But if someone tells you he spends 8 hours at school or working you would think that to be the bare minimum which billions of people do daily.
If someone told me that he spends 8 hours a day work, I’d nod and say “yep, sounds like you have a job”.
If someone told me that he spends 8 hours a day working at work, I would be incredulous. Really, the full 8 hours, working the whole time?? Not slacking off, not browsing the web or sending emails or chatting idly with coworkers or spacing out—8 hours of actual work?! Shocking!
That is the analogous case to “spends 8 hours a day working on his business”—and not “spends 8 hours a day at work”!
If someone told me that he spends 8 hours a day working at work, I would be incredulous. Really, the full 8 hours, working the whole time??
I had a job like that once (and I hope it will never happen again); it was hell. Each Jira ticket was estimated by management how many hours it should take, usually between 1 and 4, so everyone did about 3-4 tickets a day. Everyone was tired, the code was a horrible mess… there was no time to refactor anything, no time to write unit tests, so people sometimes just copied several pages of code and added an “if-else” around it to make sure it doesn’t break the existing functionality, and there were classes where this has happened more than 10 times already.
The job even didn’t pay well; it was (adjusted for inflation) the worst paying programming job I ever had. Why didn’t everyone quit? (I did, as soon as the circumstances allowed me.) Most people there thought like: “if I am unable to handle the workload in a company I am already familiar with, what chance do I have at a new company?” Which was quite absurd, as the work almost anywhere else would be much easier, but this was a well-designed sick system.
So essentially text-book example of what I was referring to when I said: “That’s why “go to college and get a good job” is actually good advice for the majority, as the majority simply are too lazy to be productive unless otherwise pressured to be productive by school & work.” & “the majority of people can’t self motivate themselves and need pressure from their schools or their job to be productive.”
This assumes that spending much of the day slacking off and browsing the web is the norm; that’s only true in a small sector of specifically white-collar employment, which is disproportionately represented on LW due to the userbase of, mainly, well-educated programmers. Most people work jobs like customer service, where there’s enough work to fill your time and you’re expected to keep doing it for as long as your shift lasts.
Perhaps, but doing 8 hours of customer service work in a day says nothing whatsoever about one’s ability to do any amount of the kind of work where you have to make decisions, figure things out, etc. (I worked retail for years, so I speak from experience here.)
I try to understand, but I just can’t understand this perspective which I consider to be quite elitist. This perspective that ordinary people who work ordinary jobs such as customer service, fast-food, etc are too stupid to be successful outside of the work field and shouldn’t try to start businesses as no matter how hard they work they won’t succeed.
If you are making the assumption that people do not differ at all in their capabilities, talents, aptitudes, etc., then I’m not sure what to say except “that’s very, very obviously wrong”.
If you are not making that assumption, then I can’t make sense of your comment.
In any case, even ignoring the above—as I said, I worked a retail job for some years. I know what kinds of skills that job required of me. I know what kinds of skills other jobs (e.g. writing software) have required of me. I can see that the former is not predictive of the latter, has almost no overlap with the latter, etc. These are simple observations from my own life, from which I am drawing straightforward conclusions.
Yeah lots of jobs suck and provide lifestyles which are equally bad.
The only reason people can put up with those jobs are because they’re ‘forced’ to do so, and the only reason they work a job like that is because they can’t self-motivate themselves to work hard like they do at job because their not ‘forced’ to do so. So in return they have to put up with that life.
Hence the title, “school-and-jobs-are-good-solely-because-people-are-lazy” because if they were to quit that job than likely due to their lack of self-motivation abilities they will live a even worser life. But if they had the adequate self-motivation they would certainly be able to create a successful business.
Valid point, I did understate the amount the average people slack off at school/job during those 8 hours. But despite, that the average person is still working a LOT at school/work minus the slacking.
Just in college, not in high school or anything extra. If you spend 40 hours a week on coursework, for 30 weeks a year (2 semesters a year − 15 weeks per semester) for 4 years. You dedicate (40 hours*30 weeks)(4 years) = 4800 hours just to college.
