I enforce a militant "40 hours only" policy for my employees, and it's incredible for productivity. When you work longer hours defect rates increase, code quality drops, and things are on fire all the time. You also lose really good people due to burnout.
Sustainable pace is super important for creating and maintaining high performance teams. Crassly, it's just a more profitable way of doing business.
I wish more managers would stop buying into the myth of "time in seat == productivity", and look at the real output of their teams. When you actually run the numbers there's a lot of results that run counter to conventional wisdom.
Pfft. A man-hour of labor is a man-hour of labor. Which is why I fully understand why my employer is requiring me (and the others on my team) to make up the 48 hours of labor I lost when I evacuated due to Hurricane Irma (even though the office was of course closed for much of that time).
I'm spending the extra hours perusing/posting on HN and looking at job listings :|
> Pfft. A man-hour of labor is a man-hour of labor.
Not all hours are created equally.
I do my best work with hyperfocus.
I don't just mean more work, but far higher quality work that's at the edge of my intellectual capabilities.
This is the work that's most rewarding and gives results that I'm proud of.
But I can't get significant time "in the zone" on a 40-hour week.
All the normal but necessary distractions take at least four hours a day, and I need at least an hour or two of "non-zone" work before I can hit my stride and achieve flow.
So I find 60-70 hours a week is essential to doing my best work.
But I can't sustain that level of effort continuously for years.
So I balance that out with a week a month of low-intensity "work" (slacking/procrastinating/socializing) plus at least twelve weeks per year of contiguous time for uninterrupted travel, long-distance trekking, rebuilding relationships damaged by hyperfocus, etc.
I think you'll find that pushing back on the four hours of usual distractions per day will be more productive than working long hours.
Personally, I find the usual distractions more tiring than coding, based on years of experience.
I estimate at least 2 hours of work lost per hour of meeting, once you add in meeting prep, calendar wrangling, walking,
after and before meeting back chatter, realizing you have 30 minutes till lunch/commute after/before the meeting, being tired from presenting/listening/arguing, etc.
One strategy is to have meeting-only or meeting-free days, so meetings primarily ruin your productivity for other meetings and not your actual work.
Meeting-only days scale with team size, but can backfire by enabling the total number of hours in meetings to increase.
"I think you'll find that pushing back on the four hours of usual distractions per day will be more productive than working long hours."
Pretty much this. When you are explaing long hours by on the job ineffectively, then you need to deal with on the job ineffectivity - especially if you are in any kind of leadership position. Otherwise you end up rewarding innefective workers and punish workers with better organizational skill.
General feeling that it is ok to work ineffectively because we stay late anyway was one of the things I resented the most in previous job. And people who caused interruptions and wasted everybody time were seen as "hard workers" because they stayed late.
I enjoyed this +1 but sadly and inevitably there are replies saying essentially "no no, all man hours are not equal". Why doesn't the intertube get satire/sarcasm/irony ?
Text is a bad way of conveying tone, though there was the smiley at the end. I interpreted it the same as you, but I can see how a lot of people would miss the tone.
Poe's Law is why the internet doesn't get sarcasm - that without additional information, it's impossible to differentiate between an extreme position and one mocking it.
The comment we're talking about was skillfully constructed, there's only one way of interpreting it. On a phone so quoting from memory, but the second paragraph starting "that's why I am spending the time perusing HN..." is just an elegant way of saying that the first paragraph was tongue in cheek.
Oh, yea. Although, this sort of thing is actually fairly common for my industry (defense contracting), so I'm not sure any of us will end up anyplace better.
The funny thing is, if you just eat the cost, any halfway conscientious worker is going to pay it back in kind. Maybe a few extra hours here or there, maybe a little bit more emotional investment in the work.
Not all hours are created equal. If you're doing simple enough tasks perhaps your output is relatively stable. When I work on hard problems I've had single hours that can outperform a day or two. Getting rid of most/all of those key creative moments by keeping employees in a constant state of fatigue from large hours is bad. Studies show for typical employees after about 6 weeks of 70h work weeks a 70h week is producing less than a 40h week for a fresh non-overworked employee. So pretty quickly hours become half-hours in terms of production.
I partially agree with you, but personal productivity varies. So in our company we have a rule "work as much as you like, usually we expect no less than 30 hours, but it is OK to do 50. Anything beyond these ranges is odd".
Well many managers and execs might respond with "well then, give 'em more work! We obviously aren't giving them enough to do!"
Salary exempt is usually a losing game for developers. Crappy places will say "we pay you a salary to get the work done" and under staff and/or overwork. If it takes you 60 hours then you have to work 60 hours. But if it only took someone 30 hours they can't leave early because a) deadlines will be tightened to ensure 40+ hours or b) more work and assignments will be given.
Same experience. I've used the extra time to start internal side projects, for which a few I've earned $$ for. Surprisingly no one asks how I have the extra time
I used to be someone who worked only 4 hours max in any company and use remaining time to be on top of tech stacks(SysAdmin). But last four years i self trained on stock trading and it close to be becoming my main job in another year or so. Though i now look for trader jobs where i can trade for profit % but the salaries are no where near in my country for traders.
Everyone is different, so good managers set targets based on past performance. If you set the bar at what you can accomplish by working 3-5 hours per day, they'll assume it takes you 8 hours per day, and give you work based on that. If that works for you, great.
Some thinking-intensive work can bring you at the edge in just 3 hours a day. After that, you generate more problems than solutions. Especially mathematicians are prone to this. Similar cases in software development need to be respected.
3 hours of thinking-intensive work is fine. Then take lunch/walk/shower, and sit down to write documentation, update bug reports, chat with a coworker about your ideas, review someone else's code.....
>I wish more managers would stop buying into the myth of "time in seat == productivity", and look at the real output of their teams.
I think a big part of this is the generally ambiguous nature of knowledge work. If you could quantify work into discrete widgets it’s easy to mark people to output, but on stuff that’s fuzzy and hard to quantify it’s not so easy.
It actually takes a fair bit of work and intimate knowledge of how stuff gets done on the ground to make realistic projections about output or to understand what “real output” even means.
Just as a first approximation, I think other knowlege workers who have enough money and clout to be in control of their schedule whole work as a good model for optimal number of hours spent working over the long term. For example, look at doctor's who have their own practice. They (hopefully) like their work, and can determine their own schedule. How many hours do they work? How do they structure their time?
>They (hopefully) like their work, and can determine their own schedule.
Ehhhh. They’re not really as “in control” of their schedules as you would think. Their time is being boxed by financial pressures, generally imposed by insurance and Medicaid/Medicare reimbursement rates, and all the administrative requirements of both complying with burdensome regulations surrounding both their medical practice AND running what amounts to a small business.
They don’t even really necessarily like their work either. Running your own medical practice has a really high burnout rate and many of the people who do it now tend to be older and/or not fully dependent on the practice for their income (e.g. independently wealthy, willing to retire but just wants supplemental income, married and can rely on spousal support financially, etc.).
I'm mostly the same, but I'm less militant about it and, instead, try to empower my team to handle it themselves. That said, I explicitly promise that any time outside of the normal 40 hours should be taken as comp time. So if someone spends 3 hours one evening dealing with a production issue or we have an upper-management-imposed push to get a feature out, there should be an equivalent number of hours taken off when the employee would have otherwise worked. And it's not time that can be banked to use to increase a vacation, it should be taken immediately and if I notice that someone isn't taking it, I'll tell them to leave the office. I've found that employees who aren't overworked can pull a 70 hour week and actually be that much more productive, but they can't do it on a regular basis and they need to recover afterwards.
Also, to combat the "time in seat" fallacy, I encourage my team to take walks every couple of hours, even if it's just around the office, though they should get outside if it's not raining. They can do it in groups, pairs or alone, but I've found that developers are more creative and better able to think through consequences/permutations when they don't spend too much time being sedentary. And it has the dual benefit of breaking the notion that sitting at your desk is the modern day timecard. As you've correctly noted, getting stuff done and achieving quality are what we should measure, not ability to spend time typing and looking at a screen.
Walks are very productive in exercise and clearing head. I often try to take a walk with some people on my team. We just talk about whatever comes into our head - life, hobbies, etc. Sometimes it's work and we end up brainstorming.
We joke if we get caught walking we tell management that we're in a meeting.
My employer has traditionally been very good about 40 hour weeks. However, recently everyone on the team has been doing 55-80 hours per week. On about week 4, I pointed out to my manager that the last time we were on an extended stretch of OT, the company put in place a policy to pay us at an hourly rate equal to our annual salary / 2080 for all OT hours worked. He responded "Yeah, but [project x] was on OT for over a year! Besides, OT is expected at most other companies, and none pay for it." (never mind that most at least have bonus programs). It's now been over 3 months of OT for my team, and personally I think there is no end in sight. Of some slight consolation, the less senior team members do get paid for a portion of their OT (usually around 1/2 to 2/3).
Also, our company doesn't do bonuses at all, doesn't offer anything in the form of comp time, and has an unlimited vacation policy that's basically meant 'next to no vacation' for the past half year or so. Some members of my team have hinted to me that they're looking for new jobs, but I don't think management has a clue.
We use Pivotal Tracker, and it's pretty easy to see how many bugs are popping up and how often.
Code quality shows up in your velocity over time. My favorite saying right now is "quality is future speed". We also do regular reviews to assess things like cyclomatic complexity and how well SOLID principles are being followed.
You are my new favorite person. I love running into these anecdotes - I keep thinking I'm alone in believing that a business can be run according to this policy.
I'm not convinced it's optimal! However, it's a "known good" number that's easy to convince people to follow along with. Running experiments is hard and expensive, so we just haven't tackled that yet.
My personal suspicion is that optimal is probably in the 35-45 range, but I'd love to have more data.
It is "known good" specifically for repetitive manufacturing labor. That's what all of our business structures are optimized for. As work changes to be primarily mental, things will change. It's good that you're thinking about this sort of thing, it will give you a significant advantage in the coming years. Lots of research into how capable humans are of extended periods of mental exertion shows that we can be productive far less than with physical exertion. I suppose it's a good thing that thanks to computers, mental exertion ends up producing productivity multipliers rather than just incremental improvements then!
My suspicion is it's somewhere in the 30 - 40 range. For me personally my productivity starts declining after 30, but I'm fairly certain some of my coworkers can do it longer.
It's what most of the English speaking societies have centred on over time.
Other places say Scandinavia might put it at 37 and some Asian companies might be closer to 45.
But around 40 hours pr week is where most modern societies tend to think work/life balance is reasonable both for the economy and the individual.
The old union slogan used to be 8 hours of work 8 hours of sleep and 8 hours of leisure. And in many ways that the origin of our 40 hours woork week when we only works 5 days a week.
People were happily working around the clock, but I'm fairly certain the people breaking Enigma didn't try doing that more than a fair number of hours a day (fuck if I know what it is, but it's not equatable to making bombs or tanks).
The US was only in that period from Dec 1941 to Aug 1945, just over 3 1/2 years. Assuming that the build-up years (when "everyone knew" we were going to have a war) were not as intense.
I don't think most people working at home during WWII were primarily motivated by concern about their allies abroad. Instead, I'd argue the motivations were:
* supporting a friend or family member serving in the military
* capturing a new economic opportunity (government contracts, etc), following the shockingly hard times of the Great Depression
To that point, there are currently millions of people suffering at this moment around the globe. If you were motivated by compassion, you'd probably find a different job and put in long hours.
How does a total of 40 hours per week affect the predicability of being there at the same time in a way that 35, 39, or 42 hours maximum per week could not?
my teams do the same thing, it works fine as long as there's some degree of predictability in the schedule. My team does a standard 40 hour work week but only 6 hours per day of required "core hours" used for pairing. The other two hours ar e flexible so the folks can adjust their schedules if they want to get in earlier in the morning and leave earlier.
9-4 you'll be in the office and ready to pair, and lunch for everyone is 12-1 regardless of when you got there; but you can come in at 7 and leave at 4 if you want, or get in at 9 and stay til 6 or work at home later if that works better.
you need that strictness of "pairing time starts now" otherwise you have people coming and going and needing breaks at all different times and it gets disruptive.
But the daily schedule is only dependent on the maximum numbers of hours to the extent that the hours have to fit within that weekly window. If we assume a five day work week, and the maximum weekly total is 35 instead of 40, then you may only have 5 core hours (or 6 core hours and one fewer flexible hour per day), but the predicability remains exactly the same. Changing the total hours per week does not mean having to throw out a schedule entirely.
I am afraid I still don't quite see what impact the total maximum hours for a week has to do with predictability of scheduling. What am I missing?
I often think about Arthur Rubenstein, the phenom mid-century pianist, for whom a lot has been written about his mission in early life to "practice as little as possible." There's a lot of hyped up romanticism in these quotes and anyone who plays at his level has spent a lifetime playing piano, period. Regardless, his guidance about spontaneity, creativity, and the relationship to practicing too much, which I equate to the current discussion on overworking, is highly interesting.
"I was born very, very lazy and I don't always practice very long, but I must say, in my defense, that it is not so good, in a musical way, to overpractice. When you do, the music seems to come out of your pocket. If you play with a feeling of 'Oh, I know this,' you play without that little drop of fresh blood that is necessary—and the audience feels it." Of his own practice methods, he said, "At every concert I leave a lot to the moment. I must have the unexpected, the unforeseen. I want to risk, to dare. I want to be surprised by what comes out. I want to enjoy it more than the audience. That way the music can bloom anew."
Not all work benefits from risk, the drop of blood, the unexpected, that are all baked into the right amount of effort, but a great deal of valuable and innovative work does.
There's simply no relation between the constant death-march described in this article and "practice" in the sense of personal improvement and skill-building. In fact, they're antithetical.
Even the strongest advocates of "practice makes perfect" doctrines, such as Anders Ericsson, talk about something called deliberate practice, which is an expertly designed regiment, requiring exhausting mental and physical effort, the close tutelage of a veteran teacher, and adequate rest periods for its positive effects to properly ripen.
These authors typically assess that even a top motivated and well-rested individual can only engage in "deliberate practice" for 4 hours daily at the very most.
So if you want to do that, then far from almost doubling the length of your workday, you should actually cut it in half, and ensure plentiful rest and light recreation before and after your workday. Basically, mimic the way top athletes train.
Otherwise, don't delude yourself that you are "practicing" or "improving". You're simply working, chugging along sub-optimally, doing what you already know without substantial improvement or room to grow or learn much.
These very same authors predict that by working a punishing 10-12+ hour daily schedule, your skills will not improve, and likely will deteriorate, since you will become deeply disengaged (cf The Power of Full Engagement).
The idea that perpetually over-worked, over-stressed, nearly-exhausted engineers are "practicing" or "improving themselves" is a romantic wishful-thinking with no basis in reality or scientific research.
Anecdotally, I've seen such places up close. Most people there burn out and/or move on quite quickly. Turnover in these companies tends to be very high, and they only keep those who can't find a better job.
Practice is important for building skills, and for knowing the piece.
The point is that you should be able to play the piece like you know how to walk.
Imagine: if you had do 'think' about walking, about every step, you would walk unnaturally. You'd certainly not be able to swatter.
