Not much more to say. Companies in the Netherlands are advertising roles and contracts here in London. I have friends working in agencies in the Netherlands and they have a hard time sourcing developers locally.
Ukigumo, great question! We're asking our reviewers to assess functional, UX Design or Agile requirements to look for gaps, errors, omissions, contradictions, or other flaws to help our customers improve the quality of their requirements. In the registration process, we actually ask you to do a sample exercise to help explain what we're looking for. In that exercise, you'll develop What If scenarios to spotlight issues that could turn into bugs and defects. So it's not about a specific methodology per se but rather about your observations and logic. It's like solving puzzles!
Well, I guess it won't hurt if I offer my services for PCI guidance for startups here :-)
One thing to keep in mind is that PCI is a bare-minimum of security "best practices" that aims at validating that a company transacting with payment cards has an understanding of data classification and protection.
If compliance is bare minimum and not enough, what is a comprehensive approach available right now to reasonably protect our sensitive data? The security professionals will tell you Risk Assessments and Pentesting often is the best alternative [1]
Their answer is to specifically switch to Risk Assessment and PenTesting often, which is Requirement 11 and Requirement 12 of PCI. Each one of the bullets written is specifically covered by PCI DSS 3.1, including social engineering/phishing attacks that are provided through security awareness training. They're telling me that compliance is bare minimum, yet their suggestion is to do a subset of compliance. Its circular logic. Since its circular logic and nobody has been able to provide me with a reasonable approachable alternative to going above bare minimum, I claim that compliance is NOT bare minimum, but in fact, due diligence.
Think of a fort. Forts had defined compliance checklists in the old times. In a fort, you go through a security rotation of making sure the pot of boiling oil tips over on time. You practice your smoke signaling so that the appropriate people are notified in the event of a wall breach. Were they spending a majority of their security drills taking half their army, launching it against the fort, fixing what fails, and then doing a risk assessment?
The most comprehensive approach is to have an InfoSec policy portfolio which permeates into every corner of your organisation and dictates secure operating behaviours and mandates logical and physical security practices. This will include regular vulnerability scans on your code, your application stack and your infrastructure but it will also include instructions on how to classify data and how to handle data according to that classification.
Compliance is a achieved by marking a checklist which is why is fairly easy to botch it up. Sure you can do a subset of the checklist and have compensating controls for everything you've missed but the risk of non-compliance is not being able to do business (at best) and jail time (at worst) so you tell me what is your motivation to fail to meet the bare minimums of security best practices in card payment industry, aka, PCI-DSS.
Think of a castle; It will have several walls, towers, heavy doors, guards etc. It will also be placed in a hill, a mount or otherwise hard to access area (never in a vale for instance). It will also have the largest possible distance between the treasure hall and the front door. The threats your castle faces will continuously evolve, and the walls that stood up against bows and arrows are useless against turrets or cannons, so if you want to keep your treasure you do your best to be one step ahead and you don't get that by making sure your original walls are still in place or any other base requirements are still met.
Likewise, and also quite likely we are some of many thousands. Unfortunately I think in this case there are some people re-inventing the meaning of "digital" to signify young.
Enough grumpiness for one day, I'll go organize my Casio collection now.
Out of curiosity, if you had received an application from a 40 something who has been "digital" since before the internet was deemed a human right, would you have felt comfortable hiring him?
It's not often that I have the opportunity to feel proud of the legislators in my home country, but Portugal has been on the leading edge of drug prevention and rehabilitation since we moved from a "war on drugs" to a program of health risk prevention and removed the weight of criminal charges and proceedings from the equation.
It's hard to correlate the two because there have been several policies put in place to reduce crime over the years, don't forget that our main industry is tourism and happy people spend more :-).
I can tell you that in the late 90s some areas of Lisbon were pretty dismal if not outright dangerous, and now the city seems much safer. I believe there are some studies on the effects on crime rates mentioned in one of the links above (my original comment).
I Heart Portugal. It is my understanding that Portugal couldn't go as far as they would have liked due to trade agreements with the U.S. Do you know if that is true?