The number is substantially higher when you account for high school, SAT, working on obtaining great extracurricular activities that look good on an application, doing things to get a job like solving leetcode questions, internships, taking advanced classes, etc.
If someone told me that he spends 8 hours a day work, I’d nod and say “yep, sounds like you have a job”.
If someone told me that he spends 8 hours a day working at work, I would be incredulous. Really, the full 8 hours, working the whole time?? Not slacking off, not browsing the web or sending emails or chatting idly with coworkers or spacing out—8 hours of actual work?! Shocking!
That is the analogous case to “spends 8 hours a day working on his business”—and not “spends 8 hours a day at work”!
I had a job like that once (and I hope it will never happen again); it was hell. Each Jira ticket was estimated by management how many hours it should take, usually between 1 and 4, so everyone did about 3-4 tickets a day. Everyone was tired, the code was a horrible mess… there was no time to refactor anything, no time to write unit tests, so people sometimes just copied several pages of code and added an “if-else” around it to make sure it doesn’t break the existing functionality, and there were classes where this has happened more than 10 times already.
The job even didn’t pay well; it was (adjusted for inflation) the worst paying programming job I ever had. Why didn’t everyone quit? (I did, as soon as the circumstances allowed me.) Most people there thought like: “if I am unable to handle the workload in a company I am already familiar with, what chance do I have at a new company?” Which was quite absurd, as the work almost anywhere else would be much easier, but this was a well-designed sick system.
So essentially text-book example of what I was referring to when I said: “That’s why “go to college and get a good job” is actually good advice for the majority, as the majority simply are too lazy to be productive unless otherwise pressured to be productive by school & work.” & “the majority of people can’t self motivate themselves and need pressure from their schools or their job to be productive.”
This assumes that spending much of the day slacking off and browsing the web is the norm; that’s only true in a small sector of specifically white-collar employment, which is disproportionately represented on LW due to the userbase of, mainly, well-educated programmers. Most people work jobs like customer service, where there’s enough work to fill your time and you’re expected to keep doing it for as long as your shift lasts.
Perhaps, but doing 8 hours of customer service work in a day says nothing whatsoever about one’s ability to do any amount of the kind of work where you have to make decisions, figure things out, etc. (I worked retail for years, so I speak from experience here.)
I try to understand, but I just can’t understand this perspective which I consider to be quite elitist. This perspective that ordinary people who work ordinary jobs such as customer service, fast-food, etc are too stupid to be successful outside of the work field and shouldn’t try to start businesses as no matter how hard they work they won’t succeed.
If you are making the assumption that people do not differ at all in their capabilities, talents, aptitudes, etc., then I’m not sure what to say except “that’s very, very obviously wrong”.
If you are not making that assumption, then I can’t make sense of your comment.
In any case, even ignoring the above—as I said, I worked a retail job for some years. I know what kinds of skills that job required of me. I know what kinds of skills other jobs (e.g. writing software) have required of me. I can see that the former is not predictive of the latter, has almost no overlap with the latter, etc. These are simple observations from my own life, from which I am drawing straightforward conclusions.
Yeah lots of jobs suck and provide lifestyles which are equally bad.
The only reason people can put up with those jobs are because they’re ‘forced’ to do so, and the only reason they work a job like that is because they can’t self-motivate themselves to work hard like they do at job because their not ‘forced’ to do so. So in return they have to put up with that life.
Hence the title, “school-and-jobs-are-good-solely-because-people-are-lazy” because if they were to quit that job than likely due to their lack of self-motivation abilities they will live a even worser life. But if they had the adequate self-motivation they would certainly be able to create a successful business.
Valid point, I did understate the amount the average people slack off at school/job during those 8 hours. But despite, that the average person is still working a LOT at school/work minus the slacking.
Just in college, not in high school or anything extra. If you spend 40 hours a week on coursework, for 30 weeks a year (2 semesters a year − 15 weeks per semester) for 4 years. You dedicate (40 hours*30 weeks)(4 years) = 4800 hours just to college.
The number is substantially higher when you account for high school, SAT, working on obtaining great extracurricular activities that look good on an application, doing things to get a job like solving leetcode questions, internships, taking advanced classes, etc.