Background Data and Battery Usage of Facebook's iOS App - <AUTHOR> https://www.macstories.net/linked/the-background-data-and-battery-usage-of-facebooks-ios-app/ <comment><USER2> I totally agree with this. I have been doing tests with Facebook's iOS app installed/uninstalled for month and without FB app, the battery is in much more better state during the day. I haven't done some crazy analysis, but noticed that removing the FB app increase my battery life for rough ~30%. I only use Safari to access the FB and I'm super happy about that. I spent less time on FB and have more battery. I highly recommend this approach to all my friends complaining about battery

</comment><comment><USER3> I did notice recently that if you launch Facebook and put your ear to the bottom of your iPhone you can hear that the audio is on (white noise like when turning volume way up on a stereo that isn't playing.

Just now I confirmed that's happening and then home-screened to bail out, and after a second or two the white noise stops. Seems like it should be pretty easy to do similar experiments aimed at proving the OP's hypothesis.

[Edit: I tried the same experiment after playing videos, etc. Speaker still sounds like it loses power after bouncing back to the home screen... so while there might be games being played with regard to the app's activity and battery usage... I'm not really compelled by the specific hypothesis put forth in this article as to how]

[Edit: Of course, still begs the question "Why is the speaker getting power at all?". I haven't found other apps that appear to do this.]

<comment><USER4> I think you will find many a device with this. I recall my Nokia N800 had a sharp snap after having played any kind of sound in a quiet environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Last week my SO was freaking out because she kept getting ads for things she had conversations about in person, but never looked up on her phone. A few days ago I asked her why we had a plastic bag from Games Workshop (we've never shopped there and the bag came from a Craigslist purchase we had made). Her phone was sitting on the table, and a few hours later she showed me an ad for Games Workshop on her news feed. This was on Android, and the Messenger app includes permission to use the mic at any time.

It might be audio being always on, or it might be more than that. They aren't above it.

<comment><USER6> Ever checked the T and Cs to see if they are capturing audio?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have had issues with playing music via Bluetooth (essentially the volume being too low) and research brought me to the Facebook app being open and closing it fixed it. Facebook is definitely doing funky stuff with audio that it should not be doing.

</comment><comment> ju-st I removed the Facebook Android app because everytime I opened it it used 1MB of data.

<comment><USER8> Try Facebook Lite. It's designed for low powered phones.

<comment><USER9> I tried installing Facebook Lite in the Google Play store but it says "This item isn't available in your country". I live in the US.

<comment><USER10> They intend for it to only be used in countries with slower internet. You can download the apk from [http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/facebook-2/lite/](http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/facebook-2/lite/) and it will work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've had to do the same thing for my iOS enterprise app. The issue is that you can't play audio if you're app is in the background and you haven't used your audio session in the past 1-2 minutes.

The workaround is to play a silent audio mp3 to prevent the app's audio session from being suspended.

The proper fix would be for apps to be allowed to start audio from the background

</comment><comment><USER12> Facebook pushes an update to their iOS app once every two weeks (I think). I wonder how much review scrutiny it really gets.

Anyone with experience on an iOS app like that have insight into what the App Store review process looks like when you're that big and ship that often?

<comment><USER13> App Store review can only do minimum security level check in reality. And actually there's not much they can do either. Let me give you 3 examples:

1) Hybrid apps that most contents are actually webpage, such as the tripadvisor app and at&t app at some point (not sure if it's still hybrid today)

2) Games. You can load new code as static files or contents, then the app parse and execute the code as a new update. This is quite common in mobile games. As games require frequent update like once or more per week, it's really an unwanted workaround to fulfill the update frequency requirement.

3) Do you remember/know the case recently that some hacker released a "poisoned" version of xcode and apps written by that xcode "automatically" contains code sending user info to that hacker?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I disabled video autoplay to see if that helps.

It also appears that the Youtube app spends a significant amount of time in background so FB may not be the only one doing something shady.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wonder how long before we get some stern words from Google about Facebook abusing priority messages to circumvent Doze.

</comment><comment><USER15> Facebook doing something user-hostile? Say it ain't so!

</comment><comment><USER16> This is the same kind of deceptive thing as VW.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not saying this to start a war, but I don't use an iPhone. I use an Android phone. I have found the Facebook Lite app on Android to use virtually no battery when idle. I know that this app was pretty much designed for low power phones. It's odd that on the one hand, they are thinking about low powered phones and using less data while on the other hand, as with iOS, they aren't.</comment>


A Bot that Calculates your quarterly taxes? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quarterlytaxcalculator.com/ <comment><USER2> Nice interface. Definitely takes a bit of anxiety out of thinking about taxes.

Direct link to Google Spreadsheet used for the calculations: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DR66Yqd3KaxX9Qje7QiV...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DR66Yqd3KaxX9Qje7QiVggRAlZ5VmaM2j4iTqKTO-6c/edit)</comment>


Why I Don't Do Unpaid Overtime and Neither Should You - <AUTHOR> http://thecodist.com/article/why_i_don_39_t_do_unpaid_overtime_and_neither_should_you <comment><USER4> The U.S. has a strong free enterprise foundation and its laws reflect this. Freedom of contract remains the rule even though it is much criticized in some circles and has been hedged considerably over the years. In employment, the old rule was that you could pretty much fire anyone at will for any reason and, if you did, you incurred no legal consequence. This is pure freedom of contract. In time, this unrestricted freedom came to be deemed repugnant where it bumped into important social policies - for example, that employers not discriminate on the basis of race. Hence, protective laws were passed and these circumscribed the old unrestricted freedom to have pure at-will employment relationships that gave an employer an open ticket to fire people for any reason whatever, even a repugnant one. That said, however, when you get down to the day-to-day employment relationships that most of us encounter, the at-will rules still prevail and, with limited exceptions, it really does remain the case that most people can be fired for any reason at any time and almost always without legal consequence. This may be seen as good or bad but it is the way of life under U.S. law with its strong bent toward free enterprise and freedom of contract.

The same pertains to overtime rules for employees. The U.S. does have a body of protective laws that require employers to pay overtime for excess hours worked, either by the day or by the week. But the historic relationship between employer and employee had a strong bias toward freedom of contract - that is, if an employer and an employee agreed to a certain working relationship, that was their prerogative and the government had no say in the matter. Again, this older form of unrestricted freedom led to consequences deemed repugnant as a matter of social policy (e.g., sweatshops). Thus, laws were enacted to abridge the older unrestricted freedom of contract (wage and hour laws, in the example considered here). But, as in the case of at-will rules, these laws did not disturb the large measure of freedom of contract that formerly prevailed except for the specific situations where a policy judgment was made that the workers were most vulnerable and in need of protection. Thus, U.S. overtime rules apply without question to low-skilled jobs and to low-paying jobs and to jobs where the employees have little or no independence or control over how they perform their duties. But these protective rules can and do peacefully co-exist with an equally important set of rules providing that high-skilled employees, skilled professionals, employees with substantial administrative responsibilities with managerial functions, and like positions are expressly exempted from the overtime rules. The idea is that, in a free economy, as a matter of policy, it is better for parties to retain freedom in defining the work requirements of a position than for the government to dictate protective rules where the parties are not deemed in need of protection. In other words, the employer-employee relationships for such exempt categories are deemed to be healthier if the parties are free to negotiate salary/bonuses or other compensation that is not tied to rigid rules about overtime. The laws let the parties have much more flexibility in deciding how to frame their relationships, and this basically reflects the old-style freedom of contract that has always characterized the U.S. economy. Protections were adopted as deemed necessary but they are limited as a matter of public policy. This can be seen as good or bad but it is the law in the U.S.

What does this mean in practice? It means, for example, that a computer professional can be paid a salary of $100K/yr and be asked to work like a slave, all without overtime compensation. But that same professional, if paid $30K/yr, is required to be paid overtime for excess hours worked, even if that person is on salary. One case is treated as appropriate for free choice by the parties without overriding restrictions; the other is not. And the difference, in this case, turns on the amount of salary paid - the highly-paid worker is treated as being able to protect his own interests while the relatively low- paid worker is not.

Europe clearly has taken a different approach and this too can be seen as good or bad depending on one's perspective. In general, in Europe, the idea of open-ended freedom of contract is suppressed in favor of more sweeping protective laws favoring employees. Whether this leads to a robust economy or chokes enterprise is open to debate but it clearly differs from the U.S. approach.

In this piece, the author criticizes the U.S. employment pattern as, in effect, requiring exempt computer professionals to work for free when they are required to work excessive hours tied to a fixed salary. In making this point, the author admits that his European biases are showing. The "U.S. view," if I can call it that, is not that the worker is being made to work for free but rather that the worker has not agreed to be paid by any hourly measure but rather for an overall performance to be rendered, no matter how many hours it takes. This might be regarded as "slavery," but (taking, for example, the exemption for executives) does anyone really believe that top executives have as their focus the exact number of hours worked as opposed to broader goals related to their job performance. The same can be said of professionals, as many computer professionals look primarily to the task and not to the hourly measure as the mark of their jobs. In my field, lawyers too see the hours worked as entirely secondary to their jobs. For every such executive and professional who would be deemed "helped" by overtime laws that might be extended to apply to their jobs, there would undoubtedly be many who would recoil at the limitations of suddenly not being able to do their jobs without regard to the scope of hours worked. I don't believe that most such employees see their work as "slavery" when they have to work excessive hours. I think they see it as career development. And, in any case, the U.S. law gives such employees freedom to become "slaves" if they so choose for their own reason. It is the old freedom of contract and highly skilled, highly compensated workers in the U.S. retain that freedom to choose, as do their employers.