From what I can remember, the original plan had some provisions for "assisted usage rooms" where trained personal would help guarantee that needles were clean and offer assistance to reduce ODs, but this never made it into the law because.
I can't be sue if US political influence had any weight on the final legislation, I mean, it would not be unheard of but on the other hand it would not be a matter of public record either.
Heh, can't forget when the second such room opened in Oslo. It was situated closer to the wealthy side of the city, and almost right away did they have people show up driving expensive cars and wearing expensive clothes.
In essence these were high up people in the Norwegian business world, coming to set a needle between their toes or snort a line in privacy before going off to make a multi-million deal or party.
After that it seemed all talk about such rooms became very hush hush...
This is not a thing. There are no large veins between the toes, and circulation in your feet is pretty poor anyway, not to mention hygiene and infection issues... There are some veins on the foot that can be used, but it's fucking painful and I wouldn't recommend it. If you use clean works and rotate injection sites regularly, there won't be any real visible marks. Not to mention that any needle marks are not going to be obvious to non users anyway.
This is my fear. The "War on Drug" really is a health issue, but most people I know that are against the war basically want to smoke more and more pot and/or Libertarians and the reply to stop the war is not and we can help more people.
This is essentially the stereotype of legalization activists, but it's not really true. I don't smoke pot, but have long been an advocate of legalization. It's so strange to me when people assume I do smoke because of this advocacy... I'm also a straight supporter of equal marriage, and a male supporter of pro-choice policies, &c., &c.
People who want to use drugs are already using drugs.
Marijuana legalization would never have passed the ballot box in the western states if the reason people supported legalizing it was just to smoke more instead of on the policy merits.
I have also been a supporter of legalizing MJ and light drugs, but I'd never go far and say the same for hard drugs. I knew people in HS who got hooked on hard stuff and it ended terribly for more than I care to think about.
I know this is a little bit of a canard and what people really mean is "I don't want to see more people go that way", but it strikes me that there is a need to separate these two things -
1. Some drugs, particularly opiates, are a bad thing to get into.
2. Therefore banning them and criminalising use is the right thing to do and the best way to stop more bad stuff.
Personally I think a system which decriminalises possession of hard drugs and legalises their distribution from (or use at) a well regulated medical centre would be a good thing, from a harm-reduction viewpoint. But I'd agree that not everything should be as easy to get as a can of beer.
I definitely agree with the treatment centers. Professionals should be able to treat addicts with the best methods possible and we should not have laws getting in the way of those treatments. Still not sold on decriminalizing any "recreational" distribution. Small use possession yes.
Distribution maybe not, but possession certainly. Criminalising addiction hasn't gone very well for us so far.
--edit-- now realise we're not arguing!
I'm not sure, with heroin for instance, where recreation ends and addiction begins. By having it freely available (with a side-order of counselling and you have to take it on-site) we could reduce harm from bad needles, impure drugs etc etc. We would also reduce crime as nobody then needs to rob people to get their next fix - they can get it. In what little I've read about where this is the prevalent method (Switzerland) addicts are often able to function normally and even reduce usage quite rapidly, when the stress of finding the money and the contacts for the next hit is taken out of the equation.
Marijuana should definitely be legal, but I'm conflicted about opiates and cocaine. We can certainly establish a rational basis for banning them based on addictive potential, dependence, &c., if we put alcohol as the worst drug we're willing to tolerate within the law. OTOH, the basis for drug policy, I think, should be harm reduction.
The prospect of heroin corporations selling advertising dirt-cheap heroin on TV is not something I would welcome.
I don't think it's a baseless stereotype. I'm in the same position as you, for instance, and if drugs or drug laws come up in a conversation, I'd agree with you.
But whenever I am part of a conversation like that, somebody inevitably makes it into a conspiracy fueled crusade -- like it is simply the most important political issue in the world -- and that person is most often a stoner. One who insists on being the loudest voice in the discussion.
It's definitely not a baseless stereotype, but then again few truly are. It is however a stereotype that is pretty inaccurate and more readily accepted than it should be.
Your last statement alludes to other related stereotypes; that people who smoke cannabis are the kind of people who make this argument, or that people who smoke cannabis secretly only want to legalise it for the sake of their personal weed-greed.
This isn't targeted at you, I'm not saying that you believe these things.
Or that one guy that thinks that if everyone just tried LSD the world would change overnight and we'd throw out our politicians to live a new life of harmony...
Yeah, they don't really help the drive for a pragmatic solution!
The parent comment to yours refers to same-sex marriage between two people. Please don't be disingenuous. There are no major organizations or groups of people advocating for the other situations you mentioned. You knew full well before you typed your comment what the person was talking about.
It's not germane to this discussion. The previous poster only brought it up to draw parallels between a straight person being for allowing gay marriage and a non-smoker being for legalization.
Yes, marriage, as far as it needs to be a government-sanctioned thing for wherever reason, should be a partnership of 2 or more consenting entities that are legally allowed to enter contracts. Like an LLC kind thing - the whole point, as far as government goes, is to provide asset management, is it not? Adding arbitrary restrictions is inelegant.
This. Why can't more people see it the way you have described? True marriage equality does not discriminate.
As it stands, the campaign for "marriage equality" is deceptive and has only been concerned with marriage between homosexuals - other minority groups be damned!
According to Chief Justice John Roberts, not exactly a liberal, marriage availability to homosexuals per the method you are describing amounts to sexual discrimination.
He is clearly talking about same-sex marriage. And if you're trying to make a slippery slope argument against same-sex marriage, that's been done 1,000 times before and it hasn't served the "family values" crowd too well lately.
Because marriage equality is a well-established term with a clear unambiguous usage in political discussions. Sort of like "pro-life" and "pro-choice", which could (divorced from context) each have a wide variety of possible meanings, but which, in the actual context of modern American political debate, have very specific meanings in terms of particular opposing positions regarding abortion policy.
> It's a marketing myth that "gay marriage" is the same thing as "marriage equality".
It would be more accurate to say that "marriage equality" is a brand that has been established by advocates of legal marriage without distinction based on the sex of the partners.
I am not the OP, but I have no problem with any of those scenarios. Given how much those scenarios would be outliers I see no reason they would adversely impact anything.
Totally off topic, but I recall a guy who killed his father because his father disapproved of his relationship with his dog. I think that was in Maine somewhere. Guy was obviously not quite sane. He'd signed the dog's testimony with a pawprint.
So there was a court case in 1991 but average joe would not have known about it or cared about it. Compare that to the daily news headlines and social media discussion that exists today.
Unfortunately, the "war on drugs" is really a social control issue. Look at what it's successful at, and what it doesn't care about being successful at.
Experiment 1: Imagine what you'd think if an enemy nation had a "war on drugs" with similar results. (Highest incarceration in the world, strangling/shooting even children of a formerly enslaved ethnic minority in broad daylight, etc.)
Experiment 2: Ask yourself if you think that politicians systematically use rhetoric to basically lie about a policy's true intentions. (Without necessarily being aware of lying; powerful interests may support oblivious people who act properly.)
Experiment 3: If the "war on drugs" were really about health, what policies would be implemented? (No need to assume a supernaturally effective government; just one which makes reasonable errors but moves towards accomplishing the goal. For example, consider three policy types: prevention, treatment and punishment. How would you rate them in terms of priority, given abundant studies of their effectiveness and cost?)
The big "eureka" moment was to start treating drug usage as a health issue instead of a criminal issue. It's not legal to buy or sell drugs in Portugal and if you are found carrying drugs they will be taken away from you (in most circumstances) but it's not a crime to consume them so you won't go to jail or face any prosecution.
Does it really matter why someone is against the current failed policies? There are any number of paths that could lead someone to desire change, and none is more legitimate than any other.
I think your parent commenter's point was, the implied other half to ending the drug war is replacing that policy with another one. What policy does it get replaced with? Just a free-for-all market that a crazy literal libertarian would like? Some sort of regulation similar to our current legal drug market? What about rehabilitation programs? How would those be implemented and what would they cost? Suddenly you've got fiscal conservatives on your back.
Ending the drug war is good, but what do we replace it with?
