Why Basecamp CEO Jason Fried Believes 40 Hours Is Plenty | Hacker News Reader

Why Basecamp CEO Jason Fried Believes 40 Hours Is Plenty

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45 pointstabbyjabby22 comments

We encourage developers to work 20 hours a week. Our experience is any engineer worth their salt is as productive in 20 hours as they were in 40 --- if anything, they're more productive. We also have an unlimited vacation policy, but we enforce a minimum of two weeks a year, which has really helped ensure people actually use their vacation time.

Can you tell us what is your company?

Apsis Labs, http://apsis.io

What and where is this land you speak of?

The internet. We're at http://apsis.io

How do you enforce the minimum, and also how do you make sure people don't mistake the minimum for the expectation?

A lot of yelling. We find people respond well when you yell at them to stop working and take time off.

I can second this for personal projects. When I had two hours per day to work on personal projects I accomplished more than when I moved to work part time and thought an extra 3 hours would be beneficial. They were the opposite.

> if anything, they're more productive

I cannot count the times that I've spent the whole Friday on some problem just to have the solution occur to me out of nowhere at some moment during the weekend.

The most productive engineering I ever do is while I'm washing the dishes.

Could you please update your HN profile. Usually a member checks it to get in touch. Interesting policy and I do agree that qualified engineers should be able to deliver within a reasonable time frame. That said, the time spent on the problem isn't the best measure to gauge productivity. Each person approaches problems differently and usually well knit teams solve problems faster than geniuses in isolation.

Certainly, and we don't encourage isolation from our engineers. They are free to work further on problems, and often do --- but when the expectation is to work your fill, rather than to work the problem to death, we find our employees excel. Taking the weekend to ignore a problem often leads to a solution on Monday morning.

Your website says that your minimum vacation is three weeks[1]. Have you since changed your policy :P ?

[1] http://apsis.io/blog/2015/04/23/work-sustainably

No. I'm dumb.

Jason Fried is a master at managerial science. Hopefully some day we will look back on him as a pioneer in treating employees well, and we'll wonder why we were decades behind him on employee satisfaction and retention.

Why not 35 or 30 hours or even 25 hours? That last hour or two or three at work are near worthless for me and just about everyone I know. Having parents leaving between 2-4 means they'll be able to pick up their kids directly from school or limit "latch key" alone time. Non-parents will certainly enjoy less time at work and more sunlight and time for physical activities while its still light out.

Seems to me, the dominating narrative, driven by some questionable characters, is longer school hours to match business hours. No, we should be lowering business hours to match existing school hours. We can't compete via hard nose puritanical work ethic turned up to 11. The puritans were, frankly, miserable creatures and 'hard work' environments universally create miserable people who ultimately aren't any more competitive than the less working competitors. Its time to consider the emotional experience of being human and as we have more and more automation options, to consider eliminating a few work hours per week and perhaps eventually replace work as we know it.

There's a fight for the future that's particularly ugly. The "to compete with China/India/whoever, we must become them" vs the "we can do better with less human labor and with more automation." If the former camp wins, it'll be horrific for our quality of life and will not produce the gains these people expect. If the latter wins, we will all have better lives and we'll change our society to handle high levels of unemployment and under-employment.

Actually they have "Summer hours".

"4-day Summer Work Weeks: May 1 through August 31, we work a Monday-Thursday 8-hour day work week, aka “summer hours”, for a total of 32-hour weeks. Brand new employees may have to complete a training program per their team lead to be eligible. Note: The customer support team staggers their days off so we always have 24/7 coverage."

https://m.signalvnoise.com/employee-benefits-at-basecamp-d2d...

I have rarely had a job for which, after a year or so, 3 to 4 concentrated hours daily weren't enough to accomplish what was expected of me.

Well done on mentioning non-parents; a subset of the workforce usually overlooked in these conversations.

At Voxy we have a 40 hour policy for our engineers, it's been in place for about 15 months. Before that it wasn't unusual for engineers to work 12 to 14 hour days. It's increased our engineer satisfaction tremendously, productivity is actually up 40% with fewer hours and we haven't had a single engineer leave in over a year. Would do again 10/10.

I've been contracting for about a year now and, personally, I'd say even 30 hours is plenty. It may be anecdotal, but I am far more productive in 30 hours than I ever was in 40+ at any of my salaried jobs.

In large part I attribute this to my environment which, now that I'm working from home, is almost completely free of distractions. I get started at about 8 AM and wrap things up by 2 or 3 on most days - which is right when my kids get home. I clock out for anything more than a bathroom break which means my clients are getting a far more potent work-hour out of me then they get from their employees.

The reality is that the 40 work day is an anachronism; and it can't die soon enough. Start evaluating your employees by whether they're actually giving you the value you're paying them for and not by how much time they clock in your building working, looking at Facebook, or goofing off in the breakroom.

I wonder if they have any employees in the southern hemisphere, and if so, are the summer hours flipped for them, or do they just get winter hours instead?

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