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Do You Thrive or Crack Under Pressure?
Flatline5150 writes "The New York Times has a good article on why some people thrive under stress while others crack under pressure. Among other tidbits, pessimists make great lawyers..."
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"When people start feeling that what they're doing is not meaningful, then they take more sick days, begin looking for another job, and complain of health problems."
This should be required reading for all managers.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
Do You Thrive on Crack?
-thewldisntenuff
My MythTV HowTo
I do well under a little pressure, but if the pressure is unreasonable I will refuse to accept it.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
When I first read the headline I thought it said "Do you thrive under crack or pressure".
Pressure doesn't bother me, in fact I thrive on it.
My district manager just left my office after telling me that a huge project due for completion in January 2006 has been pushed forward. It's now due at 4:30 today. "No biggee," I said "is there anything else you WANT YOU MOTHERFUCKER?!"
Everyone handles stress differently. Tonight, long after the project fails, I'll go to my district manager's house and burn it down. Then I'll urinate on his smouldering crisp remains while screaming "HOW'S THIS FOR A FUCKING 4:30 DEADLINE, COCKSUCKER?!"
Most people would really crack at this stage. Not me. Tommorrow I'll come into work with a chainsaw. The first to get it will be the bleach blonde fat bitch at reception who always pronunces my name wrong. Then will be the district manager. He's only there through nepotism. Hopefully he will not have heard about how his uncle's charred, urine-soaked remains were found that morning. I expect to remove his spleen through his anus with my 18" McCulloch WoodMeister2000.
This is the point where the men are separated from the boys.
After a relaxing cup of coffee in the blood splattered cafeteria I'll quietly go the front grass of the building and stomp earthworms in my bare feet while awaiting the police. Little do they know that I'll have sticks of dynamite under my light jacket ready to go at the press of a thumb.
I'll show them.
det burg was here
I thrive on crack under pressure.
I thrive on pressure. By choice. See, I have a little issue with this thing called procrastination. I always wait and end up doing a large amount of work at the last possible minute, it keeps me on the edge, neat :D
Oh yeah, although it can be stressful, I seem to be more productive under the gun. When there isnt much pressure, theres too much room to be goofing off and playing with yourself.
I'm under the impression I would compress. Might be messy, though.
Seriously, if you don't give me a deadline of tomorrow, it doesn't get done. Period. (Why am I employed? I don't get it.)
Honest, when my mind goes blank, and no reasonable outcome seems nearby... I get more easily swayed by distractions. Probably the dumbest thing to do...
Crack seems to help a lot
^^
If I come home from work and don't occupy myself with something, I'll get tired and need a nap. If I find something to do for the evening (aside from watching TV) I'm active and energetic until about 1 am (I usually get up between 6:30am and 7:00am). After doing some reading, I've found there's a good chance I have ADHD to one degree or another. I'm awaiting a doctor's appointment to see if this is the case, not that it has a major impact on my life. I have suspicions that this thrive under stress and symptoms of ADHD are very related.
I thrive under your mother.
is perceived stress. ever come across a difficult coding problem that needs to be implemented asap, but you've become lost in it, perhaps for 2 days straight and come out the other end going "wow" at yourself?
Some people are like that when dealing with people, dealing with law, public speaking, managing teams, groups, or entire corporations. It's just not 'stress' in the way that many would imagine the stress of a responsibility for many people or millions of dollars.
I've noticed that people (including myself) who enjoy working under massive amounts of pressure don't work really well when there is no pressure at all. Go figure, huh?
I have ADD and I definitely do much better under pressure. If I don't load myself down with hours each semester, I get crappy grades. But, if I take way too many hours and never have enough time to possibly get all the homework done, I get better grades. I gotta have my time always allocated.. Otherwise I'm just completely unproductive.
For me, a little stress feels good. If I don't have anything to stress over, it feels like I'm not getting anything done.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Mmmm, shreddies.
Calmly say "First Post."
vicious, untreated political sewage...niche entertainment for the spiritually unattractive...worshipless pap
"Among other tidbits, pessimists make great lawyers..."
Slashdot must be swarming with lawyers, then.
I have noticed that for myself the levels of stress I can successfully endure vary according to the circumstances. Specifically I can endure large amounts of stress and take on big responsibilities if they are brought on gradually and ramp up slowly, on the other hand sudden stress can be too much for me.
This seems to agree with the article, at least in part, as the researchers seem to be getting at the fact that your outlook on the situation, not just your genetic predisposition, is important to how well you thrive. Of course the two are linked and many bodily functions, as we are discovering, are psychosomatic.
I make diamonds
(geology joke, carry on)
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Much more then 14.7 pounds per square inch and I go squelch.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
That's why I post almost exclusively as an Anonymous Coward. That way I can pretend that most of my posts are being moderated as off-topic or flamebait rather than +5 insightful.
Unlike some who link ADD to thriving on pressure that isn't the case for me. But situations that tend to be high stress for most, tend to calm me down.
Main database server has crashed and the CEO is on the line? No problem. Someone cut the fiber to this block? Eh. We gotta move from one colo to the next in 17 hours! Ok. Driving 130 MPH down long loney highways? Blah. Tornado heading this way? Another Earthquake?!@ Whatever, let's get prepared.
However while these kinds of things don't get to me I've found that emotional issues can stress me out quite quickly. Issues with my girlfriend, friends or family tend to make me all loopy and panicky, much the same way other's get with the scenarios above. I wonder if this is true for other people who strive on situational stress?
--- I do not moderate.
Chronic stress has been linked to an array of illnesses, including heart disease and depression. But people who cope successfully, studies have found, punch in at work with normal levels of stress hormones that climb during the day and drop sharply at night. Their coworkers who complain of being too stressed have consistently higher levels of hormones that rarely dip very far, trapping them in a constant state of anxiety.
That means being able to "decompress" or forget about work after you leave. When I leave work my thoughts about it remain there. It's easy to do when you lead a completely seperate home-life than work-life.
Personally the way I do it is to not maintain any post-work social contact w/my co-workers. This keeps job talk to a minimum when I am out and about. It keeps workplace drama to a minimum because no one knows what I do when I leave (this might not be a problem where other people work but in an institution full of females I do notice a lot of petty bitching going on).
I don't work my hobby. I have several hobbies that I take part in that aren't work related at all. It gives me something to further seperate my life from work.
I really do feel for people that can't let go of their problems once they leave the job. Might want to try something different to get out of that rut. No one wants to die thinking about how much they hate their job.
I've always considered myself the kind who just... cracks, pressure or no. Kinda sucks when it just "goes off" while I'm watching TV or something.
I don't know... I see a high pressure situation and make myself scarce. Let some other sucker handle it.
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
It logically follows that assholes make great pessimists.
"Much more then 14.7 pounds per square inch and I go squelch."
