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Comment by jhummel | Hacker News Reader

I started a consulting/services company a few years ago, and this year was finally in a position to start hiring. I'm a big proponent of this type of thinking, so while I couldn't offer the best salary, or the best benefits - I could offer a better work/life balance. I knew it was a win-win for us and the new employee.

We landed on a 36 hour work week. 8-5 Mon-Thurs, then 8-12 on Friday. We had more applicants than I ever dreamed of, and scored a great hire that was coming from the 70-hr-a-week startup life. Everyone's been extremely happy over the past six months, and I don't feel like I'm missing out on any productivity what-so-ever.

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This is great, but isn't that a 40 hour work week? Most places consider 9-5 to be 8 hours (lunch and coffee breaks count towards the total).

If we accept this convention, your workers are technically there for 9 hours a day for 4 days and 4 hours on Friday. Still clocking in 40 hours.

Nevertheless, I'm sure they enjoy their half day off on Friday and the work culture that put it in place.

Regardless whether you count lunch breaks or not as working hours, the fact they get to leave at twelve on Friday is different from most companies. I'd certainly prefer that schedule over the normal schedule.

lunch and coffee breaks count towards 8 hour work day? usually 8 hour work day = 4 hours work before lunch and 4 hours work after

It should, yes.

Difference between US and Europe, maybe? In Europe so far I haven't seen the case where lunch time doesn't count into work time (assuming you get lunch time at all - many employers in low-skill fields use every dirty trick in the book to extract work out of people).

It is certainly common practice to not include lunch as work time in the US. But I think that is unfair to the employee.

In the US almost all Low-skill jobs that pay by the hour dont count lunch as work time. At those jobs you usually explicitly "clock out" for lunch.

At salaried jobs it is less common, though I'd guess 50% or more don't count lunch as work time.

If that is the case, then workers should also be allowed to eat at their desk (or otherwise eat while working - reading emails on phone, etc) and leave early if they spend less than an hour at lunch.

Perhaps this is regional, but I don't know anyone in a salaried position that gets paid for lunch time. It is always expected that you are working 8 hours a day outside of the lunch hour.

To be clear, I live in the United States.

I have a cousin with a union job. Her union negotiated 8 hour day with mandatory paid half hour lunch. The lunch is negotiated as mandatory so they go around and make everyone leave their cubicles at lunch time. Perhaps to make sure no bosses are expecting people to work through lunch.

I started work at 9. I'm responding to your comment while eating lunch at a restaurant. I plan to leave around 5 today. This is my normal schedule. I'm salaried and live in the US as well. My last two jobs were the same way as well.

That's great :)

Just how it should be.

Same in UK - My work week is considered 37.5 hours with work day of 9-17:30.

Totally the opposite experience - normal 40 hour week means working 9 AM to 6 PM, due to 1 hour lunch break. This is even the case in most public administrations (Germany, France, EU Commission), I'm quite curious where a 9 AM to 5 PM day is normal...

I count my work day as "time spent commuting, working, or anything else keeping me from spending time at home with my family."

Me too. It isn't time off just because I'm not producing for an employer. If it requires me to commute, walk, etc. and it is work related, I classify that as working hours because those are the hours of my day that are given to my employer, even if they are not getting an immediate, direct benefit from those minutes. I realize I am not being paid for that time, but it doesn't change the fact that I am doing that instead of something else.

If you are salaried, you are being paid for that time. The effect is to reduce your effective hourly wage.

I quit my last employer because the extra 2 hours required for commuting and dressing (both of which incur unreimbursed expenses) on top of my 9 billable hours was taking up a significant chunk of my compensation.

I co-sign this. If you want me to be in a location, any time spent conveying myself or being there counts.

I wish I could live in that fantasy world, where my hour commute both ways and my lunch break counted as working. Then I'd only have to do 5 hours of work while my coworkers did 7, and we'd all get paid the same.

Perhaps you should take up smoking cigarettes then? My coworkers take four 20-minute smoke breaks a day.

I try to get work done, not look for reasons to count commuting/smoking/etc. as time worked.

