too much thyroid hormones in your bloodstream.
I'd love to see if this is true via a blood test. I'm 32, and my beard has gone from a dark brown to very much gray in the last 12-18 months due to a highly stressful life. My brother calls it the "Obama Effect" due to how quickly Obama's gone grey over the last ~8 years (supposedly due to how stressful being POTUS is).
Also note, the graying of your hair or beard isn't necessarily related to thyroid hormone levels, unless the hairs themselves are also becoming very fine. Graying, of course, can also be related to stress.
While I don't agree with everything in the article, I did enjoy its hyperbole and think it touched upon some really good points that are sometimes difficult to convey. Especially within an organization where the standard groupthink is hyper-driven and hyper-competitive.
I've observed similar patterns since joining the workforce at a large consulting shop several years ago. It's one of the reasons I started freelancing and will always seek to BYOB (Be your own Boss).
The problem with freelancing is that you are essentially becoming your own company and shifting the burden of finding continuous work, as well as absorbing all the inherent risk of running a business, on to your shoulders. Given that there are practically zero social safety nets in the US, this is a large undertaking not to be taken lightly. Simply put, it will add to the amount of hours you are working per day, not reduce them.
Going from working for a company to freelancing has definitely increased my number of daily work hours.
However, in between contracts I have the ability to take long breaks to work on my own projects or travel. Overall, the benefits have outweighed the risks for me, but then again, I'm just one data point.
Unfortunately, in this scenario, since a freelancer does not receive paid vacation time, they suffer 100% of the opportunity costs of missing out on billable hours as well as lost funding for things like retirement, paying for healthcare or the rising costs of housing. These are all exceedingly high costs that they must burden just to take time off. The situation gets even worse when there are large gaps between contracts. If a freelancer is young, he/she can absorb this for a while, but eventually it will become unsustainable and then they are right back to where they started from of working 40/50/60+ hours a week without vacations.
From my point of view, being a consultant/freelancer/contractor, whatever you want to call it, isn't a solution to the "Overkill Cult". If anything, it exacerbates the problem in the long run. What we need (in the US) are cultural shifts and at minimum basic policy changes such as mandatory maternity/paternity leave and increased annual leave that matches other western countries.
I am always working in the sense that ideas pop into my head at times that I can apply to my "work"...but I really only work about 20 actual hours a week, that being said, I am salaried and do not really get paid that much, I work with cult members but am a marked non member which makes things interesting and conversely makes me valuable. Try it out!
The "Overkill Cult" is an artifact of a working world built on subordination rather than progress. When the VP is working till 7:00, the Director better be there with him and then some (if the VP delegates out the door). In many companies, this ripples down the chain. It's a very old rule: don't sit when the king stands, and never appear more relaxed than your boss. To not participate in shared suffering is taken as rude, even if there's no good reason for that suffering to exist. Unfortunately, an attempt to remove that suffering from existence will upstage the VP and end one's career even faster.
The Big Lie is that most people aren't being paid for their intelligence or creativity or even their "potential", but for their availability. They're excess capacity. For a variety of social reasons, though, management needs to come up with 8 hours per day of work for them. Worse yet, there's a fucked-up incentive structure. Since a manager's job is often to make work, set meetings, and change what people are working on, you have a culture where overachievers end up overmanaging and that usually devolves into micromanagement or some other pathology. If a manager over-does his job, you don't get an efficient organization: you get monstrosities that look like Scrum. A good manager over-does his job upfront and very briefly (to remove standing problems) but then sits back and underworks at the management thing. His job is to make himself not needed.
Before about 1975, the culture of subordination made sense. It's an age-old pattern: subordinates do the work, and dominant people "lead" or "manage" or "order". It's failing us now because computers simply outperform us in all ways-- availability, cost, reliability, context-agnosticism-- when it comes to subordinate work. They work 24-hour days and don't give a shit about whether they're being trained up to something better (like their boss's job). We now live in an era where there's a strong social pressure to work in a way that makes one eventually replaceable by a machine or, at least, a person of lower skill (e.g. a "commodity Java programmer" instead of a hacker magician).
