The part about a big tech company being a stressful environment isn't the thing that surprised me, but rather people's responses to how they react to either being on the receiving side of the stress, and management's failure to respond to this or even try to talk about it.

The thing that bugs me the most about the entire situation is that most of the stress that seems to exist, mostly exists because of people who have no idea what they're doing, make decisions they have no business making. Then you have engineers that either come from cultures that are high in agreeableness, or they've never been very assertive themselves and just accept these decisions, thinking it's a situation of "if I don't do this I'm going to get fired".

Most of the people I work with don't even consider the option of just taking an extended period of time off to prevent being burned out because they're basically tied to their employment due to work visas (you guessed it, Indian and Chinese workers) and a lot of them are trying to support family back home. So even leaving their job and taking extended time off isn't a viable option.

Don't even get me started on how I've seen people's physical and mental health completely deteriorate. I know lots of people in my organization that are extremely depressed and wouldn't even be the least bit surprised if I heard they ate a bullet tomorrow.

This whole industry has just motivated me to work to achieve financial independence/early retirement as soon as I can just so I never have to think about working with incompetent people in my life again, or at least, have the financial freedom to cut those relationships once they do arise. It sucks because I know I'll be working on tech related projects for the rest of my life, but I have to ignore the desire to work on things that will actually make a difference so that I can build up that nest egg to have the financial freedom and peace of mind to actually pursue it.

People stop taking advantage when you stop letting them. More than you might expect actually respect it. I don’t think this way of working has hurt my career progression, and it’s certainly done wonders for my mental health.

Europe certainly has a better model here than the US (more vacation, unemployment benefits), but there's room for improvement (eg. basic income).

Personally I left my office job in NYC about 4 months ago and have been traveling for the last 2 months (in South America). Being here and meeting other travelers (especially European), digital nomads, etc. has really made me realize how toxic American rat race work culture is. One Colombian I met who spent time living in the U.S. summed it up the best - Americans only seem to think about money.

Now I know some of you will say "but Colombia is poorer than us!" That may be the case, but it doesn't dispute the fact that our culture has become toxic - money/work obsessed, 2 weeks/year vacation, usurious amounts of student loan debt, etc.

If you need an example of a country with a bit more sense - I met a 28 year old Finnish guy here in Colombia in the middle of a multi-month vacation. His job back in Finland? Working in the deli section of a supermarket selling sausages. Completely blew my mind. If he were born in America and in the same occupation, he would probably not have the time or money for a 2 month international vacation. I've got friends the same age in professional occupations (eg. economist for the government) forgoing vacations until they pay back their 6-8% interest student loans. Europe in general has a much healthier attitude when it comes to work/life balance than America. Though on the bright side, at least we have it better than Asia (minus the student loan and healthcare part).

I'm doing a bit of consulting with a startup at the moment, and one of our team members recently disappeared off on vacation. Good for him, I thought. Two days later, he popped back up on the company slack, working away from his tropical beach.

To be clear, this is not a case of digital nomadding. This is 10 days of vacation time that they somehow guilted him into throwing away after he had actually flown halfway around the world.

20 years ago, there was an expectation that when you left the office, you were unreachable except in an emergency. I don't see any hint of that expectation anymore. It's a combination of employers with serious boundary issues, and empoloyees fearing the ramifications of pushing back.

You really need to stand up for yourself these days. But at least I've found that if you do so, it generally works.

A thousand times this. Very few of the lessons my parents taught me apply in the corporate world. Be honest and straight with people, assume good intent, take responsibility, etc.

All that behavior will do is paint you as naive. Sure there's room for honesty and responsibility, but only when used appropriately (strategically). Strikes me as acutely inhumane every time my career is rewarded for suppressing those behaviors.

I am not even allowed to tell a candidate (another human being that probably NEEDS a paycheck) why I didn't hire them and what they can do to improve their viability.

Just because the company has discarded this person it also means I must discard them as well? It kills me every time, but I NEED my paycheck more than I prefer to help my fellow human.

It’s not uncommon when applying for a job that you take a “personality test” that measures not just technical knowledge, but also scores you on traditionally “soft” traits like assertiveness vs. agreeableness, with the hiring manager getting a readout of where you fall relative to the “ideal” range of that metric for the job you’re applying for.