When you can play as you walk - then - you can loosen up, and focus on having fun, making it creative i.e. have swagger. The actual notes are mundane, like walking, then the music can come out. If you have to think about it, it needs more practice.
Also - 'work' is not 'music'. Most of work is not practice, it's building stuff.
A carpenter who worked 1/2 days would probably get just about only 1/2 done, for example. I know tech is not quite the same, but it's mostly similar. We are not solving complex math problems, most of tech is mundane.
A programmer can usually average ~4 hours of focused highly productive work where they are not on Hacker News etc per day. Fewer people can do that kind of focused effort for ~8 hours a day regularly. I have never met someone that can do that kind of highly focused effort for ~12 hour days.
That does not mean highly focused effort is the only valid type of work. But, it is very valuable for most programming jobs.
Further, cutting back hours often increases productivity even if you spend the same amount of time in the office.
Modern day programming is so much more than just opening up your IDE and churning out code. You have to collaborate, talk, review other people's work etc. There is also a meta aspect to it to improve you productivity at work by looking at your own work from a level above.
You also have to keep learning new bleeding edge stuff to not be out of business in a few years.
Plus doing a lot of side projects and extra work, always opens up avenues for new opportunities and helps you to meet with other smart people who often have something new for you.
All of this is work. And there is no way you can be good at this if you only work for 4 hrs a day.
A type of deliberate practice only relates to a specific skill. Normal work programming has little impact on interviewing or competitive programming skills.
However, it is very relevant to getting better at exactly those specific kinds of things the company is working on.
My brother is in a bluegrass band. They've been around for 10 years now, and there's a lot of music they've played so many times I'm sure they could do it in their sleep.
There are a few songs that I really do think they used to do better, back when they were just starting out. Specifically, some of the fast, most technically difficult songs that they used to play right up until they were at the edge of what was possible for them. Those songs were full of an energy that they just don't have anymore, now that they can do them perfectly without a sweat.
That particular form presents an interesting challenge. Many performers tend to stay with memorized breaks, or within certain patterns, that they can do on stage without breaking a sweat. The blood only shows in jams or informal performances. Unlike jazz, where it is not. cool. to play the same solo twice anywhere.
I think of the Rolling Stones for this. They have played every song 10,000 times now, and it shows. Their 60's and early 70's shows were magic and energetic. It sounded like the song could fall apart at any moment, like we were on a musical quest discovering the song WITH them. Yeah, they're in their 70's, but plenty of other musicians their age pull it off.
Didn't Rubinstein humbly then revisit technique and practise religiously in his 40s? (Not to detract from your point, which I think has value).
I think that the middle way is key. I've met people who think work for the sake of work is valuable. Others who wouldn't touch hard work with a barge pole. If you cherish success, both are required.
Having met virtuoso pianists, I'd say the context which Rubinstein talks from is open to misinterpretation:
Reaching the level of mastery where one can sightread any of the Beethoven concerti or a Liszt etude requires a lifetime of years/decades of dedicated practice, but it is true that once you're at that level, you can find diminishing returns on hard work which encroach upon your creativity.
>> Reaching the level of mastery where one can sightread any of the Beethoven concerti or a Liszt etude requires a lifetime of years/decades of dedicated practice, but it is true that once you're at that level, you can find diminishing returns on hard work which encroach upon your creativity.
I would argue that looking at sheet music and playing it requires very little creativity, if any at all. It is in that arena that practice is important. Being able to play anything put down in front of you is only possible with mastery of your instrument. However - if you are creating music mastery can get in the way. Often the best ideas come from stumbling upon things. If you know everything or know how things 'should' be done coming up with original ideas is difficult. Personally I've seen this in guitarists. There are some who are clearly masters of their instrument. They can play anything, at any speed, with a wide array of techniques at their disposal. Most of the time they don't write anything interesting.
"requires" is an interesting word. i think you can get away with being a robot, but you are basically saying that no classical musicians are creative, which is laughable. you can improvise dynamics, tone, articulation, phrasing, tempo... its not just the pitches man!
as a lifelong, professional classical and jazz musician, I can tell you that the current state of both very closely mirrors the current state for swe, it is just that swe's seem to have to go through what we have been through, just faster. There was a time in classical music and jazz, and even pop, when creativity was sought after. this time is no more. Classical/jazz has become a robotic craft in search of technical perfection. Back in the day, pianist-performers like Cortot or Grainger were appreciated for their personal contributions to style and art. Now, this kind of thing is shoved under to elevate technical perfection. It is robots all the way forward there for performers, and that is what they teach us in conservatories. They then pretend this is a form of artistry when it is simply reproduction of printed direction--- we are asked to be human compilers. This is what is understood by many to be musical art. Cortot makes too many errors for the kids as we say in the biz. We are also asked to do it all because we just love it so much-- who needs jobs or money? All we need to eat is love. Don't forget passion. So yeah, we have been asked to be as robotic as possible, as self erasing as possible if we want to get paid. Take heed swes! Btw, pretty much any first year music student at a conservatory can do what Lady GaGa does musically. Her "improv" isn't much of a strain for anyone who studies music at that level. The thing they can't do is see beyond to pop and understand that they need to find themselves a meat dress and a stylist plus a wealthy investor to pay for promo and these items. It isn't what we are inculcated to value-- nothing against that btw, and good for her, but she is no Rubenstein or even Streisand. She's a great performer and showperson though. Nothing wrong with that-- it is its own thing, but please. It is so not the same as being on the level of a Monk or Charlie Haden or Sun Ra or even Mostly Other People Do The Killing. I can tell you that Rubenstein and Any member of MOPDTK practiced a ridiculously stupid number of hours per day for years before they realized it doesn't make sense.
I play harmonica for fun. I tried to learn sheet music, and gave up in two weeks.
It felt wrong to even begin with. Music is mostly about hearing and feeling. I saw no point in turning myself into sight to music converting meat robot.
After several weeks of tinkering, I was finally able to learn how to play by ear, and I've never enjoyed music more than then.
good post. its funny, im a musician too. i decided the conservatory could fuck off after 1 year. ive found gypsy jazz a breath of fresh air personally... wonderful people and spirit, tons of gigs, technical virtuosity to the extreme, AND even some truly creative players. i do agree the paralells are strong esp between jazz people and swe. i dont know, you probably are further on your musical journey, but, i feel like complaining that creativity isnt present in music just means your hanging with the wrong people. in any case, a fun read, thanks
I agree, the conservatory really should fuck off. Creativity is definitely present in music, but unless you are a composer, you won't get paid for it. --not much anyway. Unfortunately, creativity doesn't really exist in classical performance anymore. When it exists in jazz, it is happening very rarely. There are exceptions, but no one knows these folks outside of jazz. - as you probably already know. The gypsy jazzers are a fun group of people, but again, it isn't creative, unless some nutball takes a really cool solo (once in a blue moon) which is such a wonderful moment when it happens. They are usually not asked to jump in much, as you probably also know. But nice to say heyto a fellow musician/engineer.
you average jam, sure, its a bunch of licks mostly. but like... bireli? angelo debarre? sebastien giniaux? the list goes on... there are lots of people who come up with crazy shit on the fly. though you will find lots of licks in everyones playing
with all respect to the great players of gypsy jazz (many of whom I like) gypsy jazz and solos over changes in that style is not really creative. It is a formula that has been invented. People like it;I like it too. But it's what I mean--- not innovative. It has nothing to do with our time. It is retro like BeBop. Recreating BeBop and Gypsy jazz is not creative- it is like really cool Civil War Reenactment. This is what I mean by music lacking creativity for the most part. I mean we don't support innovators- we support technically excellent practitioners of a well-known style. This is a craft, not an art. Nothing against great craft at all-- I love it. But we are in desperate need of art. Ditto in computer programming. It is important that it notice these pitfalls.
interesting. craft is central to the style sure, but its not the only thing! but in any case, im curious how you are drawing the line... surely youd call django an artist? what about antoine boyer now? he sound so new! isnt that newness an artistic vision, not just an expression of mastery of craft? maybe you think the ratio is too heavy towards craft, or that requiring such a high degree of craft to be heard in the first place is whats keeping us from hearing artists? who are the artists you know?
of course django was an artist. he innovated the style we now immitate. we don't have a ton of innovators in jazz anymore. I mentioned Mostly Other People Do The Killing. There ate many in the downtown NY scene I could mention--- I'd say Christian Marclay. Shelley Hersh. But- that is getting away from the point. the point is--- we need to put the practice of innovation and diversity of perspective to the fore in computer programming or it dies the same unknown death of monoculture.
> i decided the conservatory could fuck off after 1 year.
Yes and no. Remember Picasso: "It took me four years to paint like Rafael, but a lifetime to paint like a child". Being patient enough to acquire the mountains of knowledge, the sound bases achieved by generations before yours, pays great dividends later in life, no matter the field. It's truer for some fields than others, of course.
There are some surprising examples: Mika used to be a classically trained lieder singer, and won a scholarship (if I recall) to the Royal College of Music, which he promptly used to "learn to sing like a pop star" with the results we know today.
Now this is not to say you should do hours of figured bass if you want to be a blues singer (and FWIW, Arnold Schoenberg says in Harmonielehre that he thinks this is a silly way to learn harmony). But there is value in learning common practice harmony and understanding both Beethoven and Richter even if you are going to do blues.
> complaining that creativity isnt present in music just means your hanging with the wrong people
Yes and further, in order to have something interesting to say you must have lived, which is why high school concerts can be so tedious even with very talented students (mine had note-perfect Rachmaninov Paganini variations! what hope have we mere mortals... yet the pianist is now a doctor). Globalisation is also reducing the variance between artists, both because concert halls are standardising star power cross-border, and because people are becoming more alike all over the world. On the demand side, I'd whine about the Instagram generation falling short on the pathos side of things but I'd start sounding like an old man; really variance is the problem, not depth.
The only exception I can think of is of Amy Kobayashi as a tiny child doing Mozart's 26th concerto [1] in a really fresh and interesting manner (this lent truth to something a pianist who had lived through WWII told me, that Mozart could be understood only by children and those on their death beds).
also to the "you must have lived" to have anything artistic to say... depends on your defenition of artistic. Certainly, in order to reproduce the piano compositions of middle aged European men, it might help to have lived, especially to the age of the composer. Maybe that gets in the way of your only children and the near-dead understand how to play Mozart. Martha Argerich and Pollini say hi, but when they were middle aged. This whole dusty notion of music is the basis of this completely un-artistic, elitist notion of classical music. Elitism is the good pal if monoculture. It promotes the homogenization and dumbing down of the arts and I fear it will do the same for computer programming if we aren't careful to look out for it and push back with diversity measures.
who is Mika? As to knowing Richter and Beethoven to play the blues...I think it would be difficult for someone who has the money for piano lessons and a conservatory style education with hours to practice on a Steinway in a climate controlled practice room at Juilliard ... i really think it's hard for those people to play rhe blues properly. Not to get all snobby about the blues (joking here) but I do think the player who understands how to do that might come from a different background. Also, they tend to be black, for obvious reasons. Not to say that people from other races don't experience hardships on that level, it is just that the blues is really a particular language and pathos from a group of tragically oppressed people in a particular time in the United States, who didn't get to attend Juilliard or the like, or eat most days. You know, it's part of the Afro-Cuban tradition that created jazz, which has its roots in the African-American community in the United States. Old European and Euro-descent men only wish they knew something about it, which is why they tried to imitate it (Ravel a conservatory drop-out btw, Stravinsky, Bernstein, Gershwin...)The only one who kinda succeeded in reaching back into that ethos from his Juillard practice room was Miles Davis-- and he dropped out too, btw) rich kidz at Juilliard, eastman, the New Scool, and other conservatory jazz programs spend their life trying to understand what it means to be that oppressed. I know, I've heard hours of blues, or should I say "blues" played by the white children of the rich. Beethoven and Richter don't get it. And schoenberg doesn't either. Frankly, very few educators at conservatory have any idea how to teach musicians. That is because they are supposed to get out of the way and help them teach themselves. This rarely happens, because artistry doesn't have a path. It finds its own- conservatory pretends there is a path, which brings us to where we are now with homogenized music. is there something that can be gained here with respect to programming artistic development? I think so, it just seems that the field is so insular and mono culture (just like classical music and jazz) that it can't learn from other pedagogical and culture mistakes the arts have already made. Namely, there is no "path". Thatmight help. but definitely check out Brushy One String. He is a modern blues guy who gets it-- again, hes from an impoverished island background not unlike the Mississippi Delta back in the day-- no Beethoven and Richter for him-- just poverty, drugs, crime, and oppression.
If what you're saying was true then any two good classical musicians would sound exactly the same... but they don't, right? The difference between a good pianist and the great pianist is in the expression of those same notes they're playing - call it as you wish: articulation, energy, dynamics, emotions...
these days, they sound pretty much the same-- no one is really scadalized or blown away by a classical artits' choices. Sure, we can "tell the diff" btw Hillary Hahn and Midori. But honestly, I can live without both of their dutiful takes on Standard Violin Concerto X. But if you know of some truly inspiring, artistic choice making, innovative classical player, I'd love to know so I can buy their record. I mean that sincerely.
Try post-stroke Stephen Kovacevich. He was already a maverick before, the loss of much of his physical ability forced him to review his approach and the result has, at least, forced me to reconsider my view of many pieces I thought I had done and dusted (e.g. Brahms 4th Ballade). Hearing him live was both terrifying and awakening. His Beethoven cycle is unique and changing over time.
I also think that if you can abstract from the visual, Yuja Wang's playing has a ferocity and hunger for life that reminds me of the Russian School at its peak without the tragedy, and the technique to back it. I've not heard it in anybody else of her generation. It is a bit of a shame that her repertoire choices are so conservative, but to be expected given how she is marketed; I am very keen to hear what she will sound like in 40 years.
Stephen Hough has a sensitivity and big picture awareness rare since the death of Richter. Sitting in a 4 hour masterclass on Franck, I learnt a dozen new things, almost as if new dimensions unfolded about the art (I got the same impression from reading Neuhaus' book - ideas clicked into place seeming so obvious ex post, unreachable ex ante).
Finally Zhu Xiao-Mei has had an incredibly full life (from risking her life smuggling a piano and sheet music into Mao's reeducation camps and playing that piano in a meat freezer, to cleaning houses in LA before becoming a Parisian ghost wonder after accidentally playing a friend's piano and getting standing ovations in German concert halls that had greeted her with audible disdain) and it comes through in her playing. As a bonus you can "rediscover" a fair amount of Schumann this way.
> Didn't Rubinstein humbly then revisit technique and practise religiously in his 40s? (Not to detract from your point, which I think has value).
He did but I think the reason he did so was not because he felt it was better for the music but because he had children and he didn't want them to be lazy. I wish I could find the source but I suspect it was from a video interview so I'm finding it difficult to find.
I see the point you're making, but I have to disagree. I think a part of mastering any area of expertise is being so good at what it is you do that it becomes second-nature to you. This allows you to use your skills on demand when you need it, whenever and wherever. No prep required. And since it's second nature, you can tweak it as needed to make it fresh and interesting to yourself and other people.