No more dating fat ladies for you, mister.
I thrive on Crack, yes.
It's true.
BALAA.
If you have to work with a group of people, and are approaching a deadline, the people I work with tend to dictate the outcome.
If I can trust someone to do their part of the job, I'll thrive. I can handle quite a bit more than most people, just so long as I don't have to make sure someone's not being lazy, failing to do their job, or something similar.
However, I'll tend to crack when I don't trust the people I'm working with. I'll be more likely to try to manage the situation, thereby distracting me from my allotted workload.
When I had to manage a few database-related projects, I would merely assign more work to those I thought more competent. Those projects were tremendous successes. However, when I had to manage a project where half the people were going to be taking days off right before a deadline set from above, things fell apart quickly. I had to take on the entire project without any assistance for the low-level, repetitive, easy work. As a result, the high-level planning went to hell due to lack of time to attend to it.
Having the deadline pushed from 3 days away to 1 day away didn't help either.
There is no way to tell immediately whether or not a project will sink or swim. However, confidence will go a long way towards getting things done quickly and efficiently.
Stress and pressure, while similarly manifested, are distinctly different. Stress is "the bad stuff" you have to deal with while pressure is the positive. Worry over your job being outsourced is stress. Pressure is needing to make a deadline with a project to support a marketing effort, assuming the deadline is realistic. Stress is having to carry the weight of five coders not getting their job done. Pressure is being responsible for guiding the success of a project by mentoring those five coders.
For myself, I thrive on pressure, withstand stress, but even more importantly, know precisely what my limits are for both. One important point not made in the article (on brief perusal) is that while pressure is beneficial to some, even those who flourish with it have their limits. Eventually, even pressure becomes counter-productive.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
Understanding whether people "thrive or crack under pressure" is relevant. All of the things the troll is complaining about are VERY stress inducing. If we could learn to not crack, or to deal with stress in ways other than lashing out against those we percieve as "enemies", maybe we and our "enemies" would both live in less fear. Less fear all around leads to less violence, which leads to less fear, which leads to less violence...
Hopefully it also would allow us all the levelheadedness to adress our disagreements constructively.
If it's pure coding then yes, I thrive under pressure. Now when it's a damn nasty undocumented feature (aka bug), that's a whole different story...
var sig = function() { sig(); }
I don't know if it is the logical side of my brain but whenever I have been in or witnessed an accident or medical emergency I seem to be the one not freaking out, crying, screaming, panicking etc.
Do people with a strong logical sense have the ability to deal with panic and pressure more so than the "other" people?
I really do know KungFu
I'm just lazy.
Aych tea tea pea colon slash slash slash dot dot org slash
Forget what your parents told you. I am proof that snorting cocaine, drinking excessively, and lying we'll never impede your career.
Thanks in advance,
"President" George W. Bush
Wow, this article is the first article I've ever read that confirms that people like me exist. Everyone always tells me I'm utterly insane because I work 70-90 hours a week banking and sleep 4-4.5 hours a night, and I love it. I've always been of the opinion that you take things as they come and deal with what you can. You also need to accept that you are responsible for most of what occurs in your life, both the successes and the failures, rather than shift responsibility anywhere else.
If at the end of the day you say "I did the best I could," then you're healthy and happy whether you accomplished anything or not. However, if at the end of the day you say "I was lazy," you'll probably be unhappy over the long term, regardless of whether you accomplished anything or not.
Read jack phelps dot net
Myself, it depends on WHAT is bothering me. A tough programming task or difficult system recovery don't generally bother me that much... it's intellectually challenging. I just put on my headphones, crank the metal and go.
:)
If, on the other hand, someone chooses to stand over me, or demand status updates every 15 minutes... I'm fairly likely to just say 'Either fix it yourself or leave me the fuck alone for a while'.
My old boss (crappy company, great immediate supervisor) would leave me alone when a system died. He knew I'd call when I had a relevant status change... I miss that
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
OMG!! GIVE ME ONE, PLEASE!!!
Yes
I mean, no!
Yes!
No!
Yes .. no ... yesno ... yes!
...
No!
GHAAAAAAAAAAAA!
... Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 3.8).
Lameness filter is lame
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
neither one. I ignore pressure.
If there's no pressure, it's difficult to get started on something. Sometimes I'll just artificially create pressure by limiting resources to my tasks (perhaps unconsciously) so then I get it done better. I find when I'm under pressure, decisions are easier to make because you HAVE to decide something. You take all the information you have, mix it up in your head, and then choose one as best as you can, because you HAVE TO. Without pressure, it's hard to be motivated to decide anything.
But that's just me.
My experience with pressure and pressure-holics, is that they make more mistakes when they are working under a deadline than when they have planned things out. Since many of them believe that they cannot perform well unless they are under some pressure, they either (subconciously) blow it off until the deadline or they sabotage themselves until there is some pressure.
In addition, many of these people cannot distinguish between important and urgent. If you have read First Things First, or The 7 habits of highly successful people then you have seen the 2x2 matrix showing the difference between important and urgent. Draw a box, then divide it in half vertically and half horizontally. Label the left column urgent and the right column not urgent. Lable the top row Important, and the bottom row not important. The pressure-holics cannot see the top right, nor the lower left corners. To them, anything in the left column, belongs in the top left corner. Anything that is in the right column belongs in the bottom right square. A phone call is urgent. If it is a customer, or boss, then it is important (upper left), if it is someone selling carpet cleaning, it is not important (lower left). Doing your taxes is important, but it is not urgent until early April. As important things "ripen" they become more urgent.
The worst bosses are the ones who cannot see the difference between important and urgent. The TPS report might be due on Friday, but if you are working on it on Monday, then you are screwing off, and they will dump some imaginary crisis on you, to stop you from doing what (to them) is goofing off. Or, they will arbitrarily move up deadlines because you aren't sweating enough. You cannot make plans or schedules when these sort of people are around, as they will deliberately mess things up for you.
I thrive on crack.
-- Mace only makes me hornier.
FUCK RIGHT OFF, I AM BUSY!
:)
Put it on the helpdesk please.
They don't. Problem solved
I thrive under the pressure of using my skills and experience against the clock or to do something I've never done before. The pressure caused by a challenge is great. Yeah.. I get shitty for the last 12 hours before a big deadline, but that's pretty normal.
I crack under the pressure caused by stupid managers, antiquated processes, by being told to do something then having the resources pulled (and I don't mean restricted, I mean obliterated), having my "expert opinion" overrode by some dickwad who really doesn't have a clue how to do things, then being lumped with the blame when it doesn't work.
Maybe some people thrive on the latter. It just makes me more sympathetic for the postal workers.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
I am an underemployed lawyer, and silly me thought it was the terrible hiring market for lawyers. I guess the other underemployed lawyers I know are also too optimistic as well.
