causation or no causation. we need to rethink the whole idea of work anyway. at some point something went seriously wrong.
how can people accept that it's right that we get taught in a certain mental pattern for almost 20 years and then we are to work for 40 years in that pattern so that we can spend the last 15 years of our life in peace anyway?
i spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to get great at things - you know, human nature.
but the times i spent in traditional work structures i actually got lazy and stupid, because they encourage you to create things that are just good enough at a slow pace, because if you actually perform too well you become a liability.
I think that more than 1% of startups dish out equity/options, an incentive to perform well, and the impact of your work at a startup is immediately visible -- there's a tight reward feedback loop when the work you're doing helps the startup grow, is actionable, and increases its value (and the value of your equity). On the other hand, the big corporations are the ones with no incentives to perform well.
All the significant money I've made in the valley (and technically I could retire today if I were willing to move to Portland or Seattle) has been working for post-IPO companies with 1,000+ employees. When I get offers from startups, it's for chickenfeed equity (0.1 to 0.5%) for a series A or series B company with a senior liquidation preference they won't discuss with me. I have yet to see a company I've turned down do anything but die.
The only downside I have seen to my strategy is sour grapes from ex-CEOs of failed startups at which I once worked during the dotcom boom insisting that I'm a bad hire because I left them once I realized they were doomed.
So how does the following data update your worldview?
Probably not at all I expect. I suspect we really see things differently.
But assuming your title is not a TLA with single to double-digit equity, would you rather take a 1% chance at making a one-time hit of 5x to 6x a typical engineering salary E(X)= $10,000 to $50,000 or a guaranteed hit of $50,000 to $100,000 assuming you stay exactly where you are at a company with a decent growth rate?
This assumes you flee the stinkers as fast as you possibly can with no tolerance for solos on the world's tiniest violin from the CEO/CTO/etc who has 20x-100x more equity than you and therefore a completely different set of incentives.
Since most startups aren't facebook or google, I eventually learned to choose the latter and slowly accumulate wealth with occasional liquidity events(tm) rather than chase the rainbow of brogrammers and script kiddies.
you might have to shift your perspective a bit. if you work in a bigger structure(e.g. government) a managers job might be to keep as many people working as possible. also, his measurement of success is by how many people he manages, not how much he delivers. ever heard people say "i manage a team of 100 people"? i've heard people say that, and i can assure you not a single person (that mattered) asked, but how efficient are they in return.
so if you start optimizing so that a single person can do the job of 5 people in less time you not only threaten their job security, you also question the manager, and you become trouble for accounting. therefore you become a liability.
you could argue that, wait a minute, by freeing up their time, and yours we can make more money and more other things, and in theory you would be right, but in practice that's not how it works. there's a certain budget, and you as an individual won't make more that that budget.
also for the institution it's better to keep that budget split up for those 5 people. that way they can charge 5 people on that budget, and accounting won't have to cheat. if you don't, then suddenly you'll have to find other jobs for those other 4 people otherwise they're kinda cashflow negative on their salary.
Exactly right. I once timed my departure from such a job within a period during which lines lost to attrition or retirement would not be replaced. This was soon after a reorganization. The loss of direct reports hurt the manager's street cred.
Another aspect, I think, is that someone who is very productive both gains influence and become hard to replace. Neither of the things is desirable for someone managing many people.
Not to mention having to deal with the negative reactions, politics, and jealousy of your coworkers who you "make look bad" by outdoing them in productivity by a factor of five.
Add to that your new innovations and creative methods of solving business problems requires managers to reskill themselves into new modes of operation. Something they hate doing because they got this position to keep the status quo for as long as possible.
Methinks some causation and a large degree of correlation. There's quite a bit of spread until 2050 hours or so.
Most workaholics I know neglect their health, they stop exercising, and they are generally miserable.
I used to be all three. These days, I prioritize the first two points, but I'm still occasionally miserable when the work is tedious. If the work is engrossing, it's hard to pull me away from it because it feels more like I'm exploring than working. I've gone to great lengths to make sure my work is interesting. My longevity will hopefully provide a useful data point.
