Technocrat Trying to Simplify

[SophieGirl]

I am a computer software-designer --- it's what I'm doing for a living. And though my long-term goal involves me no longer having to be a technocrat for a living, for now that goal is strictly long-term --- as in, for now, no real alternatives are available.

Question is ---- how, as a technocrat, can I make my life simpler --- both at work *and* at home? How can I prevent technology from *consuming* me until I get to the point that I no longer need to be a worker of technology to keep the money in? (and I have to keep the money coming in --- both for paying my bills as well as paying the price for not always having been as frugal as I am these days.)

Thanks,
Sophia

[razz]

Set short-term goals for following other interests perhaps? What else do you find fascinating to explore?
Interested in photography just as an example - how can you develop your skills and understanding to progress?

[ApatheticNoMore]

Question is ---- how, as a technocrat, can I make my life simpler --- both at work *and* at home? How can I prevent technology from *consuming* me until I get to the point that I no longer need to be a worker of technology to keep the money in?

Well depends on how it consumes you and I'm not at all clear. If you want a good computer with the latest software you make use of, yea that's job relevant and not particularly excessive. It shouldn't make your broke probably (I have some software I get free from classes - but haha classes aren't cheap either). If you do design for the mobile platform you might want a smartphone too (and regardless probably want a cell phone). If it's getting way more excessive than this then I don't know, maybe if you are designing for a dozen different mobile platforms, or have to test on lots of different hardware or something.

Now if it's just a question of excessive hours, push back. And if pushing back is futile (they threaten you with firing for not working overtime etc.), look for a better job, I really don't think there is another solution.

[bae]

Set clear boundaries.

Here's my cautionary tale:



Sleepless in SiVal

It's a sign of our times. Since I've started this development job,
I've been working more hours than I used to. Though, I still manage
to get 6-7 hours sleep. I don't know if I could handle the sort of
sleep habits described in the following San Jose Mercury news article
which was forwarded from someone in my development team...
Sleepless in Silicon Valley
---

Technology's fast track dictates a slumberless lifestyle

Published: June 21, 1996

BY MARK LEIBOVICH
Mercury News Staff Wrier

On a typical night, Andre Lamothe will stare into the glow of his
MultiSync XP computer monitor until 5 a.m. He will doze off at 6 and
sleep until the phone rings from the East Coast or Europe around 8.

If it's a restful night, maybe he'll knock off at 4 a.m. and steal
three hours; or if he's feeling fitful, he'll thrash around in bed and
maybe not sleep at all. Lamothe, 28, who runs a video game start-up
company from his Milpitas home, says he feels his body aching more
than it did when he was younger. Some mornings he feels dizzy.

Yet he endures a schedule dictated in part by a high-tech industry
spinning so fast it renders sleep a luxury. Sleep is unproductive
time, an annoying rest stop off technology's fast-track to the
future. To resist has become a necessary, if not desirable, lifestyle
choice for a growing after-hours club of mortals like Lamothe. They
have taken the '80s-vintage workaholism that built today's Silicon
Valley and accelerated it to extreme -- some would say pathological --
levels.

''We are all absolutely out of control, on a race for something we're
not even sure exists,'' says Lamothe, an avid weightlifter who roller
blades through the dark streets of Milpitas when he needs a
break. ''This will be the first generation to show the physical and
mental toll of the information age. We're pushing against how we've
evolved on the planet.''

It's a motto that drives this bleary-eyed segment of valley life:
Snooze too long and someone else grabs the patent, promotion, venture
capital or market share. Never mind the colds, occasional delirium and
hazards of driving home drowsy. This is the price of participation in
a global marketplace oblivious to time zones, with start-ups sprouting
daily and a mad dash to cultivate new Internet technologies. E-mail,
ISDN lines and the Web have colonized homes as workplace extensions;
product cycles have been compressed in the pursuit of beating the next
guy's brainchild out the door.

''There's been an incredible escalation in the speed with which
products are being developed,'' says Lenny Siegel, director of the
Pacific Studies Center, a non-profit advocate group in Mountain
View. '' Ten years ago it was enough just to rush from one job to the
next,'' he says. ''Now you need to start something before you finish
something else.''

Beyond competitive realities, the sleepless ethic springs from a
uniquely compulsive computer mentality in an industry that glories in
pushing limits and subverting conventions. Great programs and
companies have been born under the glare of fluorescence, buoyed by
adrenaline and caffeine.

''I've never understood the need to sleep,'' says David Filo, the
30-year-old co-founder of Yahoo! Inc., who fights the urge just as
hard now as he did before his company went public in April and he
became a multimillionaire on paper. Filo seldom sleeps more than four
hours a night, sometimes under his desk: ''I'm always looking for a
way to avoid sleep. Physically, I don't think you need it. It's more
a mental thing.''

Night work is well suited to a techie's mindset that prizes long,
uninterrupted clumps of time free from daytime interruptions such as
phone calls. ''You don't find a lot of people who get into this
business because they are political creatures who love to schmooze and
sit in meetings,'' says Michael Latham, a0- year-old group director
at SegaSoft, his Redwood City office still a blur of activity at 2
a.m. Latham rarely sleeps more than four hours. He calls this ''a
permanent lifestyle choice'' -- or as permanent as his body allows.

''They can hang a gold watch from my corpse,'' he says.

Like a college dorm

Combine this nocturnal affinity with furious competition and you get
this hyper-driven slice of Silicon Valley. Company campuses might
evoke the frivolous air of a college dorm late at night, with
T-shirted post-adolescents eating pizza and playing foosball in their
bare feet, but that does not disguise the warrior's mentality that
characterizes so many work ethics. Rare is the person who complains
about fatigue. ''You have to afford the intellect the chance to
transcend limits,'' says Byron Rakitzis, 27, a programmer at Network
Appliance, a Mountain View file server company. ''That is the price we
pay for supreme human accomplishment.''

Last year that price became too high for Rakitzis when he plunged to
''an emotional crisis point,'' which he blames partly on a work
schedule that typically landed him in bed at 4 a.m. Even when he slept
enough, Rakitzis felt bone-tired. Computer commands would invade his
thoughts unbidden as he drove to work. He took three months off
starting in December.

Rakitzis returned to Network in March and now calls himself ''a
recovering night person.'' He tries to leave his office by 5. But
when the interview ends, Rakitzis is still at his terminal, ensconced
in a bug report at 1 a.m. He plans to scale back to part-time work
later this year.

If anyone ever discusses being tired, it's often in a boastful
way. ''We compare how little we sleep in the same way athletes compare
knee injuries,'' Rakitzis says. Like sports, high tech is
predominantly a young man's arena, subject to the limits of the aging
process. Single males under5 are the prevailing demographic in the
industry. You sense some racing to coax as much production as possible
from their bodies (and money from their companies) before they get too
old.

[bae]

And the rest:



''The goal used to be to become a millionaire by 40,'' says Gary
Burke, president of the Santa Clara Valley Manufacturing Group, a
high-tech trade association. ''Now it seems like it's down into the
20s.''

This ambition extends to the broader technological sensibility of
today's Silicon Valley. ''It is no longer enough to solve a problem in
this valley,'' says Chuck Darrah, chairman of the anthropology
department at San Jose State University. ''Now we expect everything we
do to be a model for the rest of the world. If you're off the highway
for a nanosecond, time passes you by.''

In this context, sleep becomes a ready casualty. ''You sense this new,
panicky edge to staying ahead of the competition and the technology
curve,'' says Lili Pratt King, a career counselor who works with
Stanford Business School graduates. Forget the notion of the relaxed
California lifestyle. ''People in Silicon Valley have developed this
tenacious inability to let go of their workday and rest. It has become
so profound and much worse than anything I have seen on the East Coast
or in the Midwest.''

This is hardly a unanimous way of life among the valley's high-tech
workforce, estimated at 200,000. People who adhere to traditional
schedules account for two commuting periods each day. But high-tech
campus parking lots can be crowded at a.m. And many evening
commuters will log on to their office networks from home.

Sending e-mail at 2 a.m.

Brian Ehrmantraut, the3-year-old systems engineering director at
Network Appliance, leaves his office most nights at 8 and works at
home in Saratoga until 2 a.m. Ehrmantraut tries to sleep five
hours. But if he gets an idea when his head hits the pillow, he'll get
out of bed and send it to a colleague on e-mail. ''I will e-mail
someone at 2, wake up with another idea at 4 and find that my 2
o'clock e-mail has been answered already,'' he says.