We recently had an open position, and I know for a fact that we turned down multiple perfectly qualified people with successful track records in this exact role because they didn’t pass a personality test they received after the interview process - the reasoning for giving them the test after was that this personality test is particularly expensive. The “solution” was not to ditch the expensive personality test, but to bite the bullet and give all the rest of the candidates the test beforehand. But my eyes were opened.

I’m very worried that applying metrics to people, not performance, is creating a homogeneous culture that goes along to get along, resulting in silent acceptance of the situation described in the article.

So how from the ground up can we make corporate culture in America more focused on the social health of their employees?

I ask because at my current job, a lot of work is explicitly motivated by the threat of getting yelled at or publicly shamed in some way. I often wonder if these stressful interactions could just be handled politely but in a way that doesn't automatically turn into work that gets handled invisibly or passed down the chain to some other poor sap.

This won't happen as long as the worst offenders can push individual arbitration agreements. The Supreme Court heard arguments about them recently, and a decision on whether they are legal is expected soon.

On the other hand, electronic health records should make it easy to show with statistics if a workplace causes chronic disease, relative its peers. We just need to add employer information to the standard information that hospitals collect. Certainly a group of university hospitals would be interested in seeing this data, and could organize an initiative to collect it.

Edit: Actually, a way to link massive amounts of healthcare data to patients' employers might already be available. Medical records often store insurance information, which can be used to figure out a patient's employer if they are the subscriber.

It doesn't have to be like this, and we will find our way out one day, be it through UBI, AI or other post-capitalist mechanism. Might take a few hundred years though, mind you. Once Trump has been flushed through at least.

> Dying for a Paycheck, published by HarperBusiness and released on March 20, maps a range of ills in the modern workplace — from the disappearance of good health insurance to the psychological effects of long hours and work-family conflict — and how these are killing people.

Thought experiment: How can the world be different if we changed the understood definition of family from "home life" or "family of current origin" to "family of choice"? What then happens if the majority chooses humanity as its family, followed by collectively choosing to meet the needs of all in the family?

I personally think the biggest thing we could do is to just add a reasonable safety net. I get treated well because my employer knows I have a choice of jobs; if we gave the people on the bottom some minimal safety net so they wouldn't go homeless or starve without working, then employers would have to treat them well enough that working was better than living off the minimal government benefits. And that's a good thing, though it would need to be balanced with how much wealth we have as a society. Certainly, though, we can afford public housing and food for everyone right now, and we should. "Work or starve" is only morally justifiable when society has so little that someone must starve.

But... on the other hand, I do think that in some ways a lot of us (especially a lot of us on hn who are in the top half of computer technicians and software engineers) have it pretty good. For me? I know I had a lot of negative feelings about management when I was younger. I thought they were stupid and evil. I became a lot happier as an employee after I blew a whole lot of time and money trying to run a business myself.

And it was ramen profitable, but god damn did I work hard for that ramen. I'd be most of the way to retirement if I had lived on what I lived on and worked for someone else, investing the difference in index funds. But I think running that business really helped me be a happier employee; I mean, I am not saying I understand the business bullshit... I don't know what to do about all the moral dilemmas at that level, about negotiation, about hiding information, etc... some of it still does seem kind of stupid and evil. But I understand that business bullshit exists, and that I don't understand it - I ran the experiment, and the data showed that I really had no idea what management and business development was all about.

Because of my time running the company, I'm much more laid back about letting management manage than I was before I ran my own company, because I tried. I gave it my best shot, and I'm just not very good at it. I'm a pretty good technician, though, and I really appreciate that I'm in a world where that means I get a well-paying and comfortable job where all I have to do is be that good technician, and not be too rude to anyone else. I don't have to worry about not saying this or that or the other (well, with some exceptions. As a general rule, I can tell my boss anything with the door closed... if that's not true, I get another job, because clearly they want someone with a different skillset.)

I know it's hard, but I think you have a responsibility to step in when you see things like this.

I've been severely depressed before, and if someone, even if I didn't know them very well, had done something to indicate that they knew what I was going through, it would have helped. Sometimes people who are suicidal are convinced that if they did eat a bullet tomorrow, no one would care.

I've had to fight numerous battles with my boss, along the lines of, "I don't care who scheduled the meeting, I already have plans tonight, and it's not reasonable to make me change them with no notice."

This mentality has turned out to be (a) well worth it for my marriage, and (b) not actually a big deal in the scheme of things.

> I don’t think this way of working has hurt my career progression

I am sure it has helped.

