Slashdot Mirror
Take Back Your Time!
pycnanthemum writes "Today is national Take Back Your Time Day. Boston.com has a story about it, it's a Seattle-based movement to get overworked Americans to value the non-material parts of their lives. When I read the article I thought of a lot of techies I know."
I avoid being needed at 3:00AM. I've been there before. I've had the VPN software installed on my own computer so I could fix someone else's bugs in the middle of the night.
I have a Palm and a cell phone, but they are mine. Work doesn't have the cell number, nor will they. I no longer have the VPN setup on my computer.
I've refused to work at all hours and on my own time, and it has prevented me from advancing to a position that requires it. That is a feature, not a bug. I know in these days it is hard to be picky, and if I was faced with the prospect of carrying a pager or being unemployed, I'd suck it up, but I would start looking elsewhere.
I work with way too many people who see working as a programmer as a gateway into management. They don't understand why I don't want to "advance" (advance by their definition). It completely baffles them that I'd rather be happy than make more money.
Life is tradeoffs. If the coolest opportunity came round, but it required me to be on call now and then, I'd take it. Likewise, I'd rather not make the extra few thousand a year, but have my time be mine.
That's just letting the terrorists win...isn't it?
Life was great!!
Then, I get a new boss. Classic 'Type A' personality. Worked 60+ hours a week, claimed it took her 40 hours a week to read her email.
Long story short, she fired me. Claimed I couldn't do the job that I had been doing for over nine years.
Former coworkers basically said she couldn't handle the fact that she worked 60+ hours a week, and I worked 32 to 36 hours a week...
So, try this at your own risk!
If you let yourself be conned into working 80 hour weeks, that was your call.
Boss: Come in on the weekend please.
Employee: Can't. I'm going on a picnic with my family.
Boss: No, I'm going on a picnic with my family. You're working or you're fired.
Employee: What time?
A lot of people think it's some sort of given that they must have a large house, 2.4 children, a Lexus and an SUV parked outside. Not so!
How about a small house, children and a paid-for car? By the way, it was a given until people got fired every three months. Now they're lucky if they can afford to eat three times a day.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Type-A management. These people see a group of employees working 40-hour weeks and getting all their work done, and to their overheated little minds, it seems inefficient.
So they cut staff. If the work is still getting done on time, they cut more. Then, when deadlines start getting missed, they say things along the lines of, "well, the work still needs to be done. We all need to pitch in."
Then you get employees working 50-60 hour weeks to meet the deadlines. Then the boss gets a huge bonus for cutting costs and making the business line more efficient, and then goes on to "improve" another business line.
The only solution is to shoot them all (kidding! I'm just kidding! But not by much)
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
I wouldn't count on it. A french philopsher in the mid 1800's computed that the amount of work we actually need to do is only 2-3 hours a day and yet we still work our asses off. The problem is progress and the overly rich. All our life styles require x amount of work per day to sustain. However, the problem is that some people's life styles are so outrageous that there are simply not enough hours in the day for that person to possibly sustain there life style themsleves. Guess who makes up the difference. You see Aquilera acting like a whore and living like a king, remmeber, omeone has to do the necessary work to produce stuff so that she can do that. In our society, we call it money. We buy a cd. We pay way more than what that cd is actually worth. Assuming the time they each spend wroking to create that cd is equal to the time spent of alll the people that purchase that cd, and that the peopel who created that cd is equal to the number of people who purchase it, then the amount you would have to pay woudl be equal to the amount that you worked (aka your total income for that time.) In other words, the amount they work should equal the amount you work and (in a perfect soiciety) the cd they created would be worth the amount of work your equivalent group did. So wahts' wrong? It isn't. The amount you spend to purchase that product is far more valuable than the actual work and effort put into that product. Quite simply, your paying them more than the work tehy are doing for society is worth. Hence, they are using taht extra wealth to consume more of societies overall wealth than they are contributing to it. Someone has to make the difference up. [The actual argument would be a lot more complex tahn this of course but you get the general gist of what I am getting at.] In addition to this, there is the mater of progress. In order to stay as we are, we could work only a mere fraction as much as we do now. However, if we want to progress, we have to put in a little more time beyond what is required to sustain us. Now look at progress over the last 1000 years. As the amount of work we do increases so does the speed of progress (though not as much as it could and should be increasing due to the amount of work we put in.) By working more we also create more wealth and hence raise our standard of living (ie. progress.)
The question we have to ask ourselves is when is enough. When do we have enough material goods that progress can slow down to a more comfortable level? The problem is we don't. That's is what they thought in the fifties: taht certainly by now we would have all we could ever want and so we could move to sustaining ourselves instead of trying to aquire more and go farther. And quite simply our greed is unquenchable. No matter how much we have, we want more. 100 years ago they thought we would be able to settle for the heaven we live in (and many of us do live in a fantasy land - especially the gated community types) but the fact is we are starting to reach the phyical limits of what can be achieved. The world can't support 6 billion Americans. There isn't enough resources on earth. The question is can we even sustain the level of living at we are at now? By using sweatshops and taking advantage of the third world, are we actually as an entire scoiety taking mroe than we contribute (even though we contribute a great deal - and if the answer is yea than there is the matter of europe who has the same standard of living and works even less which would mean they are contributing less but taking the same amount as we are.)
We need to stop looking at the world wealth and the work done through symbols like money an start looking at the actual wealth. We need to start rewarding ppl for the work they actually do. Aquilera does not deserve the life style she has. Probably neither do any of us. We have to stop being greedy. we cannt maintain a ridiculous standard of living. If we try the number of poor will increase, whether you see it or not (when every family in india goes with one less meal it isn't so obvious as
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy