OMG, 9 to 5
“They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start to pull 9-5 days.” -Business Insider
Back on August 6, Julie Bort wrote an article on software engineers who drop out of the super intense life style while remaining on payroll—resting and vesting. On one hand, this is infuriating: here are people making six or seven figures for barely doing any work. How unfair is that in a world in which many, many people are scrapping by on two or three jobs?
Yet, the important part of this article (which Blot doesn’t address) is the completely unhealthy relationship Americans have to work. Blot starts the article with an anecdote about a Facebook engineer deciding to rest and vest after waking up one morning and vomiting over the idea of going to work. And we’re supposed to be critical or envious of this person? For all the backsliding that is happening in this society, unions fought for sane working hours, recognizing that one cannot live one’s life if one is always on the job. Yet today we glorify that life style. How courageous, how admirable is the coder who spends 14 hours a day at work. They are truly the symbol of the American dream. But what sort of dream burns people out so much that they become physically ill?