I am an H1B from India working for the American subsidiary of an India company. For a short period of time, I was put on a project that was created by some other team and finally abandoned by the customer. Then, 1-2 years later, new customer management decided to bring the project back to life. Only thing was the new management didn't know it was still in prototype stage. They tried to go to market with it, only to find issues.

Unfortunately for me, when this customer approached my company, I was free and I got assigned to this project. I did what they asked to. It was only for a month of so. Then, I heard nothing from this customer for a couple of months. Then they showed up again asking me to make some changes, that lasted for 1-2 weeks. It repeated once or twice again. Then I never heard from them.

2 years passed by after I worked on this project for the first time. I must have worked on and off for 2 months total in this so far. I went to India on a 40 day vacation for my brother's and my marriage. I get an email from the manager who handles this customer that this customer has come back again and they want me to work. I tried to work from India as much as I could. But this manager insisted on me cancelling my vacation. Finally, he escalated to my actual manager's boss's boss, saying that I have to cancel my honeymoon. I was scared of loosing my visa, so I ended my cancelling my honeymoon. Since my brother and I got married within the same month, we had our honeymoon's planned together. So he also had to cancel.

The day I got the email from the manager asking me to cancel my honeymoon, I stayed in room for the whole day. I was incredibly stressed and miserable.

I was never the same person after this. I lost all my interest in work and my company. I will resign within 1 or 2 months and leave US altogether. There is a good chance I will regret it later, but it has become too much for me to handle.

You can. Get rid of your phone. Most of us don't have a job that actually requires a phone, and it's really as matter of your work willing to take advantage of the fact that most of you won't push back when pressed. You can take advantage of the fact that they won't pay for you to carry a phone.

I finally got rid of my phone about a month ago. Started off deleting all the apps, stopped carrying it. Finally, took a roofing hammer and smashed it to bits. I may purchase a pay-as-you-go "brick" and leave it in the trunk of my car for emergencies, but otherwise I will never have an internet connected device that I carry on me at all times. It's needless for most of us.

You can talk about how convenient it is to have things like Maps at all times, and to be sure that is convenient. Just requires a little forethought and planning. Don't give into the FOMO, smash your phone.

I was amazed that I wasn't bothered once. The no release thing leading up to the vacation was a huge saver I think. Thats not to say I haven't been fucked by this company. I worked all day December 30th (Saturday I think) and a half day on NYE this year. But in general things I've put in like only doing releases on Tuesday to keep them far away from the weekend and only doing system patches once per month outside of super critical things (Meltdown and Spectre) have saved me. Again though I still get fucked on occasion.

But I mostly fuck myself into working either because I feel pressured by the sheer weight of ever building tasks and bugs or because there is something fun I want to try in our application, generally performance optimizations make me happy and give me a sense of accomplishment. I can be found doing those some early Saturday mornings before getting on with my day.

From what I've seen, in a sample size of three commercial workplaces with software projects, I think it varies from person to person and company to company.

At my current enterprisey gig, my perception is that some of my colleagues are very poor at setting boundaries with work, especially in terms of signing out of the team's slack after hours. This isn't forced by the environment, it's people choosing to remain plugged in. Some of my other colleagues are much better at setting boundaries. I managed to last about 1.5 years in my role before checking my work email or work slack outside of business hours.

In previous gigs at a small company I've seen far worse culture in terms of crunch time to hit project milestones or close deals, but also fairly positive leadership at times from the CEO telling people to go home.

You want to work for a company where people signing in to company slack/Skype when they are meant to be on leave are kindly but firmly hounded by colleagues and management to disconnect and go actually have their holiday.

Maybe I am sort of fresh in the workforce (3 yrs) but I just don't allow this - if I am not in the office I don't work. I don't have slack on my phone or whatever and I have strict boundaries working 9-5. Does it become worse when I have more exp?

This is commonplace in Europe. Vacation is vacation, and largely this is respected.

Companies didn't create these policies arbitrarily and unprovoked. They became necessary because of some people who took advantage of the legal system to get settlements. It's in the company's best interest to protect itself from frivolous lawsuits, so it's better to be safe than sorry.

Which isn't to say that there aren't people who actually are discriminated against, but in this example it's not a company "discarding" someone as much as it is covering its bases.