I work through lunch, eating at my desk. I prefer to do this over wasting time away from the office. 1 hour is not enough for me to go home and see my kids or work on my house or do anything legitimately useful or meaningful. Instead, I find myself being forced to fill it with something I wouldn't otherwise want to do. Therefore, I just grab a sandwich and eat while working. Officially, we aren't supposed to do this. Unofficially, no one has stopped me yet.

In my experience, lunch with your colleagues is one of the indicators of a healthy work environment. When this doesn't happen, for whatever reason you may have, I have always found the team to be unhealthy. How is it for you?

In my team we usually eat lunch at our cubes while being stuck on conference calls with folks from our local office, California, and Europe. Not sure if this counts as having lunch with colleagues :)

I don't do lunch with my colleagues because I don't eat lunch. Even if I did eat lunch I don't want to waste more time at work than I have to so I would nibble at my desk while coding. Our team is perfectly healthy.

I can't imagine lunch taking a full hour, seems like a waste of time to me though I know other people have different opinions on this, it's individual preference.

Do you have mandatory lunch times and locations? Doesn't anyone ever want to spend their lunch break exercising or taking a walk? Or even going home to eat with their families? These are all common in my office. What if you hired a Muslim who fasted for Ramadan? Will you force them to watch everyone else eat?

I have similar approach. I like to eat lunch at my desk - even if my hands are full so I am not coding on the work project per se, I can at least be reading something. I have plenty of opportunities to talk to my teammates during the rest of the day anyway.

As for hour+-long lunches, I don't get it either. I guess some people like it - in the same way in which I like to come home and work on my own projects. Everyone wants to allocate time on stuff they like. I don't particularly fancy eating with people.

I'm 62 and find my head hurts if I code all morning and then eat at my desk and get right back at it. So 1 to 2 times a week I eat in the cafeteria. I take a full hour and that helps. 3 days a week I take a power nap in my office even if my lunch was an hour. I used to feel guilty doing so. No longer. My productivity is high and my bosses count me as exceeding expectations.

I am lucky I don't have a micromanager as a boss.

Oh wow I am the exact opposite. If I take breaks I have a very hard time getting back to work. I like to get in the zone and stay there.

When I was much younger that was my prefered mode. Not sure what age has to do with it but I allow myself to try new approaches from time to time to see if old assumptions still hold true.

> Do you have mandatory lunch times and locations?

No. In some offices there is a canteen where you can sit down and have a lunch with your colleagues, though.

Times and locations are most of the time decided by people. For example, you might decide to go to a restaurant/pizzeria with 2-3 colleagues, or just one, or more people from different departments, etc.

> Doesn't anyone ever want to spend their lunch break exercising or taking a walk?

Normally, people here in Europe tend to eat at the same time - let's say 12:30, or 13:00, or 13.30 - depending on the country.

> Or even going home to eat with their families?

This is almost never the case - as far as I know.

> What if you hired a Muslim who fasted for Ramadan?

I had a Muslim colleague once, and while he was fasting, he just didn't join, which is fine. However, before/after he was always part of the group.

Mine was not a criticism, just an observation, because that's what I have noticed during the years. It doesn't imply anything, just that under the following circumstances:

- in a country where people tend to eat at the same time on average ( let's say at 12.30),

- there is a canteen/kitchen in the office, or restaurants nearby,

- nobody goes to see the family during lunch,

- nobody goes for a walk during lunch, except for reaching the restaurant, or in the case everyone in the group (that doesn't have to be the whole team/company) is willing to.

Then, I have noticed that when people don't sit at the same table (it doesn't have to be the whole company simultaneously), there are issues in the teams. As I said, this is a personal observation, and I want to thank you for answering because your response offered me different insights and points of view (like: exercising, going for a walk, eating with family, etc).

Oh OK I thought that there was mandatory lunch time for teambuilding.

Elective lunches and socialization is certainly a thing at my office too. It's just there is such a variety of lunch activities in my office and it's never been a hinderence to the team dynamics.

There's also some people with strong opinions on your relationship with your co-workers should be business-only and others who have met their best friend or even spouse at work.