Why is this so difficult for some people to process? We have very well regulated markets for cigarettes, alcohol, prescription drugs... why would this be any different? And even if we moved to state-sponsored rehab, do you have any idea how much money is squandered on the "war"? I don't hear these aforementioned fiscal conservatives complaining about that.
When you say "why is this so difficult for some people to process", what is the "this" that you're referring to? Are you making an argument for "legalize, regulate, no rehab"? The main argument amongst supporters of legalization is whether rehabilitation should replace the war on drugs, not "should the market be regulated like cigarettes or alcohol" -- only the most diehard libertarians would argue for a free-for-all.
As for the fiscal conservative angle, surely you can see the difference between offering rehab to people who freely chose to take a drug, vs. preventing people from committing a crime, even if you don't think that it should be a crime. And fiscal conservatives who do not believe that drugs should be illegal are certainly complaining about the cost of the war on drugs.
I imagine that when you have generations of people that have been told all their lives by authority that "this" is bad, it's rather difficult to change a mindset to "this" isn't so bad now and we wish to raise revenues with it.
If a fiscal conservative isn't complaining about the cost of the drug war at this point, I would conclude they aren't a fiscal conservative.
Legalisation (we'll leave the exact definition unspecified here, because it doesn't matter) neither asks nor requires anyone to change their opinions of recreational drug use. Regulating and taxing an activity do not constitute an endorsement of it; more fundamentally, this attitude inverts the foundation of American law by asserting that only those things of which the government approves should be lawful. The legalisation argument is not that recreational drug use is "not so bad". It is that the marginal harm caused by prohibition (by a large number of vectors) is greater than the marginal harm it prevents (the harm done to or by some number of people not using recreational drugs who otherwise would). The reality is that every schoolchild has been repeatedly informed of the effects and risks of the various recreational drugs on the market. It is literally easier to graduate high school illiterate than to avoid learning about recreational drugs. Those who choose to become first-time users despite prohibition do so as informed citizens. There is no evidence that prohibition discourages any great number of would-be users, though it would be naive to insist that it discourages no one. Neither do economic incentives: witness the millions of dollars lost every year by professional athletes who are penalised for violations of their employers' anti-drug policies, which are stricter even than legal prohibition. The objective is not, and should not be, to encourage recreational drug use but to limit the harm done to and by recreational drug users, and to limit their number through education and, where appropriate, rehabilitation of addicts. Neither does legalisation imply that recreational drug users who commit crimes or do other harm while under the influence will not be held responsible for their actions. Consuming alcohol is legal; drunk driving is not. Being high is no excuse for crime today and would be no excuse under the policy regime of legalisation.
Accepting legalisation as a superior alternative simply doesn't require the mental leap you're suggesting. It should appeal to most people, regardless of their overall political views.
I appreciate the detailed statement you just made and cannot disagree, but I just can't say that most people would hold to that viewpoint even if you think they should.
But I think your point is a slightly different issue than the problem I was attempting to describe based on the original question.
but most people I know that are against the war basically want to smoke more and more pot and/or Libertarians
Downvote because of the implication that an idea expounded by libertarians is, ipso facto, a bad idea. Our political discourse needs minds considerably more open than that.
But theft, burglary and robbery are all crimes against property while drug consumption is about personal health, be it alcohol or tobacco or un-taxed drugs.
My first reaction when reading the title of this article was to think of a variation of the punchline for an old _macho_ joke: "because other men pretend to care".
In my experience, and granted I haven't worked in the US, the number of hours you spend in the office is always expected to be in line with what your manager has committed to paying you for.
In countries like Germany or Holland, if you consistently stay over-time in the office you might be surprised to find that you will be called upon justifying your behavior since the local belief is that you are either incompetent and can't finish the work assigned to you in your normal work schedule, which will cost the company money to train you or hire a replacement, or your manager is incompetent because he over-assigned your time and it will cost the company money when you finally burnout or start taking shortcuts in your work.
Other European countries have established rules that forbid employers contacting their employees (mail or phone) outside of business hours to avoid the pressure of having to do work on your personal time.
I don't want to start a "war" about US vs insert-European-country-here productivity but, honestly, do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?
