In a world gone mad..

After reading this Artima as a follow-up on Ron Jeffries’ Impact of Overtime on Productivity (two interesting views on quite an interesting topic) the thing that stuck with me is one of the comments to the Artima article:

Frankly, I think even 40 hours a week is overkill, but anything over 40 is immoral and unethical. Many of my coworkers died in the past few years and their deaths really remind me of how precious and short life is, and how important it is not to let your job, peers and management overwhelm you. I feel that work environment is partly responsible for some of my corworkers’ early demise.

I assume this guy must be somewhere in his 40s. I’m nearly 33 now.

Apart from some bike riding whenever the sun is shining, I really enjoy spending my time sitting at the machine. But I guess that’s OK. As long as it doesn’t create any stress.

That’s probably at the core of these two articles: Two approaches to coping with stress. Ron Jeffries’ assumes a context with a good team with good management. In this scenario it may be possible to avoid stress mostly or completely. Frank Sommers on the other hand talks about ‘reality’. But what he probably means is an environment with more average developers and management. There you can’t avoid stress and you have to compensate with nice holidays. Well, I’m over-simplifying a little bit here.. :)

I’m probably lucky that I can work in an environment where I pretty much make my own schedule. I learned avoiding Frank Sommers’ reality as much as possible. I guess I wouldn’t mind working in a Ron Jeffries context. But this kind of setting isn’t that easy to find.

I have to write a follow-up on this topic. I think it’s a common problem for the ‘upper league’ to confuse ‘their’ reality with ‘ours’.

tfdj

Filed by The.French.DJ at 1:53 pm under Development
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