Work-life balance _is_ very important as well, a point the author emphasizes. He seems to have made that choice later in life (as did I) and I commend him for it. But, while I can exhort others too to strive for such balance, I will not begrudge them the choice to work exceedingly hard (especially as they are first developing in their careers) to achieve other "unbalanced" goals. People do accomplish insanely great things by working insanely hard. If they choose to do this in their work as employees, that is their privilege and, as long as they are highly-skilled and highly compensated, I say more power to them if they do it without the benefit of protective labor laws.

<comment><USER5> There are two problems with your wall of text.

Firstly your comparison to lawyering is disingenuous, lawyering has the partnership model, you take a load of young naive idiots, you dangle this partnership jackpot in front of their noses and then you work them to the bone doing dull and even pointless work that you bill your clients many $$$s an hour for while the partners take the bulk of that money home. Lots drop out, some make partner, the cycle repeats. It's a 'jackpot' industry.

Programming is not that way, there's a massive demand for programmers, there's not a massive demand for young lawyers.

The second problem is your belief that working long hours = working 'exceedingly hard'.

There's a massive body of evidence that working past 35-40 hours per week that you're actually _less_ productive in the medium to long term past about a month, it's bad for your health and the whole scenario feeds on itself in a horrible vicious cycle as employees who decide to 'opt out' of it get punished with no promotions and lower raises, perhaps even fired.

You see posts like yours trotted out when anyone puts their hand up and says 'hey, why _are_ we working these long hours?'. Worse still in the UK, where a lot of companies also have this ridiculous culture, we have contracts in place specifying the amount of hours to be worked _but they are just ignored_. The employer is wilfully and knowingly breaking the contract and often lying to prospective employees in the interviews. But what can you do, you took the job and you can't have too many jobs in the last 2 years as people will begin to wonder.

But we have to protect startups and free enterprise right. Because all managers and CEOs know exactly what they're doing and have been taught that creating a culture of long hours rapidly creates pointless busy work zombies where everyone's losing.

And that's where you're argument falls flat on its face. Turns out we're not actually training any managers they just wing it and one of the intuitive fallacies everyone subscribes to is that more hours at the desk means more hours of production that somehow putting more hours means you're working 'exceedingly hard' instead of the truth which is 'exceedingly inefficiently'.

Perhaps it is time for government to step in as the free market's quite obviously failing at it as they refuse to listen to the scientists and worse are totally ignorant about studies done 100 years ago.

<comment><USER6> You're not arguing with Grellas so much as cherry picking sentences out of his comment and howling at them in isolation. If we extract the signal from your comment --- that partner-track law careers are problematic, that working unreasonably hard is a bad idea for employer and employee alike --- from the emotion, we find a series of arguments that Grellas himself likely agrees with.

In some cases I can guess that he agrees with your underlying argument because he's written comments to that effect in the past (for instance, you can use the search bar at the bottom of the page to find out some of what he thinks of partner-track law). In others, unfortunately, I can guess that he agrees because the very comment you're replying to says that he does.

I think I speak for a lot of people on HN when I ask that you not berate one of the more uniquely valuable contributors to HN for writing "walls of text". He writes differently than you and I; longer, yes, but also much more carefully and considerately. I have never, ever seen him address someone else on HN the way you just did him.

<comment><USER7> "You're not arguing with Grellas so much as cherry picking sentences out of his comment and howling at them in isolation."

That's certaintly a creative way to put it. But that is what everyone does when they make comments. They respond to things they don't agree with. The use of "cherry picking" in your context seems to indicate taking unfair pot shots. The use of "howling in isolation" brings up an image of a lonely dog in the dead of night. Why is that necessary exactly?

"I think I speak for a lot of people on HN when I ask that you not berate one of the more uniquely valuable contributors to HN for writing "walls of text"."

Then why do you need to say this? If there are people that think that they will downvote, right?

By the way this is not to say I agree with his language. I think it's great that grellas takes the time to write a "wall of text".

<comment><USER8> If you focus on individual points, then the discussion will degrade. Take the time to synthesize what the overall message from the post is, then respond to that. The danger of responding to individual points, instead of the message, is you start arguing about the trees, not the forest. It's the difference between an honest discussion and a game of "Gotcha!" I admit it's a difficult balance.

I will sometimes pull out individual sentences from a person's post, but only if I feel that sentence is representative of their overall point, or it is a mistaken premise that when corrected, the rest of the post is moot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I worked for a big company, I had a very simple rule:

If I make a promise to my team that I can reasonably keep, I owe it to them to do so.

I'd generally aim to under-promise and over-deliver, while feeling like I'm making a comprable (or bigger!) contribution in comparison to my peers. After some practice at this, I got reasonably good at estimating work. I'd work 20 to 50 hours per week depending on how accurately I estimate, usually aiming for (an achieving) about 35 hours of work. Only once or twice did I ever feel like I really put in any serious "overtime" and I blame that on estimation inexperience.

I made it a point to explain this philosophy (sans actual target hours) to every manager I've ever had. I always fed them the "Work/Life Balance" party line and reminded them that if I wanted my work to be my life, I'd join a startup (I have since founded one). They all seemed to appreciate my being forthcoming.

Once or twice I got a panicked email. The team was going to miss a deadline unless I stepped up to help out! Each time I replied that I had expressed my concerns about scope and timeline during the planning meetings. I'd remind the panicked person that we could simply cut the feature (always an option for a previously shipped product) and would offer my help and time in doing so. No one ever took me up on it.

<comment><USER10> It's too bad you couldn't openly tell your team how you were scheduling your time. It sounds like you developed a very good, consistent process. In my mind, that's exactly what a large company should be going for because it can scale.

<comment><USER9> I did tell them! See where I wrote:

> I made it a point to explain this philosophy (sans actual target hours) to > every manager I've ever had.

I simply didn't tell my manager exactly how many hours I targeted because it was less than the customary 40h/wk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't know much about US employment law, and what I do know, I don't like. But what I do know is this:

No employer has ever, ever given me free money, and I have never expected it. There for, I have never ever given an employer free time, and never ever will.

To do different is insane. It lowers one's worth since the deal is an exchange of money for time. It makes the employer think your free time is theirs to exploit and frankly damn wrong.

Like I say, the day employers give out free money is the time I give out free time.

<comment><USER12> So, I agree with the point made in another comment about this not being so much about overtime, but about crap jobs.

But:

> the deal is an exchange of money for time

It's not really, no. It's an exchange of _work_ for time. If you're doing an exchange of time, you'll be punching in and out, and the boss worrying about your "butt in seat" productivity metric is reasonable.

It doesn't necessarily follow that you should work 80-hour weeks for months on end, but the case where some extra hours in a crunch is warranted makes more sense. Of course, a good employer would seek to offset that, either with money, time off in lieu or otherwise, but that ties back to the crap jobs again.

<comment><USER13> There's an asymmetry here:

I want to see the exchange as money for time, because my work is not valuable to me (I don't get to keep the product!), but my time is. I want an upper bound on how much of the resource that's valuable _to me_ that the company is entitled to in exchange for their money.

The employer wants to see the exchange as money for work, because they couldn't care less how the work gets done. They want a lower bound on the amount of the resource that's valuable _to them_ that they get for their money.

<comment><USER14> And a difference of opinion:

I want to see the exchange as work for time, because I work much more effectively than many other people. An hourly-rate job is simply not attractive to me, because the hourly-rate will not effectively capture my value.

As explained by grellas above, overtime in the US is typically applied to replaceable workers who's hourly value is a more or less quantifiable resource. If I'm flipping burgers, painting a house, or banging out simple webapps based on someone else's design then it's fairly easy to quantify the value of my time.

However, if I'm working in an industry where force multipliers abound, for example software engineering, or any sufficiently advanced executive/management position, I would much rather capture the value of what I produce -- there simply cannot be a good fit with shoehorning me into an hourly value rate. It simply isn't an accurate way to represent my value.

This is best exemplified by jobs which supply equity stakes. If you give me a chunk of your company I'm no longer working for free, when I work overtime.

<comment><USER15> > I want to see the exchange as work for time, because I work much more > effectively than many other people. An hourly-rate job is simply not > attractive to me, because the hourly-rate will not effectively capture my > value.

Why not? If you provide better value per hour than others, you should also get higher hourly rate. If you just work more hours without more compensation, then you're just cheap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I agree with the author. We work to make a living, not live to work.

However, he thinks that in Europe there are more human conditions. Well, this is rapidly changing towards the american system. E.g. the bail out for Greece was offered with the exchange of passing new employment rules. Some of them are enabling employers to demand for more work time without extra compensation, or to fire much more easily without specific reasons. Another nice change, not yet implemented but soon to be, the employee will not get the full monthly salary if he had any sick days.