US engineer here. Agreed on not wanting to start a "war". Allow me to share the rationale that my manager in a previous job shared with me.
This is not an exaggerated quote, it's taken from the notes I wrote immediately after the incident.
"engi_nerd, we at $MEDIUM_SIZED_AEROSPACE_COMPANY expect our engineers to work at least 15 to 20 hours of unpaid overtime each week. This is the minimum of what you need to do to demonstrate that you are ready for a promotion. During that extra time, we'll assign you duties that are beyond your normal job responsibilities. Carry those out well and you'll prove that you're ready for a promotion."
I swear I am not making this up. When I stated that I refused to do what he asked, the manager said, "Then you'll never have a chance to be promoted from what you're doing now." That very day I went home and began updating my resume; my final day at that job was less than 4 months later.
Good on you. I would refuse to work at any company that places such ridiculous standards on its employees. I'm surprised you even stayed for 4 months I would have been out of there much sooner.
It took that long to get to where I wanted to be -- I had to arrange to sell a house and move, etc. But the actual "find a new job" process took a single email to a key member of my professional network.
That sounds like a horrible place to work and the arguments are complete nonsense.
To me, and maybe I'm just too cynical, but it sounds like the manager was telling you that the company needed 50% of your work to be off the books in order for them to meet expectations which is a sign of a poorly managed company. But then again it makes sense since, according to him, only people who show no capacity to self-manage, prioritise or delegate get promoted.
I think you did well in leaving that job, good on you!
What makes this story a little more ridiculous (and funnier to tell) is that we were all employed in the business of designing and launching scientific research rockets.
The phrase "it's not rocket science" has a whole new meaning for me now.
Fair play to you. That's some shockingly explicit wage theft. Thankfully, skilled workers (such as most Hacker News readers / contributors) usually have other options and don't have to accept such nasty work conditions.
BTW, I'm impressed that you're organised enough to keep notes on such exchanges after they happen; memory alone is too damn unreliable.
I was taking notes because I believed that my manager was unfairly trying to make a case to fire me. Background, if anyone might be interested...
I was proven right two days before I handed in my resignation letter, when said manager called me to the carpet and informed me in very direct terms that he thought I was an extremely poor engineer and was not going to last long without an attitude adjustment. I believe that my refusal to work overtime, as well as my refusal to comply with management directives I found to be unethical, was what triggered that conversation.
The unethical acts they wanted me (and all my fellow engineers to do): work on one mission while billing time to another, which is illegal while working on US government contracts, and tell ISO auditors that we were following our engineering redlining process while actually following a secret, different process that was not officially released in our document management system.
Not going to prison for you, nor am I compromising my professional ethics.
The problem is the definition of work. Last night I was at a Wine Bar in Houston with Clients and Colleagues from 5:30 to 9:30.
Was it billable? No. Was it paid for? Yes. Does it have work value? Yes. Is it "technically" work? Maybe. Did I have a good time? Yes. Would I have done it if I didn't think there was business value to it? Absolutely not.
That's not always the case, though. I have a friend who works in public accounting who actually does work 80-hour weeks during busy season (i.e. just before taxes are due) and spends pretty much that whole time in the office from what I understand.
Knowledge work is so diversified now, it would be impossible to capture everyone. I was just providing an anecdote as someone who sympathized with the article.
Well, I would classify it as work because it was a social interaction with a comercial intent.
If you were a contractor you could probably justify those expenses as part of your activity because it's culturally acceptable to engage in alcohol consumption with work relationships and you were representing your company while doing so.
>I don't want to start a "war" about US vs insert-European-country-here productivity but, honestly, do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?
In short bursts, I think the diminishing returns of long hours is sorta overblown. Over the long term, 16 hour days will wear you down and destroy you.
I work in a big law and 16 hour days are too common. But people are successfully managing billion dollar deals and litigation while doing 16 hours fairly often.
But over a long period of time it takes a toll emotionally and physically.
One problem with organizations that bill by the manhour--law and consulting--is that even if the employee output diminishes, the firm still bills the same rate. There isn't a lot of incentive to keep your employees heads fresh.