A good example of this musically is Lady Gaga. She has performed the same set of songs so many times, but she has mastered her musical ability and skills so well that she uses it to her advantage (and the audience's) in a performance.
She improvises on the spot, harmonizing lyrics with herself and backup singers, changing lyrics to make them relevant to the crowd or show she's doing, and if she's on a piano sometimes changes up an entire song and adds parts to it which never existed, and may never exist again.
The result is an engaging performance that is never the same a second time around, and it leaves a lasting impression on the audience.
This is because Lady Gaga is actually an artist, with practiced skills and true talent, vs. a performer that has to be auto-tuned when on stage because they were picked due to their looks or marketability and not due to any inherent talent.
That's what we still SELL as the ideal of art and music, but very rarely deliver. LG is a refreshing presence in modern music.
I listened to an interview with guitar Richard Lloyd (Television, Matthew Sweet) with a very similar sentiment that stuck with me.
(While discussing talented guitarists like Satriani who exhibit perfection in their performances)
"There's got to be a little danger. Some of the greatest bands, you feel as if they aren't going to make it through the song... It's captivating in a way that perfection isn't."
It adds drama to a performance. When a performer is a little shaky the audience empathise with them more. With perfection, people just sit back and let it wash over them.
A performance I'll always remember was a community night, free entry, amateur performers. Some guy and his sister got up. The guy said 'Hey, this is my sister's first time singing in public, say Hi everyone.' And the sister looked like she was going to die. Then she sang like an angel, still looking like she was going to die all the way through. Audience went bananas.
For a different take on it from Heinrich Neuhaus who taught Richter, Gilels and Lupu:
"Godowsky, my incomparable teacher and one of the great virtuoso pianists of the post-Rubinstein era once told us in class that he never practised scales (and, of course, that was so) . Yet, he played them with a brilliance, evenness, speed and beauty of tone which I believe I have never heard excelled. He played the scales he encountered in musical compositions in the best possible manner and in this way learned to play ideally "scales as such".
[...] What was Godowsky's method of teaching? As everybody knows, he was reported to be "a wizard of technique" [...]. For this reason numerous young pianists from all over the world flocked to him, mainly in the hope of getting his recipe for attaining "virtuoso technique".
Alas for them! Godowsky hardly ever said a word about technique in the sense in which these youngsters understood it; all his comments during a lesson were aimed exclusively at music, at correcting musical defects in a performance, at achieving maximum logic, accurate hearing, clarity, plasticity, through a scrupulous observance and a broad interpretation of the written score. In his class, he valued above all the real musician and approached with obvious irony those pianists whose fingers were fast and agile while their brains were slow and dull"
I feel the same way about karaoke. Do a little bit of practice so you don't look like a fool. But, if you over-practice you'll take the fun out of having your best performance live.
I feel like karoake has a bathtub distribution. My favorites are the people who are outrageously good or outrageously bad. As long as they are outliers, it's fun. The ones in the middle who sing well enough to not embarrass themselves but not good enough to be an exciting performance are boring.
Humm, if you get everything right I would probably assume you already read about something similar which means that it is evaluating nothing or rather it is just evaluating your ability to remember things which is not that useful when you can just google it.
Pro tip for non-singers like me: Buy one of those karaoke games. Now find out the songs your voice naturally sings reasonably well. Stick to those songs forevermore.
I love the idea of the drop of blood and I value that in live music. In all fairness, though, it probably helps to be so fantastically talented that you can get farther with 1 hour of practice than other musicians get in 10 hours. I wonder if Rubenstein ever lost a gig or missed a meal because the risk went really poorly.
i think the key here is the risk, not necessarily not practicing. its always good to boost you technique. its always good to know more rather than less. but, if you practice in such a way that you are trying to eliminate risk when performing, thats i think where you run into trouble. far be it from me to think i know more about this subject than rubenstein... but just my 2c. risk kind of seems like the empathic gateway with the audience, they can see that you are vulnerable, which makes the whole thing infinitely more interesting. its almost unfair that playing things perfectly makes them worse, because most people wont even know its hard or could have fallen apart.
don't underestimate your own wisdom here. Rubenstein was just a guy who played piano a lot. You are right about vulnerability. But anyone at any technical level can reach for new stuff. Rubenstein was trying to romaticize something in an old fashioned, deep aubergine velvet sounding way. Of course he had his rep practiced to the point of row row row yer boat facility-- all musicians do who get paid to do it. The point is to have the courage to reach beyond what you have already mastered. Anyone can do this. He just says it in that old school arrogant classical master way-- like "i like to hold myself back from complete mastery so there is a little blood in it". My response to this is: oh Rubenstein! You nutty old master. It surely is ok to admit to everyone that you could not get to perfection if your life depended on it. None of us can, and it is totally cool to admit that. Back then, there was this "the Great Danton" mystique to the magical magical art of classical performership. It was the Harry Potter of then. Even his statements ate supposed to evoke the air of smoky mystery and genuis. Watch the Prestige for an explainer on this era of showmanship and life-altering commitment to this "performance". It is an anachronism. But just like in that movie-- people want to believe its magic. Dig?
There's also a lot of research that suggests it's not just how much you practice but how you practice. A recent book, "Peak", covers research into expertise and how deliberate practice is essential rather than just blindly spending lots of time.
I would guess that managers who blindly mandate 70 hour weeks are more likely to be blind to the actual work habits as well.
You need to get really good at something to arrive at this level. This is the equivalent of saying somebody who scales a Mt Everest regularly, can scale Mt Everest regularly without excessive practice.
Conveniently forgetting all the previous effort that went into it.
As much as I'd love to believe the "work more than 40 hours a week, because SCIENCE!" party line, I have a hard time accepting it, and I think so do most people who hear it (outside of HN, at least).
For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity.
For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of people who work longer hours and do it successfully. And most of the really successful people out there will mention that they worked insanely hard at some point. Are they all lying? All wrong?
The article itself mentions people doing extra hours of coding on personal projects, and we all know some people who have started companies that way. What, do these projects simply not exist? How does that make any sense?
You can think it's exploitation to ask people to work hard, but this is to work on a team with a world-class researcher who most people would love to work with. Is it too much work for some people? Sure. Are there others for whom it is worth the trade-off? Probably. Why does everyoªne on HN just assume they know better than those people themselves, and set off to make them feel bad and exploited? Working really hard is a totally legit and rational choice under some circumstances.
(Btw, worth pointing out that this article is at least partly a pitch for a book about working less hours. Not saying this invalidates its points, but it is certainly taking advantage of the publicity Andrew Ng's post has gotten to sell a product).
If you are expecting me to work extra hours you will have to pay multiple of my normal rate for overtime. I'm sorry but anything else is some form of exploitation or at the very least unfair.
And the argument with extra hours working on personal projects is ridiculous. As a matter of fact I am a heavy open source contributor and work on numerous projects in my personal time, some of them already have many hundreds of hours invested time in them. I choose to work on them for free because they interest me.
If you want me to spend that extra time working on the company instead then don't expect me to do it for free. You are basically asking to own my free time which is ridiculous.
Overtimes and their compensation should be clearly defined in the contract, otherwise you can't expect to take employees' free unpaid time outside of work hours.
I think GPs point was that people can clearly be productive more than 40 hours a week because so many are. How people should be compensated for their time is only loosely coupled with how many hours they can work.
I agree with you that we should be fairly compensated, but I also agree that the dogma of "40 is the max a worker can be productive, possibly less" is wrong in a large number of cases.
The claim to be answered is not 'people can't be productive working more than 40 hours a week'. It's that people would be more productive if they worked less. We don't have to rely on vague anecdotes and 'what about people who are really really sure and feel it very deeply that their personal sacrifice wasn't counter-productive? Shouldn't we just believe them so they can feel their exertion wasn't wasted?' We've got research.
But its quite important to make a distinction between manufacturing work, repetitive physical labor, and mental work. Different organs are involved and they function differently. As nice as some might imagine it would be to only employ machines, in reality we still have to put bathrooms in the workplace, give people a lunch break, and admit that they're sacks of meat. They've got limits, and ignoring them will never be productive.
You might be right that some people can be productive more than 40 hours per week because I am one of them.
However my point was that when negotiating salary you can't really say "I can be productive 70 hours per week" and therefor ask for 40% higher salary. It doesn't work that way and what you negotiate is based on your skills mostly in comparison to other people who are assumed to put in cca 40 hours per week.
So even if you can be productive for 70 hours per week, I wouldn't do it and instead invest that time in your family and yourself, making your life outside of work richer and more fulfilling. Otherwise you will just be working for free the extra 40% of the time and never be compensated for it by most companies.
Finally, you only have one life so spending most of your life in the office or commuting in and out of office is quite a waste of your time. You should use your free time to enjoy your life imho and experience more things.
>You might be right that some people can be productive more than 40 hours per week because I am one of them.
Is that constant heads down, in the zone coding, or does that include some coding, some management, some marketing, etc? Also, how long can you do that for? 5 years straight?
I typically work in bursts. If I don't have an outlet in between bursts (surfing, 30 minute tv show, walk, etc), the longer it takes to get back into a burst. Being in an office doesn't offer much as far as outlets go.
It's the same for me, I work in bursts. Sometimes I will have 30m-1h of not very productive time (reading blog post on web, going for a walk etc) but then I will have a burst of productivity when I hunker down for couple of hours and do a lot of work.
Obviously it isn't constant 8 hours of heads down, in the zone coding, there are things in between and also meetings and planning often takes time. I used to work longer before but as you say, that is not sustainable for a long run, you can do it for couple of years before you burn out.
I also used to do quite a lot of extra work in the evenings and weekends when I had sudden inspiration / urge to refactor or improve some piece of code. But I don't do that anymore and instead use that free time for myself and my hobbies :)
If I feel an urge to write some code on Sunday, I will work on one of my open source projects or contribute to some other projects out there if they interest me or I will experiment with new tech to keep my skills up to date.
40 hours might be the maximum a worker can be productive on a single issue/project. After a little while you have to do something completely different.
> For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity.
It's not in the slightest bit down to convenience. It's because 40 hours was quite simply discovered to be a more productive length of day, well over a century ago, back in the later stages of the industrial revolution.
In the US, if memory serves, the move to a 40 hour working week largely started out at the Ford Motor company back in the early 1900s, after Henry Ford experimented reducing hours and discovered that the number of mistakes made by workers went down drastically, and productivity increased. This swept across the industry because the improvements were impossible to deny. Slowly but surely that spread across other industries until it became the staple.
40 hours isn't done by custom, it's done because it's proven to be the most productive working week. This isn't a case of scientists discovering that "what people are used to is what they're most productive at". For most of the industrial revolution people worked 12hr+ days, and that was considered, even by the labour force, to be perfectly acceptable.
Hauling that back to 8 hour days was a herculean task that no major factory owner was going to do without damn good evidence that it would improve things.
40 hours isn't done by custom, it's done because it's proven to be the most productive working week. This isn't a case of scientists discovering that "what people are used to is what they're most productive at". For most of the industrial revolution people worked 12hr+ days, and that was considered, even by the labour force, to be perfectly acceptable. Hauling that back to 8 hour days was a herculean task that no major factory owner was going to do without damn good evidence that it would improve things.
That's a relatively biased misreading of the history of the 8 hour day. You're implying that science and factory owners decided on it. Yet the labor movement, industrial action and strife played an outsized role. The 8 hour day movement is an old one (http://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/8hourday.html), and the call for 8 hours was echoed by the labor movement for decades after.
It's because 40 hours was quite simply discovered to be a more productive length of day
That was true when most of the workforce was doing manual and factory style labour. To the best of my knowledge it hasn't been rigorously reproduced for works that spend their days staring at a screen thinking.
And if it's not been rigorously tested, then there doesn't seem to be any strong case to assume that the ideal number for office work is higher, rather than lower, than 40.
I'm also wondering how commute time (and method of commute) factors into this. Does 30 minutes of physically strenuous cycling before/after work have a positive or negative impact on office workers? Does the same time spent in a car navigating stop'n'go traffic have a different effect? Both involve some element of mental effort, but both are quite different from the rest of the days tasks. Certainly in my experience one helped my mental state and one didn't.
I recall reading somewhere that one of the best predictors of employee turnover is commute length. But that was for call center employees, and I can't recall where I read that, so take it with a grain of salt.
Anecdotally, I once moved from having an hour long commute to a 5 minutes walk from work. I did end up leaving, but I feel that I enjoyed life much more living close to the office. Getting an extra two hours every day allowed me to enjoy life much more.
I guess commute doesn't need to be minimized, it just shouldn't be too long. I cycle to work which takes me 20-25 minutes and I enjoy it. It gives me a break between work and home so that I can separate the two.
there doesn't seem to be any strong case to assume that the ideal number for office work is higher, rather than lower, than 40.
Absolutely. I'm at least as convinced that 35 hours is optimal time as I am that 45 is. I also agree with your point about commutes. Instead of looking at time in the office it probably makes more sense to look at the time from when one leaves home to when one leaves the office. And speaking only for myself, having to drive 30 minutes to work each morning would be a pretty major deal-breaker for any job I'd consider.
Hadn't really thought of it before, but there's a compelling amount of evidence out there that sitting down for long periods of a day is very bad for your health, which can only be bad for your overall functionality. Definitely something that should be re-examined... My supposition is that companies know this and won't re-examine because they're afraid of the outcome: paying more for less butts-in-the-seat (the only metric management understands).
I'm afraid this is a case of when the winners rewrite history.
Unfortunately the 40-hour week seems to have been among the last big wins of the US labor movement. Hence the popular (on HN at least) idea that this win was the result of Ford's top-down pioneering.
"To qualify for his doubled salary, the worker had to be thrifty and continent. He had to keep his home neat and his children healthy, and, if he were below the age of twenty-two, to be married.
What started out as a team of 50 “Investigators” eventually morphed into a team of 200 people who probed every aspect of their employees lives. And I mean every aspect.
Investigators would show up unannounced at your home, just to make sure it was being kept clean. They’d ask questions that were less appropriate of a car company, than they were for the modern-day CIA. They’d query you about your spending habits, your alcohol consumption, even your marital relationships. They’d ask what you were buying, and they’d check on your children to make sure they were in school.
Women weren’t eligible, unless they were single and had to support children. Men weren’t eligible unless the only work their wives did was in the home.
....
spiritual smelting process where the impurities of foreignness were burnt off as slag to be tossed away leaving a new 100% American.
you needed the company’s permission if you wanted to buy a car, which included a requirement to be married and have children. "
and Ford himself retracted the whole philosophy:
"It was also highly controversial, and because of the competing economic, and ironically, societal factors, it was slowly wound down. Even Henry Ford himself found that he was against many of the program’s aspects, writing in his 1922 autobiography:
“paternalism has no place in industry. Welfare work that consists in prying into employees’ private concerns is out of date. Men need counsel and men need help, often special help; and all this ought to be rendered for decency’s sake. But the broad workable plan of investment and participation will do more to solidify industry and strengthen organization than will any social work on the outside. Without changing the principle we have changed the method of payment.”
> For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity.
It's probably not, for thought workers at least. The correct value is probably lower - closer to 30 hours a week. There have been studies which have begun to correlate this, but I don't have them off hand.
40 hours is for manual, repetitive labor. And from my limited experience doing manual, repetitive labor when I was younger it's a pretty good number. I wasn't so exhausted I couldn't do anything at home after work, and I had the weekends to spend with friends and family.
Working hard is a personal choice, but the chances are pretty good that the quality of work is going to drop as the hours pass.
I know many people who work lots of hours and the result isn't necessarily good. Those hard workers get lucky some of the time...but much of the time its all show and no substance. Pumping out all that poorly designed brittle code is not helping anyone. You can do a 70 hour week here and there but you can't sustain it long term without negative consequences. It's best to save your 70hr work week energy for when it's actually necessary than it being a regular thing.
In fact even when looking at myself, many times I was "working" lots of hours but in reality I wasn't getting anything done. When I work 40 or less hours and take lots of breaks during the day I got way more done than when I had just been a seat warmer for 70+ hours per week. This is likely due to the fact that having rest periods and breaks allow my brains diffuse mode to also help solve problems. Many of my best ideas come when I'm lifting or playing basketball at the gym.
You are not getting the best version of a person when they chose to work lots of hours and refuse to take time out for themselves. Our brains need plenty of rest in order to function optimally.
Yup. It's one of those case we want something to be true, but really, it isn't (always, anyway). Sure, some people are absurdly productive on 25 hours a week. Good for them! Keep at it!
Others though, not so much. In programming, you also get better by doing it more. So even if it's not "for work", if you have side projects, you will (generally) be better than those who don't, from pure practice. The super high salaries don't just reflect a higher demand: they also reflect an expectation of higher expected output than in other professions. It's implied that you'll spend the time to stay on top of things, stay up to date with technology and other things that may require more time than your weekly allocation of jira tickets.
There's a guy in my team who probably works 60+ hours a week. I warned him about burning out, told him he didn't have to (as his manager), etc. He does it for fun. Because he enjoys it. And he's amazingly productive. He's not doing it for a promotion either, he's already pretty much at the highest level the role can be.
And while a lot of people SAY they are "more productive" working less, often it's not true. One of my buddies keep spouting that, and honestly doesn't get much done. Another also repeats it AND is the most productive person I know.
Essentially, your millage will vary, but only rarely are people at the very tip top manage to do more with less time. Some do, but they're essentially gods among mortals (or lying to themselves about it).
Personally, I generally work about 40 hours a week, but I don't pretend I'm doing more than others. I just do what I feel I'm paid for while also pursuing my career goals to go up the ladder by doing what's best for my employer.
Your 60+ hours per week guy probably doesn't have much of a life outside software engineering. He'd be working between 8,5-12h/day, depending on how many workdays he puts in.
At that level of time investment, he doesn't have time for a romantic relationship. Almost no one would be crazy to accept so little attention, but even if they would it would be a weak & shallow relationship.
They probably don't have time for friendships or even spending time with their family and socialising, which will take its psychological toll.
Unless they magically find time to do some sports and take care not to sit in a chair all time, they're stressing their body a lot, which could lead to a weaker immune system and potentially musculo-skeletal problems.
In conclusion, one can behave like a machine and work 60+ hour weeks, but they're literally trading away their life in order to achieve that.
Get ready to search for a replacement or two for when/if they burn out.
If someone works 12 hour days, and then implements the, and it hurts me to even type it out, "lifestyle hacks" to further squeeze the sponge of productive hours, the sacrifice they make to their own personal lives is a big toll. 12 hour days, plus commute, plus 8 hours of sleep leaves little time for socializing, hobbies and let alone exercise.
But the bigger tragedy is, on a team where there might be competition (eg., a bonus), the guy pissing his life into his work is going to get the accolades and bonuses, or at least it looks that way, which takes a morale toll on the other members of the group. It leads to a race to the bottom.
This might be okay when you're junior, first starting out, or a partner, or someone with significant equity (read: in a few years they won't need to work), but for everyone else, there is a very high risk of a toxic work situation.
To the person above who said that we're highly paid and so forth and expected to perform - well we're not paid because we're expected to perform highly, we're paid because laws supply and demand at present benefit us. If a situation should arise where the balance of the scales reverts, I assure you you'd still be completing your beloved 12 hour days with a much smaller salary.
If it would be just about him getting bigger reward for more work, then it should be fine.
The problem is that people don't socialize at all out of work still have those pesky communication needs. And they use meetings to fulfill them ... slowing everyone down. And what used to be one sentence affair is suddenly 30 minutes long hard to stop chat, because lonely people need to talk. Or one person job is suddenly two person job for no reason other then one of them lack socialization.
And since they dont mind spending there 12 hours a day, they organize things in a way that makes it impossible for other people to come home sooner. Meaning that meetings are late, important information is passed late etc.
And oftentimes means that tired people make more bugs and do less rational decisions. So they insist on work that does not need to be done right away to be done right away for no reason other then fear.
Literally just "not having kids" makes up for the entire extra time and then some.
But really, if you replace things like kids, videogames, netflix, long commutes from the suburbs, spending time with extended families you don't care about, etc, it honestly puts the balance in favor of the person working 60 hours a week.
Now, if they don't ENJOY IT, and they rather be doing those other things, then they should do these other things. Else it is unhealthy, both physically and mentally.
But if I just take my work days + time spent playing videogames + my side projects/blogs/whatever, I come way above 60 hours a week. Sacrifice that and it comes easy.
If it came in the form of additional financial security and it lets you hire someone to clean the house, you might come up even more ahead. The important part is you have to do what you do because you want to.
So the main issue really is that that person will have what other perceive as an unfair advantage, career wise, and THAT's what all of this is all about. People in general are pretty uncomfortable with the idea that someone else is getting ahead of them because they decided to finish that prototype instead of watching Netflix tonight.
While I'm not a fan of 60h per week, I'd disagree here. If you work 12h per day you'll still have several hours in the evening and the whole weekend for your partner.
From my observations, relationships don't depend on how much people work, they depend on how much of their free time both partners like to spend together.
If you're willing to sacrifice other aspects, sure. And if your partner is willing to be secondary to your job, or they have a similar schedule.
Figure 30-60 minutes getting ready in the morning, a 30 minute commute, a 12 hour work day (12.5 with lunch!), a 30 minute commute back, 30 minutes for dinner, and 8 hours of sleep. That's about 22-23 hours of the day. Assuming you spend a grand total of 1-2 hours with your partner, and you do all the things you need to do to be a functioning adult (laundry, dishes, home maintenance if you don't rent, etc) on the weekends.
Or you can work at a company that respects its employees and is close by. From the time I leave my house to the time I come back is less than 9 hours every day, and that includes my commute and 45-60 minutes for lunch (not at my desk).
I am what OP describes. Recently burned out and went on leave for 6 months, and it's happening again two months later. Can't take leave this time, though, since I emptied my savings last time.
The biggest loss wasn't any of what was listed above. No, I knew about the risks and accepted them because I was passionate about creating and contributing. Now the passion is gone. Working and trying to improve causes so much dissonance, like trying to swallow roast beef that always seems to cause food poisoning.
Because we need some voice out there standing for people and work life balance amongst a sea of slogans, media, advertising and group-think advocating sacrificing your life for the businesses' bottom line.
Why would using your left-over time and effort for a side project that may improve your life a bad thing? Does your employer have the right to "own" that effort as well?
Well said. I share your suspicions about 40 turning out to be the magic number. I also notice that these articles never seem to allow for differences between people, which flies in the face of my 25 years of experience. I've always felt most comfortable working seven days a week, at a manageable pace each day. Other people need those weekends, and are happy to put in long hours in the week. One of the most productive people I ever worked with seemed to work literally all the time.
As for whether or not it's "exploitive", I'm sure it is, under some circumstances. Some poor dev, trapped by an H1-B, getting ground up with hours upon hours of billable work, for example. But a lot of us are paid through equity. In such a case it's perfectly reasonable to sacrifice for the good of the company in which you have a stake.
I don't know if 40 hours is optimal or not but it is the standard or yard stick by which salaries are set and measured. If company A offers me 100k and company B offers me 115k I can assume the rational choice is to accept company B's offer. This degenerates though if I discover company B requires 70 hours of work a week as there are costs to that including reduced family time, increased stress, less time to work on my own projects. etc.
40 hours is essentially a useful measuring stick and the accepted standard.
Now I do agree that for some people they can and do work long hours and greatly enjoy this and good luck to them. I have to assume they are working at a company where they do work they love and are proud of. I think of employees at SpaceX, Tesla, video game companies for gamer type developers and NASA.
I interviewed at a large game developer a long time ago and was asked back for a second interview. After I discovered they regularly worked past 7:30 at night I declined. I do not play video games so for me the draw was not there but I could absolutely understand how that could be someones passion and they love what they do.
For me I value my family time and when comparing jobs prefer to compare apples to apples and the main way barring a very unique work place is to compare dollars earned per hour worked (including benefits).
To your point though if someone wants to be there, they are making an informed choice and they believe it is an amazing opportunity then more power to them.
There are many reasons why one can't believe a person's own reasoning for why they've succeeded where others haven't.
There are a lot of startups who work "smart and hard" and they don't go anywhere, and there are a lot of startups that are successful despite having spent very little, real effort on their product, because startup success is orthogonal to hours-worked. It's much more important to know the right people who can make the right introductions to investors and press.
People are not reliable narrators. If you ask a person to list off everything they've done in a day, without prior preparation to know they were supposed to remember everything, they will likely forget vast swaths of activities, busy work, and goofing off they performed as a matter of routine. I know a lot of people who claim to be busy all the time just because they are in the office for 80+ hours a week, but I know for a fact they spend most of it trawling Twitter and HN. Yes, that means they are sum-total working less than 40 hours a week.
It's extremely difficult to measure the impact of decisions on productivity when you're even trying, say nothing about when you're anecdotally claiming your success is due to habitual overtime. A person who habitually works overtime has no idea of whether they are being more productive or less than they would be if they worked fewer hours, because they never work fewer hours to be able to compare.
There are other confounding factors, but to me, these are the biggest.
> For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity.
You're right, it's probably actually much less. Go count how many people are browsing Facebook/etc at the start of the day, lunch, and at the end of the day. Even out of what's becoming an increasingly normal 45 hour workweek (9-6), lots of people are probably working 35 at best.
> For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of people who work longer hours and do it successfully. And most of the really successful people out there will mention that they worked insanely hard at some point. Are they all lying? All wrong?
You're comparing the outliers to the average. Some people will have an almost-linear relationship between hours worked and productivity. For most people, it'll be logarithmic.
Further, lots of bias going on here:
* You remember the successful people who worked hard more, because it furthers the idea that hard work == success
* No one's going to tell you they became successful without working hard. It's a slap in the face to everyone else, and few people are honest/tactless enough to admit they became successful without working hard.
* Most successful people would probably rationalize their success as the result of hard work (and obviously that might be true to some degree)
> The article itself mentions people doing extra hours of coding on personal projects, and we all know some people who have started companies that way. What, do these projects simply not exist? How does that make any sense?
One is self-driven and you can drop it at anytime if things get in the way (children, etc.). The other is imposed on you externally and you can't really go from working 70 hours a week to 40 hours a week. Well, you can - but it almost always involves changing jobs.
> Why does everyone on HN just assume they know better than those people themselves, and set off to make them feel bad and exploited?
Because it's downward pressure on our value as laborers. I mean - that's the real story. If you have to work twice as hard to earn 50% of the salary, your value as a laborer has just been divided by 4.
Very few people want to feel like they're becoming worth less over time. This of course can be offset if the output of your labor has more value to you (e.g. people go to work at non-profits, etc), but in general it's easy to pinpoint why most people resist this kind of pressure.
> For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of people who work longer hours and do it successfully. And most of the really successful people out there will mention that they worked insanely hard at some point. Are they all lying? All wrong?
You have it reversed. Get a sample of people working 70 hours a week and see how many are successful by some chosen measure compared to those who work 40 hours.
I don't think so. Everyone isn't the same, some people have more or less capacity to handle long hours. I personally feel that mastery and enjoyment have a large role in how many hours you can work.
If you're working on something you love and are good at, you're going to be productive longer. I think just measuring hours is missing the point.
In my experience, the amount of workload you can handle is highly dependant on the person though everyone will see some diminishing returns after working a few hours straight.
The people who pull 70+ hour weeks successfully tend to have an abnormally high tolerance to stress as well as an abnormally high 'drive'. I'd be willing to bet there's a genetic component.
> The people who pull 70+ hour weeks successfully tend to have an abnormally high tolerance to stress as well as an abnormally high 'drive'. I'd be willing to bet there's a genetic component.
Or else they're just killing themselves. I'd be interested to see how they do in the long-term.
I absolutely believe it's exploitation to ask people to sacrifice their lives (which you're doing if you're working that long; you have no time for other things) and not pay significantly higher.
"The article itself mentions people doing extra hours of coding on personal projects, and we all know some people who have started companies that way. What, do these projects simply not exist? How does that make any sense?"
There's a huge difference between working on something for me, for which I have total ownership of, and working on something just to make someone else rich.
The 8 hour work day was with physical labour in mind and makes much more sense in that context. Of course there are limits to office time productivity too and the stress factor of office jobs has considerable spread. That said I'd have 11 hours coding work over 8 hours of labour any day.
Though Ford is noted as moving to 40 hours per week and gaining productivity in the factory, the 40 hours mostly came from political action from the labor movement.
Personally, I think that our economy is technologically productive enough, and the nature of work has changed enough in many work places, that we should be considering a shorter standard workweek.
It's the 'correct' amount of hours to maximize productivity for repetitive manufacturing labor tasks. Not mental work. We don't have any companies that have looked at the research into how capable humans are of extended periods of mental exertion and what it takes to optimize that.
"For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity."
Maybe the gov't set the standard informed by our biology?
Actually 40 hours isn't "exact". It's close though. Why?
First weekends. Weekends mean that a 7 day week has 5 work days. Typically weekends are still off (bros' gotta climb El Capitan). If instead of 2 days off every 7 we had 1 every 10 (a failed metric innovation pushed during the French Revolution) we would work 26% more, or 50 hours/week @ 8 hours a day. I don't know that 2 of 7 gives us much more needed reset than 1 of 10, but that would be a sucky weekend.
To test, at an interview try to hire someone with "we work 11.1 hour days, 9 days in a row". 11.1 hour days 9/10 days = 70 hour 5/7 weeks. You'd hire no one.
So 2-7 weekends are the first restraint.
Then we have our biology. 8 hours of sleep (give or take an hour or two), leaving 16 hours.
Not doing the same activity for 16 hours straight is necessary for all humans except the most severe case of autism. 8 hours to bath, eat, greet your spouse, play with your kids, ect. These are things we're evolutionarily wired to do btw (we're social beings whose parents both contribute, typically, to child rearing).
So why 40h? Could be 30 (B. Russell argued 100 years ago that we need half that). Could be 50. Having a balanced life @ 60hr weeks (12 hr work days) is already impossible.
Finally, I want to point out two things:
1. I really doubt any of these 70hr. proponents will out-produce a 70 year old Carthusian monk who make their hipster beers. And they spend most of their days praying. Why? These monks are focused. We're all dibbling about on Facebook. 70 hrs? @ 100% yeah right! More like 70 hrs @ 30%!