The old industrial regime didn't only require widespread subordination, but it required layers of educated, intermediate subordinates. They had to be given a sense of importance (19th century clerks, 20th century middle managers and "junior executives") but their working lives needed to be mediocre, because making people into a machine is hard and making a large group of people into a machine is so hard that it demands hierarchy and it demands an elevated-but-still-subordinate tier. This need for intermediate subordinates meant that our (errant?) tendency, in human organizations, to promote people based on their being good subordinates, rather than creative ability or leadership, didn't hurt us that much-- not back then. Now it does, because this skill of turning a mass of people into a machine is far less useful, because actual computing machines are better machines than we could ever be.
Unfortunately, I don't see this changing, because humans are short-sighted and too often focused on relative dominance rather than absolute prosperity. It's like the Chinese finger trap. Technological unemployment and underemployment are real and the severe mismanagement of the prosperity that technology generates means that average people (and even computer programmers) have to fight harder to get the dwindling number of jobs. You don't deliver genuine progress by "fighting"-- it takes time and reflection and collaboration-- but our instinct amid scarcity is to fight each other and the behavior of competing-to-subordiante (as in a chieftain's harem, or in capital's harem, also known as the corporation) is quite old as well. You get the macho-subordinate culture (i.e. a race to the bottom) of Scrum and open plan offices (violent transparency). It's a losing battle because we're fighting to do something that we, as humans, are no longer competitive at. Ultimately, anything that can be done by a ScrumDrone in 2015 will be done by a compiler or a tool in 2030.
Personally, I would rather accept this and focus on progress instead, but it's hard to make that statement without drawing the "you just don't want to be a subordinate" rebuttal (and that's true, I don't) and be painted as "not a team player". So little progress is made and, from what progress does occur, the prosperity it generates is badly invested. Thus, we have a world in which people work harder and more productively, but for a personal take that is stagnant at best and quite possibly (considering hyperinflation in the Satanic Trinity of housing, health expenses, and tuition costs) declining.
Long hours persist because, ultimately, the most measurable way to subordinate is to spend an ungodly amount of time in the office, which is a place where no one-- especially not the people who enjoy the work and want to be productive-- really wants to be.
This is so true and has gotten me into trouble many times.
I'm highly focused, I worry a lot about the downside, I work hard but my calm exterior and relaxed, aproachable manner has led this type of comment: "You're a pretty laid back kind of character, aren't you". Meant as a criticism, not compliment.
I hate it. Not sure what to do about it. Submit to the corporate BS, or startup on my own with my own rules.
Stop being a slave to looks. I'm as laid back as I can be. I don't panic when something happens. Yes, I've had management get mad at me for not screaming in a panic with them, but I don't care.
Of course, I don't care about their profits either or how they look to their boss. Yes, that makes some management types annoyed that you don't sell your soul to the company.
Show up, do your job well. If you do you will be calmer. You are just there to do the job you were hired for. Stop caring so much about anything else.
I think that reflects more poorly on you than you might think. Not because you're calm and laid back but because you don't care. If you're working a job that doesn't excite or, at least, interest you, you're not doing anyone any favors by continuing to work that job.
Do yourself a favor and find something you like to do and a place you like to do it in.
You're advocating simply refusing to participate in the game, which may be a good choice for you personally but probably isn't applicable more broadly. As an overly-extreme example, imagine if a woman responded to sexual harassment by refusing to ever get a job again. It may have solved the problem for her, but it's not good advice to give someone experiencing the same thing.
i think he is still working, i am not what this compulsion being sincere to corporation. I can sincere to the monay paid and get the job done for that. I dont have an interest in making money for the CEO. If the corporations are so good CxO should be get less money and share that with other in company and community. When they limit thier profit sharing why should we not limit how much value we provide to them. Why we should give our life to company.
What exactly would submitting to the corporate BS get you? A promotion, the recognition of your current batch of co-workers? Are you really the kind of person who cares about such things? Do you need more money, are you afraid you might be fired? No? Then what's there to worry about? At any rate, it sounds like option 2 is more up your alley.