>One problem with organizations that bill by the manhour--law and consulting--is that even if the employee output diminishes, the firm still bills the same rate. There isn't a lot of incentive to keep your employees heads fresh.
I think you've hit a pretty good point straight in the head here. The article also seems to focus on a consulting company which very likely sells man-hour packages so it is on their best interest to have "heroes".
In CA some people won't meet the salary requirement, which is somewhere around $90K/yr. Also, all administrative and many sales staff, who use keyboards extensively, are exempt (except at VP and up level).
>>do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?
It depends on what you are working on, how important that is, how interesting it is and what is at stake. There have been instances when I could do long hours which just come naturally out of the flow. Other times, its difficult to get by the day and I long to see 5:00 on the watch.
Having said that most of the burnouts and hatred towards long working are caused due to resentment. I have seen people used and thrown like tissues for the well being of political cartels within companies.
Overall I think this is the largest flaw in Humans. Else if we had any appreciation for meritocracy we would all be living in space colonies by now. A lot of talent and work is lost because a few hardworking are making up for every one else. And with rewards continuously being stolen by the thieves in the political cartels, there is a little incentive for anybody genuine to stay up and contribute.
Conclusion is people don't like to work hard when they get nothing in return. This situation is starving the whole world ecosystem of good work.
> do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?
Knock it down to 14h, and I can think of 2 people. I worked for both, and both fell into the category of having moved to the US from another country. My career took me elsewhere, but they were both great to work for.
In my experience people who work long hours are often too tired to be objective about the quality of the work they are delivering or their own efficiency .
The short version is, despite the information-age, we still think about this stuff in an industrial-age terms; that productivity is directly proportional to time spent. In fact it's highly non-linear for most forms of information-age value creating activitie.
I agree with you completely. Even our work schedules are still based on the mandated daylight times which were created so that factories wouldn't have to keep their lights on for too long.
I'm an expat myself so I'm curious about this.. Were their visas tied to their work contract? Did they have their families living with them?
As an anecdote, when I first moved abroad I was single and didn't speak the local language (Dutch) so I didn't really have any incentive to interact socially outside of work and I ended up spending way too many hours in the office but just about managing to do my job competently because I was pretty sad and demotivated all the time and often doubted my decision to move abroad.
I also have some experience working in Germany and I feel you are right with the hours but that's not the point. Even if everybody wants you to work just 40 hours people still have unreasonably high demands because they don't understand the complexity of the situation they are in (coworkers, bosses, customers all the same). So you still need to find ways to satisfy people without always doing exactly what they have asked for.
That's just the nature of work though. You'll find that even general contractors do a great deal of pushing back on scope during a project in order to make sure things come in on both cash and time budgets. The only difference is we work in the virtual space which tends to disconnect people from the fact that things still take time.
Yeah, that's what I was pointing out in another comment directly responding to the topic. That's just how work is, or better how life is. You can complain about it or you find a way to handle it. It's not about the 80-hour week but about handling people.
> local belief is that you are either incompetent and can't finish the work assigned to you in your normal work schedule, which will cost the company money to train you or hire a replacement, or your manager is incompetent because he over-assigned your time and it will cost the company money when you finally burnout or start taking shortcuts in your work.
That belief makes too much sense. To be a belief shouldn't there be a contrary believable belief? I wouldn't want to be part of the other retrograde group who believes something else.
The contrary belief is what is described in the article, where people are expected to stay in the office, or on-call for long hours to be valued as employees.
The sad thing is how many people actually live like this, defining themselves through what they do instead of who they are.
I live in Berlin and a lot of tech companies here (especially startups) expect unpaid overtime. This is in stark contrast to Vienna where I've almost never encountered it.
I think it's normal for startups to try to get things for free, be it software or work hours, and that's OK up to a point, but once a company reaches a plateau of business activity and operational maturity then it becomes a sign of poor management that they can't balance workload and workforce.
Out of curiosity, are you German? My experience with German companies was centred in the financial services sector out of Frankfurt and some tech companies out of Munich and overtime was never even suggested so I'm thinking there might also be some differences between the regions.
I'm not German, but we've been living in Berlin for about 2 years now and lived in Vienna for almost 8 years before that.