Furthermore, the public pension funds and health care is being demolished. Soon the only option will be to get in a insurance plan offered by your company (big companies have already started to offer such plans). So except if you're one of the very few top talented people, soon you'll be very depended on your job and will be forced to accept to work more working hours without any additional benefit.

Romania has already moved that way, and Italy will follow soon. And the rest of Europe after that.

This mentality that you must sacrifice your life for the benefit of your company, it is just absurd. If the law was enforcing less working hours and bigger compensations for overtime, there wouldn't be any competitiveness excuse. And the developed world should enforce the same work rules to the developing countries.

It's absurd, especially if you think about how much the unemployment rates have risen and how much the technology today automates tasks so no humans are needed, and the production of material goods is so high that most products are never sold and end in the recycle bin. It screams about lowering the working hours and the retirement limits instead of raising them.

<comment><USER16> I have begun to wonder why we don't have a regulatory authority, something along the lines of a national central bank but for working hours, dedicated to regulating the work-week. When unemployment and overemployment are low, work hours are kept stable. When there is a chronic over-demand in the economy, the work-week is lengthened. When there is a chronic over-supply in the economy, the work-week is shortened.

First World economies right now have an oversupply problem. Marx predicted the crises of capitalism due to overproduction and under-demand. We don't need a complete socialist revolution to deal with this issue (though I'm somewhat in favor of one), we just need to fine-tune the working week to productivity levels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's my problem with people who put in 80 hours a week: they don't write good code. At my first job - way back in the last millenium - we were creating a carrier class network device. I was hired to run the mail servers but ended up building an embedded linux that ran the PowerPC on our hardware - we also had a Strong ARM that ran a gig ethernet but that was under another guy. So, how did I go from mail server to an integral piece of the product? I took over for the guy who put a lot of time into not solving a problem. Before you can even get linux running on your hardware, you need a boot loader to initialize your hardware and get it into a state where linux will run. Our "hard worker" volunteered to write a boot loader and spent 60+ hours a week for the next 6 months writing it. But it never worked.

Management decided to let me take a crack at the boot loader. Now, I was in my early 20's. I had bars to drink at, a girlfriend to get some lovin' from, and parties to go to. I didn't want to spend 60 hours a week at my desk. So, I did what any lazy hacker would do: I found an open source project that was close to what we needed. The project I started from was PPCBoot and it was started by Wolfgang Denk for the purpose of booting hardware running a Power PC processor. I spent 2 weeks telling everyone else in the company that I needed their help on X, Y or Z; getting them to write some code; and burning the new version of PPCBoot onto the flash chip. After 2 40 hour weeks, something amazing happened: it worked. It configured the hardware and handed control to linux which booted up.

Anyway, that's my reason not to spend more than 40 hours at work in a week. All of the people who I've seen put in all those hours aren't really working. They're just playing with a neat project because they've always wanted to write a boot loader. The purpose of you job isn't to write code, it's to ship a product. If you keep that in the front of your mind at all times and focus your efforts on shipping product, you can "work" 40 hours a week and code a pet project on your own time.

<comment><USER17> Honestly that anecdote just proves that you were a better engineer than the 60 hour boot loader guy. It doesn't say anything about hours other than that some people will work hard even if they aren't making progress. You aren't claiming that he'd have done _better_ by spending only 2/3 the time, just that a solution (that he couldn't find) existed that fit.

Honestly I find myself amused at the extent of the argument here. Most people I've known in the tech world who work long hours generally do so because ... they like it. It's a way to define your life. It's a way to feel good about yourself. I'm sure there are programmers trapped in death march dungeons somewhere for exploitative wages, but they are the exception, not the rule.

<comment><USER18> I think the point is more that having some sort of time constraint perhaps helps force you to come up with more realistic solutions.

For example the number of startups with VC investment who seem to have spent 50%+ of their time creating a new NoSQL DB or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Please stop comparing overworking or non-optimal work conditions as slave labor. Slavery means you can not, either because of the law or threat of violence, leave the service of your master.

I've had bad jobs in my day. One I left (I was a "partner" @ startup) and it was a financially bad decision, yet it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Here is the difference between slavery & a crappy job; a person can choose to leave the crappy job even if it means living hand-to-mouth a slave can't.

I generally agree with what this author is saying. The best way to start thinking about your job is as though you are a contractor and your employer is your client. Remove the boss/employee template from your mind and start using the client/contractor template.

</comment><comment><USER20> I work 3 days a week for quite a large social game / mobile web company here in Tokyo. They are asking me every 3 months to become a "Seishain" - full time employee - but I will continue to take the no-benifits, paid by the hour option. The pay's not great but I'm learning a lot. And I can go home on the dot at 6.. However, everyone who is not part time is here before I arrive, and stays after I leave. . . .

<comment><USER21> I think that holds true for nearly any company in Japan though. The main reason people want to become "Seishain" is because you have much more job security. It is very hard to fire a full-time employee in Japan. And if it is a large company, there is the pension you get... a large sum of money when you retire, from the company. It is not uncommon to get an extra 10M - 20M yen when you retire.

Part-timers don't get any of those... but they get some more freedom in their lives (unless they choose to go against the grain, which most Japanese don't).

<comment><USER20> Yeah.. I've been there (at an admittedly insane company), and "enjoyed" the benefits of cheaper health care, pension.. at the cost of sleeping under the desk a few nights a week, coming in at 6 or 7 just to read every single mail which circulated not to get caught out having missed some minor little thing by my senpai..

Now I balance this with really laid back face-to-face english teaching. It's actually quite nice. Half the week staring at a glowing box, half the week talking casually with people who are motivated to learn. edit: I'm quite broke though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Like the old saying goes:

"I work for money. If you want loyalty, get a dog."

</comment><comment><USER23> I have worked at game development companies for nearly 20 years. Initially I worked a lot of overtime for free,but after a couple of years I started to feel the effects on my life. After that I mostly just did not do OT unless it was paid. One year on a badly run project I doubled my salary through OT pay, and though my life outside work was not good I was able to put a significant amount of money aside. The following year hourly OT pay was gone, but the expectations were not. I made it clear I would only do OT on rare occasions, such as my work falling behind and a colleague being dependent on it at the weekend, when he would be working and I would be having a life. Even this caused resentment and I had to do the walk of shame at 5pm every day, and I was laid off as soon as the game shipped. The sense of personal failure was very hard on me at the time, but 12 years down the line, I've had a successful career in games, while being upfront at the hiring stage about my attitude to OT. I have worked a handful of weekend days and never later than 8pm in the week. I didn't miss my son growing up, and I read him a bedtime story every night. I don't think this is possible for every programmer and every company, but you can make it work.

</comment><comment> buff-a _If you lose your job you may have to pay a lot more (COBRA) for a limited time_

No, you'll pay the same as you were paying. Its just that before, you thought you were being paid $100,000 when in fact you were being paid $120,000, and out of that came your health insurance and the other (more-than-) half of your social security and income taxes.

<comment><USER24> You pay 10% more on COBRA than your employer was paying on your behalf. But the gist of what your saying still stands.

<comment><USER25> Plus, COBRA payments are (generally) not tax-deductible, so add another 30-40% more.

<comment> buff-a A self-employed person can deduct health expenses against gross income. You are correct in that COBRA cannot be deducted in this way. But it can still be taken as an itemized deduction. I'm not a tax accountant, but my tax accountant is. Another gotcha: if you're taking the 60% markdown on COBRA from Obama, then no, you're not allowed to write it off at all, but I wouldn't be complaining about that.

<comment><USER25> Only the portion which is greater than 7.5% of your gross income can be deducted on Schedule A.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I work at Twitter, where i regularly work longs hours (my standard work day is something like 10 - 19:30) and am frequently on call. I even spend time at the weekends thinking and hacking on specific problems.

I feel that the author's post doesn't apply in my case, because:

\- Some of the problems i work on are amazing. They're interesting and fun, and i enjoy them outside the normal "work hours".

\- Twitter has an "unlimited"—be respectful to your team—holiday policy. I've probably taken about 6-7 weeks off in my one and a quarter years here.

\- Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are served for free. While you might not count that as 'being paid overtime', the costs of food can add up.

\- This behaviour is not required. I know people who do 9-5 and that's it. They get their work done within deadlines, and there's no issue with that.

So, am i to assume that Twitter is a huge exception? I'm not so sure. I think that while Twitter is a special environment, there are many companies that offer similar benefits.

Maybe the real statement shouldn't be "don't do unpaid overtime", but:

 _"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle."_ \- Steve Jobs

<comment><USER27> > Twitter has an "unlimited"—be respectful to your team—holiday policy. I've > probably taken about 6-7 weeks off in my one and a quarter years here.

Curious as to how these things work in the states. I take it that you pay for the time off from your salary? (E.g. you don't get any for the period) Do you have any time off that is paid by your employer?

<comment><USER28> It is all paid time off. A lot of tech companies in the US have this policy. I know software developers that have taken two months off (paid) after a big product launch. It is part of the compensation and perks.

Ironically, this policy is illegal in most European countries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Many industries are forbidden, by law, from unpaid overtime. The law specifically exempts the software industry from this requirement. Like so many other things about the culture here, this issue seems to come down to the US being afraid of its own shadow. We're the greatest country on Earth... we say so all the time. But to change the law and forbid unpaid overtime for the software industry, something that will make people's lives better here in the greatest country on Earth, is to risk losing all these programmers jobs overseas. A terrifying prospect. So we do nothing out of fear.

