There are many jobs (though largely not office jobs) where you HAVE to be on time, where not being on time seriously throws a lot of scheduled things out of whack. It is not unreasonable at all in these professions to expect someone to always be on time, and get rid of them and find someone more responsible if they cannot be. One good example would be all of the elementary school teachers I've ever known; they NEED to be at work at their start time because that's when they get a roomful of children handed over to them. Being habitually tardy or unreliable in any way is completely unacceptable.
The friction here is probably from someone used to working in one of the job fields like this coming into an office environment where your hours aren't as relevant as the quality and volume of your work.
I will say though, I was a lead developer at my last job and I had some issues with an employee (with two young kids) not putting in forty hours a week, and he wasn't otherwise making up for it either. He'd be the last one in and the first one out, and it was problematic because he was supposedly the senior developer on the team but he was not meriting his higher salary. In the end I suppose you could say the real problem was with his output, not his hours, but they did seem like interrelated issues.
I would argue in this case that people simply need to plan a bit more around the inherent frailty of humans.
You can have supply teachers on call. Or you can pay them a bit extra to arrive early and mark work in that time. (e.g. make the actual working day 5-6 hours; other hours used for marking, planning, etc). There are other solutions.
One that sticks out in my mind is that when I used to work retail, our hourly pay stopped when the store closed. Obviously you don't and can't leave then. The last customer is slow, you might need to lock up, etc.
In most cases, all you need is for management to actually think about these issues and to not allow the quest for margins to result in abusive practices.
When you're a contractor then yes, you are The One, you have chosen and need to be reliable. When you are part of a massive organization with profit in the billions (e.g. a supermarket), it really is a deliberate choice they are making which results in stress being loaded on you.
Did he do architecture? Design? Mentoring? Its not all about the hours. A manager, for instance, was probably paid higher than anyone in the group and didn't do any code.
It's not that they think work is more important than your private life. They want you to think that work is more important. This peculiar brand of totalitarianism is popular in startup-land, hence the beer outings every damn Friday.
Does he know that's why I'm coming in 5 minutes late? Maybe he just thinks I'm a slacker who doesn't want to get out of the bed in the morning. I think I'd rather try and explain to him the situation I'm in before walking out. He's probably doing it out of ignorance, not out of malign. You can talk to him about it and explain your side and maybe understand his.
Right now you're making the same kind of judgements of the boss as he is making of you.
Nietzsche was co-opted by his sister (who was a proto-National Socialist) and was strongly misinterpreted. In fact, Nietzsche was strongly anti-German nationalism and anti-Anti-Semitic, which lead to a fallout with his idol, Wagner.
Actually, he wrote this employment letter in 1482, before he made anything of serious artistic importance. He may have been somewhat known in the artistic community, but he was by no means very well known.
I mean, here in this age, nobody's going to know who you are as an artist before you make something important. But in the 1400s, just being an artist is a huge enough accomplishment that people are going to know who you are. Also too, what's important to us now is not the same thing as what would have been important to 1400s upper crust society.
The main point I'm trying to make is that 1400s Europe was a really small world. So different than the one we find ourselves in that, if you want to take anything at all from Leonardo's cover letter, adopting his language will probably get you much farther than adopting his actual technique, which was devised to fit the needs of the 1400s.
It may have been smaller, no doubt, but this statement is not correct:
But in the 1400s, just being an artist is a huge enough accomplishment that people are going to know who you are.
Artists in da Vinci's day were more akin to craftsmen. Da Vinci himself was basically raised in an artist's workshop (by Andrea del Verrocchio) and worked alongside dozens of other students on their master's projects. This is in stark contrast to today's artists, who are basically expected to be the sole creative genius (barring people like Damien Hirst, of course, who is known to use assistants.)
In a nutshell: people don't change fundamental beliefs, even when confronted with evidence. Instead, they die off and the newer generation adopts the new theory.
That really isn't what Kuhn is getting at with the idea of a paradigm shift. It's not an argument based on generational age or demographics, it's more about observational data slowly accumulating until current explanatory models become untenable. The people doing the accumulating and the people doing the sudden theoretical shift aren't necessarily the old in one camp and the young in the other. Granted I do see how that argument could be made, given the fact that a lot of the famous paradigm shifts were made by people in their 20s - it just isn't Kuhn's argument.
Most of what Einstein achieved were during his miracle years from 1905 - 1915 when he was in his 20's and 30's. But just to level set, I am not an ageist, I am 58 years old. And all this is just my opinion of course, but I find for myself it is harder and harder to accept new ideas. But being aware of this, I try to always listen and embrace new "crazy" ideas young people come up with. I think older people like me have wisdom and younger people have new ideas and if there was a way to combine those things it would be powerful. Perhaps stating the obvious there.
Each day in the Republican Calendar was divided into ten hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes, and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds. Thus an hour was 144 conventional minutes (more than twice as long as a conventional hour), a minute was 86.4 conventional seconds (44% longer than a conventional minute), and a second was 0.864 conventional seconds (13.6% shorter than a conventional second).
If any Poles say otherwise, feel free to correct me, but my impression of Poland's religiosity is largely dependent on the strong role of the Catholic Church in recent historical affairs (Pope John Paul II, keeping Polish culture alive during USSR era, etc.) and less on the population being more "religious".
I don't think the majority of Poles are actively "Catholic" in their religious metaphysical beliefs, but rather they all belong to the church because of its cultural importance. I could be wrong, however, as I don't live there.
It makes me wonder about other countries where the church plays an important cultural role (Italy, for example.)