I was even explicitly told by some companies when interviewing that they expect and encourage workers to stay until at least 7-8pm...at least between Berlin and Vienna there is definitely a difference in attitude.
I don't want to start a "war" about US vs insert-European-country-here productivity but, honestly, do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?
American here. No need for "a war". European countries are more productive. Long hours don't work. Most Americans know it, and would agree with everything you have to say.
I would generally agree with you, although I don't think that long hours necessarily signify incompetence. In the HBR article, the sense given is that they signify being bad at politics, and therefore find themselves in a position where they sacrifice too much and only get moderate reward. The people who are good at politics figure out how to "pass", how to get full credit for being dedicated without working unsustainable hours.
It's a vicious cycle: people who are bad at politics put their heads down and work 80-hour weeks, and because they're overworked they never learn how the politics of the organization really work (they don't have the time) and, when they inevitably tire of the nonsense and face time, they don't have the political skill to reduce their effort and get away with it, even though they could probably cut their hourage by 50% at least without hurting the company at all.
The counterintuitive reality is that overwork projects low status, in the US as it does in the EU, but so many people are oblivious to the fact and think that "busy" is a good look on them. (It's a good look to other over-busy, mid-level chumps. It doesn't fool the people with actual power.) There are a few jobs in which you simply have to work 90-hour weeks or you'll get fired (e.g. investment banking's analyst programs) and my observations wouldn't apply but, even in the US, they're rare. This isn't like Japan salaryman culture where average people have to work 14-hour days just to stay put. In general, working in a way that lowers your status, emphasizing availability and sacrifice rather than unique skill, tends only to get you more grunt work.
The irony is that, 10 years ago at age 21, these bankers and consultants were, for the most part, way ahead of people like me in terms of social skills. But after 10 years of doing the true-believer thing and working themselves to death, they've gotten to the (surprising) point where they suck at politics.
This is also why I think it's silly that Americans are so averse to learning "office politics". Academically, it's a disgraceful game, but if being halfway good at it saves you 20 hours per week and gets you the same damn reward, it's absolutely worth learning. The truth is that 5 percent of one's reputation as a strong or weak performer is performance, 10 percent is raw (and obvious) politics, and 85% is the politics of performance that looks like merit to true-believer types, but is usually quite game-able. And there's nothing morally wrong with gaming it; it makes a person more likely to reach a high-impact role with his or her capability intact, and that benefits the company as much as the individual.
There is a prisoner's dilemma aspect to office politics: the more time you spend learning the politics of an organization, the more effective you will be within that organization, but the more time that everyone in the organization spends politicking, the less effective the organization will be as a whole. At some critical point, the organization collapses inwards on itself and becomes unable to react to changing market conditions, and goes out of business. That's why there's resistance to teaching or even making people aware of politics: eventually it results in the destruction of everyone's jobs.
There's another game you can play, which is to find organizations (or parts of organizations) where there is a minimum amount of politics to begin with. These are usually younger, high-growth companies filling a real need in the marketplace; because everyone's so busy delivering value to the customer, they don't have time to compete with each other, nor do they need to because the pie's expanding faster than anyone can gobble up a piece of it. As Eric Schmidt liked to say, "More revenue solves all known problems."
The problem with personally optimizing for office-politics is that now you have a big comparative advantage over other employees, but only in high-politics workplaces. That will bias your selection criteria toward companies which are about to fail in the marketplace, which may not be a winning strategy in the long term.
There is a prisoner's dilemma aspect to office politics: the more time you spend learning the politics of an organization, the more effective you will be within that organization, but the more time that everyone in the organization spends politicking, the less effective the organization will be as a whole.
I agree that this conflict of interest exists.
At some critical point, the organization collapses inwards on itself and becomes unable to react to changing market conditions, and goes out of business. That's why there's resistance to teaching or even making people aware of politics: eventually it results in the destruction of everyone's jobs.
That, I'm not sure that I buy. Large tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have a lot of politics but are still very successful. I think that, at some point, companies get to a level where typical political behavior doesn't help them, but won't unhorse them either. Most Fortune 500 companies do just fine at delivering returns to investors and salaries to employees, despite being large and political.