2. Most developers live in our own filth (kinda hard to clean @ 70 hr weeks). That's literally[x] unbecoming.
[x] to be human is to, among other things, have a sense of aesthetic beauty and to be an animal is to have some basic sense of self-care. Even high order animals take care of/decorate where they live. Therefore, to live in our own filth, to neglect our hygiene, is to reject or very nature. Therefore, we are literally unbecoming.
This is insane. I've actually been looking to reduce my work hours to about 30, because even 40 seems too much. Having had a couple of burnouts before, I want my life to be more than my job, and I truly believe this would make me better at my job in the long term. After a day of full time work I almost never have the energy to do some of the other things I want to do. I want to be able do more open source, learn a foreign language or a musical instrument, spend time with my partner, study some new cool technology, do some exercise etc. I was very disappointed to see a big name in the industry to promote exploitation like that.
I'm working 32 hours: 4 days a week. That leaves me a day with the kids outside the weekend. Oldest kid is at school most of the day, so I take the youngest to the zoo or something. I heartily recommend it.
It's crazy that we're all still working 40 hours a week. Didn't Keynes promise we'd have 15 hour work weeks by now? (He did. He didn't anticipate our bosses taking all the profits from our productivity gains, though.)
>He didn't anticipate our bosses taking all the profits from our productivity gains, though.
He also didn't anticipate zero-sum competition for inflexible goods like housing. If I want a nice house in a decent city, I have to out-compete and out-borrow everyone else who might want that house. If everyone around me is making bank and I want the nice house, then I'd better make bank too. Lots of us end up working more than we'd like, in a delicate balance between our desire for stuff and our tolerance of overwork.
Life would be a whole lot easier if we could control our desires but it's easier said than done.
if you consider good housing to be only within a certain distance of some CBD, then yes, housing is zero sum. But there's lots more space available than humans right now, and relaxing the distance/centrality requirement will greatly increase the pool of available housing (and hence, "cheaper").
The only winner when everyone tries to outbid for a small amount of housing is the original owners.
All the best jobs are in the big expensive cities. Everywhere around the world, if you want the best job you will need to go to New York, SF, London, Tokyo, Paris, Munich etc. That's one reason why everybody wants to live there.
Second reason would is to be close to a large number of people which greatly increases social activities you can do. In a large city even a niche hobby will probably attract enough people that you can find a group of buddies who like same things.
How do you define "best job"? I want to minimize my commute to work. Right now I work about 4 miles from my house, which is a 10 minute drive without touching a highway. If I lived in San Francisco I'd need to make over $300k just to break event when you look at the insane cost of living, and that's not even taking into account the higher federal taxes or California taking its cut.
Most people want to live in big cities for the big cities - not because of the jobs there. NYC would be really fun, but I'd need to make an insane amount of money to have the same lifestyle I have now and a 10 minute commute to boot. In fact, that'd be impossible, because now I have a yard, a dog, and a car. A 10 minute commute in NYC would pretty much require me to be in a small apartment.
If we stay within the context of software engineering jobs, I'd define it as something using latest tech and pushing new frontiers in different areas (AI, machine learning, distributed computing, dev ops).
So it would be jobs working with interesting tech (things like functional programming, or something like Tensorflow, microservices with Kubernetes and Golang, using newest dev ops and automation stack, distributed systems etc) and on interesting problems and novel ideas. Majority of these jobs will concentrate in big tech hubs where it makes sense to invest heavily into R&D like this.
Outside of major tech cities these jobs will be more sporadic and most jobs will be for companies which treat tech as a cost centre so you will end up working on some boring internal CRM systems made from bunch of enterprise overpriced products with horrible APIs glued together with some Java or PHP code.
>> Right now I work about 4 miles from my house, which is a 10 minute drive without touching a highway.
I live about 15-20 min walk from my office currently. If a city has sane transport system it might be more efficient than driving a car. I understand commuting to work by car is more of a US thing. At least in Europe in most major cities you can use mass transit (and most people do). I don't actually need to own a car and can save money as I don't need to buy expensive piece of metal that will start depreciating the same day I bought it, no need for insurance or parking space.
>> Most people want to live in big cities for the big cities - not because of the jobs there.
Of course. I agree. Lifestyle is a major reason why people want to live in NYC or London etc. But I also think that unique and plentiful career opportunities are an important reason. There are simply opportunities you won't wind anywhere else.
>> In fact, that'd be impossible, because now I have a yard, a dog, and a car. A 10 minute commute in NYC would pretty much require me to be in a small apartment.
This is true. I have only lived in tiny apartments my whole life so imagining living in a house with lots of space and a yard/garden is very appealing. Definitely would prefer that.
Is it really the best job when the out of control expenses in those cities leave you no further ahead than someone working in the 'not the best job' elsewhere? Unless by best job you mean some kind of non-monetary metric, but I'm not sure that holds either. The best jobs for non-monteary reasons in my opinion are also found outside of those cities, but are definitely low paying due to the fact that everyone wants to do that kind of work.
It depends. You are right that you can probably be monetarily better off living in some smaller cheaper city and working as a developer for a non exciting company. Real estate prices in that city are probably something like 3-5 times lower than SF/London.
The downside is that selection of jobs is very lacking in places like that. If you are not happy with your job, or want to try something else (maybe go to a different field within IT), it might be very difficult to find anything new. Also in economic downturn like 2008 there will still be enough new jobs in big tech hubs but anything outside might dry up for couple of years.
Another factor is that even though everything is super expensive and you might be relatively poorer compared to somebody with 60% of your salary but living in a place with 40% cost of living, once you manage to get on a property ladder in a city like SF, given the constantly rising real estate prices, your house will be worth a lot once you repay your mortgage and can be a great way to retire later.
Unfortunately the only way I can see to relieve this is to support remote/WFH workers who might live in suburbs away from major city centers, or even in a totally different part of the country. That, and decentralizing our entire culture. That'll be much harder.
Absolutely true. I just bought a house in Amsterdam. The seller got over three times what he originally paid for it. I don't regret it, but we can only afford it because we both have excellent jobs. A single good income is just not enough anymore. And it's all the fault of people like me who are willing to pay whatever it takes to live in a really nice city.
You can have a 15hour work week if you are an independent contractor, or if you pair up with a buddy to share your job time, as long as you only demand the wealth of an average person in Keynes's time. Economically, Keynes was spot-on, but he failed to account for political and social changes
Go for it! I'm working a 30-hour week right now. Like you, I feel even 40 hours/week of pure coding ist just not sustainable.
Out of the 3 software dev jobs I had up to this point all the people that 'worked' over-time were just wasting more time drinking coffee and chit-chatting with colleagues. Most of the time I just want to put in a productive day, solve 1 or 2 problems and then go home at a reasonable time, so I can actually enjoy my life, not just sit in a damn office all the time.
Also, having worked a 30-hour week for a few years now, I'd actually be willing to work a 40-hour week again, but only if my job then gives me responsibilies beyond just being a coder. Putting in 4-5 hours of really productive coding work a day and then spend the rest of the time on something else, like managerial work is something I can see myself actually doing. But expecting people to produce high-quality coding work for 8 hours a day is just wishful thinking.
It actually started as a side-job while studying. I actually increased to 30 hours/week over time from starting with 20 hours/week.
That said, I think most companies would be willing to find some agreement on reduced working hours if you've proven valuable too them. A friend of mine just recently switched to 32 hours/week over 4 days, after having started out at the company with a 40 hours job. It's really the best option for the company and yourself if one of the two parties isn't satisfied with the agreement anymore.
"I'm valuable, just ask my boss. He sings praises for me"
It is a very naive position that needs to be eradicated If it is not, then "take 50% off your salary and be happy about it" would be a norm. In our society money and power are proxy for the value.
People get promoted to one level above their competency because at the top level of their performance they do well which means that they are promoted one layer higher. That's the last promotion they get.
I dropped my standard hours down to 24 just recently and it's been rejuvenating. I do pick up the odd freelance/contract job whem it suits (pay/hours) and spend the rest of my time working around the house and generally relaxing.
It's done wonders for mental health and stress levels. No more sitting in traffic all day, missing half my kids' life, stressing out about not getting stuff done around the house, eatimg crap food on the fly, being too tired to do much in the weekend, and most of all I can spend more time with my wife, which is awesome.
I did cut my salary by 40% voluntarily. I now work part-time (3 days per week, plus the rare emergency). Much better, as I can still pay the bills and got a 4 day weekend to do whatever I please with. I'm also a lot more productive as well both in and outside of work.
The only downside is that I don't have as much spare money as I used to to spend on those free days (e.g. travelling or taking lessons on x/y/z), but there are other low cost hobbies I take instead (my own coding projects amongst them). Socialising has gone up as well.
Working 70+ hours can be fun at some point in life, I've done it before. But it's too easy to get stuck in there and burnout or worse.
Between jobs once, someone gave me a pity job. It was hourly, 4 hours a day. I did job search stuff the other hours of the day. I was completely crushing it with those 4 hours.
It's probably a really good arrangement for an employer if they somehow convince people to do they dicking around on hackernews off the clock. 4 hours of pure output.
Unless he's paying seven+ figures annually, all working 70 to 90 hours a week will get you is a broken relationship/marriage and utter social isolation with little or nothing to show for it in the end when you realize what a mistake you've made and unplug from The Matrix, probably 20 to 30 pounds heavier than when you started.
Work hard. Study a lot. But take a breather now and then. Life is short.
Hi LogisFailsMe, I ran across one of your old posts regarding curing a sinus infection. I'm trying to avoid a third surgery and hoping you will please let me know what you used for success? Thank you very much
I wake at 0600 and commute to work, to be in for 0700 at the latest (I cycle 6-7km.) From 0700 to 0800 I work on personal development such as reading a book or doing some online study (or sometimes I just catch up with online news as I am now.) From 0800 to 1130 I work. From 1130 to 1300 I dine and take a walk/socialise. From 1300 to 1500 I work. At 1500 I go home.
Essentially I work for 5.5 hours -- my fingers are on the keyboard, I'm in a meeting, or I'm thinking through a problem for 5.5 hours per day. We also have the concept of the eight hour day in Australia (which I believe is a matter of law, in fact): eight hours of work; eight hours of social time; eight hours for sleep.
I do this everyday. It gives me a lot of freedom to do the things I want to do when I get home at about 1530 and makes me feel great. I feel healthier for it. I can innovate when I get home and work on a project, or spend more time with my fiancé.
If I ever find my self in a position with a company that the boss(es) don't like this setup, then I simply show my self the door and find another job. Life is way too short to be putting my employer before my own life, health, wishes, and dreams.
Also, I aim to find a job in which I'm solving real social problems (even in a for-profit manner) and not just doing it for the sake of it or the wage. I think this is important too.
Could I ask where you are in your career and when you started this regimen? I would like to adopt something similar, I'm not sure if I have the willpower just yet but I'm seeing one of two options: following your approach or burning out gradually.
I'm a Senior Site Reliability Engineer in Brisbane, Australia. I started out in the UK at about 27 as a Junior SysAd. I'm 33 now.
I highly recommend you space out your working day like I have, perhaps even going as far as using a method such as [Pomodoro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique) to avoid burn out. Also, maybe do what I've done, but do it within a 9-5 window for now.
Just remember that burning out for your employer is just isn't worth it unless you're doing something highly social, like helping starving children, providing medical support, some sort of charity work, etc., things that are worth burning out for (in my opinion.) Burning out for your boss' idea of the perfect mobile game is a joke at your expense :-)
Apps that I use (iOS): "Timetable", to layout the week and get notifications on when to get up and move on to the next part of the day; "Today", for reminding me to do things and "checking in" when I've done it - this is for building habits; "Pommie" as a Pomodoro timer, but I don't use this much; and "Wunderlist" for todo lists I can share with my fiancé - I have a "Today" entry that has me checking this 2-3 times per day so I'm always aware of what's needed to get things done around the household.
I studied film production in grad school, and one of the reasons I didn't pursue a career in that industry is because of the rampant, pervasive abuse like that mentioned in the article. "12 on/12 off" was a movement started by an industry veteran that cried for limiting the work days to 12 hours and providing a minimum of 12 hours down time before having to be back on set. It was started after a crew member died from falling asleep at the wheel on the way home from a shoot.
I am so glad to work in a place that a). not only doesn't have insane deadlines and the corresponding pressure but, b). has a sub-discipline dedicated to project management. And that I get to push back with my favorite mantra, "poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part."
Tangential: I loved the "When programming is your hobby" part of this blog post. Finally someone accepting, and not dissing, people who actually like to code. The advice is spot-on, too: coding > 40h / week is fine, but why give up your freedom of choosing what to work on, when to work on it, and when to take time off, without any compensation?
Yeah, except what this actually means is, "You don't have any interests outside of work and you do not have kids that may take you away from work and you don't have a SO/spouse to tell you that you're being taken advantage of."
It's not really about your interests, it's about you being naive.
This is pretty amazing. OP made a comment about people not hating on those who enjoy coding and you came and called them naive. Plenty of people code outside of work, on personal projects, and are not being taken advantage of.
It's all very nice disparaging people for having found a passion, but when I read Masters of Doom, I didn't pity John Carmack and John Romero and their gang for programming all week, then 'borrowing' work computers to program and play D&D all weekend. I admired them. They found a thing they loved to do with people they loved to do it with.
Other people have to do many things to be happy, but they found it all there! These were incredibly intelligent, incredibly creative people expressing their intelligence and creativity. They weren't lesser men for their passion. It elevated them.
You're right, we shouldn't disparage people for working long hours in pursuit of their passion. But we absolutely should disparage investors and founders who seek to exploit this youthful passion and energy to enrich themselves without fair compensation. The tricky part is actually defining what's fair.
I have children, a SO that helps me see when I'm being taken advantage of, and I love to code. It augments my career (data scientist/economist), gives me interesting problems to solve related or unrelated to my work field, lets me build a personal brand should I want via github, and opens my eyes to more possibilities in the world.
Were it my job to build code, I would probably focus on the other aspects of my current role (statistics, ML, forecasting, etc.).
Keeps the ax sharp, fun to do, and leads to great friendships and networks.
I guess I could spend _all_ my time outside of family and work doing something like strategy board gaming, which I find enormously fun, but I guess I see such things are more like spice in life.
Exactly, just because I love programming in my free time doesn't mean I want to work on enterprise Java company code on Sunday. No, thank you. I have much more interesting personal projects to work on that actually excite me.
True, but what if your work is the thing you'd choose to spend your time on, given the freedom to pick anything.
Other comments suggest that this is referring to a job posting from Andrew Ng's deep learning startup. If that's the case, you might have access to expertise and compute resources that you could only dream about if you were working on a side project.
That's a fair argument, but it doesn't change that the job ad is pretty bad. SpaceX has lots of people working serious overtime because of their belief in company's mission, but it doesn't routinely advertise overtime as a job perk...
Nobody really ever "disses" the people who like to code. What gets talked about are those who spend all that time coding to make someone else rich, instead of doing something for themselves.