<comment><USER30> Programmers here are discussing if they choose to work unpaid extra hours or not. You don't make a country great by forbidding extra work regardless of the employee desires. You make a country great by allowing employers and employees to decide amongst themselves case by case. If labor wants to forbid this for other vocations good for them. I would like to keep my right to work more hours on salary or not.

<comment><USER31> Nobody is forbidding overtime work - they are exempting tech employees from receiving pay for the overtime they work. Much of this legislation was passed in the US through the lobbying of big tech corporations (Microsoft) to increase profit margins. I personally would like to revoke my right to work overtime for free.

<comment><USER32> They are not prohibiting tech employees from receiving overtime, nor are they prohibiting companies from paying tech employees overtime.

The law simply _does not require_ companies to pay overtime to tech employees (along with other, more traditional professionals such as doctors, accountants, and lawyers).

<comment><USER31> You're correct in that tech companies _can_ pay overtime but in real terms this legislation results in no tech companies that actually pay overtime (but Im sure there is some rare exception). I'm sure there is a bandwagon of free- market folks who would be quick to point out why this is good for tech workers but from a practical point of view it has lead to an industry that treats long hours for the same pay as the norm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Towards the end, he gets to the main point - the US health system is not set up for people who aren't wage slaves for a big company. The idea that a company should pay your pension is also kind of dumb.

<comment><USER34> Bingo. What to do about it though? Would meaningful reform of the current system be possible? Where could one start?

<comment><USER35> The Australian system is quite functional and, unlike the USA, we still have a functioning economy. Granted it mainly comes from digging up bits of the country and selling it cheap to China, but it's not all bad news. The USA could do with a lot more socialism than it's currently got.

<comment><USER36> Australia was successful before the mining boom started. The policy reforms of the 80s and 90s are the basis of our long-term success.

<comment><USER33> Well, we were OK in the 90s. The mining boom, and the fact that overseas lenders are only just starting to question our ability to take in more debt has what has kept us out of recession, for now.

Medium term, we might be in for a beating, like the US. Long term, we need more innovation. Name Australian innovation. Easy, right? Now name one innovative Australian company.

<comment><USER36> The boom was abruptly interrupted here, as it was everywhere else, in 2008 when the GFC kicked off. My old man works for Rio, who dumped _tens of thousands_ of contractors almost immediately, freezing tens of billions of dollars of projects.

What really saved our bacon was a) labour market flexibility (ie many companies renegotiated hours instead of being forced to sack people) and b) that the Reserve Bank had lots of room to manoeuvre. The Commonwealth could also borrow deeply because it had no long term debt.

None of these conditions was accidental. They were, as I said, consequences of decades of sensible reform by both major parties.

> Easy, right? Now name one innovative Australian company.

There are thousands. They're just not necessarily talked about by the HN set. Off the top of my head there's Cochlear, the half dozen companies spun off from NICTA, Kaggle, Computershare which was the first of its kind and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What about the part where programmers work overtime, but not because they are demanded to?

I consistently see programmers, even in my own team, who happily stay 60-70 hours per week because the idea/concept they are working on means something significant to them.

I find this phenomenon to be the exception of what your post has mentioned. Although the post was mostly accurate, I encounter this exception on a daily basis.

While those 60-70 hrs./week aren't at 100% efficiency, the idea that a programmer will stay the extra time to produce high quality work while maintaining their own personal life says a lot about their view of their job and career. To some, it's just that - a job. However, others see it as an art (just as any profession, I suppose) and strive to increase their skills - <USER2> understand that invested time equals increased knowledge and a more refined skill set.

<comment><USER34> If your job is such a great learning experience, or the mission so captivating that you want to work 70 hours a week on it, you should be allowed to do that. In my experience few positions will be so exciting that you'll want to do that though. One can only get so much thrill out of writing CRUD apis for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> If you are constantly needing to work 70-80 hours a week that generally implies an issue with planning and/or engineering practices.

</comment><comment><USER39> Well, I have an American way of looking at things. Why is 40 hours the magical number? Why is it that you're working for free after that point? He was correct in the first place that it's devaluing your hourly worth (assuming time is fungible). But guess what, if you can't get the job done that the employer wants to pay you the given salary for in the 40 hours you expected to satisfy him with, and the employer would let you go if you told him that this wasn't what you signed up for, you _are_ devalued. The employer hired you for a certain amount of work and was willing to pay a certain amount of money for it. If you made an agreement about the work to be accomplished, and did not make an agreement about hours, and you end up working 80 hours a week, you _are_ being paid overtime. Your base salary is just much lower because you're not worth very much to that particular employer at the base salary.

Now, if the employer would _not_ fire you if you put your foot down, it's a matter of knowing your true worth. And I definitely agree it's worth doing this if you end up in this sort of situation. Either you part ways from a job that isn't worth it to you, or you get the conditions that are worth it to you. Negotiations have some leeway, you don't really know what the other person is willing to give up.

</comment><comment><USER40> This is a rant that's a bit all over the place.

The author points out a lot of exceptions (eg working at a startup or somewhere where you might get something out of it). If you take out all those exceptions, you basically end up with the crap jobs.

The real problems with a crap job isn't the unpaid overtimes... it's that it's a _crap jobs_.

The fact is though, you get as much out of pretty much anything in life as you put in. If you want to working 9-5 5 days a week, you can probably find a job that'll let you do that if you try, which is fine, but I probably wouldn't expect anything but stagnating in it.

I too have been a contractor. Never again. It's the ultimate in _transactional work_ [1]. When I did do it though, I _always_ negotiated an hourly rate. Employers love a daily rate because what is a day exactly? An hour is unambiguous.

Health insurance in the US is a problem. This is known. The lack of vacation here is (IMHO) a problem too.

I now have a great job and I have it because I put in effort (both at work and outside). YMMV.

[1]: <http://cdixon.org/2009/10/23/twelve-months-notice/>

<comment><USER41> In the real world, there aren't only great jobs and crap jobs. Most jobs are just jobs. Period. You put in work, you get paid. It's not horrible, it's not always great fun either, but it's neither awesome nor crap.

This is what most people do for a living. If you call that "stagnating" or "crap", you missed out half the point of the post: that the majority of people don't live to work, they work to live. They don't expect to get any fulfillment out of their job, they get it out of their life _outside_ of work.

The idea that you cannot expect to get much out of life if you only put in 40 hours a week is bullshit that reduces the majority of the population to drones who's happiness is irrelevant.

<comment><USER34> If you live your work life, say from when you're 25 to 65, working from 9 to 5 on something that you don't really care about but you do just to pay the bills, aren't those 75,000 hours of your life you flushed down the toilet?

That's almost half of your adult life, if you exclude sleep, that you throw away just so you can "enjoy" the other 8 hours a day you have. I personally have failed miserably to be happy with my life if my 8 hours of work a day sucked or were mediocre, I want all of my waking hours to have meaning. Not everybody has that luxury, but I feel it's something we should all strive for.

<comment><USER42> Tell that to the people cleaning after you in the office. The people picking up your trash or the millions of other jobs that pay the bill.

Now if we are only talking in the domain of information workers. There is still CRUD to be developed or the 1 millionth website designed or other boring business logic to be developed.

I got this questions many times if you win the lottery would you still be doing your job. Hell no and I love my job. But there are other things I enjoy even more...

<comment><USER34> Why do I have to compare my situation to that of a latin-american middle-aged lady that ran away from the crippling poverty of her country to pursue her version of the American dream? How does that put in perspective 300 grand I dumped into six years of education at two top 5 US institutions and years of experience at industry giants?

If I had unlimited money, I would still work in technology and with technology, I simply love learning and hacking too much. I would not be writing mindless Java CRUD though, unless perhaps if those were my customers and I somehow felt that someone's life somewhere will so greatly benefit from it that I HAVE to do it for their sake.

<comment><USER42> What a stereotyping. I think in America a lot of people have 2 jobs or maybe 3 jobs. They must be loving their job. America is the greatest and best country if have to dump 300 grand in education.

Luckily I can study at a university in Belgium that's one of the top 100 universities in the world for a fraction of that amount.

Actually If I had unlimited money I would do the same thing as what Bill Gates is doing now. It benefits people too and you don't have to do the work :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I used to work at a company that routinely worked people well over 40 hours/week. I left because I felt I was losing the best years of my life doing tedious projects, however I know a lot of people who stayed and who still work there. Its not like people don't know the situation. No one looks at routine 60 hour weeks and says 'yeah, this is about right'.

Everyone has their own reasons for staying, or for leaving. One big reason is the 120k yearly salary they make (in SF). But NONE of these people are slaves. Anyone who uses the term slaves loses all credibility. Feel free to call them sheeple all you want, but _they're not slaves_.

People need to learn from their own mistakes. You can't teach people lessons on a grand scale. Everyone needs to find their own career paths.

The biggest problem with employment is not that we need more regulation (no no no we dont), its that we have a culture where we view jobs as privileges rather than simply: me exchanging my time for your money. (as others have pointed out, health care issues are a big factor here)

<comment><USER44> A better term than "slave" is probably "golden handcuffs". You are trapped by what you are given, whether that's healthcare, salary, vesting, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> "For men fright at relinquishing their material goods, but shackle their time to others willingly."

