he faced online criticism for equating desperation with resilience—the original post has since been deleted but was retweeted by Danny Thompson, Director of Technology at This Dot Labs.
A lot of my fellow Americans celebrate their work ethic. You have no idea how many times people, even people on sites like this one, brag about how hard and how many hours they work. I never got it. The minute that clocked turns five, I’m out the door.
Having lived and worked in Britain which also has the very same “work hard” fetish, I’ve always felt that was just celebrating the very opposite of efficiency:
- A person in a quarry breaking stone with a small hammer 12h a day is working hard.
- A person in a quarry breaking stone with a pneumatic drill 2h a day is working far less hard.
Guess which of the two produces more gravel at the end of each day…
In many industries “hours worked” might be vastly easier to measure for each worker than their productivity (plus under bad management highly productive workers get trottled down by the rest and things like bad project planning), but “hours worked” is in no way form or shape the desired product of employing somebody unless what we’re talking about is a Human Resources company billing those hours to a client.
“Look how hard I’m punching myself! It took me a lot of practice to punch myself this hard! Jealous?”
I’ve legit told my present supervisor that literally works 14 hour days by choice and brags about it that I pity her for it.
That’s what it feels like when they brag about it. If you want to brag about how hard you worked and how long you took building a fence around your back yard, I will be impressed. If you want to brag about how hard you worked and how long you took filling out reports or whatever, I could not care less. If anything, you have my pity for thinking that’s something to brag about.