I had an interesting experience in this regard. I was hired by a company who had a small team of developers. When I first arrived it was obvious they had built a culture of "work until you drop". Not because anyone above them was pushing it (at least I don't think so), but they seemed to enjoy "being heroes".
Granted, from my perspective it appeared they needed to be heroes in the first place because they had accumulated so much technical debt they were drowning in it.
I tried silently to change their culture by coming in for 8 hours, doing my job, and leaving on time. I don't know if I was ultimately able to change their mentality, but I certainly turned some heads when they realized that when I was on a project it never sounded like my fingers stopped typing until I would leave for the day. That's the kind of efficiency you can attain when you have work life balance.
To add to this, I recently got let go from my job 2 weeks ago . With that said, my boss routinely tried to guilt trip me because I didn't want to work more than 40hrs a week. I have 2 very small children and my wife is pregnant, I can't spend all my time working, nor do I have any desire to. There were a few times I put in a couple of 60hr weeks, but that was only to appease him, not because I felt it was necessary. Like I said, my boss would bully me with phrases like "When CAN YOU work after hours?" "You're a 40hr work week kind of guy" "Time to put on your big-boy pants" and other totally demeaning comments. This was for an IT managed service provider.
The real clincher was that I was let go the day I got back from vacation. The first thing after he said "I gotta let you go" was "You didn't check in at all on your vacation".
That was incredibly disrespectful to me and shows a total lack of empathy for me and my family. I am happy to no longer work for him, although I am in a bit of a financial bind now.
Although I think I would have a decent case against him, I can't afford legal fees right now. And 70% of our clients were law firms who would be more than happy to represent him.
My separation notice said "Unable to perform job duties", which makes no sense, since I worked there for nearly 2 years with positive reviews and multiple successful projects.
But apparently I'm not working because I want to go home at 6pm and take my unpaid lunch.
100% of employment law firms would be more than happy to represent you. If the case is as cut-and-dried as you make it sound fees will probably not be an issue, they will work on contingency.
IANAL. In the US. You can argue that there's an implicit assumption that you will not work on vacation in the employment agreement. Most of the US states are at will states, i.e. a person can be fired for no reason at all, but having a wrong reason, especially when documented in a termination letter, might be a cause for litigation.
Agreed from my experience. From what I have seen it's mostly juniors who are putting in extra time consistently in order to either impress their boss or to get up to speed.
Experienced engineers who are often key technical people in companies are much more consistently going home at 6pm. Makes sense as they are much harder to replace so they can get away with working ordinary hours.
Don't just sue for yourself. Sue to have all their employees reclassified as wage employees rather than salaried exempt, and try to get them to pay out overtime for all that after-hours work.
It would take an examination of the criteria determining the exempt classification.
FLSA 13(a)(17) covers "computer professionals".
If you do not use highly-specialized knowledge, or are not allowed to use your own judgment and discretion, you could potentially challenge the exemption. I would consider the number of hours worked in excess of 40 per week to be part of that discretion. And in my opinion, "at will" employees have significantly reduced discretion, as they can be fired at any time for any reason, or no reason, but I am not a lawyer, and I don't think any judge would ever determine exemptness based solely on that. It might be a contributing factor. If you're at will, and feel like working fewer than 70 hours/week would get you fired, a judge might strip off the exemption just from the pure horror.
But definitely read that section of the law, and ask yourself again whether software professionals need a union. That was specifically written for us--or against us, depending on your opinion of it.
Most of the time, you'll be just fine. Even with the "at-will employment" clauses, most people are decent people. That said, it only takes 1% of managers being dicks to ruin the image for everybody, and it's sad to say that it's probably more than 1%.
It's a gamble in the US. Most of the time, your direct supervisor and your group manager will both be actual, decent humans, and you will never encounter this madness.
But sometimes, one of them, or your division manager, junior VP, senior VP, CTO, or CEO will be an insane demon from the acidic bowels of the abyss, and they will make everyone underneath them miserable.
Generally, you either recognize it immediately and decline the offer, or you start looking for other work as soon as you figure it out, because they will eventually fire you or drive you to quit, and you will have no effective recourse against them.
We have no union aligned to our interests and no political party wanting to curry favor, so malicious employers can get away with whatever they want, and any penalty or backlash is usually dwarfed by the additional money made by the unethical behavior.
The consolation is that if you can get a decent job with sane management, the gross pay before cost of living expenses is a lot higher. You could potentially save up for retirement a lot faster, but you could also get two bad jobs in a row and burn out.
It is not the norm. Maybe for certain segments of people within the country that expect to be able to burn out their employees, but for the most part it is not the norm.
Props for standing up for yourself and not letting them use you without proper compensation. I'm sure you'll be better off somewhere else, where they actually value your personal life & free time.
To be fair, I would expect people to 'check in' on vacation as well.
Not every day - but if you have real responsibilities - others may depend on you.
I know it's not ideal ... but in a 'week off' I'll glance at my emails every few days, and maybe once or twice fire off a little note. That little note can make a huge difference to the machine.
Unless I plan to be 'in Rome' or whatever, in which case I would plan ahead, confer and make sure there was no reason anyone needed me and they knew I could not be reached.
> To be fair, I would expect people to 'check in' on vacation as well.
Your expectation is unwarranted. If your company can't let employees off for a week or two without checking in, I suggest the management style and staffing levels be checked. Your employees need these breaks to attend to mental stress, and adding to their stress by expecting availability during their time off should be re-evaluated.
Responsibility is not a magic switch you can turn on and off.
You can't 'exit a system' if you have responsibilities, in a situation wherein that machine could break down in your absence.
If 'reading a few e-mails' is 'stressful' - then the person has issues working in a professional environment. 'Checking in' should not be stressful. It's just that - popping your head in to see what's up.
In reality - there is absolutely no escaping this for those who have responsibility unless there is a lot of planning, especially the further 'up the chain' you get.
That's why you have teams, I was on the senior level team. We shared the responsibility; thus, I shouldn't have to check-in. Other senior engineers went on vacation during my tenure there without looking at a single email or picking up the phone, so why should I have to be held to a different standard?
Keep it professional. Next time he tries to manage you by stress, respond:"okay so let's discuss overtime pay multiplications".
He wants you to do more, he won't fire you, so he only has to see the costs properly and understand that you are more serious about the overtime than him.
I have one kid so far, and zero overtime, I can't even imagine how it will be with three.
One of my past employers wouldn't pay me what I felt and showed was fair market value for my skills and what I do for them. So I counter offered to work 4 days a week for the same salary.
A year of 3 day weekends did more for my life and relationships than a raise ever could have.
It probably helped that I convinced them (then proved it) that my productivity really wouldn't fall much. I could do the same work in less time.
Unless you're making widgets on a production line, productivity doesn't linearly scale with time.
I wasn't at work on Friday, but I was still subconsciously processing what I had researched, how to solve problems, etc. It's the ultimate "sleep on it" or "get up and walk around".
What tends to kill these kinds of arrangements is other employees complaining and wanting the same deal in my experience. aka the "NO FAIR BILLY GETS TO!" factor
So few companies realise that working 70-90 hours / week calls for introspection not celebration. Fortunately, I never had a job where I had to put unreasonable hours against my will but I have heard stories of people who went through the ordeal and they share a common element: the capacity to think better solutions dampens which effectively makes 70 hour work-week, a <40 hour one.
It's sad that only a fraction of people in managerial positions
understand this dynamic. It's always people who work 'hard', who are more in the office, get admired and promoted.
Because that is not always possible. In India, in most IT firms, either budgets are fixed for a project, or there are upper slabs for hourly billing. What happens is you will eventually run into situations where you are pushing very aggressive deadlines with limited resources. The only option to do a project is to work crazy hours.
Its easy to say why don't they scale down for better work hours. If they did, they wouldn't even have those kind of projects, and by that definition you wouldn't have a job. Most companies can't do this.
Also in my early career this kind of a working environment was a boon. Sure if you are only in for a 9-5 job and money, you don't even have to sign up for something like this. But working crazy hours gives people far more disproportionately higher learning opportunities compared to peers. I have seen people volunteer and even fight with managers for these kind of projects only for the exposure. Do this enough number of years and you get very good at a lot of other things. Doing side projects, start ups and a range of other things necessary for a long haul career. Also your ability to contribute with merely participating in a project goes up way higher than your peers, and that eventually brings you more opportunities.
>>It's always people who work 'hard', who are more in the office, get admired and promoted.
Lastly, Is this really surprising to you. Look at how academic performance works, or how it is in sports, investing or for that matter in other walks of life.
Quantity of work, has a very deep effect on quality of work.
I think it's incorrect to equate working long hours with passionate pursuits like learning something or working on a side-project. Good motivation, almost always, never let's you burnout in real terms. Hell, I love creating something after work and counterintuitively, it makes me feel happier than stressful. But, I don't count this as work, it's kind of a break for me.
In most cases, the effort put is not in the right direction. Stroking the brush the same way a thousand times will never make you a better painter if it's not accompanied with a study of better techniques and introspection into your mistakes.
I can't deny that sometimes you can have enough motivation to have be 'the right kind of productive' for long hours but working on the same project necessitates a break. The break allows you to work out better approaches, which is not thought out by most managers.
I would be susceptible of any claim that working long hours enabled someone to learn more. I have often encountered them in my career, and it's never the case.
The original job postings[1][2] were even more egregious. They originally said, "many of us routinely work 70-90 hours/week".
After a lot of criticism on a Facebook post by Andrew Ng[3] (where you can still find residual evidence of the "work 70-90 hours/week" claim), they modified it to, "many of us routinely work and study 70+ hours a week".
So to be precise, they were initially offering you a 43% to 56% pay cut.
Getting paid for 40 hours when you have worked for 70 hours is a 100 * (1.0 - 40 / 70) ≈ 43% pay cut.
Getting paid for 40 hours when you have worked for 90 hours is a 100 * (1.0 - 40 / 90) ≈ 56% pay cut.
Working for 70+ hours a week is trading your entire life for whatever money you make, all of it. I've done it multiple times working crunches in games, and I finally realized it's not worth any amount of money. If it's really a true 70 hours, there is no social life outside of work. Once you exceed 80 hours, you are compromising your ability to exercise & sleep, and there is zero time for family. I worked 80 hour weeks after my 2nd son was born, and I didn't see much of him for six months. My wife was rightly sore about that for years, and even worse than that I regret it deeply and wish I hadn't done it.
That said, I think calculating the percent pay cut feels like an awkward way to frame the issue. Very few people working 70 hours at a salaried job could get paid for 70, even contractors will normally get scaled back to 40 if they ask for 70. If you worked only 40, very few people will get another 30 hours per week job to make that extra money. (And contracts for lots of salaried employees would prevent that scenario.)
The value of hours worked above 40 is your life, not a percent pay cut. It would take a jump from a 6 figure salary to a 7 figure salary, or more, to make extended 70 hours weeks worthwhile, so I think talking about a 50% pay cut is drastically undervaluing that extra effort & time.
Do salaried jobs always specify a number of hours in their contracts? Otherwise you aren't being paid for 40 hours - you're just being paid to get the job done aren't you?
At least here in Finland when you are salaried for the standard 37.5h work week (7.5h work day with 30min lunch break) if you work more then that you log the hours as overtime and get paid for them or in some form of "flex" time that you turn into vacation days or money (there are limits to how many hours of flex you can have banked up)
I know some smaller companies/start ups work around this but they can very easily get in trouble as doing that is illegal (as in if even a single employee complains to the authorities about not being paid for overtime they are fucked)
Because nobody on the better paid fields would take such a contract. You could try it but you would most likely lose in the market place of jobs by all the best employees going somewhere else.
As to why having a contract that pays you for the standard work week always I think people just like the security of getting roughly the same amount of money each month (or biweekly or however often you get paid). Especially once you have some money so you have mortgages, loans and credit cards to manage on top of your monthly bills.
Also the hours beyond the normal work week are overtime and come with multipliers for your effective hourly rate so companies try to do their best to arrange things so that minimal amount of overtime is actually done.
The point of salaries was to pay employees by the week instead of by the hour. My first job had a weekly timecard that consisted of a checkbox: "Did you work this week?"
Now, every job I have requires me to account for all my hours, so it seems like the only reason I am not a wage employee is to avoid paying me 150% base rate for hours worked beyond the first 40 in a calendar week.
Because that's what the salary is for. You work a certain amount of hours per week, they pay a certain amount of money per month, as well as some vacation money in May, and there's no need to keep track of the details. Hourly pay makes more sense with more flexible hours or if the worker wants to carry their own entrepreneurial risk (which is what I do; I'm self-employed and bill by the hour). Many people don't want to be self-employed, though. They just want a steady paycheck.
A very common problem for hourly workers, for example in the food service industry, is that they don't "get" enough hours in a certain week or month. They would be willing and available to work more, but there is not enough work/shifts for them to earn what they need.
Of course it goes both ways, the employer can also not be sure how much they will be available to work for him and needs to reschedule constantly.
I dunno. The direct translation of "salaried" to Finnish is "kuukausipalkallinen" and/or "palkallinen" (which is what it says in my current contract). Which basically means monthly paid or just paid. This is the "default" way of getting paid for your work. We have separate system of hourly paid called "tuntipalkallinen" (again a direct translations tunti==hour and palkallinen==paid)
I think this comes down to the employment law here in Finland. Working more then 40 hours a week is basically illegal unless you get compensated for those extra hours. There are some exceptions:
* owners (duh...) and their family members (family businesses)
* C level employees
* work you do at home wholly (if your company has a office the employee visits a couple times a year is enough for you to not be included in this)
* churches religious employees (priests etc. not the janitor)
* military/border control has their own special way of doing it
* some jobs have 120 hours every 3 weeks way of counting this
As a side note:
Maybe we just don't have the same concept as "salaried" in our language at all (at least I can't come up with one). Closest would be "urakkapalkka" which is basically contract work (as in I will build you this website that you want for X euros. Doesn't matter if it takes 1 hour or 100 hours because we already agreed on the price). No you are not allowed to abuse the contract work way of doing it by having "he will work for our company every week day for as long as we cancel this for as much time as it takes to get shit done"
Only legal way that I know of for getting around this is starting your own one man company and being a consultant. But then it is a contract between 2 companies and a whole lot of protections in both directions go away. Also you most likely need a lawyer to get a "good" contract and handle all the taxes, pension, etc by yourself (this is pretty much automated here in Finland for normal employees).
true though as an English language site most would assume Anglo Saxon derived employment law - I know one member of a major UK union executive who would be deeply offended to be thought of as some one who got paid OT
At least here in NZ, the core difference between salary and wages is that when you have a salaried job, you talk about yearly income, and when you have a wage job, you talk about hourly.
The no fixed hours and no overtime thing seems to be an American thing.
They should, because if they would instead offer an amount per week or month without the hours, employees could just decide to only put in 4 hours a day. Contracts work both ways. Also the definition of "getting the job done" would also have to be defined in the contract somewhere.
The job advert also states "full-time", which IIRC implies a certain hours a week.
Not really. Most of mines have had stuff like "the employee will work the amount of time needed to get stuff done", worded in legalese. Which is kind of the definition of being salaried, so it makes sense.