This is a paraphrased quote from a weird version of the Stoic Philosophy of Seneca; I'm sure the correct quote is out there, but hopefully you get the point:

Your time is your most valuable asset. Dole it out like your employers (or clients, etc.) dole out their money: carefully.

I know people who'll complain about taxes, drive further to get to a cheaper gas station, order goods in bulk to save money, etc. all to save some cash. Rarely do these people have this diligence with the allotment of their time.

Be careful and cautious with how you use your time. View it as something being spent, and if higher dollars means less free hours then don't do it.

This philosophy, in my (albeit small amount of) experience, helps you avoid a lot of the issues OP brings up.

Be careful, people. Paper money can blow away in the wind but then be recouped fairly easily. The few seconds you spent reading this comment, for example? Permanently gone. Be wary of how you spend your time...

</comment><comment><USER46> You should be paid to do a fixed amount of work (generate a certain amount of value for your employer), not work a fixed number of hours. If you can get that work done in 10 hours a week, everybody wins. If you need to work 70 hours a week to do that work, well, maybe you're not a good fit for the job.

<comment><USER47> How do you consider the factor "good work"? You can finish a job quickly, but it'll bite you (or a coworker) in the ass later, or you can do the job well, but take you longer.

As a programmer, I can't thing of a worse way of management than the former. You'd have to start defining criteria for "good work", and then spend tons of time reviewing. Nightmare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> When I get paid to work I really care that the work I do is worth the money I am paid. That is, if I'm paid for 40 hours, I feel its important to give my employer 40 hours of good solid work. From time to time, I don't mind going above and beyond, things happen and sometimes it takes a significant effort to correct them, a bit of overtime is fine. But I strongly feel that any of those companies that pay people for 40 hours of work, but generally expect them to work 60 or 80 hours most weeks are abusing the relationship on their side. What they are looking for is a seriously large discount in labor costs. Unless there is some 'other' form of compensation that balances it out, then it is clearly abusive (and quickly leads to burnout, so they aren't even getting value for the hours worked).

Paul.

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm not a big fan of unionized work but it is worth mentioning that when developers agree to work in poor conditions like this it changes the social norm and negatively impacts the economics surrounding software development.

If 2 developers are working 60 hours a week they are essentially putting a third developer out of work. (I understand that studies show you can't be as productive over a certain number of hours but the principle remains the same) Unless there is a large pool of unemployed developers in the market this need for developer number 3 will in turn drive the cost for a developer up as the market will be more competitive. This is simply supply and demand at work.

<comment><USER28> The weakness in your argument is that developers are not fungible commodities in practice. You can't just hire a third developer in many cases so no one is being put out of work. For many companies (like mine) there are far more open positions than we can find qualified developers to fill them.

The reality in the market is that there is a shortage of developers, or at least developers with the talent and skill required. This is not an argument for working 60 hours per week, just that you can't solve that problem by hiring more developers. There are not enough good developers as it is.

<comment><USER49> I understand what your saying but if the need for developers truly outweighed the market the cost would continue to rise until an equilibrium is approached. In many areas as the cost goes up balance is found with outsourcing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> _which is not all that common in this industry_

In context, it sounds like he means "which is not uncommon in this industry."

</comment><comment><USER51> I have noticed that the example you set when you start somewhere new is what is expected of you for the rest of your time at that company. To clarify, if you start a new job and work for free an extra 40 hours a week then you will forever be expected to do that.

I made the mistake of doing that to 'prove' myself and I ended up working very long hours at a place which I wasn't particularly fond of. The person sitting close to me worked exactly 8-5 from day one. Everybody knew he wouldn't be at work after 5 and they never expected it.

</comment><comment><USER52> Sometimes the overtime is implicit in the rate. If you joint a sweatshop that pays 100K, you know going in that it's not $50/hour for 2000 hours, it's more like $40/hour for 2500 or $33.33 for 3000. It's not unpaid, it's built into the expectation.

The real question is, "How much do you want to work?" If you are a talented hacker, you can answer that however you want. If you are 21 and looking for someone to teach you a trade while paying a good wage in a tough job market, it is a more difficult choice.

</comment><comment><USER53> All I want to know is: why do I have to work as many (unpaid) hours as necessary to get the job done, but I have to count the hours I take off?

<comment><USER54> This seems to be a cultural problem with the US. I agree with everything the author has said, but let me play devil's advocate: What is stopping a employee -- in a free market with specialized skills -- from adding a provision in his/her employment agreement for payment for hours worked >40 hrs/wk.

If the employer values you they will either tell you not to work more than the 40, or tell you when you can -- shifting the power to you.

There is no rule -- or should there be, about negotiating such terms.

Switching back, I think this should arrive more from our culture as it takes an assertive individual to do this as of now. I am a little hesitant to make such terms gov't mandated -- but I would like to hear arguments for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Whilst I agree with the general principle of not working yourself to death (nobody ever says on their death bed, 'I wish I'd spent more time in the office'), I think the author of this piece is missing something crucial.

I regularly work more than 40 hours a week, not because I have to, but because I want to learn. One day I'd like to go freelance or perhaps start up a business, but I need to skill up first. I'm lucky that I have a job in my chosen sector of mobile web development, something which pays me to learn about the technologies I am passionate about. I am seizing the opportunity to learn as much as possible so I can be in a position to just work when I want to in later life.

IMO the author is looking at this from an experienced point of view. Juniors and those starting out often have no choice but to work a little longer to get where they want to be in 20 years time. There's nothing wrong with that, surely?

</comment><comment><USER56> Generally IMHO not paying overtime usually masks inefficiencies in your business. If someone is having to work 70-80 hour weeks to get the job done then something is messed up somewhere in your process.

Paying overtime is an easy way to spot these area as its immediately visible to any half brained manager.

</comment><comment><USER57> The title is misleading.

[IANAL] In the United States, for a person in a salaried position, work week hours beyond 40 are not legally classified as overtime.

For salaried positions, the length of the workweek and compensation for additional hours are always subject to negotiation (for hourly positions compensation for overtime is also negotiable but cannot be less than the statutory minimums).

In my opinion, the author's analysis of economics entailed by salaried positions is rather naive. Hourly rate of pay is often less important than the monthly or weekly or yearly rate, i.e. cashflow is often the more important consideration. For example, if one's household maintenance is $10,000 per month, then monthly income, rather than hourly rate, is likely to be a more critical issue in regards to compensation.

</comment><comment><USER58> Wow, that's a pretty disjoint rant. It boils down to this:

"I'd rather have a work and life balance that I can enjoy."

Which has nothing to do really with working overtime and everything to do about how you approach work and life. I think one could boil down the philosophy into 'if you're working too much and your balance is out of whack, then quit.' And it is quite reasonable. In the Bay Area families can be especially hard hit by people who over commit.

That being said, in spite of the Author's disdain for economics, the interrelationship between who is available to work, pay, and whether or not they are willing to stay, does 'fix' the problem magically.

</comment><comment><USER59> There is no contract stipulation in my contract that says I might need to do overtime. The only mention of overtime is the fact that it is unpaid.

So I've never done it. I get in at 8:30am and leave at 5pm every day.

<comment><USER6> There doesn't have to be; if you're told to get X done before leaving the office, and 5pm rolls around with X undone, you can be fired. That's the nature of at-will employment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> That's really true And you are right about over hours. Why should I work more hours and receive money only for 40 hours a week? But sometimes(I mean my case) if you like your work and project and it is intereting to you to do this job, why not to work a little more for example, because sometimes you should finish task today - for your own purpose - not to forget smth. tomorrow. But I said that only for 1-or max 2 hours a day and only sometimes, and you can use this hours if you want for example leave work in friday earlier.

</comment><comment><USER61> _In Europe your health is not tied to your employment in any way._

This statement is just wrong. In Estonia, health insurance is subscription based, paid as a tax from your salary.

<comment><USER62> So you lose your health insurance when you lose your job? How is health insurance for unemployed people handled in Estonia?

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> i'm never a fan of these blanket statements such as "i won't work unpaid overtime". Some jobs are 35 hours, and some jobs are 70 hours. Some jobs pay 40k, and some jobs pay 200k. Who said that 40hr week is the holy and undisputed threshold everyone should abide by? Look at construction workers, some of them work from sun up to sun down, 6-7 days a week (i sure did when i was younger) and there is no such hour standard. Sure they are often paid on how much work gets done, but at the end of the month, many won't make more than someone with a good salary working in an office writing code. I am not trivializing writing code. that's what i do, and i often work 60-70hr weeks, and sometimes it's a stressful time. But i do get paid accordingly (not in overtime, but i consider my salary to be great), and i do get a lot more done than average person would in 40hrs. I guess if your employer tells you it will be 40hrs and it turns out to be 70, thats a problem. but in my experience most of the time you know exactly what you're getting into when accepting a job (besides occasional crunch times couple times a year).

</comment><comment><USER64> If you hate your job and have no interest in the success of your company, good advice. If you love your job, there's nothing wrong doing it a bit more. I sometimes see myself work 12 hours a day just because I can't get my mind of a coding problem. And I sincerely hope the company I work for become successful.