> You don't deliver genuine progress by "fighting"-- it takes time and reflection and collaboration-- but our instinct amid scarcity is to fight each other and the behavior of competing-to-subordiante (as in a chieftain's harem, or in capital's harem, also known as the corporation) is quite old as well
Exactly. People considers that the idea of natural selection and darwinism applies in society, it should not, because society is not a natural construct, it's an artificial construct, designed by humans, for human purposes, and those purposes are to escape our animal state, protect us from the elements, etc.
Ultimately, people are deemed to fail if they can't see they life day to day, and understand the end of it other than through the lens of some "global systemic purpose". There seems to be no end to this painful work process people put themselves into, yet the majority of people are convinced they need to work.
>Unfortunately, I don't see this changing, because humans are short-sighted and too often focused on relative dominance rather than absolute prosperity.
I wonder if that may only be because most people can't see what may be possible in the future if certain things are done today. That's not an intrinsic limitation of people, it's just that people tend to focus on different things. To bring someone else's perspective into their view is difficult and takes time, especially if there is no easy way to share one's perspective (different languages, different cultures, different life experiences).
I think that if we can find ways to express (sound) ideas to people in ways that they can understand, we will find that most people will agree and want to build that better future. Actually building that future requires solving technical problems, but also requires political solutions to resolve the inevitable clashes of perspective (and flat-out wrongness) that will occur.
I always enjoy your posts and insights. I find them to be right on when I consider my own experiences at various companies (all outside the mythical and magical Vale of Sillicone).
What role do you see managers playing in an organization? What do you mean by "His job is to make himself not needed"?
It seems like for any organization, some structure is required just for information dissemination. So making an enormous assumption that corporate leadership trusts their people to do the job and do it well, what does a structure that is not a "giant human machine" look like?
The job of a manager is to lead as a natural outgrowth of deep domain knowledge and industry experience. The best bosses I've ever had were those from whom I learned new things every day, and I was glad to take guidance and instruction from them. The trust goes both ways--the manager trusts in his/her people to make the right decisions because he/she has led them well. In that way they don't need to be involved in the day to day of their reports and are only called upon in moments of uncertainty or conflict.
On the other hand, I've had bosses where I was 95% certain I could do their job better than they could, and the only reason I had to subordinate to them was because they got there first. These were also the type of people to micromanage to 'prove' that they had organizational value (probably also because they feared losing any control). You then have a few choices: either shut up and submit, or play the political game of positioning yourself either as a lackey of the boss or as a potential replacement should they fail (there's obviously some incentive there to secretly engineer situations to make them look bad/incompetent to the rest of the org). Neither is a particularly good option--that's when I know it's time to seek better opportunities elsewhere.
I'm not convinced that leading is the job of a manager, at least not all managers. As an example, a line manager, someone who manages the work of several developers, is more of a Project Manager / People Manager and less a leader.
Maybe this is getting too much into semantics. A leader, as I tend to think of that position, is about setting direction, guiding the vision, dealing with the culture, more strategic in whatever they are leading. This could be a company or a project or a product, doesn't have to be high-falutin, can be as simple as leading a project to completion. The focus, however, is really about the strategic view of whatever it is that's being led.
A manager is the tactical view. Making sure people have enough work and that work fits the project. Making sure that the people doing the work are the right ones to do that work (some crossover into leadership here, can't help that). A manager is really part communication traffic cop (in a positive sense, not "give you a ticket" sense), part nanny (reward & punish behavior), part mentor and part canary for the upper management of things going wrong.
As a side note, this is why I found 1-1s valuable at all levels of managing. When I was running several teams, making sure my leads were having 1-1s with their people and talking about how their teams are doing gave me a view I would not have had otherwise. I'm still learning about this though.
Part of my thinking about the original comment was about the role of management in an ideal scenario. If you remove the "human machine" from the conversation and look at what most of the time managers at all levels are doing, it's communication management. Yes, this is an overgeneralization to a great degree, but it helps me to think about management in that way.
