[game_edu] Qol, "crunch" and Education

[Mike Sellers]

On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 8:41 PM, Ian Schreiber <ai864 at yahoo.com> wrote:


> Incidentally, I think the difference between what you term "lifestyle

> crunch" and "heroic crunch" is debatable.

>

> Certainly from an emotional (and probably mental health) perspective, what

> you call "heroic" crunch can be fun and certainly isn't draining -- by

> definition, if it's something you choose to do out of passion on your own

> terms when you want, it feels good.

>


Right.  It's also entirely voluntary.  You just hit some of the biggest
differences between that and the enforced "lifestyle" crunch.


That said, does VOLUNTARILY working long hours still have the same effect on

> productivity? Of course the people crunching out of passion will tell you

> they are more productive, they certainly feel that way, but if actually

> measured I'm not sure that you'll find a real difference.

>


I think you would, and would point to virtually any self-powered
three-guys-in-a-garage startup out there.  I've worked on projects where
we've been amazingly productive, as measured by what we *produced* not how
we felt about it.  In fact I think you'd be hard pressed to find any startup
or really significant technology or other development that was created on a
schedule, no more than 35-40 hours per week, etc.  Creativity and drive
aren't infinite, but neither are they doled out in equally sized daily
batches.  Some days you get twenty minutes of really inspired work, some
days you get twenty hours.

I don't know how to describe this.  I've been doing software development
professionally for over 30 years (i.e., I'm not a young guy who doesn't know
better), and these days I'll definitely pay for an all-nighter more than I
did a decade or two ago.  But even so, sometimes taking something on as a
matter of will as much as of skill, something that's out of the ordinary and
may not be doable, has a particular thrill.  I suspect it's a combination of
these (will, skill, and thrill -- rhyming unintentional) that boosts
performance over what it would otherwise be.

Now, this is not sustainable.   You can do this for a few days, maybe a
week, and then your performance drops fast.  Some recover faster than
others, but the deficit is real -- as real, I think, as the boost.  It's not
taking on some improbable task that's pernicious IMO, it's the idea that
companies manage their teams as if they could do this all the time, or for
months on end.

The question is: how do we handle this as educators? If one of your students

> mentions before class that they were up for the last 48 hours doing nothing

> but finishing your latest assignment... how many of us would just

> instinctively grin and call them "hardcore," versus actively calling them

> out as idiots for their poor time management, versus saying nothing and

> letting the other students draw their own conclusions? And what effect does

> this have on student culture when we react in a certain way?

>


Excellent questions I don't have an answer to.  My own experience has
definitely been as something of an outlier.  In my senior year of college, I
was married with two kids.  I was taking 20 credit hours, working 20 hours
per week as a programmer, and was doing a thesis (required because I created
my own major).  There were long stretches where I got 3-4 hours per night of
sleep, and I had pneumonia twice. There are swaths of that year that are
still a blur to me. I don't say any of that so people will go "wow, that's
hardcore."  It was what I needed to do, what I signed up for, and I got
through it, that's all.  Something like voluntarily taking on malaria for
some good cause.

I would never recommend that kind of course to anyone. And I think it's
incumbent on educators not to teach to being "hardcore" but to teach
students to understand what they're getting into and what they're capable
of.  Not, I think, in a "tut tut, more than 40 hours per week and you'll
lose your edge," but in ways so that they know how their task estimates
stack up against reality (as I outlined before), what they can do in sort of
a "turbo-boost" mode, and what the costs of doing so are.  Only then can
they reliably make intelligent choices about what they take on and how they
get it done.

Mike Sellers
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