The opposite is idleness, which we also do not particularly enjoy and will make ourselves play to avoid.
It's a spectrum. Too busy or too idle for too long and we break.
Some people do not perceive this, they're either workaholics or aboulics.
Tiredness and boredom are good things evolved to prevent damaging ourselves.
If you ignore these you get burnout on one end, but no idea what is the opposite called.
> The opposite is idleness, which we also do not particularly enjoy and will make ourselves play to avoid [...] It's a spectrum. Too busy or too idle for too long and we break.
Nope, there's a hidden axis you're implicitly ignoring. It's possible to be active and "in flow" doing something without feeling "busy". So it's not just a 1-dimensional spectrum of whether one is idle or doing things, but also the psyche/attitude experienced when doing those things. The corresponding analogue to idleness is "leisure", where it is possible to enjoy idling or acting without coherent purpose.
It takes a particular kind of anemic perspective to ignore the experiential axis, and just consider the axis corresponding to "things done" or "output produced".
For a more detailed exposition on what goes into achieving a "flow" state, I recommend checking out Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's book titled Flow. For more on "leisure", I recommend Bertrand Russell's essay In praise of idleness.
You can accomplish a lot of task checkboxes that are irrelevant. This is exactly what the article talks about. You must ask questions on whether what you're doing has any value - ultimately for you or someone/something you value.
And while in flow state you cannot ask such questions as they're not directly related to what you're doing.
Company values are at least a few degrees removed from this ultimate value.
If you spend all the time in the flow state, you're likely are achieving nothing for your own goals, because you're not setting any. (Or worse, the goals are not thought out.)
Flow is the same as hyperfocus physically, and overdoing will ultimately harm you physically, if not psychologically or socially first.
It's also related to meditation. Like meditation it is not always beneficial, especially in excess.
If this author has some other definition of flow, be careful, there might be a tautology or "no true Scotsman" involved.
I found that a very nice observation! I've been struggling with stress lately and I feel like I'm surrounded by a culture where being busy is valued a lot, and people boast about how they stayed up very long to finish something, and it feels like that is a behavior that is reinforced.
I really like tackling things on my own time, and I feel this "tunnelling" a lot and I don't like it at all. Sometimes it can be nice, but I feel like due to stress I tunnel too much.
And I noticed that after being stressed for a while (weeks/months) it is very hard to come back and enjoy idleness. I think this is a problem in cultures with a "busy" work ethic.
There's definitely something to that. Calvinistic thinking that labor is pious seems to have been a part of American workplaces forever, especially tech. It's even a part even of the stackoverflow ethos-- god help you if you ask a question without showing that you've "done the work" up front.
But it's all over the place. Look at the China tech sector with their popular 9-9-6 workweek. Is that an import from Western Calvinist thinking? I'm not sure, maybe?
Whatever the case, "busyness" certainly has been exploited to serve "the man" and not "god".
> god help you if you ask a question without showing that you've "done the work" up front
I think that's different. It's not about puritan work ethic or whatnot, it's about showing the minimum respect for the people you're asking to make an effort for you. Questions which don't show any effort [1] are shunned in tech circles, and this isn't something particular to StackOverflow. And there's a good reason for it: many are asked by "help vampires" [2], people who will burn honest answerers with pointless, ill-researched questions with no follow-up, no useful feedback or even a thank you. Extreme help vampires will even ask the same question repeatedly, apparently too lazy to even see it has been answered already. Some of them just want people to do their homework for them, free. Once or twice may not seem much, but if you don't cut them short, they'll overrun your community.
The mere act of thinking how to phrase a question well, showing you've made all the research you could before finding yourself at a dead end, is often enough to actually find the answer for yourself!
So the StackOverflow community may be a bit trigger-happy, but I completely understand why they'd be upset at people lazy enough to not even bother to formulate their questions clearly.
> So the StackOverflow community may be a bit trigger-happy,
Not "a bit"... actually very trigger happy.
Even perfectly reasonable questions that don't exactly fit what a quite a lot overzealous members consider to be on-topic and properly researched questions get slammed hard.
It very much is a form of Calvinist thinking at work, IMHO. There's a notion of "worthiness" that the asker has to meet. It's a needlessly harsh standard that turns off a lot of people who need help.
BTW the dated, smug and dismissive ESR advice and premature labeling of people as "help vampires" doesn't help the argument on the SO side.
I tried to explain it's not a SO thing. The Help Vampire describes a real phenomenon, codified by someone not on SO (search for "stackoverflow" in the text...). If you feel it's premature, you're probably lucky to have never dealt with them. ESR's advice is a bit smug -- I don't like the guy myself -- but will clearly help anyone to ask good tech questions; it also predates SO by years if not decades.