Then you aren't doing it right. There is something exceedingly shocking about a brutal bluntness. Master this and you will forever change your perspective on job interviews, relationships, marriage, and leadership. You will know when you really nail it because people will begin to describe you as articulate or eloquent.

Honesty is highly valued, which is counter-intuitive to perceptions of the corporate work culture where kindness is the most highly valued interpersonal quality. How can you be brutally honest if honesty often hurts peoples' feelings? Be confident and frame your remarks with a dose of empathy. People don't like having their feelings trampled upon, but they generally prefer that to little white lies.

> but only when used appropriately (strategically).

Epic fail. Always be honest and direct with people. If there is some policy preventing the most direct and appropriate answer then don't respond at all. People are generally good at discerning when you are tap-dancing or spinning your wheels (cowardly bullshit).

> but I NEED my paycheck more than

Once you have allowed your ethics to be compromised the blood is in the water. This is a natural stress that other people will detect as a deception and a weakness. You are compromised and available for manipulation. You are a puppet. If a job makes me feel that insecure, like the last one, I will leave and go work somewhere else.

I really like interview questions that have binary results. If you can do X, you can do this job. That way if a candidate fails, they pretty much know why they failed. They couldn't do X. It's not always possible to phrase questions like that, but when I can, I do.

"All that behavior will do is paint you as naive. Sure there's room for honesty and responsibility, but only when used appropriately (strategically). Strikes me as acutely inhumane every time my career is rewarded for suppressing those behaviors."

The corporate world is only a reflection of the society that makes it up. There are plenty of people who are dishonest and manipulative. There is no real way to "fix" the corporate world.

Ergo there are only two ways to fix it, both of them only involving yourself:

I see a number of comments here opining that the current workforce health crisis is driven by a "money is happiness" society. You know what money buys you in this case? Freedom. The freedom to act how you wish and not care about this game.

Once you are free from that, it is a matter of perspective:

"The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."

- "This is Water", David Foster Wallace https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWKenyonAddress2005.pdf

I think they should have given you a personality test before giving you HR responsibilities. I'm not trying to disparage you, but you seem not particularly suited to that job.

> "It kills me every time, but I NEED my paycheck more than I prefer to help my fellow human."

What's killing you here? "It" is your decision to comply. A more active phrasing might be "I kill me every time I choose to comply with management's requests..."

Also, it sounds like you chose to believe, if only by accident, that money is a human need. This is false...we simply have cultures around the world where asking our community for support is not considered acceptable. Again, this is a lie. If you ask enough people for help, you'll eventually find someone willing. There's more than enough of everything to go around, especially money.

The biggest issue with RSI and other repetive-use injuries (which happens in many professions and even athletics, especially with bad form) is that it happens slowly, then suddenly. It's so slow that it's discomfort. And you ignore that discomfort, especially as your concentration is on a computer monitor with important stuff to worry about being displayed on it. Also, sometimes inflammation happens later (later that night, later that week, etc.).

Start now to reduce your RSI (and RSI isn't your only problem, more on that below):

Get an external keyboard either that has an ergonomic design is is comfortable for you, and a mouse too. A Mac keyboard will be nightmare, don't use it. A Mac 'Magic Mouse' or trackpad will cause damage. It's not made for serious long-term work (there might be a lawsuit one day).

Pro tip: this may sound crazy, but get two mice, one left, one right. Change often. Learn to use the lefty even if you're right-handed, or vice-versa. You'll be surprised at how quickly you get used to it (and you'll laugh when someone tries to show you something on your workstation).

Get a desk that moves up and down. Spend some time standing, some time sitting. Again, change often.

Next, other than RSI is your neck and back. As your rhomboids get stretched and weak from forward rotation of the shoulders, the rear neck muscles get stretched and weak, the serratus goes unused, the chest and front-neck muscles get short and tight... You arch your head forward which causes your head (which already weighs about 8 pounds) to exert a lot more than 8 pounds of force on those muscle groups. And you also look at your phone all day, which you hold down below you. Well you're in for a world of nightmares and headaches that'll make the RSI a distraction by comparison.

Start early to avoid these things, before it becomes too late.

Sincerely,

A guy with some greying and screwed up wrists/hands and neck.

I was scouring the net and ran across a developer who swore that The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain by Sarno fixed his issues. I looked him up, proved to myself he was a dev and then basically said, fuck it, let's try it despite it seeming woo-woo to the extreme.