This is a typical article that everyone here will feast on. Another of a long list of "the answer to your problems" to make people who are in a rut feel better about themselves.
For the last time "work" and the amount of work doesn't mean the same thing to everyone to begin with.
It depends on what you do, how much you like doing it, why you need to do it and a host of other pressures and things that you deal with every day.
I work everyday and enjoy what I do. Other people can't wait to get out at 5 and take the train home. (When I was in high school it was that way for me because of the type of jobs that I had when I wasn't doing my own thing which I typically did (side businesses)).
I have a shore place. I get bored on the beach. You know what I do? I get off the beach and go answer emails and "check in". I enjoy doing that better than sitting on the beach. I do the same when I am on vacation. Some people like what they do and it's not work. It's actually relaxing.
That said this idea that you need to find something that you enjoy to earn a living is not true either. Because sometimes you can't it's not that easy. I had to do many jobs that I didn't like to get to the point of doing a job that I do like and enjoy to do.
Yesterday I had to review a legal contract and truly despised doing so. So I'm glad I'm not an attorney because if I was the stress of that job would certainly make it hard for me to "work all the time". But if I have to I do that work and just make sure that I reward myself with doing things that I need to do that I enjoy (like writing a shell script..)
> I have a shore place. I get bored on the beach. You know what I do? I get off the beach and go answer emails and "check in". I enjoy doing that better than sitting on the beach. I do the same when I am on vacation. Some people like what they do and it's not work. It's actually relaxing.
That's lovely for you, but please understand that you are atypical as humans go. For most people, most of the time, work causes stress and stress reduces health/lifespan. Outliers are definitely worth considering, but they don't disprove the accuracy of the average data.
For the last 4 months, my daily goal has been 'no client work before lunch' [1]. I'm happier, healthier, and more focused on the important things than I have been my entire professional life.
Nah, its not that, its that there are not enough controls to make the claim. Lets create a strawman and see if it works for you, lets say your "job" was fitness equipment tester, and the more you worked the more exercise time you got in. Historically there is a sort of bell shaped impact on health here where exercise increases your overall health up to a point at which point too much of a good thing starts impacting your health in a negative way. If you were at the global maximum on that curve, either working more or working less would cause you to be less healthy.
For people where they are more 'at risk' at work than they are not at work (say 'deployed soldier') working less is statistically safer, for folks who have the reverse (say submariners) the reverse is true.
The discussion usually comes around how do you narrow the claim to make it either provable or disprovable. Is it true for all programmers? how about for 'all java programmers' or 'all java programmers in the bay area'. See the challenge?
I'm more of the mindset of who would want to work 40 hours a week? I work on projects that I find interesting and I still only do about 20-30 hours a week of work. I've done the whole work yourself to death thing, 75 hour work weeks and work until dawn every night for a month. F#%k that!
statistically, working for a startup is about the worst thing an otherwise intelligent person could do for his health and financial well-being. Unless of course by working for a startup, you mean owning the startup and conning 25 year olds into taking 30% under-market pay for 80 hours a week for 0.25% equity while you prep for a sale that will make yourself and the VCs rich while not even making up for what your employees would have made had they worked those hours at market rate...
Come on Economist, realize that we're plotting averages of averages and then fitting that average. Not too scientific. Let's break down the underlying formulae, solve to carry through the dispersion of the underlying data, and then add the confidence bounds on the sides of that bestfit. If they did, we'd see much lower confidence around those 2300-2500 hour points.
But wait, we've got an R2 of 0.2! Let's keep in mind that at best, high hours of work are not the dominating factor that killed you.
If you want to impress an employer as someone who will work until they die on the job, your answer to the question "where do you see yourself in 5 years?" should be "dead."
A blanket 'work less hours' policy across professions might actually be bad because doctors, scientists, researchers, etc work longer hours to advance medical knowledge which benefits everyone.