If he can't get home, Ehrmantraut's office is equipped for long-term
comfort: stereo, bowl of fruit and espresso machine, with a stuffed
Tasmanian devil atop his terminal (''to scare away the marketing
guys''). If a deadline looms, SegaSoft workers sleep at a nearby Motel
6 at company expense; Netscape Communications Corp. employees used to
sleep in designated futon rooms, but the company removed them, partly
to encourage workers to stop working and go home.

But habits die hard.

''People keep asking for the futon room to come back,'' says Cindy
Hall, a Netscape technical writer and a late-night regular at the
Internet giant's Mountain View campus. With gym bags packed with
clothes, personal hygiene items and roller-blading equipment, Hall
calls herself ''a yuppie bag-lady.''

''Instead of pushing my shopping cart, I just cram everything into the
back of my Beemer.''

Employees are often grouped in a ''team'' structure, and when
deadlines and shipping dates near, late night becomes essential work
time. In a collaborative environment, failure to pull your weight can
be devastating. ''We work under aggressive deadlines, and no one wants
to have to say "this is my fault,''' says Hall. Peer pressure
intensifies when, as in the case of many companies, employees own
stock.

Computer product teams are socialized like soldiers in a platoon, says
Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park. ''In war,
no one dies for their country,'' he says. ''They die because a
structure is set up where you look like a coward in front of a big
group of people. Same thing if you're in a group developing a
product.'' Saffo describes today's Silicon Valley as ''an intellectual
arms race.''

The machines themselves cast their own tyranny. Engineers and
programmers describe the time-warp sensation of tinkering with a
problem for a few seconds, only to realize hours have passed. ''Last
night, I was working on a piece of code, and I just couldn't get
everything working at once,'' says Deborah Kurata, co-owner of InStep
Technology, a software consulting company in Pleasanton. ''But I kept
getting positive feedback from the computer. It's so addictive. I had
to keep going until I was finished.''

By which time it was 4 a.m. At 7:30, after a nap, Kurata was up
getting her two daughters ready for school.

A family sleep trade-off

Among high-tech parents, Kurata's is a familiar scheduling equation:
Borrow from sleep time to balance the demands of family with
career. Before his son,-year-old Andrew, was born, Greg Gilley,
the director of engineering for imaging and video products at Adobe
Systems, would leave his office at 10 or 11 p.m. Now he gets home
at 6, eats dinner, gives Andrew a bath, puts him to bed and spends
time with his wife, Karen. At 10, Gilley returns to Adobe in Mountain
View, and he doesn't get home again until around or 4 a.m.

''You either have to trade off family or sleep,'' Gilley says, eating
a Butterfinger in his office at midnight. ''There's no real choice.''

Pale and disheveled, Gilley does not look well. He doesn't exercise
and hasn't seen a doctor in five years, and Karen worries about
him. When his current product cycle ends, he plans to catch up on
rest. ''I can usually go at this pace for four months before I'm
toast,'' he says. How long has he been at it now? Gilley shakes his
head: ''Eight months.''

Later this month, Helmut Kobler, the 27-year-old president of Cyclone
Studios, a subsidiary ofDO, a games company, will take his first
vacation in years. ''There's almost a folkloric quality to pulling
all-nighters in this business,'' Kobler says, sitting in aDO cubicle
at midnight. ''But once you go through it for a few years, they lose
their romance. Now I'd rather be in bed.'' Kobler acknowledges he has
said this before:

''I've said to myself, "I'm sick of eating Campbell's soup every
night. I have to develop other interests. I vow to change. But after a
while, my life starts feeling pedestrian. And I want to conquer the
world again.''

[razz]

That article seems like a report of a state of insanity to me, Bae. i can see do these hours for living things but not computer stuff.

[SteveinMN]

That article seems like a report of a state of insanity to me, Bae. i can see do these hours for living things but not computer stuff.
razz, unfortunately that is the computer biz these days, even if you don't work at a company that makes its money on hardware, software, or IT services. I lived that life until three weeks ago, as a software engineer for a global manufacturing company. Sometimes I felt like a lobster in a pot of water being heated on the stove -- you didn't realize how bad things were getting until it was (almost) too late. Now, three weeks away from that job, my blood pressure has gone down 15-20 points and people keep telling me how much more relaxed I look.