On a side note, there is indication that some lawyer functions might be off-shored in the near future, so I've got that to be optimistic about as well. Nothing like have Gurpreet in India writing your legal briefs.
As a high school senior, I've learned that your peers can often influence your performance, even subconscienciously.
At school, I take honors/AP classes and notice my performance often improves when I'm with my more intellectual peers; compared to the standard classes that I have taken in the pas; which I just slacked off of, cause most of the other kids cheated and got away it, and didn't care....Made me feel why I should care, if not much is showing ?
Well, that's a vote for "Cracks under pressure."
They left out the perfect pessimist's job: sysadmin!
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
Unless there's a good bit of pressure I find it difficult to do anything at all. In crisis mode I'm a maniac but if I don't feel rushed I'm lethargic. It's the source of my all-nighters in college. Believe me though, if the shit hits the fan you're (as a coworker) gonna love my ass.
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
Well, for me it's always depended on the type of stress/pressure. An important piece of software that needs to work, a deadline, coding or decoding some obscure language idiosyncrasies - no problem.
Having somebody walk up to me and immediately grill me on something (say a blonde hair on my shoulder)... temporary freeze-up.
As far as life goes though, I've tended to be a "prepare for the worst, hope for the best" type of guy. I expect that things probably won't go my way, and prepare the following:
a) How I would react under certain bad situations
b) How the other persons involved might react (and my reaction to their reaction)
c) Countermeasures and contingency plans
So really, one of the more unpleasant types of stress is the "oh my crap it's just happened right now" variety. The good thing is that these are very trying but usually short-lived
Stress works well with goals as well. I can definately stress on something knowing that I have a given problem that I can solve, or it will be over by a certain amount of time. Having no known end to a problem (relationship, unemployment, etc) is probably the worst type of stress.
ummm . . thrive or crack, thrive or crack . . .
Can you come back to me?
Well.. I have kissed a man before.
pessimists dont make great lawyers. it is the other way around. I am in law school and let me tell you that the legal professions is one depressing undertaking. My law school does surveys about job satisfaction and the longer the person has been working ina firm the less satisfied he is with the work and the more he feels like he cant get out of it. So the longer a lawyer works the more experience gets and the depresion he faces.
People who need stress put on them are the reason managers create unrealistic deadlines and tell employees they're not good enough. Put another way, these people are not self-motivating. They can't maintain a steady pace of work on their own. Their work ethic is too weak.
The article blurs the difference between what people do under occasional, warranted stress like a death in the family and continual artificial stress. People who need the latter kind need to re-evaluate themselves, people who can cope with the former are simply healthy.
Among other tidbits, pessimists make great lawyers...
I wanted to be a lawyer, but I didn't think it wouldn't work out.
put on a TuTu and dance around like a loon.
This scares the pressure away, and I can get back to work.
If it weren't for the last minute, NOTHING would EVER get done.
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
Interestingly, it seems that it is the profession itself that causes the depression. In one study I read a few years back, when individuals were assessed the summer before law school, they showed rates of depression equivalent to the general population, but even after just the first year of law school, let alone once they graduated, rates of depression jumped to anywhere from 20-40 percent of the population studied.
You are not alone!
From the article linked to above:
Further:
Get your Unix fortune now!
You've obviously already cracked under the
pressure, if you hadn't you'd realize that dealing
with stress is even more important; now that world
is falling apart. People are dieing, corrupt
polticians play with people's lives,
and attrociates are being commited on all
sides.
If eating "shreddies" and watching poorly
dubbed anime gives you a moments repite from this
than by all means do it.
That face is equivalent to 2 blue valiums.
Just as long as I can get an average of 7-8 hours a sleep at night and 3 good meals. I can manage my stress pritty well threw out the day work up to 12-15 hours a day if needed. But If I haven't get enough sleep and start loosing meals I start cracking. I also cant handle when they give me a stopwatch job, here finish this in 5 minutes. But I can deal with normal heavy stress and when I get home I leave the stress at work and I can get to sleep easiliy like nothing happend.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
would cocaine not be strong enough.
Only in America, would someone need to make a drug that makes your head explode as soon as you smoke it. -- Dennis Leary
Thug with a baseball bat trying to kill you? Crush his throat. Firetruck 20 feet away going 70km/h? floor it. Lying in the street with broken bones? Get out of traffic, do (minimal) self first-aid, and make sure someone's called an ambulance.
Most of the real emergency things that have happened to me, I was too busy dealing with the situation to notice stress. What gets to me is the things that I can't do anything about.
According to my watch I don't crack until 100 meters.
But seriously...I'm bored if I'm not in a high stress job. I jumped right into IT/Systems Admin where I was taking care of hundreds of systems and got used to it. Now if I have a low work load I feel like I'm working 18 hour days.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
I spend a good chunk of several weeks of the year sitting on my ass doing not much of anything at work, which would suck ass if I didn't have linux to learn.
:P
:P
Underutilized employees are in all likelihood unnecesssary- which means they're a waste of money, right?
Fortunately, the variety of things I do adds up nicely- they'd need three different people to replace just me, so I'm cheaper. And I'm not the only one with occasional VAST GULFS of slack time. And I don't get training or any kind of tuition incentives. So I use that time to learn stuff, since it's the only way I'll be able to leverage myself out of this place.
Am I a Workaholic? Yes. Just not for the day job.
But never the whole thing. I don't crack easily, but I do occasionally crack; if I'm not extremely busy, I get bored and get slightly depressed.
Under stress, I am very productive until my breaking point. Once I hit my breaking point, I crack for a short period of time (a few hours to a day or two), then I'm only slightly less productive than I am at my peak. I actually do my best (and fastest) work when I'm just short of this point. Suprisingly, I'm also quite happy there, but once I go over the breaking point, even once I've pulled myself together, I'm miserable, and my productivity stays at that "slightly less than peak" level until I'm calm and relaxed (i.e., have had a decent amount of time to recover - usually a weekend; as much as a week if it was prolonged stress).
I put too much pressure on myself... so much in fact I either hit it *perfect* or I make a complete fool out of myself.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
I've always thought that there might be an intentional diversity in the genetic components of human behavior, not unlike the hypervariablity found in the genetics underlying the immune system. Human society functions better in a nonstationary environment (= ice ages, floods, dry spells, changes in diet from whale blubber to potatoes) if the society is structurally non-homogeneous. Society needs risk takers and risk avoiders, optimists and pessimists, manic spenders and thrifty savers, lone achievers and gregarious team players. How else can we cope with the rich times, the poor times, the peace times, war times, the stay-at-home times, and the move-to-another-land-times.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Do You Thrive or Crack Under Pressure?
What's with the 3rd degree?!? What's the deal with all the questions? It wasn't me! I - uh... I've got to go...