</comment><comment><USER65> Coming from a student, for those who might really enjoy the project they are working on and have a comfortable enough lifestyle to not worry about money, working more is its own reward. I am only paid for a maximum of 20 hours a week though I work more than that since I enjoy working.

<comment><USER42> Well explain to the your children that they can't get more food because daddy likes the work more over getting paid.

A bit harsh but understand that not all people live in the same context. Single, student, ...

<comment><USER65> I said for those who don't have to worry about money, from a student. But thanks for restating that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Work does, quite literally, _kill us_ \- [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-22/the-worse-the- econo...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-22/the-worse-the-economy-gets- the-longer-people-live-peter-orszag.html)

</comment><comment><USER67> This doesn't work when one works in a multi-national company. My colleagues in other locations will eat my lunch because they are less concerned about work/life balance and a lot more hungry.

<comment><USER68> That's when you work smarter, not harder.

I've found that the biggest benefit of working reasonable hours is that it gives you time & energy to self-reflect and look at your process as a whole. Most work processes have inefficiencies that can be eliminated if you look at the process as a whole. If you do that, you can easily accomplish more in 6 hours than your colleagues in other locations can in 12. That in turn gives you more time to invest in other process improvements and tools, which in turn let you accomplish still more, and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> This is stupid. Why? Because you are getting legal advice from someone who isn't a lawyer. The spirit of his post is fine, but the reality, for a lot of people, is very different.

<IANAL>

In Ontario, the Employment Standards Act, which defines all of this (and a lot more) has a ton of exemptions. Here's the exemptions for "Information Technology Professionals":

[http://www.labour.gov.on.ca/english/es/tools/srt/coverage_go...](http://www.labour.gov.on.ca/english/es/tools/srt/coverage_government_it.php)

Notice that we are exempt from "Hours of Work", "Daily Rest Periods" and "Overtime" to name a few. This means that, aside from your employment contract, there are no laws that protect your right to refuse unpaid (or paid) overtime.

<comment><USER70> It's good thing you're not a lawyer because nothing he said violated the law or a contract. :) Unless I missed it, the only thing he discussed relating to laws was how other countries dealt with this sort of thing. Refusing to work unpaid hours is just fine, perhaps you will be fired, but it is definitely you're right but no boogeyman is going to come and lock you up for banging out mindless Java code to meet some unrealistic deadline.

<comment><USER69> First, he suggests that no one should work overtime, which isn't practical for people who can't afford to get fired. Second, he suggest that there's no benefit to working over time, while many would see keeping your job as a benefit.

I'm not sure if he realizes that refusal to work overtime can, in itself, be a reason to get fired, or if that consequence simply doesn't matter to him. Either way, saying that they shouldn't matter to any one else is incorrect.

Also, the entire health care angle is weird. Both Canada and UK have public health care, but both work a lot of overtime:

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4149835.stm> [http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/Unpaid+overtime+grow...](http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/Unpaid+overtime+growing+problem/1889928/story.html)

<comment><USER71> It's only impractical in a poor job market. I take it you write code?

As a fellow Canadian, I have only one suggestion: get the fuck out of Canada. The market for programmers is piss poor, the selection of jobs anemic and mostly drudge-work monkeying. There are other geographies that offer much more interesting work, double-to-triple Canadian salaries, and a strong enough employment scene that _nobody_ can hold much over your head, least of all fears of being on the street.

You sound like you're being bullied. Your employer is holding your basic survival over your head to get you to commit to unreasonable demands. I'd highly suggest turning this around.

<comment><USER69> I was in Canada for most of my life. I'm in Asia now. I agree, getting the heck out of Canada is a good idea.

None of this is about me. I just think the article really comes off quite sheltered..."I can do what I want and who cares if I get fired, so should you!"

<comment><USER71> > _"I just think the article really comes off quite sheltered..."I can do what > I want and who cares if I get fired, so should you!"_

I don't see that sentiment in the post.

There are two takeaways for me from the post:

1 - You have more chips to play with than you know, particularly in this industry. We're not fighting over factory line work here, we're people with a highly coveted skill set that is (at least for now) at incredibly high demand world-wide. Abusive employers would _like_ for you to believe that you have no choice but to submit, but in reality people in our line of work have an almost comically absurd number of options right now. If you are programming and dealing with this, you probably don't actually have to, and your fears of getting fired and unable to find other work are likely unfounded.

"You're going to get fired if you don't submit to my unreasonable demands, and you're lucky to have a job at all!" is usually a scam. Triply, quadruply true for our field.

2 - If you _do_ find yourself in a position where your freedom to say "fuck you" to an abusive employer is compromised (no other jobs in the area, collapsing industry, etc), you need to get yourself away from that kill-zone as quickly as humanly possible. If you need to retrain your skillset, do so. This is a problem that will never correct itself, and you _can_ get out. If you have high expenses that limit your savings rate, and thus your unemployment runway, do something about it. Your employment mobility is _the_ negotiation leverage in this line of work, and you should never do anything to compromise this (like, say, take out an unwisely large mortgage).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> If there are no cost of overtime, I think the company lack a feedback on how well planning, estimation and execution do.

With no feedback there are less reason to change the company for the better.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you don't like unpaid overtime, move to Massachusetts! Programmers aren't overtime-exempt here.

</comment><comment><USER66> "Work hard and go home!" - Amen, amen, amen!

</comment><comment><USER73> The culture of overwork in America in general (not just in IT) seems simply pathological, and I just don't understand it.

The crazy overtime that people in the medical profession are expected to put in is probably one of the most egregious examples, because lives could literally be lost as a consequence of errors made due to lack of sleep and overwork.

Lawyers are typically worked to death at law firms.

Wall St is famous for making people slave away virtually non-stop -- making work your life and having no life outside of work is quite common. Of course, big bonuses are promised -- and delivered to senior people -- but more junior people often aren't so lucky.

Even teachers, who many people think "have it so easy", actually spend a huge amount of time outside of school hours grading papers and making lesson plans. Their "long vacations" are also typically filled with work-related activities.

And don't even get me started on how low-wage employees and undocumented workers are typically treated.

It seems no matter where I look, people are working their assess off in America -- and suffering the consequences: burnout, a shitty life/work balance through which their families, friends, and their non-work lives suffer.

And for what? It's not like many of the companies these people work for couldn't afford to hire more people to reduce the workload to sane levels.

I'm really amazed at how highly skilled employees at prestigious law firms and Wall St firms are made to work like mad. Those firms could easily afford to hire more junior people to pick up some of the lower-level work -- but they don't.

As a result, a lot of these firms are like revolving doors, with people dropping like flies. The carrots of money are dangled in front of their faces, but otherwise the firms don't really seem to care about their employees -- and will often drop them without a second thought (even if business suffers as a result, which it often does).

And it's just so incredibly dangerous and downright unethical to make doctors and nurses work a crazy amount of overtime with little or no sleep.

Why is it so difficult for these companies to offer their employees a healthy life/work balance? Why is a big paycheck is supposed to solve everything? Why don't more companies offer their employees a healthy amount of time to sleep at night instead of just more cash?

Business will improve as productivity improves as a result (and business should know this well by now, as there have been tons of studies to show it). Employees and their families will be healthier and happier. Healthy and happy employees are clearly better employees, especially compared to the super- stressed near-burnout heart attack candidates that so many of these firms seem to prefer to cultivate.

Improving the life/work balance seems like a huge win-win situation for both employers and employees, and a no-brainer. What am I missing?

</comment><comment><USER74> you get a bad deal when you negotiate without leverage.

</comment><comment><USER75> Its not always about the money I earn now, or over the next two weeks. Looking at thing from that perspective is not just a narrow minded way of looking but a very destructive thing over the longer run.

I push 16 hours work day packed with productivity at the extreme, why? Sure I don't get paid for all that immediately. But bear in mind incrementally over the years I have learned tons more than the average guy. I am also better trained to perform on my current job than my peers. The chances of me doing some thing big are higher, I am better aligned to a good job/promotion or a raise.

Basically when somebody is talking of career development and over time this is what they mean.

I joined this industry 5 years back. Without fancy degrees, Ivy league brand, marks and grades. Today I'm far ahead of most of my peers who joined with me then. Ofcourse I have faced a lot of ridicule, mockery as to why like a fool I do so much work for free. I am not doing anything for free, I am just ok with temporary loss in compensation for a premium later.

In you and your research by Richard Hamming - <http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html> , This point is mentioned:

 _Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!

What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - <USER3> is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this. _

And trust me this incremental learning and productivity give mindblowing results over time.

</comment><comment><USER76> first world problems

</comment><comment><USER77> Do you know there are people working in sweatshops at really low wages? Be glad you're not there yet.

<comment><USER77> Seriously?</comment></comment>


New App Letting People Get Paid For Smartphone Photos - <AUTHOR> http://www.outletmedia.co/ Check it out. I just started using it. Seems pretty cool. I'm just posting all of my pictures. <comment><USER2> A landing page with white text on a pale grey background? What is their UI designer smoking?