Sophia, here's what I did. No guarantees it will work for you, but it kept my sanity for much longer than I thought it would:

At work, I was strictly-business. No coffee breaks, very little "schmoozing", frequent lunches at my desk. I got a second workstation so I could have that one do time-consuming tasks while I took my laptop to meetings. My cube and hard disks were very organized: no paper copies if I had an electronic copy. And one known-good electronic copy, not three or four -- I saved time looking for the latest and greatest.
When my 9-10 hours a day were up, I stopped at a logical point and went home. Certainly, if something broke and I had to fix it, I stayed. But, most days, I went home to my life. I did not work on work after dinner or on weekends unless it was critical and unavoidable. And I comped time when I needed to, to keep it to 45-50 hours. Everyone who needed to have it had my cell-phone number. People rarely used it. If they did, most times it was okay to tell them I'd handle it first thing the next morning.
Be a little ruthless. I deleted email readily. The stuff I wasn't sure about was parked in a mail folder which I purged quarterly (if I didn't need it in 90 days, I didn't need it). Ditto with meetings. Except for my boss' agenda-less meanderings, I squirmed my way out of meetings without agendas. If matters could be handled with a few emails instead of a meeting, great, though sometimes it was easier to schedule a face-to-face meeting rather than rely on a bunch of emails, so then you schedule a brief meeting.
Respect time, especially yours. We had a time-reporting system (one of three!) which kept on for years though no one did anything with the entries. I spent as little time as humanly possible filling it out. My entries were plausible fiction at best. Who cared? No one used it, so why fret over the numbers each month? When I was asked to "work something into my schedule" (problems with our computers excepted because that idled half-a-dozen people), I politely challenged the request by asking what I would be pushing down (or off) my current task list so I could work on the new priority. You'd be amazed how many "rush" projects that kills.
If you can, specialize. Or at least avoid being a shallow generalist. There is so much to know about software these days that no one person can know it all. Nothing wrong with reading casually about a new development environment or methodology for your own edification or amusement. But if you're in a "waterfall" shop, spending lots of time on how to do agile development is of little value to you. If that's something you must learn about, negotiate with your supervisor to make that education a goal/achievement for your annual review.
Don't be a slave to technology. Don't play with every to-do app that exists (including the infamous "beta" versions) to determine which is the absolute best one for you. You can waste lots of time moving your to-do list from one app (or methodology) to another and never actually accomplish the tasks on the list. Don't think you have to be the knower of all things digital in your circle of family/friends. You don't need to be the expert about phones and DVRs and game systems and digital cameras. And don't go digital unless it suits you. I like to cook. I do not have a digital database of all my recipes. The time it would take to enter them all? It won't ever happen. Besides, I remember the books or sometimes even the paper/color/typeface for my favorite printed recipes and can find them faster that way.


As other posters mentioned, it's about boundaries. I believe those boundaries are informed by priorities. If your priority is to eventually move to some other kind of career, then you have to do what you can to enable that. If it means reducing expenses as quickly as possible to give you the freedom to accept a job that pays (much) less, so be it. If it means reserving some time from work and other commitments of your life (family, your health, etc.) to engage in that different direction, then you have to put a rope around the time and energy your day job takes from you. It may mean (as it did for me) that raises and promotions will be fewer and farther between. It may mean denying yourself some nice things (nicer car, new TV, fancy vacation) to preserve the capital you need to do your own thing.

People were amazed when I left my job three weeks ago, especially since there's only my wife's income at the moment. But I'm not tied into the cabin and huge house and car payment and motorcycles like so many of my peers are. And, as a male, I'm not into the "if-I'm-not-working-I'm-nobody" trap. So I have the freedom to reclaim my life. I don't regret leaving for one minute, even if it means my wife and I will have to become intimate with the bean aisle at the grocery store. We've got what's important to us.

Sophia, if you haven't already read it, I suggest reading the book, "Your Money or Your Life". It does an excellent job of illustrating how we pay for our lives and what we are getting for our time and energy. It really may help you define what it is you want to do for yourself -- as well as what you don't want to do.

[bae]

Nicely said Steve!