AAAAAH! Too much pressure man! *twitch* *twitch*
Instead of saying "i'm usually too lazy to do anything 'till the 11th hour", just say "i need pressure, and if i don't have i'll create it myself".
I think this kind of thing is also useful for many kinds of computer programming, especially in high-reliability areas like operating systems and compilers. I've had to fix an awful lot of bugs in programs written by optimists.
Have you read my blog lately?
I thrive when I have responsability and when I have to do important things during short periods of time. What I can not stand is when there are many things that have to be done during a longer period of time, and where there is no fixed time schedule for doing them. What stresses me up then is that I have several things in the back of my mind that I feel that I need to do. In such situations in the past, I have usually slacked off as a way of calming myself down .. but besides from being a bad side effects (nothing done), the intended effect has often been missing.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
So does that mean it smells like burnt ass hair and dead skin in your house right now?
Is there an easy and foolproof way to identify the hormonal abberrations and liquidate them *before* my employer realises that /. may not be required to do my job?
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
Stress is a biochemical reaction of the body on exceptional situations, like threats, danger and excitement. The oldest part of the brain (reptilian brain) sends messengers which make it possible to deal with those situations. These exceptional situations are often called stress. But the messengers can also contain endorphines which let us feel good with the so called stress.
In fact stress is a very clever builtin algorithm to ensure survival.
We are even not aware of many situations which are handled by the stress algorithms in the human brain, like accident avoidance and life saving. If you ask people who rescued someone else under totaly weird circumstances why they have done this and why they did not think about the danger, then most of them will have no answer because the survival mechanisms of the brain take control over the rational waging of feasabilities. This can also be observed on job related challenges where the either technical challenges or the competition against a coworker or a competing company pushes people over their limits. Most people set those limits very low due to unawareness of the own abilities and everything exceeding those self set limits is called stress. The stress complaint is hip in our modern society. Our ancestors would laugh heartly about those complaints.
On the other hand there are people with limited capacity of dealing with those challenges. This is often caused by personal deficits, but those deficits are not seldom a result of education in a sheltered environment where all sources of natural and healthy stress were hold off from the kids and young adults. If they are confronted later with the reality of challenges they are predestinated to fail.
tglx - I personally need challenges to be productive
Am I the only one to read the headline as "Do You Thrive on Crack or Pressure?"
Personally, I neither thrive nor crack under pressure. I tend to burst into flames at a friendly web site called Slashdot and usually feel better after the fact. :)
Given how it has contributed to my productivity by lowering anxiety levels, we are going to suggest to management the implementation of "Slashdot therapy" at my job.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
All my work is done under pressure, so I must thrive on it. I delay everything until right before the deadline and suddendly I have to much work and a lot of pressure to get it done... The upside is, the total 'worktime' is significantly less ;).
"Some of it is genetic, some of it is how you were raised, and some it is just your personality," Dr. Bruce McEwen.
and what, pray tell, is your personality? i would guess it's something that is shaped predominantely by two factors: genetics and how you were raised.
...that I can crack to. Otherwise there is no pressure... I don't feel it because to me it does not even exist.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
How was that a troll? That was funny.
Regardless of the validity of this statement, I find the opposite to be true. In my law school classes, it is the optimists who seem to be the better lawyers.
Many cases can be looked at as losers. "You did what? Crud, we're sunk" is not the lawyer I want to hire. "You did what? Hmmm, well maybe we could stretch the reasoning on this case and apply it to yours. Or maybe this decision from a neighboring jurisdiction, tough no decisive, may be persuasive." That's the lawyer I want. Everything can be looked at from different angles and being pessimistic is the worst thing you can do.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
What a surprise. Who would have thought that the mouthpiece of the corporate world would turn out an article like this that essentially glorifies the Velvet Sweatshop that America have become. The article here subtly hints that if you do not thrive under pressure, and accept the sweatshop environment, well, then there must be something just a bit wrong with you.
People, when are you going to open your eyes and see the grave looming in front of you a sparse few decades ahead?
When are you going to take a look at the workplace environment and rules and social safety net that many European countries have created, thus ensuring that their citizens are somewhat shielded from overwork and sweatshop environments?
PLease consider the perspective taken by this article. Could it have been written another way? Why was it written with the particular perspective it took?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I think it's a generational thing, I work at a company that is run by all men that are in their 60's, they think that if you leave work at 5 (half an hour after we are off) you are not working hard enough. The company is always running by the seat of its pants, everything is always last minute, everything is always urgent, "we need this yesterday!!!" is heard on a daily basis. My generation (x or y or l, not sure) of people in their thirties are way more relaxed, maybe we plan ahead more, i'm just not sure. Jojo
Who could possibly concentrate long enough to fill out all those questions! Geeeze!
I strive under pressure when I'm on crack. Which is daily.
WTPOUAWYHTTOTWPA
What's the point of using acronyms when you have to type out the whole phrase anyways?
I found that there's two kinds of stress: "good stress" - the kind where you've got a task to do, and you know what needs to be done to complete it, and "bad stress" - the kind where you've got a job to do, and you have no freaking clue how to get it done. The good stress gets you all fired up and focused on the task, and the bad stress puts the rock in your gut and the panic in your blood as you flail about, trying to cobble together a solution.
...umm, and thus ends your geek philosopher moment of the day. :)
So it's not just a matter of how well you perform under stress, but how well you perform under *bad* stress - programming assignment #4 at school, that new job duty at work, driving in a new place with no map, etc., and learning how to appreciate when the "bad" stress converts to "good" stress.
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
On the other hand when I have to work extended hours on a closed source project for hire, I practically have to flog myself into submission to get it done. I have to force myself to get up in the morning. It eats away at my soul that I'm wasting my creativity on something for which I'll receive no (public) credit, no copyright interest and which will forever be hidden away from the world. I'll do a good job because I'm that kind of person, but I know deep down I'm basically doing it for the money, and the stress level can be very, very high.
Of course that is just me. Other people do of course find fulfillment working on closed source projects. Perhaps the recognition from their immediate peers is sufficient. But whatever, the bottom line is that if you're truly passionate about what you're doing you'll never get stressed out.
From an earlier post by me: "...as an employee of said [government] contractor, who wouldn't have any copyright interest in whatever I produce anyway, I think I might be more motivated to produce better work if I knew it would ultimately be subject to public scrutiny and benefit the public good. Compare that to dedicating your life to writing code that will be secreted away in some closed-source product with no acknowledgment whatsoever to you other than a paycheck that lets you survive. The thought of such a dismal and pointless existence is kind of depressing."
everyone has there own little quirks about how they work, thats why its so important too at least find wich catagory you fit into, too many morons out there are so uneffiecient becuase they can't even figure there own work habbits out.
When i was younger, stress used to destroy me, a few times i just had breakdowns. kind of annoying.
but recently, ive done a complete turn around, and work incredibly well under pressure. i guess im turnning into my father.
