"The false binary of "rest OR work" is dissolving."
If you're like most people in this forum, there are people who stand to gain financially if you convince yourself that you don't need boundaries between work and rest. You may even believe that you stand to gain financially, and that this will be best for you in the long term.
Please, take some time to rest for a day or two and really think about what you want your boundaries to be. Write them down.
You're right, and I appreciate the reminder. I should clarify; I don't mean always-on work. More that the rigid "only think about code when seated at desk" constraint sometimes means losing genuine insights that surface during downtime. But you're correct that without intentional boundaries that mindset can slide into something unhealthy fast.
"These revolutions improved efficiency and quality of life"
I'm genuinely not sure. We are all computer people in this forum, so it may have improved our lives. But for many people, information technology has lessened the time spent in a given week or year on activities they find meaningful.
True. The point remains the same. GDP isn’t measuring “meaningfulness,” and it also doesn’t measure “stress” very well either. Tech can change daily life massively in either direction without moving GDP much.
Only a personal anecdote, but the humans I know that have used it are all aware of how buggy it is. It feels like it was made in 2 weeks.
Which gets back to the outsourcing argument: it’s always been cheap to make buggy code. If we were able to solve this, outsourcing would have been ubiquitous. Maybe LLMs change the calculus here too?
That's certainly a good example of a tool developed quickly thanks to AI assistance.
But coding assistance tools must themselves be evaluated by what they produce. We won't see significant economic growth through using AI tools to build other AI tools recursively unless the there are companies using these tools to make enough money to justify the whole stack.
I believe there are teams out there producing software that people are willing to pay for faster than they did before. But if we were on the verge of rapid economic growth, I would expect HN commenters to be able to rattle these off by the dozen.
I solve this problem by having open and emotionally honest conversations with people who might call me. For my relationship with my employer, I formed a union with my coworkers and we negotiated rules around being paged for production incidents.
I think this is a cool technical achievement. Perhaps it is the best solution for the author. But I encourage everyone to consider whether a technical fix doesn't trap you in a local maximum that you could escape from with some good old fashioned reflection on your values and negotiation with your friends, family, and colleagues.
Here is another way to think of this. We all understand that the value of a lawyer in contract negotiations lies not only in drafting a document that, when fed to judge, produces the desired outcome. Rather, lawyers help clients (and counterparties) decide on what their interests consist in.
Developing software is always something of a principal-agent coordination problem, and comes with transaction costs.
Much of the time, most of us labor under the illusion that each of us understands our desires and interests better than any other party could.
Self-conscious efforts to formalize and concentrate information in systems controlled by firm management, known as "scientific management" by its proponents and "Taylorism" by many of its detractors, are a century old[1]. It has proven to be a constantly receding horizon.
Despite all of these policies that improve workers' overall quality of life, Germany's output per hour worked was still 96% of the U.S. figure in 2023. So color me skeptical that key the reform needed is greater "labor market flexibility" (i.e. employer discretion in termination).
Germany and the U.S. alike have historically important internal combustion engine -based auto manufacturing that are in great danger of being marginalized by Chinese electric auto manufacturing. Industrial policy to force manufacturers to abandon sunk costs is politically fraught but necessary.
If you're like most people in this forum, there are people who stand to gain financially if you convince yourself that you don't need boundaries between work and rest. You may even believe that you stand to gain financially, and that this will be best for you in the long term.
Please, take some time to rest for a day or two and really think about what you want your boundaries to be. Write them down.
reply