In Brazil, yes, they always include how many hours are required. Usually 40 or 44 (the maximum allowed by our laws). I think it would be very weird to not have that in a employment contract, as time for money is the essence of employment.
I mean, sure. But if you have a typical programming job, it's not like there's a clean finish line. There's always more work to do, but at some point you need to pack up and go home for the night.
No, dude. Like, not, "There's always omigod super important crunch time work to do." There's always just ordinary "what's next on the queue" work to do. Descoping doesn't mean "We're done as software developers," it means "We aren't going to worry about getting this functionality into this release."
But there's no point where you don't have a backlog. When you finish the task you're current working on, you pick up the next task. Nobody's expecting anyone to work all night on the next task, but similarly there's no place where you're like, "Okay, we're done, everyone go home for the week." So... work 40 hours-ish.
In India, most employment agreements in the software industry mention an average of 40 work hours per week.
They usually also have a disclaimer that mention that one may have to work more than 40 hours per week without any additional compensation. That's just a legal disclaimer. In reality though, in every software company (except Oracle) I have worked for overtime was rewarded with free pizzas for the extra hours we spent after sunset and also additional paid time off (known as "compensation time off").
Did you read the entire comment or did you just find the first point where you can find something to disagree with and give up?
Read the entire comment again, if you haven't. I don't trade 3-4 hours of my time for pizzas. I trade it for additional paid time off, i.e. I put 4 hours one evening and I get back a full work day (worth 8 hours) off in return. The pizza is just a bonus.
It is usually specified in a law somewhere. No, salaried workers are not paid to get the job done, they are paid for the time. That is why companies can let the job loosely specified.
Contract workers are the ones hired for a job, not their time. Yet, actual pricing will vary and even then some contractors will insist on getting paid by time.
Yes this is standard. In all my employment contracts there has been 37.5 or 40 hours defined as work week. In Europe it's mostly 37.5h so you are paid to work 7.5 hours per day and have 30 min paid lunch break.
Yes it depends, I meant if your contracts says 37.5h, then if you go for lunch every day you should be in office 40h per week. Some companies will have paid lunch break though.
Unless it's a publicly traded company, stock options should be considered a bonus, and not relied upon for this. They will likely end up dilluted to hell and back, or just end up worthless.
Oh I think they're on point (with what they want) with that ad
They want the technical wizard with no social life that will give some years for the company while being paid ~50% less. They call it "strong work ethic" I call accepting such position "being naive"
I work at a startup now in a leadership role. I am not a founder and I get paid less than I could make elsewhere while doing more work. However, working in a large company is not an alternative for me. Whenever I do I lose my motivation and phone it in, which damages my mental health because I feel like I can and should be doing more to keep my brain active. There is more time for R&R but something deep inside me is unfulfilled and I break down. I need the action and adventure of a risky bet. If I'm not fighting for my life then there's no fun in it. I'm going to spend a third of my life working regardless, so I want it to be exciting and interesting enough to keep me motivated.
I'm getting to the point in this company where the risk is almost gone and all that remains is work, and the closer we get to that point the less interested I am in the business. I'm sure it will feel nice when we're consistently profitable and can hire more, delegate, etc., but it loses something at that point too. I won't be as hands-on, will have to work harder to whip the team into moving in the right direction, we'll be moving slower even if we're accumulating capital... Not my cup of tea. I find myself exploring side contracts, ideas for my own businesses, grad school, thoughts of alternative lifestyles that might make my wife and I happier... Fewer hours worked is part of that, I'd LOVE to have more time to learn and play, but it's hard to get there without putting in the effort upfront. The main thing that keeps me where I am is that I've spent years shaping my role into one where I can learn exactly what I want to learn, and I'm on the precipice of being able to finally do that. That's not something one gives up easily.
The article doesn't claim this is endemic to only startups, and in my experience work life balance among small, medium, and large companies is equally threatened.
Even the term "work-life" balance seems to assume an artificial divide between the two. When work is a facet of a rich life, those extra long hours, the grueling commute, the vacillations of the newest management fad are just not worth it. Not to mention that those with families are severely disadvantaged in a workplace that values hours at the office rather than productive hours.
I am curious to find out how this becomes a culture and whether this is reversible? Does this toxic overstepping begin at companies who once valued a predictable balance between work and life or was there a mistake made in company culture from the beginning? Can a company effectively counter this tendency? However you might answer these questions, it seems clear that throwing new studies out showing that overwork is counter-productive is not changing this trend. It goes back to the age-old idea, knowledge doesn't make you good, just more knowledgable.
I can be highly productive in certain scenarios, and in others I can really drag on where others would be much faster than me. It's stuff like, I'm really good at code that involves math, I'm not so good at operations. Completely different, unrelated subject areas, but one is viewed as "harder" than the other, so if I can do one, I'm expected to be able to do the other. I often end up get a reputation for being a high-performer, because the stuff I'm good at often gets done during the initial proof-of-concept, and then start getting the screws tightened down on me from management in a really angry way as it appears I start slacking off when we hit the later-stages of a project that involve deployment management and other things that I'm just not very good at.
And it's other stupid shit, like, "if he's a whiz at JavaScript, he must be great at CSS and terrible at embedded systems." No, in this example, I'm the opposite.
Of course, it never occurs to them that maybe expecting everyone to do everything is not the right way to do things. I think, in sum total, I'm probably more skilled in a broader area of subjects than most people, but I'm not anywhere near skilled enough across every necessary subject for a full project to be able to pull one off on my own.
I don't want to focus on just one thing. I do think I provide a unique value by being very versatile. It should be used as a way to smooth over bumps in the project schedule while management rebalances staff or highers more people. I don't mind jumping from 3D graphics into web and database development, or whatever. I've always believed that all work is worth doing and none "beneath" me.
But too often, once I reveal I'm more capable than the original position to which I was hired, I'm expected to do everything, all at the same time. And that's when things get out of hand. It has at least always appeared like the people who keep their heads down and their mouths shut during meetings and don't volunteer anything beyond their job description have a much better time of their jobs.
This job seems to be located in Singapore (can be easily found by googling the quote). On a related note, I recently saw a question on The Workplace SE mentioning it's common for most devs in Sri Lanka to work 12+ hours[1].
In both cases, companies seem to intentionally exploit this by explicitly filtering out candidates not willing to go such lenghts. Pretty pathetic.
Not that I would strive for it myself, but I think at least it was honest that the job posting was upfront about the requirements instead of being silent about it and then peer-pressuring the employee into 70 hour work weeks anyway because everyone there does it.
Who knows, maybe being upfront about it causes the applicants for the job to self-select for those who are confident that they can productively work 70 hours? Maybe the research only applies to normal people like us and the mythical super engineer they are looking for can do it (pure speculation, I don't know the research - I guess even super programmers have biological limits).
Then again, it's probably right to be wary of such job postings so that they don't create a general atmosphere in the industry that such working hours are necessary, whether you want it or not.
I think you are right. Andrew Ng is an academic and I have no doubt he works 80+ hours per week. Working really long hours is common in that world. I average about 60-90 hours per week. I know my colleagues in AI research are working just as hard and so are many of their PhD students.
The biggest problems I have are meetings. I can do research and code for 12-15 hours straight on weekends, but 8-9 hours on meeting days are utterly exhausting. Got to figure out a better way.
Kids would be the real obstacle to my current output.
In Spain this is quite normal ( they don't say it in the job offer, but is expected that you work more than 40 hours/week ). When you ask to get paid for those extra hours they usually laugh at you.
People outside Spain usually make jokes about Spanish "siesta", but in fact we are exploited in the same way this article describes.
( making jokes of course is ok, what is not ok is the exploitation )
There's life outside "consultancy companies" (which in Spain are basically just intermediaries that resell your work for a higher price without any added value).
I'm glad to see more awareness of corporate exploits on tech workers, and the push back against it.
In my experience, people involved in the IT/CS are very passionate about their work but often less outspoken than people in other industries, like finance and business. To see people taking advantage of these qualities for their gain is very frustrating and I hope it doesn't work out in the long run for this company and others like it.
Not sure if it was something that I was linked to here on HN, but I read an article recently that showed the average worker is productive for 3 hours per day - and one of the most popular non-working activities is searching for another job.
I'm a firm believer that success is defined by balance. Balance in all aspects of life - balance between family and self, balance between pursuits in which you are driven and those which you enjoy, balance between being social and productive. I regret to say that I have only achieved this on rare occasions. I am a work-a-holic, and frankly I think that's a bad role model for my children to see.
Well rested, happy people with healthy social lives can accomplish twice the work in half the time as a constantly stressed work-a-holic. When crunch time comes, they can spend the extra hours and put in that extra effort. Somebody who is already run down when crunch time comes not only has less to give, they have other priorities fighting for that time - because those other priorities are ALWAYS fighting for that time and losing.
Founders with a major stake in a company can work as much as they like; if they expect regular folks to sacrifice their lives so that they can profit from it immensely, they can take a hike.
What many here dont seem to understand is that you work commensurate with where you want to be. I work longish hours become I'm in finance and want to move up the organization or find a higher spot inn another. I want to know more about all facets of the firm and one day be a principal in a prop trading firm.
I don't put in 80+ hour weeks because I want to stay where I'm at in my career. I become involved in more and take on more reliability because I want more responsibility I the future. I work twice or more what I'm paid to work because I want to earn at least twice as much in the future.
Worrying about how many hours you are putting in against your current paycheck isn't very forward looking for your career.
> I become involved in more and take on more reliability because I want more responsibility I the future. I work twice or more what I'm paid to work because I want to earn at least twice as much in the future.
Noble sentiment, but in reality you are just marking yourself as a fool, especially to everyone above you. You seem to think that over achieving now will translate to future gains in either salary or position, it won't. You'll simply be exploited and marginalized by those who play the political game better than you. If you're goal is to move into management, then you have to play the politics where day to day competency is just a formality. Actually you don't even have to be competent, you just have to have perceived competency.
I'm far from a low level grunt in my orgs. So far working hard has proven to be key in moving up. While in my field there isn't such a clear line between management and non management my last two titles have have had a foot in the management side.
In seems to be en vogue to despise hard work today (unless it is manual labor).
There are certainly fields and/or companies where ones pay and position can be commensurate with their effort. Most would agree that these are the exception not the rule, congratulations if you happen to be in that position.
"Thanks to you, sales are up 20% and infrastructure costs are down 15%.
But you made a minor spelling error in a Hacker News post, so we're gonna have to pass on that promotion this year."
You can progress in your career very rapidly by doing 40h of high quality work per week. I know many young people (my generation) who are in their late 20s or early 30s and have made a very fast career progression already and didn't need to work 80 hours per day at all.
Also for software engineers you have to take into account continuously upskilling yourself to know the latest tech is something which takes a lot of time and is mostly done outside of work as there's never time at work for that.
So most great software engineers I know might work 40h for the company per week but in order to keep on top of their game they spend portion of their free time for that.
Just as you said "I want to know more about all facets of the firm", most good engineers want to have a deeper understanding of specific tech and finer details.
Like a lot of people in financial technology and HFT, I dont work outside projevrs very much. I get a lot of my experience with newer tech inside my job and as well have to deal with some fairlt heavy secrecy issues.
But aren't you just trading the location of work for the most part? I get that experience from within my firm on projects I'm working on while others still work on their skills just outside their employment? It is still "work" in a sense. I realize many don't get the same intellectual benefit from employment that i enjoy but trashing people who do and take advantage of it doesn't seem appropriate.
I've also learned that just knowing how to code better doesn't help you deliver a better product always. For example in my case, even though I mostly work front office I need to know how the back office works as well as how our fiber and colo facilities run. I've done everything from trade strategies to program them to installing rack system to work on fiber negotiations to deal with trade breaks to etc... It has helped me tremendously add value to the firms I work in. There is a lot to be said about knowing your business as well as knowing how to code.
>> But aren't you just trading the location of work for the most part? I get that experience from within my firm on projects I'm working on while others still work on their skills just outside their employment? It is still "work" in a sense.
Not really because it doesn't feel like work. You don't have to code in your free time, you can go out with family / gf / friends and do some fun social activity, you can do sports to maintain healthy and fit body, you can travel, read a good book etc... so you get the choice how to spend your free time.
For example with sports, if you are working 80 hours per week it is not possible to do any sport seriously. You need at least 5-6 hours per week if you want to really get good at any sport. It is also incredibly unhealthy to work 16 hours per day. You are literally destroying your body.
And if you decide to write code or do something technical in your free time you are in charge of defining the project you will work on, interesting in AI/machine learning, big data, distributed systems, specific algorithms or problems? You can work on the exact problem that intrigues you. Can't do that for a company as your work is not decided by you.
>> I realize many don't get the same intellectual benefit from employment that i enjoy but trashing people who do and take advantage of it doesn't seem appropriate.
I am not trashing anybody. Just saying that you don't need to work 80 hours per week to get promoted and progress in your career. Quality and productivity matters, not hours you spend sitting in the office.
The article is about people giving their time away of they are working more than 40 hours. Right now I place a higher emphasis on job advancement. While it might be possible to do it in fewer hours, more hours as long as you can hang definitely help me be better. We have different priorities (I just got out of a relationship and am looking more towards my career at this time).
I am not giving away my time. I am making a calculated decision to put more effort at work.
Maybe it is also that I love what I do for work and work in a highly competitive field So there aren't exactly OSS projects that fulfill that scratch the same itch in me).
(I also run almost 40 miles a week so please dont bother with that old trope and am hoping to increase my mileage this month.)
Fair enough but... If you work 80 hours per week. That leaves 8 hours per day of free time. So you need to commute to and form office, sleep, eat, run/exercise, shop and do all the other things you do outside work in 8 hours per day. Doesn't add up to me.
"But aren't you just trading the location of work for the most part?"
No, because I have complete control over what I do, what tech I choose, and how long to put in. If, for example, I decide one day I don't feel like doing it, I can blow it off and go fishing. If instead, those hours were dedicated to the company, I wouldn't be able to do that.
We're all quite familiar with the idea that working long hours gets you brownie points with your managers. The point that's being made here is that companies should not be so proud of this quid pro quo, because on paper it is quite literally a devaluation of your time.
You feeling you need to work excessive hours to progress in your career does not make anything about it right, quite the opposite actually.
Your excessive is my right amount. There are things that need to be done and just hiring nor people doesn't work. Peopleb aren't commodities - some things only I can do at a certain level much because I might have put myself into that place by learning all the prices of the puzzle.
I don't like the judgmental attitude against those of us who decide to make different judgement calls in life.
"Your excessive is my right amount. There are things that need to be done and just hiring nor people doesn't work."
That's a complete lie.
"I don't like the judgmental attitude against those of us who decide to make different judgement calls in life."
Because it's not just your judgement call. By you doing that, now the expectation is on everyone else. Especially because you set the bar by working for less pay, dragging everyone else down.
But you're not pulling the pay scale up. You're lowering the hourly rate, and setting the expectation that others not have a life outside of work. That is a bad thing.
The reality is in a startup, you're giving up income for equity. Equity rarely realizes to any value unless there is a remarkable alignment of opportunity, timing, skill, delivering a solution, and finding a market.