I find i get the best work done when i'm stuck in the do or die position, not a lack of time, but that i know that i have to stick to my shcedual just to keep up. If i trip, i'll fall behind, and then theres nothing to keep me going.
as a really overwieght friend of mine once said "the way i do the 1km run in gym? i prentend someone is chasing me in a mack truck! squeel piggy! " (yeah i dind't get the last bit ither...).
my best memories ever (im not kidding), it a total rush i got by completeing a history project (worth 60% of my mark), in basicly one night, with the rest of my team. it was wonderful! typing non stop into the wee hours of the night, with a big smile on my face.
the downsied, is now, with trival beggining of term work, its so hard to be motivated to get it done. i can waste alot of time with simple things that i don't want to do.
i still do them though, otherwise i'll fall behind, but its unerving, when i already don't have enough time.
The things we do, becuase were lucky enough to have perspective... jeez.
Aaargh! Stop asking me such difficult questions.
I procrastinate a lot. I think it is just a naturally learned thing because I have never had anything bad happen because of it, so, why not? Right?
One side effect to my procrastination is that I know that it causes me a lot of stress. I think it is just the idea that I have something to do and I can't make myself start doing it yet.
The way I handle this stress is that I end up being extremely creative and motivated to work on one of my side projects. I'm not sure why this is, but I can do some of my best peripheral work on side projects during crunch time for another unrelated thing.
I noticed this first in college. I would always be stirring up new things to and working on old pet projects during testing times. I can't tell you how many times people told me, "aren't you going to study?" but I never needed more than one or two hours of study time before a test to pull out 85% to 95% test scores
The really interesting thing is that I would often make a lot of progress on these other things during testing time, but after taking the test I would be completely unmotivated to continue work on them or think of new things. I sometimes wish there was a pill I could take to make me that motivated whenever I wanted to be.
.."you only feel pressure when you're considering failure." Or, thereabouts. Either way, when I'm up against a deadline and starting to feel pressured, it's something I keep in mind.
1) Worlds toughest sysadmin, stress flows over me like water off a ducks back.
2) General Patton would slap the living crap out of you for being such a pussy.
3) Stress, you don't know the meaning of stress. On my last project I could've made a diamond in my shorts.
now i just don't care. Theres no pay off for hard work anymore anyhow so why bother? You can bust your ass all you want and you still won't be cheaper than some indian out there who makes a fraction of your pay. I used to love my profession and corporations taught me to hate it. They used us up and spit us out. I'm much more interested in pursuing my other hobbies as a business. The only thing keeping me in computers is the need to pay off debt that i was previously able to afford.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
So that will be ... Anonymous.Coward@gmail.com?
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
Whomever came up with that old saying figured it out long ago. It just depends on how you view your situation.
.com period regardless how much work and little pay and crappy cubicle or office we worked in, because for many /.'ers we thought we were in our own nirvana and when money was part of it the equation other non-geeks felt the same way. Anyone that has every worked in entertainment industry will see the same, long hours, crappy attitudes and treatment, non-existant pay, no promise of success, but people are drawn to those positions like moths to flame.
We can all recall how jazzed everyone was during the
Yet on the flip side a highly paid lawyer will frequently leave their partner positions to do something like be a florist, real estate agent, or golf instructor for 1/4 the pay.
Just depends on how you view your circumstances.
i dont crack under pressure, it actually motivates me. what makes me crack is when im under pressure and i get 5 calls from users who need miniscule things fixed but they act like its the end of the world if its not taking care of right away. or im trying to get something important done and i hear a page with my name(yes we get paged and its abused but no one cares) "can you tell me hot to log into this machine which if i noted down the email memo from 3 months ago i would know" its really really trying....
I am tired/stressed I keep reading Do You Thrive or Crack Under Pressure? as Do You thrive on crack under pressure?
But only for a limited time. Nobody is superman. Run your cars engine RPMs well into the red for a few minutes every now and then, and no problem. Do it on a continual basis, your car will probably blow a gasket. It may take weeks or months, but almost certainly it will happen.
These guys are fooling themselves, just like the smoker who thinks they have indestructible lungs because they personally haven't died from any smoking related illness. It is always the other guy who is weak. It won't happen to me. Until the day it does happen to you, and by then it is probably too late. One day in all likelihood they will be found dead behind their desk with a stroke or coronary, or suffer a catastrophic mental breakdown. I remember reading the story of a VP who regularly pulled 100+ hour weeks, until one day he can into work and found he suddenly couldn't function anymore.
You can function on afterburners for a period of a few days or weeks even, but after that, you are fooling yourself. I have been on a couple of death march projects, and survived with sanity intact, but it isn't fun.
My rights don't need management.
"Among other tidbits, pessimists make great lawyers..."
The worlds greatest lawyer joke is hidden in that statement somewhere, if only I can find it...
I'm posting on slashdot instead of working on a matlab assignment that's due by 12.
But then, I have no doubt that I can knock out a matlab assignment in no time (a halfway inteligent chimp could do this stuff).
Then again, for problems that require intense critical thinking (cal III ) I have to take my time and pace myself so that I don't make any mistakes.
It all depends on the situation.
Sweat shops my ass!
Are you honestly drawing an equivalence with a high stress high paced corporate job with some kid in Indonesia spending 18 hours a day sewing shoes together without bathroom breaks?
I clearly stated that I was comparing America to Europe. Yet you ignored that, and compared America to Indonesia, a third world country. I find it very telling that you chose that comparison. So I guess as long as we are better off than the 3rd world, then everything is hunkydory?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Let's take a look at some of the language used in this article, in order to see what connotations are associated with people who thrive on a stressful environment (i.e., a sweatshop, as opposed to those who do not thrive. Tell me what message this article gives us.
Here are some selected excerpts from the article:
"juggling multiple projects and running on four hours of sleep is business as usual."
So that is the Brave New Workplacein America. But that is not the workplace in France, and many other countries in Europe, where 35 hours per week is the mandated maximum work week, and where everyone gets 4 to 6 weeks of time off.
"But for Mr. Jones, the stress is worth it, if only because every now and then he can gaze at the Manhattan skyline and spot a product of his labor: the soaring profile of the Chatham apartment building on East 65th Street,"
Teaching us to accept our place in the sweatshop. Slavery is Freedom, dontcha know, and sweatshop workplaces are heaven.
"Mr. Jones belongs to a rare breed of worker"
Oooh. I wanna be a "rare breed", too. How about you?!
Let's take a look at some of the words used to describe our stress-loving heroes:
"they grapple
Wow! If only I could just be like them!
"People who are high in hardiness enjoy ongoing changes and difficulties,"
OK, Slashdotters, did you get the memo on our Brave New Sweatshop Economy. No, it is not a Velvet Sweatshop that we are headed for, it is just "changes and difficulties". Now get back to work!