That, and I can't pull up the "Sign up" page or view information about any of the available photos (I see the thumbnails, but nothing happens when I click) on IE 8.</comment>


Speaking in Tongues: From Elvish to Dothraki, the rise of invented languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122961/fantastical-rise-invented-languages <comment><USER3> _So, the language Peterson is using isn't scientific, it's an act of cultural interpretation. Which is, of course, fine, and a great reminder that linguistics is a subject that connects many different fields of knowledge. But when I see an advertisement for Game of Thrones, I see a cultural vision that is inaccurate, distorting, and bears a very specific relationship to the European past. It isn't an innocent one. I see a Tolkien-inflected vision of the Middle Ages, with the sexual violence and warfare and ethnic stereotyping amped up to a pitch so cartoonishly horrendous that I can't look at it._

PC crap in an otherwise really interesting article.

It's not amped up actually. The degree of butchery that goes on in historical outbreaks of violence is astonishing to the post-19th century mind. Mass executions of enemies and conquered cities (and accompanying rape and pillage) happened with regularity in some parts of history.

One of the noted advancements of the Mongol warfare style in the middle ages, especially under Genghis Khan, was development of efficient mass execution tactics. Sexual violence and warfare _happened_ at a cartoonishly horrendous pitch. Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast has an amazing series on the Mongol conquests, "Wrath of the Khans" if you wanna know more.

<comment><USER4> > It's not amped up actually. The degree of butchery that goes on in > historical outbreaks of violence is astonishing to the post-19th century > mind. Mass executions of enemies and conquered cities (and accompanying rape > and pillage) happened with regularity in some parts of history.

"... in some parts of history"? Atrocities like that have never ended - <USER2> nature doesn't change. In the civil wars in western and southern Africa, rape is regularly used as a weapon of war. We all know the kind of massacres IS has been committing. I don't know an awful lot about Genghis Khan, but I'm pretty sure the machete-wielding executioners of the Rwandan genocide must have been just as effective. That kind of violence has nothing to do with the time period in which you live, there's nothing magic about the post-19th century world/mind. It's about humans being, well, inhuman. And that, unfortunately, can include pretty much everybody.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wish that conlangs were more popular. There are many bad natural languages that could need replacement. I live in Europe, and the languages is one of the things that annoys me the most about this continent. For example, languages like Dutch, German and Spanish use guttural sounds. Normally, when you try get rid of slime from your throat, you make guttural sounds - why on earth do people use that to communicate with? It's ugly. Or take some of the grammar of natural languages, like the das, der and die in German. I think "the ticket" in German can be called der Farhschein, die Fahrkarte or das Ticket - it makes no sense.

Maybe I should put my feet where my mouth is, and start learning Esperanto or something...

<comment><USER4> While I second your wish that conlangs were more popular (I learnt Toki Pona some time back), I would ask you to refrain from such subjective language criticisms as "it's ugly". I speak English and German natively, and I can't stand it when people criticize the other language on such personal grounds.

As for your take on the redundancy of natural languages, I would point out that it is perfectly natural and can probably be found in just about any language. (Otherwise, there would be no such thing as a thesaurus...) To stick with your example, you could also talk about "the boarding pass" instead of "the ticket" in English.

Indeed, the redundancy of words and vocabulary forms much of the beauty of a language. Especially in English much of poetry is the art of choosing the right word. I love the way T.S. Eliot puts it towards the end of his poem "Little Gidding":

      And every phrase
      And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
      Taking its place to support the others,
      The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
      An easy commerce of the old and the new,
      The common word exact without vulgarity,
      The formal word precise but not pedantic,
      The complete consort dancing together)

So please, if you want to criticize a language at all, let's stick to the objective side as far as possible. German grammar is difficult, English pronunciation can be utterly confusing - I'll grant that. But let's not talk about any "bad natural languages". Because there is beauty to be found in every tongue.

<comment><USER5> Actually, I don't mind redundancy. I meant to criticize the lack of logic and consistency. If it was logical and consistent, it should have been das Farhschein, das Fahrkarte and das Ticket :-)

<comment><USER6> It isn't illogical or inconsistent. The notion that grammatical gender is illogical comes from a misunderstanding of the purpose of grammatical gender. We learn in schools that words are either masculine, feminine, or neuter.

Gender is useful for several things: think of it as a technology with multiple applications, some more obvious than others. The most obvious would be to indicate whether a pronoun is male, female, or inanimate.

One of the more important uses for gender is for agreement. Agreement in gender helps to denote which noun an adjective belongs to. Of course, it's not foolproof, but it's good enough. In addition to agreement, genders increase the information redundancy of words, which is useful when communicating in a noisy, lossy medium.

Admittedly, genders that actually correspond to the natural gender of the things they refer to may not detract from the purpose of information redundancy and of agreement, but as with many things in life, good enough is sufficient cause to adopt the status quo.

What I'm trying to say is, under the supposition that genders should reflect natural gender, they do indeed appear illogical and inconsistent. But genders do indeed have practical purposes and do indeed develop according to certain rules, and if we judge genders by these criteria instead, their development does indeed follow rules and is consistent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone interested in this subject would do well to read "In the Land of Invented Languages".[1]

[1] - [http://www.amazon.com/Land-Invented-Languages-Adventures- Lin...](http://www.amazon.com/Land-Invented-Languages-Adventures- Linguistic/dp/0812980891/)</comment>


How to Host Your Personal Website for Free with AWS S3 and Cloudflare - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-host-your-personal-website-for-free-3101c4ab2e49 <comment><USER2> [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cipne6/how_to_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cipne6/how_to_host_your_personal_website_for_free/)</comment>


Coding contest: $200 for your evening Rails project - <AUTHOR> http://filer.progstr.com/1/post/2012/05/coding-contest-200-for-your-weekend-rails-project.html

<comment><USER2> Why Rails only? Any reason?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because our service, Filer.io, currently supports Rails. However, Node.js support is coming really soon and Node projects will be welcome in the next contest.

BTW, what is your technology of choice?

<comment><USER2> Ah, makes sense. Django is my preference though I work with PHP (Zend Framework) professionally as nothing else (besides .NET) employs where I live :-(

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing, we are looking forward to expand to PHP and Python as soon as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sounds interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, good luck!</comment></comment>


The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to "The Office" (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ <comment><USER2> A long and absolutely excellent read. Certainly its theory of the way people organize themselves in corporations was new to me when I saw it a few years ago.</comment>


Jason Fried: The Truth About Real Estate - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100901/the-truth-about-real-estate.html <comment><USER2> tl;dr - We learnt early on that we can make a ton of money holding 'workshops' rather than making software.

Whilst still an interesting study in how you can generate a 'following' religion etc, if you're writing software, there's nothing much here. If you have a large office, and want to monetize it, there's nothing much here unless you're sure you can/want to replicate 37singles cultish following.

As for the title "The truth about real estate"... Blatant linkspam. There are no 'truths' exposed.

"We also believe we'll be able to charge closer to $1,000 a seat." WTF pays $1k to go to some 'workshop'? Is this Scientology or something?

<comment><USER3> The title is pretty bad, but I think you're being a little harsh on the article itself.

I took two things from the article that I felt were useful regardless of industry or desired customers:

. keep an eye out for by-products of your primary business that you can use to add/diversify revenue -- as in the lumber mill/sawdust example

. keep in mind that some pretty unsuspecting things can qualify -- as in 37 signals leveraging office space.

It might help that I've long given up on expecting article content to support, or be supported by, their titles.

<comment><USER4> They've been hawking that message for a while now though and you managed to convey his point in about 40 words (including citing two examples) as opposed to a whole article.

I've long been of the opinion that 37 signals while making genuinely really good products are prone to going on about how interesting and innovative their ideas are way beyond what is actually justified by the ideas.

Mind you, if people were willing to pay $1,000 a seat to hear me bang on about things for a day there'd be no shutting me up either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder how many of you that fail to see the transfer of knowledge or "teaching" as the real web 2.0 revolution are out their building the next "social" whatever. From the comments it seems pretty common.

Facebook and farmville are the ghettos of the social media world, playing to the same audience feelings that Jerry Springer did in the 90's. Remember, we all watched that show back then. The real force in social media is what it will do to teaching, and 37Signals is recognizing this in spades.

Instead of professionals transferring knowledge to schools and teachers to transfer into the student; diluting it, by default, they can now transfer knowledge directly, for better or worse.

<comment><USER6> "Facebook and farmville are the ghettos of the social media world"

I thought that title is exclusive to MySpace?

I'd say Facebook is the suburbia of online media. It gives the illusion of being connected to people the same way suburbia gives the illusion of American Dream to home owners.

<comment><USER7> OK, so what is the metropolis/urban core of online media?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really think it's great that they've been able to make this a profitable venture, but I worry about the portability of the message. I've been at small companies that failed for lacking focus.. I'd be interested to hear more about how they juggled these projects and how much time and attention they took... especially at such a famously small company.

<comment><USER9> The message isn't portable if you think the message is "use your office to do workshops".

I don't think that's the message here.

<comment><USER10> You guys all sell yourselves short. Anyone on Hacker News with any technical skill who is running a business that pays for its own decent office space has tons of things to workshop, and as long as you're based on a major metro area, people _will_ sign up. We've done it multiple times. Stop blowing this off.

<comment><USER2> Doing workshops seems scammy to me. It's like doing popup ads.

Sure, you could, but eugh.