The problem with personally optimizing for office-politics is that now you have a big comparative advantage over other employees, but only in high-politics workplaces.
Sure, and I don't advise learning only politics. I think that people need to learn enough to solve political problems and to avoid losing fights. (It's rare that any kind of fight is ever "won", so avoiding political fights in general might be best. I wish I had known this when I was at Google.) Ideally, it's best to specialize in something that adds value but learn enough politics to get by, protect the good, and keep one's work from falling into a black hole.
The sad truth, as we'd both agree, is that organizations tend to end up being run by people who specialized in politics itself. That's unfortunate and, given the game-theoretic issues that you already described quite well, I don't see an easy solution. When bodies end up being overwhelmed by individually fit cells that harm the organism we call it "cancer". When corporations' upper ranks are filled with individually fit (politically speaking) people who lack vision or care for the organization, we end up with exactly what you described.
"(It's rare that any kind of fight is ever "won", so avoiding political fights in general might be best. I wish I had known this when I was at Google.)"
As human beings that evolved for living in smaller tribes, our anger and retribution instinct makes a lot of sense. If you get a reputation for just accepting being walked all over, then your life will be much worse. You need to need have honor, and to defend your honor, and attack those who bully you. But in the modern world, reputation does not travel in the same way. Nor do you have the same tools for defending yourself. Duels became passe long ago. So fighting back often is just net negative to your own interests. When you run into a bad boss, the past option is usually to play along and then plot an escape.
> Large tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have a lot of politics but are still very successful.
Those large tech companies have put some solid barriers to enter in their markets before being run by politics. I suspect nostrademons is suggesting to work in a new sector, where there is no clear leader and no entry cost: any startup has a chance to win. However in this case one has to sell the products, make some partnerships, market one's company, etc. which might involve politics, but outside the company.
All three can be explained away :D Norway = oil, Luxemburg & Ireland = tax havens. The GDP-based worker productivity definition is pretty useless, IMO.
There are huge differences in work force that make such comparisons as good as useless.
For example, the jobs for people who put your stuff in paper bags at Walmart do not exist in large parts of Western Europe, and doormen are way rarer. In general, the USA has more low-paying, low productivity jobs than Western Europe. That lowers average productivity for the USA.
Also, measuring productivity is hard. You can't look at pay, as that can be quite different for exactly the same work (you can get a suit made in Asia for peanuts, but that doesn't mean people working there aren't productive)
So, you scale for _something_: average income (before or after taxes), hamburger index, or whatever. In the end, it will be very, very hard, if not impossible, to do that objectively. If the outcome of your procedure differs by a large factor from what you expect, you will search for errors in your logic. If it matches what you expect, it is hard to keep searching as hard.
Is there not some comparison of two similar roles and metrics for those roles? (e.g. an engineering firm in the US produces specs for a bridge in X person-hours vs the Y person-hours it takes a firm in the UK.)
Define 'similar'. Do both firms have to go through the same amount of red tape? If not, is time spent doing extra calculations showing the safety of the bridge productive time or bureacratic overhead?
You _can_ let both design a bridge according to the same rule set, but to measure how hard teams work and not how fast they can do that task, you have to make sure both have equal experience with that rule set (US engineers will likely be faster at designing a U.S. bridge than UK engineers, and vice versa)
To make a truly fair comparison of efficiency of working, you probably will end up with an exercise where both teams design a bridge that will never get built. Possible? Yes, but also expensive.
I can say I'm just oblivious enough that I probably wouldn't have learned that lesson had I stayed doing the normal work thing. I freelance so I have my own set of politics to deal with, but the change in perspective is enough to view the politics as something other than detrimental.
But I've never really thought about office politics in those terms, thank you for the enlightening post.
> do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?
A lot of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft's employees all seem to put in long hours and are productive with the extra time. Amazon on the other hand is one of the companies with a lot of people "pretending" to work long hours. I was looking into these companies when applying to jobs and that was a sense I got at least.
Because they don't "oblige themselves" to follow local regulation and are therefore able to offer services at lower rates, even at the expense of the occasional fine.
