alt Hacker NewsThis schedule is no different than my schedule from 30 years ago and I don't consider it problematic at all. You frame it as 15+ hour days by including all aspects of their day as "work" but no normal adult includes their workout time and their social engagements as part of their work day. Time spent in sports is fun, not work. If it is work, then quit. Time spent in gym class and lunch is not work. Remove all that bloat from your framing and it is a very reasonable workload.
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Indeed. At uni, starting in my second year, I worked as a programmer (no remote work, office at 1hr commute from uni dorm) on top of my studies. It was hard, but doable. My major was applied math, so the CS part was the easier bit, but the math, especially Analysis, Numerical Methods, Linear Algebra, and Analytic Geometry they kicked my butt. We also had a really bad prof for the Math Logic class and no textbook, only lecture notes and his lectures were unstructured shit :(
The biggest problem wasn't the workload itself, but how inefficient learning was back then. It was the early days of the Internet, no coursera, no Google indexed uni sites, no LLMs, no online tutors. I only had a mediocre textbook and some notes I borrowed from friends when I couldn't attend lectures or labs. It took ages. I’d burn hours trying to parse two paragraphs in the textbook, only to ask mates who didn't understand it either.
Now, we have an incredible amount of information & tech at our fingertips: LLMs, Google NotebookLM, online tutors, dozens of textbooks, and sites like Anna's Archive packed with high-quality "free" material. With all this technology, the time it takes to understand, prepare, and master a topic is a fraction of what it used to be. It still takes work and discipline, but man... you can feed textbooks into an LLM and use targeted prompts to debug your exact knowledge gaps on the practice test you get from the LLM.
So I reckon it's easier now than before, simply because learning can be done so much more efficiently. After all these years, I still remember the hardest classes and the most stringent professors with great affection - even though I hated those bastards back then. My Group Theory prof once invalidated a definition I wrote because of a single missing word. At the time, I thought it was an injustice, but later I realized that word was crucial.
University is where young people must face hard work and reality, because it teaches them what true meritocracy is. It should be hard, it's the same way a gym workout should be hard or it’s ineffective.
> Time spent in sports is fun, not work.
It is fun when it is fun, when you can skip it or do it purely because you want to. If you go to sports club because you have to, it is work and not fun.
If you go volunteer or have to join the club for college application, they become work. They are not fun stuff.
> Time spent in gym class and lunch is not work
Gym class is work. Kids are not there voluntarily.
Yes, if you go to a junior college or night school, you will discover what an actual busy schedule looks like and it's not sports clubs and volunteer activities taken for the sole purpose of inflating your college admissions letter.
Some of those students have 40 hour jobs, some night shift, that they can't skip or else they don't have a home or school anymore. Others have kids that can't be neglected.