But what about the rest of us non-heroic types? How does this article describe us?
"Their coworkers who complain of being too stressed have consistently higher levels of hormones that rarely dip very far, trapping them in a constant state of anxiety.
Oh. OK. We are "complainers" trapped in our anxiety. Gotcha!
"Some people will say 'No, I don't like a lot of stress,' but they find themselves in one stressful job after another, so there must be something that's pulling them.""
Hmm, or maybe, just maybe, it is because our government has sold us out to the corporations and the wealthy, thus creating a sweatshop environment where nearly EVERY job is becoming more and more stressful. Naw, that couldn't be it. Could it?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
An interesting thing I've been thinking about recently, actually. I'm a pediatrics resident and recently did a month in the pediatric ICU at my hospital. We can be on call for 33-36 hours and I've noticed that, no matter how tired you get, when things start getting nasty you get very very focused. Never really nervous, but focused. I thought that was interesting in a way. Just a thought. Mistakes are made when things aren't going to hell. That's when it's hard to focus for so long...
Reckon I'll still be a slashdot addict tho'... ;)
I am one of these handles stress people. People who don't work unless threatened are different.
When something needs to be done I get it done, even if it takes a lot more effort.
When something doesn't need to be done, I might not ever do it, even if my boss jumps up and down with unrealistic deadlines.
I think you missed the control part of the article. I am in control, I realize that so the stress doesn't really bother me as much. The people who get stressed to the point of non function are the ones who have a problem.
If your boss gives unrealistic demands, and you get stressed out over that who has the problem? If he knows they're unrealistic he's not gonna fire you for not meeting them. If he doesn't know and he can't understand then he isn't a supervisor worth working for anyway.
The story behind the story is interesting: to thrive in high-stress corporate environments, you have to have experience coping with dysfunction.
1. Does this mean that capitalist society offers limited opportunities to the well-adjusted, and that only those from disrupted family backgrounds can tolerate the distorted, inhuman environment of the workplace?
2. Is the whole study nothing more than a self-selected sample from those who work in dysfunctional firms that demand heroic effort from their employees rather than taking responsibility for managing properly?
3. The authors of the study seem to imply that coping with this catastrophic situation is somehow healthy. Isn't it healthier to recognize it for the disaster that it is and try to change it? What is the stress level of someone who fights back? If it's high, does it make them less right?
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
The article points out that pessimists make good lawyers because they are always on the lookout for loopholes int the contracts they write.
Seems like that also makes for a good coder - you always have to be on the lookout for security vulnerabilities, threading issues, etc.
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
pessimists make great lawyers...
And lawyers made me a pessimist
Table-ized A.I.
I find that at my current job, I'm bored and feel like I'm pretty much wasting my time
Which explains why you're, uh, we're both posting to /.? And why everyone else is reading it?
On the one hand pressure exerted by management rolls off like water on a duck's back. I spent 4 years in the AirForce, and 7 years in the Army (11B, 19D) - so someone telling me nicely that they are piling on yet another project to my already overloaded schedule, or that they are moving my due date up 2 weeks, or that they disagree with how I intend to implement this software, is nothing in comparison to having a bunch of armed men around who can inflict bodily harm, or death at any moment, who are looking to you for guidance.
On the other hand, the pressure that really gets me is when I don't live up to my own expectations and I slip a deadline that I have committed to. This rarely occurs - but when it does, it raises my bloodpressure, and I lose my composure. I equate some of this to the work, but largely my overreaction I believe to be the result of delayed stress from events in my previous life.
I never consider this as me 'cracking' under the pressure - in all cases, while I may be cussing and fuming, I am still performing the job - in some cases at a higher level (to get done ASAP).
Is this 'Thriving' under pressure? I wouldn't consider it that, either, because I would not be able or willing to keep up such a level of performance indefinitely (peaks of this is okay to get the job done - but time inbetween is needed to recharge the battery).
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
are you by any chance a lawyer?
and being pessimistic is the worst thing you can do.
Hmm... shouldn't you have said, being optomistic is the best thing you can do?
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
whether you crack or not is irrelevant. YOU FAIL IT
Personally, I'm more a fan of "Back Door Sluts 9" than I am a fan of "Cracks Under Pressure" . . . but then, maybe that's just me . . .
"They are a familiar but puzzling force in the workplace, perpetually functioning in overdrive to meet a punishing schedule or a demanding boss. To colleagues, these men and women may seem simply like workaholics. But psychologists who study them call them resilient, or hardy,"
Resilience will become a new buzzword. It will become an excuse to have fewer employees with more work. This works out even better if you aren't paying for their health insurance, so watch for that to go away even more than it has been.
Whoohoo!
You paint D&D figurines and build furniture? At least smokers have an excuse for their anti-social behavior.
...I pick up my gun and start shooting things. Does this count as 'thriving' or 'cracking'?
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
While at the Goodyear plant in Lincoln Neb, I was involved with the startup on a cold feed extruder-calendar line.
:)
My "replacement" was a nice guy who would show up from time to time to see what I was up to. On one of these trips I'm showing him how a piece of the code works (PLC ladder logic) and he "fat-fingers" my program and brings the machine to a halt
He then looks at me and says, "I've got to go, I can't be out here when the machine is broken". And he left.
I fixed his screwup, apologized to the production guys, and restarted the machine. It wasn't any big deal.
When it came time to assign a permanent engineer to the equipment Goodyear picked him over me simply on the basis that he had a degree and I didn't (his was in Physiology).
After three months he was showing up drunk, after six he was gone.
It was a shame, he was a nice guy who should have never been put in this position.
John
I dream in binary.
Oh, here comes Greggery, Little Greggery Peccary, The nocturnal gregarious Wild swine... (and so on... you really should listen to the real thing...) FZ
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
Where's your work ethic, man?!
Heh... just kidding. I just loved your post and would have loved to see you discuss "work ethic." See, the phrase "work ethic" is one of my hot button phrases. I hear it all the time in upper management:
I mean - VOMIT! Since when did we (speaking for the U.S. here) become such a fascist bunch of morons? Was it when the Japanese started building those odd but surprisingly robust vehicles while ours rusted on the assembly line? Did we look at their slavering masses doing jumping jacks in the company courtyard at 6am and feel a twinge of fear that somehow we were getting softer, less competitive, less virile?When, dear reader, did we sacrifice our families, our communities and our freedoms for that bitter bitter pill called "work ethic"???!?!?
It is true that I break down easily under even the smallest application of pressure. If I have two things to work on at the same time, stress! If my boss has an anal retentive personality, stress and more stress! If something goes wrong, I assume I'm somehow at least marginally at fault; ergo, more stress!
My solution is to go through the day, sitting in front of a computer and reading Slashdot.