Put yourself in the position of the people answering questions for free. It wastes their time. How long would it take to burn you if every day you had to answer the same questions by people too lazy to write with punctuation and to search for the answers to see if they already exist, who never come back to tell you if it helped them or not, who never reply to requests for clarification, who could have found the answer for themselves if they simply tried to run the code, and who are sometimes rude if you ask them a counter-question? There are so many times you can attempt to help someone asking "plz help this code doesn't run why doesn't it run plz help me" before giving up on the website.
Low quality, poorly researched questions also make SO as a whole less useful to other people. Forums full of garbage often devolve into more garbage. So there has to be a threshold -- arbitrary by definition -- and you may or may not agree with the precise one, but without one SO would be full of garbage. SO evolved into trigger-happiness because of the problem it was trying to solve: quality Q&A without the noise and garbage.
This has nothing to do with puritan work ethic or "worthiness" or gatekeeping. How to ask good questions is something every programmer (or tech-minded) needs to be good at in order to do their job. It's not too much to ask. How else would they know what code to write or what problem to solve?
If you're answering questions voluntarily and getting nothing out of it, you can always stop.
In fact the answers on SO have a very mediocre SNR. There are some bullseyes, but just as often answers are some combination of misleadingly devoted to an edge case instead of the core problem, nitpicky for the sake of appearances while contributing no real value, out of date, or just plain wrong.
Help vampires are the least of SO's problems.
It would be far more useful to have some kind of editorial system devoted to refining answers down to their most useful canonical up to date core rather than just accreting them.
> If you're answering questions voluntarily and getting nothing out of it, you can always stop.
If most people stop, the community ceases to exist. Such is the real danger with Help Vampires.
To be clear, I'm not talking about myself. I don't have the time to answer questions on SO (though I answered some, years ago) and admire the people who do. I'm also not a moderator there, because who has the time?
> Help vampires are the least of SO's problems.
Only because the policies enforced to stop them were mostly successful. When you solve the most pressing problem, the next problem in the line becomes the most pressing one :)
> It would be far more useful to have some kind of editorial system devoted to refining answers down to their most useful canonical up to date core rather than just accreting them.
There is such a thing in SO. As you can imagine, some users complain about it and are unhappy with this solution. Some people are so unhappy that they proposed forking SO to create some other community with different editorial/moderation standards. Care to guess how successful they were?
I think China has a well enough set of different traditions to gather from (that perhaps have common antique roots), rather than having been influenced by US' or European's puritanism currents. :)
I think it's the "rugged individualism" ethos at play (although maybe that is a tangent of Calvinist thinking?) - the fear that if you ask questions you will come across as inferior to your colleagues and risk losing a promotion at best or a job at worst. It's quite terrible thinking and leads to isolation which compounds anxiety at work.
Not every American feels like it isn’t okay to be idle and bored. I guess you haven’t been following the real noise about moving to a four day workweek in America. Can we leave the sweeping, judgmental comments on the drawing room floor?
You might not realise it but this stuff gets exported to the rest of the world. I frequently see American lobbyists on British TV pushing a low regulation agenda with the intention to weaken workers rights.
I was working for a project with a small company in Scandinavia. For those unaware, Scandinavia as a region in Europe is very much pro socialist policies and pro work-life balance.
We got two consultants from the US of A and that was a hell of a month, constantly pushing us to overwork our employees, saying that we need to show them the carrot on the stick. Their idea was that people will work for 80 hours per week out of their own initiative because life is all about money made and time saved.
Whenever we would argue anything, they would start almost chanting Wolf of Wall Street style: "Time & money!". I've never felt more relieved to have someone leave as when they got back to the US. It took us almost half a year to get back on track after that whole shebang and the CEO still has nightmares of how much was payed for them to come there and bro up the place.
I was intending to write a short message but it turned into a little rant. What I mean to say is that yes, I believe you are correct and this American way of doing business is pushed around the world in what I think is a real bad direction for work-life balance.
If you/your CEO/folks from your company could write an article/blog post about the experience, it would be a great resource to share and point people to — to seed discussion. Please consider :-)
I don't like being busy, but I also like to be doing something active. I can only watch a couple episodes of a show before I have to create something or work with my hands or exercise. I don't think this has anything to do with a puritan culture.
BTW, no fishing I've ever done has been idle or boring. Fishing is generally a lot of work.
You're making assumptions that aren't necessarily true. For instance, I'll avoid play in order to enjoy some idleness. I've figured out why I think; because I don't want to lose track of time, then have to go to work. The same reason I can sleep fine before my day off, but not before a work day.
I don't even think I hate my job that much. I'm not really even working crazy hours; yet it still seems like there's no free time, and I don't want the little time available to fly by.
It's a spectrum. Too busy or too idle for too long and we break. Some people do not perceive this, they're either workaholics or aboulics. Tiredness and boredom are good things evolved to prevent damaging ourselves.
If you ignore these you get burnout on one end, but no idea what is the opposite called.