This is pure speculation but I don't believe anyone who is at the frontier of human knowledge will ever expand it by working less hours than usual.
But what if instead of working more, they spend time educating others and their peers in the free time and brought more into the field - then they all work less... thought capitalism make take a bit of a whack out of that concept.
For an average annual hours of 2000, how can we know if that person works 40 hours a week during 50 weeks or 66 hours during 30 weeks ?
Also what jobs are represented here ? For instance for firemen or soliders it seems logic that statistically the more hours you work the more premature mortality will happen.
> it seems logic that statistically the more hours you work the more premature mortality will happen
But many of the most dangerous jobs, say fighter pilot and Alaskan crab fisherman, are actually very short bursts of intense work. The pilot might log several hundred hours in a good year and the fisherman works in seasons that are only several weeks long.
Trouble here is the mononumerosis, aka the need to boil a whole range of values down into a single number.
I know this isn't on-topic, but am I the only person who tried to read this who didn't already have an account with the economist? Apparently, I have "reached my article limit".
hopefully the robots will work for us soon...
this path might be easier than changing a system where competition and success are a lot based on spending more time working.
R-squared of 0.2? Not a stats major, but that seems like a pretty low correlation to try to draw conclusions from, even though it may be statistically significant.
R^2 of 0.2 is actually quite high for real-world data. It means that a full 20% of the variation of one variable is completely explained by the other. It's a big deal to be able to account for a fifth of what you're examining.
R-squared isn't what makes it significant. He's saying it's statistically significant (low p-value) and also practically significant (high R-squared). Statistical significance is certainty that there's a pattern; R-square is the strength of the pattern. It's a range from 0 to 1 where the value represents the amount of variation in the dependent variable that's explained by the variation in the independent variable.
20% of all the variation in premature death in developed countries is explained by this one variable, without controlling for anything else. That's enormously significant.
Far more likely an explanation is an inverse correlation between work hours and wealth, intelligence, and education, as those are shown correlated to health and life expectancy with better and more plausible mechanisms for causation than those waved around for work hours.
I am pretty sure people are just finding different ways to say "Stress shortens your lifespan".
1) Find item/activity that creates stress
2) Graph that vs. life expectancy to see how stress = death
The chart they cite in the first place seems to have a few different trends existing where they take on a polynomial curve upwards (one just passed 1800, one ~2300) and I would personally be more interested in seeing if there's any correlation there.
One reason why the graph has multiple trends is that its multiple time series dumped on top of each other (the article entirely glosses over it being data from different points in time which would potential exhibit independent trends in premature deaths).
The article does mention that "the outlying figures to the right are those for South Korea". If I'm interpreting that correctly, it's the neat little chain to the right hand side which shows South Korea's working hours rapidly declining and potential years of life lost also falling over time; but if working hours decline you'd expect a spurious correlation to appear even if there was no causal link since healthcare standards also steadily improve over time. To the extent there is a causal link between the two in South Korea - as opposed to coincidental secular trends over time - it's probably more down to economic development than stress.
I'd expect a publication called the Economist to know how to handle panel data...
Good point. Particularly interesting because you are suggesting an inverse correlation between work hours and wealth. Can you point me to some evidence for that?
I might expect some sort of parabola, e.g. people who work very few hours tend to be less wealthy, and people who work too many hours tend to be less wealthy, but people who work at the "sweet spot" in between are the most wealthy. But an actual negative linear correlation? I wouldn't expect that.
I love when these multi-million dollar studies come out and the only thing that hits the news is a headline that could've been inferred by a 10 year old.
how can people accept that it's right that we get taught in a certain mental pattern for almost 20 years and then we are to work for 40 years in that pattern so that we can spend the last 15 years of our life in peace anyway?
i spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to get great at things - you know, human nature.
but the times i spent in traditional work structures i actually got lazy and stupid, because they encourage you to create things that are just good enough at a slow pace, because if you actually perform too well you become a liability.