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
I Just Don't Give A Damn.
On one side we have those who want the United States to adopt the social-based work structures of western Europe. Maximum hours-per-week limits, six weeks of vacation per year (plus holidays, plus sick days), and guaranteed year-long maternity leave is what humanity should strive for.
On the other hand, we have pundits crying that outsourcing our jobs to eastern Asia is a natural result of how lazy Americans have become. To its proponents, outsourcing is capitalism at its finest. As long as someone else is willing to work more/harder for the same amount of money, the invisible hand prefers those who work more.
If we favor a social-based approach, we welcome downtime and life away from work at the cost of making cheap-labor markets look more enticing. If we favor outsourcing, it looks like we lose domestic jobs unless we work harder. Therefore, outsourcing convinces Americans to work harder to avoid losing every thing to others.
So, which side are we to favor? Working less seems nice, but is it viable?
You know what. Some of those folks in Europe have really taken that "laiser faire" work ethic too far though. I'm frequetnly confronted with weeks long waits for replies to emails that were next-day important when they can from the European end, but replies the the same thread take 4-ever... a little stress would do some folks good.
These dudes sure didn't thrive for long.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I start @ stress. I idle @ tense. I cruise @ crisis. I shine in meltdown mode. When everyone else is going insane I find the quiet black core of inner peace.
Hand me the sword I'll make it gleam with my enemy's blood. I will sing an aria whilst standing on the skulls of the gore drenched fallen.
What in the hell does this have to do with the kind of stress in the story. I appreciate these 'cool things you've done' but what's this have to do with this story?
Photos.
MY employees don't mind a bit that I oppress them and cause them to work unexpected long hours on Fridays and Saturdays and take away their privileges and basic human rights and ability to belch outloud without being flogged.
Do you, guys? Guys? Hello - wait, NO, OH CRAP, HELP ME (gag) BLA GLERP HEW SS SSSS S (yack) BLEW
(die)
legweak --"a book is like a leg, only it doesn't bleed as much when you stab it with a knife." --sum yung guy
Did anyone else read this as "Do you thrive for crack under pressure?"
/. had really gone off the deep end...
For a minute there, I thought
- Peter
INsigNIFICANT
When I'm under pressure, I don't crack, I just ignore it. I don't care whether my work matters because I hate working. Right now I'm starting my own business, but I only work about two hours a day, which may be why my business has not made a penny yet in over a year.
I thrive on both crack and pressure.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
"are you by any chance a lawyer?"
I am working on it....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
If I perceive it as arbitrary PHB-induced pressure, I resent it and don't respond well.
I don't "crack", but I *have* been known to wash my hands of it and just walk away,
or to deflect the pressure's internal effects by deciding to ignore it and to proceed stolidly.
OTOH, if I perceive it as situational -- "can't be helped, shit happens, no one's fault" -- then it's "hey, time to be a hero", and I thrive.
under pressure...
irc.enterthegame.com #linux
Is that you, Chomsky!?
You must work for Life Gem.
I think it is very important that we categorize the kinds of stresses that people deal with. Some stresses are good for us and help us become stronger. Stresses of these nature tend to be of a shorter duration. It's those stresses that last for a long duration that are debilitating. The interesting thing is that it is not the magnitude of the stress that is important, but rather the duration. You might have to work crazy hours for a single week in order to add a cool new feature for a product. But when the job's done you are happy. More often than not they tend to be enjoyable learning experiences. Short term stresses like these no matter how highly intensive ,are welcome.
If however you go to a job each day unable to get rid of the tiny little feeling in your head that you'd be happier doing something else, then even though the job may not be all that stressful, one can end up severely depressed.
Recognize this fact. Nobody is invincible. Everybody has their breaking point. One of the famous torture techniques is to put a man in a pitch dark room with no sensory stimulation except for the sound of a dripping faucet. To most of us it is a minor irritant. But a week in that state can break any man.
We sometimes hear stories of people committing suicide for apparently silly reasons. You hear kids commiting suicide because their parents refused to buy them a video game or people commiting suicide cuz of a bad breakup. People are too quick to judge them and mock them. However painful a breakup may be nobody kills themselves over it. It's silly. It is the cumulative effect of all the miserable experiences that they have had in their life that has driven them to it. The breakup was just the trigger.
It's not the sudden flash flood that grinds the rock, but rather the slow drip of water over a sustained period of time.
Sorry if my post was long winded, but I just wanted to illustrate the fact that you can never conquer stress. Given enough time, no matter how puny the stress, it can destroy you. Everyone breaks.
Everyone.
So that is the Brave New Workplacein America. But that is not the workplace in France, and many other countries in Europe, where 35 hours per week is the mandated maximum work week, and where everyone gets 4 to 6 weeks of time off.
Oh, please.. Europeans are mostly a bunch of lazy fucks who don't get anything done. They should hardly be considered a good example.
#!/
"Some of it is genetic, some of it is how you were raised, and some it is just your personality," said Dr. Bruce McEwen, director of COP-OUTS at Rockefeller University.
They couldn't possibly make it more obvious that they have absolutely no idea what the real cause it... Just say it's caused by a little bit of everything, and completely avoid specifics, then when you are proven completely wrong, you can't possibly be that far off.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I don't see your problem. People aren't forced to work. And why should we have a government program to cover for the presumed lack of foresight of US citizens? I personally don't need a European-style safety net and I don't see why I should pay for someone else to slack off. Shielding people from "overwork" and "sweatshop environments" is another waste of time. At least in the US, jobs are plentiful enough that you can pick and chose.
Yes. It will require legislation, but so will anything else.
With outsourcing, you're job can go to someone who can live on pennies per-day. Do you possibly think you can make that up by working harder? Unless you've been completely useless up to this point, there's no way you can work an order of magnitude harder... So working harder isn't even a real option.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It's incredibly obvious that nobody here knows anyone who works well under pressure.
You can call this article a piece of corporate propoganda if you like, I don't disagree completely, but you can't disregard the facts it points out. There are people like that, and I happen to be one of them. What's annoying is that everyone here has their own strange BS ideas.
I'm not a procrastinator. I don't need to have pressure put on me to work at all. I'm not someone who just forgets about my work when I go home either... I can keep thinking of a problem I am having at work, and not be stressed-out about it at all.
I don't have any solid answers as to why I can handle stress well. I think it may be more active than anything else. Once in a while, stress will get to me, and I'll start making mistakes. All I have to do is recognize that, think to myself that feeling the pressure isn't going to help, and just relax for a few seconds. That's all it takes, even when the stress is overwhelming... Recognize that your instinct to feel bad isn't necessary, and isn't useful, and you can handle anything.
It's really about nerves. Even before big performances, I don't show any signs of being nervous. Again, in the most extreme of situations, I'll start to show just the very smallest signs, but I can just focus and all the pressure goes away.