<comment><USER10> What a head-explodey thing to say. Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER11> I tend to agree with 'points', so I'll offer my explanation: Doing expensive one-day workshops might be a great way to make money, but it might be damaging to your brand.

To me, it shows that the you are doing everything you can to wring maximum profit out of your existing infrastructure rather than concentrating on improving your core product. It has the same feel as a hot experimental band deciding to license their songs for fast-food commercials --- perhaps a good choice financially, but potentially bad for your image. It has a smell of desperation and greed.

As to the 'scammy' part, I'm guessing[1] that not many people are paying for these sessions of out pocket. Rather, they convince their employer to pay, and that it's worth it. This presents a conflict of interest if the turns out to be not worth the money. When your boss asks you if the company's $1000 was well spent, and it was your idea to go, one might feel compelled to say 'yes' and even to go again the following year regardless of any price increases.

This said, we'll probably be considering such strategies in the future. I have a food business, and while there is no way we could charge $1000/seat, there probably are some things we could do to boost the bottom line.

[1] Jason responds below to point out that most of they are paying directly. I'm surprised, but presume he's right!

<comment><USER10> Workshops damage brands. They smell of desperation and greed. They're like fast-food commercials. They're scammy because they're based on conflicts of interest. They sap energy from your core product.

So naturally, you're going to consider doing them in the future.

 _ka-ploooie_

There goes my brain.

<comment><USER11> Yes. Despite having a truly fantastic product, we're struggling to stay in business. It wouldn't be that much of a stretch to say that there have been times that I would consider robbing convenience stores to make payroll.

I love making a great product, but hate the constant pressure to compromise my ideals to stay afloat. Every day I keep this business going, I fear that I'm turning into someone that I don't want to be, that I can't respect.

But maybe my ideals are wrong, maybe workshops are win-win, maybe we need to consider them even if I don't personally care for them. They're certainly better than some other options!

I also don't really hold it against bands when they 'sell out' --- they know their situation better than I do. :)

<comment><USER10> The workshops I've done have been free. They have not been low-effort. I did a Crypto for Penetration Testers workshop on a Saturday that sold out the room and involved a team at Matasano writing 9 lab servers, and 6+ hours of scripted lecture. I did not at any point before, during, or after the workshop feel like I had "sold out".

Again: my head is exploding over this. Exactly what part of getting interested people in a room and _talking to them_ seems scammy to you? And: if you're creating value, why is it wrong to ask for money for it?

<comment><USER11> It's not the asking for money, but rather the amount of money that is asked. I applaud your free workshops, and I'm even comfortable with moderate prices. But I genuinely can't conceive that someone would get $1000 worth of value from a day's training of anything. I want the cost to be commensurate with the value created.

One could certainly argue that the 'market' has shown it feels otherwise, but the market also has proven susceptible to Scientology and multi-level- marketing. I guess I fear that at the price being charged the audience must have expectations that can't possibly be met.

Perhaps my problems are simply my false impressions of 'value', which may be out of sync with reality. But based on the rates of good college courses, for a workshop such as yours, I could probably rationalize $100-$300 per person. Is there price at which you'd start to feel uneasy, even if some portion of the market was still willing to pay? $1000? $10000? $100000? Or relatedly, why didn't you charge?

ps. I don't mean to imply that Jason is not giving a top quality workshop. I have a similar feelings toward the Ted Conference charging $6000 a ticket and toward top colleges charging $50000 a year. It's not the quality I'm questioning, but the 'value'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My last physical office was basically free.

I rented it out to a Jewish group on Friday nights, a Christian group on Sunday mornings, and one Saturday night per month for each group. It had everything both groups needed: the conference room table folded out of the way so it could seat 30. There was also a piano, a full kitchen, a full bath, and plenty of parking on weekends. The private offices were locked.

Weekend income paid the whole bill. Not a bad deal.

<comment><USER13> plus you are insured against acts of God (or at least 2 out of 3!)

<comment><USER14> The lower bounds might be two but probably not 2 out of 3 :)

Though that is a smart plan if it works out so well for the GP.

<comment><USER13> Well you are covering 2 out of 3 of the supporters of the God with the most previous convictions for wholesale wrath of God stuff. You only need to rent it out to as a mosque on friday mornings and you should be safe.

Zeus and Thor seem to have retired from the raining down thunderbolts business, Bhudda was never particularly into it and Krishna doesn't do overseas.

<comment><USER13> Was the downvoter anti-muslim or pro-Thor?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would agree with those below who said the advice is largely nonportable (a trait I find to apply to most of what 37 Signals says, although it is interesting nevertheless), because most companies are not in the business of teaching or evangelism, nor should be/can be in that business.

The injunction to identify and sell byproducts is a pretty bad one for most companies. Growth and success in business is achieved by returns to scale in core competencies, as a general rule. This does not mean you can't "branch out" and have other business units, but in general, loss of focus, especially for a small company and/or startup, can be devastating if already thin resources are cannibalised for some new offering wholly unrelated to the original mission.

<comment><USER16> I went to a pig butchering demo a few weeks ago at a local restaurant. It was on a Sunday morning when the restaurant wasn't open.

Admission was $50. They had about 20 people there. That's $1000 to the restaurant on a Sunday morning when they are usually closed to the public.

They were butchering the pig anyway, but by turning it into a $50/seat class they were able to significantly increase their profit margin on that pig.

It didn't get in their way, it didn't cause them to lose focus. What it did was increase their profits and get people excited about eating at their restaurant. I know I wanted to go back and taste some of that pork.

It's great business.

<comment><USER17> Reminds me of Zingermans in Ann Arbor, where Ari & company have turned a deli into a deli, baking classes, creamery, cheese-making demos, business training center, restaurant, dinner events, etc. For every new business Zingermans opens, they find a way to turn the business into a place where they can host events (dinners, earlier in the summer they had a bacon festival, they sometimes teach their method of opening their books to all employees, etc.) and really create profit and excitement in non-traditional ways. See

<http://www.zingermanscommunity.com/our-businesses>

Jason's right; while not everyone may be able to turn their office into a place where people pay $1,000 a head to attend a workshop, there is certainly something to learn from thinking about how to utilize your business/office space/etc. to earn incremental revenue and promote your business.

<comment><USER10> Zingermans is amazing (it's one of the three things I miss about living in Ann Arbor). But I'm chiming in here to add that Zingermans doesn't just host random events; just like Jason Fried, Zingermans teaches workshops on "how to be like Zingermans". The Marion Street Cheese Market down the street from me in Oak Park went to one, and are rabid disciples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a poorly titled article, very typical of Inc. Magazine. It should more properly have been titled "The Truth About Your Company's Biggest Cost Center" or "How to Turn Cost into Profit". When someone refers to "Real Estate", it usually implies ownership and 37sig does not own any real estate. (One owns real estate and rents/leases space.)

The remainder of the article had good advice and was well written.

</comment><comment><USER19> The title seems to be a bit of misnomer. The article provides a nice explanation of how to monetize your office space but it doesn't seem to uncover any real estate secrets!

<comment><USER16> Here's something I didn't know until I started writing for Inc: The editor, not the author, writes the title and subtitle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm wary of any article that begins: "The Truth About ..." and I haven't read this one yet.

"The Truth About ..." is designed to get your juices flowing and to get you to read.

Caveat lector.

<comment><USER21> Exactly. It seems to be a general law that the presence of the words "The Truth" on the cover of any book decreases the chance of it actually containing any truth by about 90%.

If you want to know about evolution or the Holocaust then you pick up the book called "Evolution" or "The Holocaust", not "The Truth About Evolution" or "The Truth About the Holocaust".

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think I submitted this with the same url 6 days ago ? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629588>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah but mine's better!

(bug?)

<comment><USER22> Bested by slater again! Yeah, the urls looked the same so I wasn't sure if things were working as intended.

<comment><USER23> It is all about marketing :). Same product (url) sold differently (headline, timing). one hit number one the other 0 points (I will not include the point for submitting). I have learnt a great lesson here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why does this article say it was published on sept 1st 2010?

<comment><USER25> Iirc this is a website for a magazine. Most such websites use the date the article is printed as the publication date rather than the date the article becomes available online. Gotta love old media.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is probably firstly business porn for people to read and imagine the success. I think it's one of the 37 Signals. Isn't 37 Signals all about training and teaching people? So isn't this actually a really central part of their business model and not something anyone can really do?

It's also strange that they were doing well making classes, and then didn't do that for 7-years! Then they did it again? Was there a reason it didn't matter to them so much to generate 3x their months rent so they could share with another company?

"We built a theater-style classroom, with 37 seats..."

Haha.

<comment><USER27> thats not their primary business. they are bringing in 8 figures a year in subscription revenue from their SaaS products. why would they devote a huge chunk of their time to a 5 figure line of business. now with the bosses less integral to the day to day programming work, they can focus more time and effort on teaching, which they seem to enjoy.

<comment><USER2> I'd be willing to bet the teaching, workshops etc are the funnel into which flow people, who leave thinking "wow they're cool. I better signup to a basecamp account".

Without the teaching, book, blog, workshops etc, who would buy basecamp/campfire?

<comment><USER27> basecamp came before their initial workshops. they taught by blogging alot. workshops/teaching only bring in a small number of people at a time. But they do usually result in high LTV of each of those customers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>