Little to no pain to this day. This was after MONTHS of PT and ergonomic changes that didn't solve the problem.

Anyway. Just my two cents.

*EDIT - one of these was the article (perhaps both), https://blog.evanweaver.com/2012/09/05/a-programmers-guide-t... and http://aaroniba.net/how-i-cured-my-rsi-pain

I also think that my issues were at least in part due to muscle tension which was coming not due to physical issues but due to emotional issues. Keep an open mind and read "The Great Pain Deception" and see if it applies to your life.

I really think that in addition to the physical benefits of rock climbing helping me, it was also the realization that if I could climb rocks then there wasn't anything really wrong with my hands, and that pain when using the computer was a conditioned response.

* Hand, forearm, shoulder and neck massage. Weekly if need be. Don't discount problems in your shoulders causing issues in your wrists.

* Stopped using a single hand mouse, learned keyboard shortcuts. My RSI was worse on my mouse hand. The constant moving right hand off keyboard at 12 o'clock to 1 o'clock to click with mouse was a killer. Keeping hands centered and relatively immobile over keyboard helped.

* Bought my own office chair that fit me. I am short through the torso and chairs could never lift me high enough for me to avoid lifting elbows.

* Bought an ergonomic keyboard and mouse.

* Bought an ergonomic keyboard augment (kind of a tray that the keyboard sat upon, that had padded extensions under either side of my wrists) that kept my wrists off the edge of desk, edge of laptop, etc.)

* Every job I got, I brought my own chair and equipment and tossed whatever my employer provided.

* I had an ergonomics consultant come in and check my posture, desk, and chair set up.

As a heavy traveler, I'd really try the massage because you can get a massage in lots of locations. My shoulders were a great part of the problem.

Good luck.

Edit: I think I should also explain some of the difficulties I had with employers. Occasionally I got crap because I created an extra chair by bringing my own. I explained that I spent more time in my office chair than I did in my own bed, and I didn't purchase my bed by finding the cheapest mattress. Since I was in my chair more than my bed, I had even higher expectation of fit and comfort. If they had a problem with my asset being on their premise, they were free to buy the chair from me at my cost. Please see copies of medical bills which I'd be happy to claim as an expense.

The other issue I had was with IT. They would see all the nonstandard equipment and then say "we can't support X because of specialized keyboard or mouse". My response would be "I completely understand the needs of IT for support-ability. Please see copies of my medical bills for RSI and massage treatment. Please have IT procurement buy replacement equipment under IT's procurement control to ensure support-ability."

Both of these strategies proved successful with employers and the IT staff.

Or we can develop or dictation programming skills like John Siracusa.

http://a.co/f1v8j5e

COLEMAK keyboard layout

Contour RollerMouse Pro3

Regular wrist stretching

Apple keyboard*

*instead of Mechnical keyboards that require more force and vertical movement to depress a key

Edit: formatting

Anyway, if it is tennis elbow, you can buy a strap that alleviates ALL of the pain. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=tennis+elbow+strap My mate couldn't life 1kg with a bicep curl, put the strap on and did 10KG. It is like a miracle!

Longer term, you need to loosen out your bicep and upper traps. But really, just try that strap and see!

On the part of people being trained, as I mentioned in another comment, I've seemed to notice that a lot of my Indian and Chinese coworkers, for probably cultural reasons, seem to have this sort of "respect the decisions of 'elders'" mentality and see it as extremely confrontational to disagree with decisions even if in their personal experience they know or have faith that it won't work.

My personal issue was always that I didn't actually know enough about my domain (distributed systems/"backend") to sometimes refute decisions that I had a gut feeling were bad (for example, never had seen anything like a proposed solution being done that way in the open source community or outside of our team -> red flags starting to go off), or that the people who were in my management chain or even more senior coworkers, would refuse to teach/mentor me or even point me toward the correct learning resources.

I ended up spending about 3 years of my free time outside of work learning as much as I could about these subjects (operating system internals, database engines, learning the network stack inside and out, distributed systems primitives, etc etc).

What did I find once I actually started questioning people based on this new knowledge I had? Not a lot of them actually knew what they were talking about. They either couldn't teach me because they themselves didn't know, or they were just afraid to say that they didn't know these things and didn't want to look "stupid".

Long story short, this was the "process" that personally made me extremely confident in being able to call people out on their bullshit since I actually had the means to defend myself objectively.