If your manager built his/her interactions with you around things you need to know (communicating vision, direction, business needs, etc.) from above and took your feedback and communicated it up, then you get lots of conversations and feedback loops. This requires the upper management to listen to what the people on the ground are saying, which is rare in my limited experience.
Incidentally, what you get is managing the what and not the how, letting individual contributors deal with the how. Which opens up a whole can of worms for corporations and, sometimes, from a legal perspective too - think SOX & HIPAA as examples.
Bottom line, I believe management is to leadership as tactical view is to strategic view. Genuine communication is what management is all about, makes our work interactions human and makes it easier to give and receive feedback across the entire org.
Of course I just described a utopia, but it's nice to work towards that, even if it's just a person approach.
Well, let me back up from that and make this analogy. In a perfect world, there'd be no need for police because there'd be no criminals. There are good cops and bad cops but we can all agree that, in a perfect world, the job wouldn't need to exist.
In practice, police can't do the job so well that they're no longer needed because the world is so big. There are always new criminals, and there are many sources of crime, and that's not the cops' fault.
With management, whether that is true depends on the size and competency of the organization. With a small team, a good manager can get everyone aligned and then step back. With hundreds of people, maybe not. There will always be conflicts to resolve and problem employees to watch.
A manager's job is "protect, direct, eject". The strong employees need to be steered away from and shielded from ("protect") the political messes that earnest high performers often fall into, and from the resentment that being good at their jobs (and being rewarded for it) may attract. They also need to be able to take risks and spread their wings. The average ones need to be kept on track ("direct"), and the incorrigible problem employees need to be fired ("eject").
If you do the job well, you won't have many problem employees (the "eject" category) because the corrigible or previously-unlucky ones you can fix, and the rare incorrigible ones you should fire. The mediocre employees (the "direct" category) will be mentored until they're good, and therefore in to the "protect" category, as well. So two of the three jobs (direct and eject) are finite and temporary (except for when the team acquires more people). As for "protect", who do high-talent employees need to be protected from? Executives and other managers; basically, anyone else who can hurt them. So, yes, in an ideal world there wouldn't be the "manager" job. In practice, it's different and you actually need them.
Too many managers fall in love with the "direct" part of the job. They like telling people what to do. They ignore the "protect" part of it (because it can put them at personal risk, and because it's hard to do) and no one (except for a psychopath) enjoys the "eject" aspect. They get good at that one aspect and develop an approach that works reasonably well for middle-of-the-road employees but (a) doesn't handle the extremes, and (b) doesn't really allow for growth or progress (as in Scrum, where there's no allowance that one might graduate out of having to justify small amounts of one's own working time).
It's important to balance work and life. Whether you do it on a daily basis, a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis, make sure to do it. I worked 70 hour weeks for the first 10 years, and my health suffered, but then I learned to take long vacations and enjoy the fruits. I recommend you consider the same. Similarly, I may not have been able to take these enhanced balanced actions if I hadn't worked so hard early on. But, i believe it's more about working smart then hard.
The patches of beard that stopped growing looks like alopecia areata[1]. It's an autoimmune condition, and can't find any indication that it's stress-related. I have it in my beard, it started a couple of years ago for no apparent reason. (in particular, I was not/am not overstressed at work).
Almost 7 years ago, I started suffering from Alopecia Areata on my head. Also, my beard hair started to slowly turn grey/white. At that time I was working about 90h/week. I still suffer from it to this day and it's most active when I'm stressed about something in my life, more and bigger bald spots than usual.
Not to say that all cases of the disease are caused by stress, but I've meet a few people (via my dermatologist at the time) where stress seems to have some relation to it.
Wow, I had the exact same thing start happening to me, roughly 7 years ago as well. And yeah it comes and goes, even to this day. My head hasn't had it in a few years, but I get it on my beard occasionally. Sometimes clears up within months, sometimes persists for a year.
At one point a blood test did show a blip in my thyroid levels but not within the range of a diagnosis for hyperthyroidism.
Periods of stress can definitely induce it. Which is why I'm trying to exercise a lot more and reduce stress.
There was an article several months ago about people using fasting to reset their autoimmune system. I wonder if fasting could help for this condition too.