Comment by d23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by d23 | Hacker News Reader

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> Companies don't need to go so far as the well-known Google 20 percent time

A bit of a digression here.

I love that people think the idea that letting employees spend a measly 20% of their time deciding what they should be working on is somehow an extreme idea. What portion of your typical day would you honestly say is devoted to solid, in-the-flow work? After all the meeting, context switches, random interruptions, lunch, distractions on company chat -- I personally would say a fraction. Or flow state is simply dead for me at the office.

Recently, my roommate and I came home after work and ended up knocking out a very useful skunkworks project in about 6 hours over the course of 2 nights. That completely uninterrupted time mixed with the fact that it was a project that was freshly conceived and still full of passion in our minds let us get more work done in that burst than we felt like we had in weeks.

20% time is a joke. We need to ditch this 40 hour, strictly scheduled workweek in distracting office environments and try some radically different ways of getting productivity boosts. It just so happens that people also feel a lot better when they get these boosts to boot. I know after knocking out that project certainly made me feel awesome.

If little hobby skunkworks 6 hour projects actually made much money then that would be the norm.

The reality is that the things that people and companies are willing to pay for often take a great deal more time and dedication. Also, they often involve work that's a hell of a lot less interesting. Even the projects that are fun to start often become boring drudgery during the long haul of making a product that someone is willing to pay you for.

The point was that conventional work structure, in offices, with lots of meetings and other distractions that are mostly irrelevant are a huge productivity killer.

I don't disagree that there is a lot of inefficiency and counterproductivity in a conventional office - but the gp was offering up an example of how his hack session with his roommate proved something about how we "should" be working.

Like many complicated systems, it's easy to criticize the conventional office and offer microcosm-scale anecdotal counter-examples - but quite another thing to create something effectively comparable.

I love thinking about new ways to work. I work remotely and am always experimenting with ways to be effective from a distance... but I find that getting people's butts in chairs in the same office, and coordinating with a few boring meetings is surprisingly necessary.

Maybe I'm exceptionally lucky, but I work from home most of the time and get to prioritize my work myself. If I want to spend a day improving test coverage or build tooling, I am free to do so.

The price I pay for this is earning about 10k€ less a year, but I still think it's worth it.

I think that's a very important point that the article misses - some people will use spare work time to improve things they see could be done better rather than volunteering to do what their manager thinks needs to be done.

If you're a creative developer, or you have a passion for a specific area, then it's easy to ignore "unassigned work" in favour of doing things that you want to do instead. There can be a great deal of value in that that any manager needs to recognise. Someone who isn't voluntarily picking up unassigned work isn't (necessarily) failing to show leadership - they might be leading in an area where work isn't being created, whether it's assigned or not.

Just for fun I wondered what a missed $10k/yr was over time.

http://www.moneychimp.com/calculator/compound_interest_calcu...

values of 0; 10,000; 20; 4; results in nearly 310k of missed gains.

Increasing that 4% to 8% increases it to nearly a half a million!

At my estimated retirement income requirements, that basically means I could quit working 10 years earlier if I don't settle for being underpaid.

By the same logic you could say if only I'd done X I'd earn an extra $15k, $20k or even $50k a year but would you have followed a path in life that was balanced and happy? Not every decision can be reduced to a number

$120k in SF or 40k€ where I currently live get me both the same standard of living. I don't think comparing absolute wages/salaries has ever been meaningful.

Eh, you'll save thousands by not having to commute.

Or the other option, work remotely and not get underpaid...

You're not wrong, but you don't quite understand how 20% time works in practice. It's a formal way to recruit part-time help on unrelated projects, and it's recruited for and tracked in exactly the same way using the same systems as normal jobs & normal performance management. It's a fantastic way for people at Google to seek out learning opportunities or places to participate outside their normal team/group/dept/BU.

Most companies look at 20% time as a super-informal way for people to volunteer "spare time" to work on non-core stuff, but that isn't how it works at Google, at all.

That said, your central point is 100% accurate ... but at least within tech, I think that "40 hour, strictly scheduled workweek" has been gone for several years now.

> at least within tech, I think that "40 hour, strictly scheduled workweek" has been gone for several years now.

Sounds like you have never worked for a government contractor.

I haven't worked at a software development company where they didn't have an expectation of 40 hours and a set of "core hours" where you had to be in the office or available.

Sadly, I think we have to accept that the appearance of productivity (butt in chair, open office visibility) is more important than actual productivity most of the time.

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