[ApatheticNoMore]

I think I sometimes avoid the crazy by working jobs under my capabilities and under what I could earn. Make no mistake the higher pay (and it isn't even that high frankly, it's not necessarily the best field to go into for money) in technology IS in LIVING FOR WORK. But decent pay is enough to live on. :|

If I ate lunch at my desk I think I would be on the verge of killing myself. I bring my lunch most days and I like it, that's not the problem. It's just the never seeing sunlight .... so I take the lunch I brought outside.


Don't think you have to be the knower of all things digital in your circle of family/friends. You don't need to be the expert about phones and DVRs and game systems and digital cameras.

agreed. I mean everything is ego and proving you are a nerd among nerds, but meh F# that ego stuff, you don't need to spend all your free time learning the most obscure languages imaginable, you really just need to know your job.

Do salaried employees need real overtime laws? 1000 times yes! But since we're doing book recs: for a pep talk on standing your ground on the excessive overtime I'd recommend a book called "Work to Live" (Joe Robinson). It's deprogramming from the work ethic (or at least the work ethic taken to the point where you have no free time). A book called "Take Back Your Time" might also help since it shows how many valuable things excessive work destroys (people don't recycle because they work all the time, people don't exercise because they work all the time, etc. etc.) - but that book is a lot more political than "Work to Live" is.

[iris lily]

I like that guy's Tasmanian devil!

[SophieGirl]

Thanks for your responses everyone.

Even though the main thing I got from it is how direly important it is that within a few years I find a better way to live than as part of the machine.

[Fawn]

SophieGirl--I am not a technocrat. But I work in a field w/ a simular all-consuming management/work ethic. I am a hospice nurse, and a "normal" case load requires 50-60 hours per week to do the work right. I was able to go part-time (24-34 hours/week) which made the difference in my blood pressure (like Steve it dropped 15-20 points in a month) my alcohol consumption, my insomnia, my ability to be present with my three teenagers.

I live frugally, except for the kid's music lessons/instrument repair and everything is better now. I know in IS is difficult to find part-time work, but do what you need to find a reasonable livestyle. There are no luxuries or bling worth not having a life.

[ApatheticNoMore]

Agreed, it's way easier by far to find a job with reasonable work hours (part-time is hard to find, but limited to 40 hours is definitely doable), than to find a way to escape the machine entirely (whee no income at all! whee no health insurance at all! - yea that can take decades of saving to survive without both of those). A different career is of course always an option.

[SteveinMN]

There are no luxuries or bling worth not having a life.
Amen to that, Fawn!

[ToomuchStuff]

What do you do when you get home? Work is one thing, what is required, is required, unless you find a different job. Home is another. Are you required to have a computer at home? If so, are you required to have certain software, and does work provide it or are you authorized back up copy? Do you get asked to "fix" friends computers, etc?

I switched to Linux at home and am doing this from a netbook. I really don't need all the computer stuff I had, and am in the process of clearing it out. Since switching to Linux, I have been out of date on Windows so I tell "friends" that I am too out of date to help them with their problems.

[jp1]

Thankfully I don't work in an industry where the norm is to work insane overtime and the rest of the time be available via blackberry and whatnot. Because of that I've always taken the attitude that I'm not going to take a job where I"m expected to work 12 hour days routinely. THe guy in bae's article that would go back to work after spending the evening at home with his family is just insane. That's no way to live.

In my last job interview 3 1/2 years ago (for my current job) my boss brought up the topic of workload and my response was "I'm willing to work hard and be focused while I'm here, but truthfully I'm not interested in the job if, working efficiently, I still need to be here 10-12 hours per day most days. I'm comfortable putting in extra hours during a crunch season for a few weeks or staying late if a big fire errupts one day, but not on a regular day to day basis." I didn't need the job so desperately that I'd say anything to get it, and truthfully if that was what was expected I didn't want the job. Apparently this was acceptable since I got the job, and for the most part the job has lived up to that. We're in crunch season right now (7/1 is my biggest day of insurance policy renewals for the year, by far) but even in crunch season this year I've been able to do everything I need to do with maybe 1 to 1 1/2 hours of overtime per day for the last 3 weeks or so. It's been draining but not debilitating or demoralizing. The end is in sight and next week will go back to normal, so I'm fine with it.

[ApatheticNoMore]

I've asked about overtime in the interview, brazen but on a deep level, life != work. If I don't look out for myself who will? I don't mind the once in a blue moon overtime, that's kind of fun - yea it really is, it's the regular stuff that is the problem.