It may be linked to work ethic. I also happen to be the kind of person who will work at full-speed, even when getting very tired, practially until I fall over... Then, when everything is done, I go home, and just kick-back for a few minutes, and I'm ready to go again. Even when I'm very hungry, I don't get distracted, and I don't slow down.
Not trying to say what a wonderful person I am, just that there certainly are people who handle stress well, and the misconceptions in this discussion are immense.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Ever been to Europe? I think not. Try visiting this place, while it's still legal for a US person to travel abroad without being a member of one of the two Parties.
All people hate working under pressure. It's just some people are in the positions where they can't be threatened by it, and the results of work do not depend on what they do, so they can do the busywork 20 hours per day, and be satisfied, knowing that it will be rewarded even if it contributes nothing positive to the end result, all the while putting real pressure on people who do the work for them.
So they "thrive under pressure" simply because they are worthless parasites.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
"Underutilized employees are in all likelihood unnecesssary- which means they're a waste of money, right?"
In many situations the systems run by themselves most of the time, so employees want an SA that knows the system and is available at the drop of hat in case there is a problem that requires immedite attention.
It seems like such a guy is doing nothing, but the peace of mind he provides to a business relying on technology more than justifies for his salary and apparent idleness.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Well, it began pre-world-war-II, about the same time as it became popular to classify gene types, and classify some people as superior, others as inferior.
In a way, it began with the slaver attitude, way back in the 16th century.
In a way, it began before history began. Fascism is simply one way of saying "I justify myself using force to take what I want, and destroy whom I want." That tendency exists in us all.
Nonetheless, outright fascism in America began when we saw the part our factories played in the successful WWII war effort.
Note that we had a fairly strong economy, because most people were just in their business dealings. In turn, if you asked them why they were just, it would probably have come back to the fact that they were more interested in following their understanding of Christianity (under the Great Awakening, partly), than they were in succeeding at business.
Following Christianity made them want to do a good job in all things; thus it gave them a well-balanced work ethic.
However, our Congress, in making a false god out of a strong economy, then turned around and set up a false god of consumerism for the people.
Likewise, they set up the work ethic as a false god for workers, in the hopes of getting an even better economic performance out of them.
That drove the "American Dream", in which each person feels that they have an inherent right to more luxury than their neighbors and their parents. Therefore, if they don't have that luxury, they are justified in begging, borrowing, stealing, ignoring resposibilities, or destroying others to get what they want.
That in turn is fostering a violent business attitude which will in turn destroy the economy.
Meanwhile, the workers who ignore their familial responsibilities are raising disaffected, violent children who will have a greater tendency to war.
That, in turn, likely will cause us to go to war with murderous intent and without the economy or the will to win, resulting in us losing catastrophically.
Just the way the Nazis and Japanese did.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
"In my law school classes,... " etc.
Those are not lawyers buddy, they are law students.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In most productivity statistics one can find many Europeans come higher than USians.
Europeans in general slack less and produce more in their work hours. US people are quite productive but are a few notches below most European countries.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Because your post comes off as petty bitching.
Maybe some young, impressionable girl will read that post, or the thousands of sentiments just like it available anywhere, and assume it is a natural, female thing to bitch.
That way, the whole world can continue to perpetuate the idiotic, caveman idea that a person's tendancy toward "petty bitching" is somehow tied to their reproductive organs.
All this time I thought those were for making babies.
chump.
-----Buy the ticket, take the ride.-----
As was pointed before, there's a difference between stress and pressure. And I really don't think _anyone_ thrives under a PHB which produces just stress.
E.g., the kind of example you give is the prime one. Keep telling someone that he's a no good loser and his job might as well be outsourced, and you'll only cause stress and a morale drop. Force someone to do long hours, and _then_ tell them they're still not good enough, you cause an even bigger morale drop.
I've worked with such people, and I have friends which worked with such people. I do remember one case when such a PHB caused a mass resignation of all programmers and designers at the same time. But I really don't remember anyone thriving on it.
Now there are people you can scare into working harder, by playing on their insecurities. People who are complexed and/or terminally scared of losing their job, for example. (I know someone, for example, who is wrongly convinced that he's too old to get hired in IT any more, so he lets the boss overwork him and verbally abuse him all day long.) But they won't thrive on it. They'll work harder all right, but then they'll just get stressed and sick like everyone else.
There are positive ways to _motivate_ someone into working harder. That's pressure. The key is to work on _raising_ morale, not on lowering it.
(And for the PHB's in the audience, that doesn't mean mandatory pointless meetings. Those never actually raise morale.)
E.g., among us nerds (and especially among young ones) some praise and recognition goes a _very_ long way. Lots of people overwork themselves every day just because they know someone will notice.
E.g., speaking of recognition, it always goes a long way to know that the rewards or praise are based on merit, not on nepotism or PC criteria. Seeing the most competent guy/girl be the first fired, and the biggest catastrophe _and_ slacker get promoted, is one way to drive morale down all the way.
E.g., if you give people the impression that the company cares about them, some of them will care for the company in return.
E.g., a sense of purpose also goes a long way. Working on some pointless collection of buzzwords that marketting thought up, and makes no sense, is not much fun. On the other hand, knowing that someone actually needs that program and for what, you'd be surprised what that can do.
E.g., honest feedback and bidirectional communication can do a whole lot. Again, I don't mean pointless ego-masturbation meetings, I mean actual communication. Even if someone has an unreasonable objection, do take the time to explain honestly why it can't be done. (Even if it's "we ran out of budget" or "I said the same thing, but the client really wants that feature anyway." It shows the boss is on your side, after all.)
Etc, etc, etc.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So maybe the fall of the American empire would be a good thing. Today's Romans enjoy a healthier and more pleasant lifestyle than America does.
Ever been to Europe? I think not. Try visiting this place, while it's still legal for a US person to travel abroad without being a member of one of the two Parties.
Yes I have, many times. I love Europe, actually, and wouldn't mind moving to some of the countries there.
Workers there have a lot of protections which make it difficult for employers to get them to work. I know a lot of people working as managers in places like Belgium and Netherlands that have terrible problems getting the lazy schmucks to do anything. They take sick days constantly (there is no limit, whenever they want) and don't get any work done, but you can't fire them because there are protections in place that prevent it.
I guess people will abuse any system when they can...
#!/
I noticed that one of the employees in the article is in the architectural business.
My gf is doing an internship at a studio, often working 50h weeks for 350 a month and no vacation or benefits. She's competing with graduated architects which offer to work for free because it's so hard to get work. He coworkers burn the midnight oil and push 60h week.
This is in Germany, where the average working week is 49,5 hours.
My mother is 57 and unemployed. Next year she might be forced to work for 1 per hour.
Socialism my ass.
Crack! Crack! Gimme gimme gimme CRACK!