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Slashdot | Can People Really Program 80 Hours a Week?

Link: Slashdot | Can People Really Program 80 Hours a Week?.

Absolutely.

Intelligent healthy young people can spend most of their waking hours doing simple tasks which do not require exceptional creativity. The deffinition of work which can be accomplished in a sixty hour working week is therefore non creative and repetitive.

If you are working sixty hours plus a week, then you are not doing work which taxes your mind and you are wasting your talents. Of course its on offer and does pay the bills and therefore is not neccessarily a bad thing from a financial point of view. However it is bad for your physical, mental, spititual and social health.

Variety is the spice of life, all work and no play makes jack a dull boy, addicts do not make good friends – I can think of no aphorisms which praise spending excessive time doing the same thing. Why do you think Archimedies is reputed to have discovered the law of displacement of water being equal to the weight of a floating body in the bath – most insights are generated when you walk away from the task and see the whole picture whilst your mind idles. Maybe your job is so simple that your not even thinking about it half of the time and you can solve the interesting problems whilst “working” – in which case a machine should be doing that “work”. Thats how the industrial revolution changed the world of “work” and its comming to the world of software real soon now.

If sucess is just a question of working more hours then beware, because half the world is underemployed and they are a lot cheaper than you.

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