As a side note, going through this process of intense learning also made me realize that _most_ people don't know any of these things but like to talk as if they do, rather than just admit that they're not experts or unfamiliar with it...

Anyways, while teaching resilience could be interesting, imo we should also make the world a place where we need less of it, for both moral and practical reasons : not everyone may be able to develop enough resilience to deal with it.

Compare the working conditions of those jobs to those of current white-collar work.

America seems to be trending towards the Asian model of work.

20 years ago, before the lax in regulations made the whole world a competitive nightmare for most workers.

And if you feel with your limited resources that you need to push your work environment to an unhealthy point to survive, you'd better be sure that you're doing that only after exerting the same shrewd force to get the unreasonably good pricing from your vendors, squeezing your investors for as much money as they'll give you, cut-throating your competition to the same ethically-questionable level, and red-teaming your model and roadmap to be sure you're not wasting one breath on anything superfluous.

Beyond that, if you have truly arrived at a point where you are asking things of your employees that could jeopardize their physical and mental health, be honest and open with your people about it. Candor goes a long way. And then, identify the exact things that are taking a toll on physical and mental health, and address them one at a time.

Unreal. Literally the best feeling ever, no stress at all. The job was hard too but that extra degree of control and self direction made a difference.

People are not rats.

I saw footage of a gazelle being hunted by a cheetah. My reflexive thought is -- how unimaginably horrible. Here is an animal which is evolved specifically to hunt you down and kill you. And every moment you spend trying to live is a moment lived in fear of this awful creature. What a life! My horror does not even compare to the horror of this life.

But, watching the gazelle slalom and jump with incredible precision and grace, there is another thought: that the gazelle was also born to run. It uses its God given abilities to the absolute maximum possible extent. During the chase, it is in a state of complete flow, more complete than any Olympic athlete could ever hope for. The sheer concentration required, the exertion, the split-second decision-making required to avoid getting caught. To master this state is to escape the predator, and it must feel incredible to outrun a cheetah. Incredible in a way that is impossible for a human living a modern lifestyle to fathom.

To fail means to die, of course, and that cannot feel good to a gazelle. But it's just death. We all die anyway. Human beings, gazelle, cheetahs. It is a simple fact that you will die.

So, then, whose life is better? The gazelle's, whose time is spent performing in the most integrated and pure way possible? Or the human's?

The human's life, which is spent doing activities its body was not designed for, in social situations his brain is not built for, eating things his stomach was not designed for? And then, we die. Just like the gazelle.

Interesting to think about for sure. I myself have no option — synthetic insulin keeps me alive.

For all that we have issues with a culture where people check work emails at home and are otherwise on-call, we've moved remarkably far from a culture where work was truly pervasive, where it formed the backdrop of everything else.

All of which is to say that both the quality, as you point out, and the purity of our recreation have improved quite a lot. Counting up a nebulous "time off" value seems to seriously misunderstand the changes in how we live.

Or, that everyone who works hard reaps the rewards, ignoring the ever-increasing disparity in compensation?

That's not quite true. Farming is heavy, all day long work during sowing and harvest seasons, but other than these, which take a few weeks out of a year, it's not all that much work really. Keeping animals on the other hand requires some work every day (taking them in and out of the pasture, milking, cleaning sheds etc), but it's not all day long, it's really on the order of 1-2 hours a day.

Keep in mind also that for most of the history, farmers didn't really have all that much land to farm, and each farmer would work on much smaller plot than he and his family was physically able to. The reason for this is really Malthusian. If there's excess food, you have population growth, which makes you hit the carrying capacity only in a handful of generations. Look at American colonies for example. After they were founded, the population grew mostly through natural growth, further immigration being relatively unimportant -- foreign born population rarely exceeded 10%. Yet the population increased 20-fold in only 100 years.

This means that throughout most of the history, the farmer parents only had barely enough land to sustain themselves and 2 children -- only 2 children of each parent reproduced on average, otherwise you'd have population growth, which meant war or famine (or both). The farmer didn't have a lot of farming to do, because he just didn't have enough land to plow and sow.

If you are European, talk to some old people who grew up farming. My mother grew up on a farm in Eastern Europe, and her village only got electricity in early 1980s. When I talk to her, or my grandparents, or their neighbors, and I ask them if the life was poor back then, and what was the thing they needed the most, everyone always says that they had too little land. In America it was of course much different, for obvious reasons.