I have oscillated both ways on the spectrum of less compensation and more time/happiness, and maximizing income at the expense of other areas of life.
"Things never get easier, you just get better."
There is always a focus on what value someone is paid, instead of the value they add and create.
Having a value adding focused mentality (making sure you add value, and knowing how, and having agreement on it), there is less of an issue with facing pay cuts, when you are returning several multiples of your compensation, whatever it might be. Being essential without being irreplaceable is a valuable lesson to learn.
If you want to limit it to 40 hours a week, it has to be that much more organized, focussed, effective to have meaningful impact.
There's also 3 number to think about. What you absolutely need, what you should be getting, and what you want. Aligning your life with where you are at on those 3 fronts will help lower the dissonance a lot more and comparing yourself to the perceived location of others.
The other thing that changes in your 20's is you. You become more well rounded from experience and discover, magically, that you might be good at a few things and like spending your time on other things too.
One reality is the newer you are to working, the more hours you have to work to compare to someone who has 5, 10, or 20 years of development experience to compare. It's less about becoming a 10x developer, and more about learning how to structure and focus your time for maximum benefit both to the employer and yourself on mutual goals.
There's a reason why inexperienced talent is cheaper, and it's an incredible opportunity to soak up more things than you think you can handle. Learning to drink from a firehose isn't for everyone, but it is an invaluable experience to learn how you want your work/life harmony to be.
I always see posts like this, talking about the negativity of long working hours, but I do get curious the percentage of jobs in each of the categories. Categories like:
- Forcing only 40 hour work weeks
- Not forcing, but expecting 40 hour work weeks
- Not forcing, but expecting overtime work weeks
- Forcing (or talking positively about) over 40 hour work weeks
All the blog posts and comments talk about how necessary those standard weeks are (I absolutely agree), but knowing the commonality of both would be great to see.
In my case, I'd guess forcing of 40 hour work weeks is more common than we think.
In government consulting at large companies it's very common for people to work ~40-44 hours a week including lunch. I often see people work less than 40 hours if you exclude lunch breaks.
It's not uncommon for people to have literally nothing to do for long stretches while say waiting for clearance paperwork / between contracts / etc.
Sure, you get paid less but cost of living is also less and frankly your often working on things more important than selling Ad's.
This was presumably written by someone who's never worked at a successful startup and had equity worth something, let alone seen the tax difference between salary and equity (capgains in the US). Don't take an offer that you can't afford to live on -- but salary ain't the point of startup compensation.
As for 40 hour workweeks, most startup jobs have 20+ hours of overhead: commuting, breaks, meals, random email, "status update" meetings, etc. If you're working 40 hours, you're getting 15 hours of real work done ( https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver... ). Even "real work" includes repetitive tasks and not focused learning. At hour 40, the boring stuff is done and you're working towards Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours of focused learning.
tl;dr: if you're motivated by 9-to-5 and 10% raises -- then a startup isn't for you. No need to crap on the rest of us who love it.
Obviously YMMV. My hit rate is about one in two, with wildly varying numerators.
Even excluding googlers and facebookers, I have dozens of friends who've made millions apiece. Bay area mortgages paid off, kids off to college debt free, parents healthcare paid for, etc.
I want to reply specifically to this concept and your comment was currently the first one in the thread where I saw it. I'm quite sure if I scroll down a bit I'll find many others.
It is worth understanding that this is what a manager is for.
Imagine that you are working on your own pet project and you are the only person working on it. You are the stake holder. You are the customer. You are the user. You are the developer. In that atmosphere, you can easily spend 100% of your time doing productive work. All of your time is spent either coding or experimenting with different UX designs. Not only that but you are completely free to try different development approaches, different coding ideas, etc, etc, with absolutely no overhead trying to convince anybody else to go along.
Add an external user -- now you have to gather information. Add an external stake holder -- now you have to provide planning information and status updates. Add an external UX designer -- now you have to coordinate UX requirements and development activities. Add another programmer -- now you have to argue about how to indent your code (amongst other things).
A good manager is able to coordinate and facilitate communication and development activities. You can measure how good your manager is by how close you come to putting in 40 hours of real-work with 40 hours of bum-in-chair. Not only that, but it's actually completely quantifiable - real-work / bum-in-chair = management efficiency.
I highly recommend measuring this value and holding your management accountable.
Of course there is a potentially massive downside if your management is relatively bad: they will simply remove all the communication from the project. Then you will be spending all of your time hacking, but getting nothing done because you are working against all your teammates/customers.
It's quite difficult to find ways to keep the communication flow up while at the same time reducing the amount of time spent on communication. The best way is by building processes where the artifacts are obvious: well developed stories, prioritised backlogs, defined sprint commitments, visible code merges, visible acceptance test results, etc, etc. Then the manager must summarise the information in ways that allows all of the workers to coordinate easily without having to spend time searching for information.
More than complaining about overtime, developers should (IMHO) demand that management actually provide value for the premium salary that they receive. Don't accept 20 hours of screwing around in a 40 hour week (some people on HN swear up and down that more than 4 pomodoros a day is impossible -- they really need to find a better job!). Demand that your time is not wasted.
I like to call it the difference between efficiency and productivity.
When you're efficient, you get more things done. Normally that comes from working more, either by doing more hours or cutting out distractions. So you might get more done in a week.
Being efficient does not mean you are productive. Productivity I think of as getting more value out of less effort. It comes from good prioritization, working on what matters most, focusing on the important.
Depending on the work, you'll need to be more productive or more efficient. In programming, equal effort tasks have very different outputs. So much that no amount of efficiency can catch up to good productivity. Choosing priorities is critical. Being productive is harder, because its a skill, you have to develop an intuition, measure, reason about the opportunities, predict which tasks are worth a lot and which are useless.
Efficiency vs Productivity is one of the bigger difference between a junior and a senior developer. Its the difference between good management and bad.
One of the issues is management schools do teach a lot about techniques to make people more efficient. And certain jobs benefit, like maybe a call center, a truck driver, etc. Not programming though.
Smart trick, you will notice that people will be more rested, better motivated and thus almost as productive as in 70+ hours! But they will earn a lot less!
> But a manager that is pushing you to work 70 hours a week isn’t a manager who plans ahead for unexpected work. No, this is a manager who solves problem by telling you to work harder and longer.
This seems like a little bit of a leap to me. Is it obvious that these two aspects of a manager are inherently related? In my experience, I have also seen that solving a problem by throwing longer hours at it is a net-negative in productivity. You may hit a tight deadline or put out a fire, but it tends to be followed by a period of lower productivity from exhaustion. Overall, your team has picked up increased volatility with a lower average output. You'd be better off if you could predict and catch the problem early.
I could imagine a team, though, that is accustomed to putting in 70 hours a week, and a manager that carefully manages the process to make sure that those 70 hours are as predictable as possible. The post would imply that all managers who ignore one aspect of a healthy team or project (sane work hours) would be ignoring all aspects. I don't know if that's a fair leap, but maybe in practice it is true.
I used to be incredibly efficient in the beginning of my first job, i could easily do 8 hour days of fairly solid coding.
Then came the investment and the big client and the 'big time' and i spent 6mo doing 12-14 hour days and managed to do less work per day. And i never recovered in that job.
It took changing jobs twice to get my swing back (didnt help that job 2 was the total opposite, lazy uninspired team)
I work as a software developer. Instead of working more hours I found another approach quite useful for productivity which is almost quite the opposite. The idea is that every day you have to call it a day at a certain hour. Let's say your bus leaves at 5:30pm and if you're late, the next bus is only at 6:30pm. So you'd better get all your work done by 5:30pm to catch the first bus. Amazingly, this is quite a productivity boost for me. I don't want to waste any time at work, because if I do, I'll either have to stay late, or not get things done. It also allows me to prioritize tasks better. For example, at 5:00pm I'll try to wrap up my current tasks and I don't start any new tasks that can take more than 10 minute to complete. Another positive aspect of this approach is that each day I go home with a clear picture of what I have accomplished that day. And that feeling of accomplishment makes me want to come to work the next day.
A lot of wanting in the comments in this thread. People really want to believe that one's productivity drops off a cliff after 40 hrs. Whenever I read these types of threads, which so often bubble up to the top of HN, I wonder why people are so energized in trying to convince _others_ that they ought to work less (actually, I don't).
Its for one simple reason. If there is a sizable(but not majority) chunk of people who work above average hours, they will very likely produce above average quantity and quality of work. By that very virtue they will be more competitive, better and well ranked above the remaining majority. And it will eventually lead to having an effect on things like compensation and long term career viability. If you as a young person want to work less, your older self will want to work lesser, and it keeps getting harder to catch up, to a point you will eventually have to give up.
This will eventually create a lot of long term problems for non-participants in this crazy work hours work life. There fore they ask for some sanity as a overall work culture.
This is nothing new to software. My dad was a bus driver at a factory, he used to tell me that people who picked up over time work were routinely hated, by the remainder who didn't want to or couldn't.
Nobody likes to watch themselves being at an disadvantage due to their own actions.
Unpopular opinion: Working longer hours could be fun and exactly what some people are signing up for.
Some people might want more than a job. They want a lifestyle. A new family, a tech monastery if you will. They want to immerse themselves in work. Even with sleep, there's plenty of time for family, just not hobbies.
Of course, if you're looking for just a way to pay the bills, it's not a very good one.
Most of the companies that work extra long hours don't really accomplish anything though, and the extra time is used for busywork that doesn't change the bottom line. If your metric is hours worked and not work done, you tend to do a lot more light tasks that you can do for long hours, instead of the short, intense, really important ones.
I see it the other way around: Any programming (or similar) job that doesn't compensate you as if you were working 70 hours a week is taking money away from you. These are not the 1900s and you are not assembling widgets in a factory. Your work goes with you wherever you are, quite literately in the form of your smartphone, and more insidiously by not getting off your mind. Maybe it's just me and I lack the skill to forget work at 5 p.m. sharp, but my suspicious is that half our industry comes up with solutions to work-related problem while they are at home, on holiday, etc.
I don't disagree with the authors point that expecting massive hours without corresponding extra compensation is wrong.
But I can't believe the blanket assertions I've seen that working 40 hours a week is the proven output maximization limit. If I work 40 hours from monday to friday, and I have nothing to do on Saturday, and a strong desire to implement a an important customer request, how is working 4 or 5 hours on my day off going to result in negative output?
Interestingly enough I've been asked a few times to start coming in on weekends. I've also heard the phrase thrown around: "We'll have to start putting in extra hours during nights/weekends".
I don't think these sort of things _work_ for companies, but to appease a manager they likely have to be done at some point. Long-term I don't think this is a viable solution, but sadly it will keep happening for the time being :/
The pay cut from my experience can be pretty dramatic. Whenever I have replied to a remote job ad and asked about salary it would often mean 40%+ pay cut for me.
Working for yourself versus working for "The Man" makes a huge difference because you know every second of that 60 hour week you're putting in is to your direct benefit.
Talk to someone who owns their own business working 60 hours and then someone who's being forced to work 60 hours for their company and you'll be talking to two people with vastly different outlooks.
Yeah, my experience is the opposite. Sounds like you hang out with people in a higher tax bracket than I do, and that could explain some of the difference in experience.
Reminds of a bit by Chris Rock. Paraphrasing: "If you have a job, the clock is your enemy and you can't wait for the shift to end. If you have a career, there are not enough hours in the day." In his world, having a career means working 100% for yourself.
What happens when every company is doing this ritual?
I'm starting to notice a very bad trend. Just like how LA has record numbers of homeless people, it also has a high vacancy rate.
Similarly, despite plenty of "open positions", candidates are being denied left right and center, even as they do their best to signal that they will do anything for the job.
> What happens when every company is doing this ritual?
Just look at Japan to see what a 12+ hour / day work culture looks like. Their population and their economy are both slowly going down the shitter thanks to it, depression is widespread, etc.
Working long hours is common in Asia, especially in Japan and Korea. My wife had worked as salaried accountant at Nike, Gap, Guess fashion, and other companies that have presence in Asia, and it was common for her to have to stay at work until 11pm, sometimes past midnight, and yet expected to report by 9am the next morning. Leaving work at 9pm would be ordinary, and leaving at 6pm would be like committing a career suicide. I have a friend who worked at Samsung in Korea and told me that the work hours were brutally long, but no one wanted to change jobs because the alternative was another job with less pay but still with long hours, as expected.
> Not sure if economic problems really come from long work days.
I'm not sure either, but, at least as the story is told today, that was Ford's motivation for implementing the 8 hour workday at Ford. He allegedly surmised that if people were too busy working, they wouldn't have time to buy his products. It certainly seems plausible. If you spend all your time working, you really don't need to buy much other than the basic necessities, which doesn't help with a robust economy.
Some businesses are run in sprint mode (not agile style sprint) and others are run in marathon mode. For those trying to build a lasting business with a consistent group of employees you can only run in marathon mode.
If you're looking for businesses who operate in marathon mode you may have to look outside SF/SV or NYC (those are the top 2 markets for long hours built into the economic model and high employee turnover). Once the economic model for an area is based on 50-70 hour weeks then it gets baked into pay, baked into cost of living, etc. This is certainly a longer topic than I have time to comment on right now fully.
I live and work in NYC and several of the companies I've worked for have never required more than 40 hours a week for work. In fact, if you did work long hours they would give you a day off or let you take extra vacation time like say taking a month long vacation to make up for it. You run someone into the ground then that person has health issues or leaves. Tech companies in NYC are very good about not having people work overtime. Even some older companies I've worked at like NYT and Reuters have great time off policies. I know for awhile Reuters had work from home Fridays.
All their business knowledge goes out the door with them. You end up wasting time with the hiring process and then finally hiring someone who costs more money who doesn't understand your business at all and won't be really able to contribute at a high level for 6 months while getting up to speed.
Every company will not follow this ritual. Despite what some folks think, not every technology is run by 20-30 somethings without families. I know quite a few engineers in my city, and I've never heard any one of them say they are compelled to work more than 40 hours a week[0]. This includes engineers at at several "household name" companies.
Yes, some companies have poor management, but these companies are also not exclusively tech companies.
[0] Yes, sometimes we all work a bit of overtime because of issues in the field, or one poorly run iteration. These things happen. The critical thing is how management works to avoid those situations in the future.
If the underlying hypothesis that overworked developers are bad developers is true (and I believe it is), then it should be a competitive advantage to not overwork your developers.
Hours worked is easy to measure, good/bad developers, quality of code -- not so much.
Doing deep/meaningful work for 70hours a week is reserved for genetic freaks -- 0.1% of the cases -- the rest are either the sub-mediocre bureaucrat types who want the office face time in order to climb the corporate ladder or the victims of the said bureaucrats who are guilt tripped into doing it.
Articles like this show why the economic growth of the 21st Century will be in East Asia. This generation's educated Westerners are too comfortable and complacent.
Sustainable pace is super important for creating and maintaining high performance teams. Crassly, it's just a more profitable way of doing business.
I wish more managers would stop buying into the myth of "time in seat == productivity", and look at the real output of their teams. When you actually run the numbers there's a lot of results that run counter to conventional wisdom.