None of this has ever hurt team dynamics though.

My office skews older though.

Thank you both for your answers! ;)

I think we have a healthy work environment. No major conflicts or issues. I think the idea of lunch together as a team is nice, but not practical in my organization since we all run different projects and have conflicting schedules. We do try to do a monthly team lunch, where we go out to a local restaurant to eat together, but even those do not always happen due to scheduling conflicts.

I have seen places where people don't have any reason except for "naaa, I don't wanna spend my time with them, I prefer to spend it alone".

When there is a justification that goes beyond that, for me it's okay - actually, I am okay with every decision.

However, I have seen places where people create real factions during lunch time, or they just tend to be alone, because of the reason mentioned above.

No criticism, just an observation, which is wrong apparently, if not all factors (different schedules, etc.) are taken into account. :)

Our team has lunch together every week or so. I wouldn't be happy with the norm of having lunch together all the time. I like to get out of the office and play stupid games on my tablet over lunch. Doing that around people is seen as antisocial so I prefer going off on my own.

That may be true in general, but some of us just don't enjoy going out for lunch that much. I've always eaten at my desk with a few exceptions when I do want to go to lunch with coworkers.

Then I believe such a "team building" activity should count towards working hours total.

I guess I have never had a job that counts lunch as an hour, or heard of such a job! My wife, friends, etc. all seem to do a 8-5 with breaks and a lunch hour. I guess I've technically been working 45 hours all my life if that's the case.

I've had the opposite experience. Spent 6 years working in one professional position and another year at a second, where my lunch counted toward my hours, so a 40 hour week meant I arrived at work 8 hours prior to leaving work. When I finally started my current position and they explained that my lunch break was off the clock, I was shocked. Now I've added this difference to the things I have to account for when considering a new position.

And, when it comes down to it, all that really matters to me is the number of hours that pass between stepping out my front door and returning through it. So I suppose unpaid lunch time falls in with commute time as time that I'm not technically giving to the company, but is still heavily impacted by my work requirements.

In fact, the main draw of my current position over the last was cutting over an hour commute to 15 minutes, each way. Saved over 8 hours in commute time at the cost of 2.5 hours for an unpaid half hour lunch.

Most places in the US don't count lunch. 8-5 or 9-6 are normal 8 hour days, or 8:30-5 if you take a 30m lunch.

I have never worked in a salaried position where this is true. Citation needed.

Anecdotal, but I'm in exactly that situation at a fairly large tech employer. We log hours against different projects, are expected to log 40 hours a week, and are specifically instructed not to log anything for a non-working lunch.

Billing clients or projects per hour is like billing lines of code. It's a metric that doesn't correlate to real productivity as much as some people think.

I guess it makes about as much sense as paying employees per hour.

Often especially for salaried consultants, the client billed hours count towards your bonus (which is a part of the overall compensation).

That said, most folks in such roles often work through the lunch. This is a bad habit but logical outcome of such comp structures.

Billings and pay rate basis are parts of a large lie in business.

Revenues are based on customer value, supplier costs, and relative bargaining positions between the two, which moves the balance between the two. The party that can't walk away is the party that loses.

Pay needs to similarly compensate for the provisioning cost of labour, fully accounted.

If you're not paying your employees what theey need to survive and raise families, you're not creating wealth but are extracting liquidity. How you pay isn't terribly significant, though bad bases, such as piecework, are often long-term harmful.

Marginal cost and value are, I'm increasingly convinced, in many ways a distraction. Not entirely, but they confound the matter.

Guy named Smith had a lot to say on this a ways back.

Umm, I'm here in Austin in a salaried position, work 40 hours per week, lunch doesn't count. If I work 9-5, and take a one hour lunch, that means I would have to work 9-6.

Citation needed? Wtf?

Citation: I can't bill my customers for my lunch cause that's fraud. They don't pay me to eat. My employer provides no lunch charge number that I can charge overhead to.

Anyways, it's obvious that every employer has different policies for different things. "My employer doesn't give me disability insurance, citation needed yours does." (And mine does, I don't know how common that is)

Having anecdotes on both sides makes that "most" claim non-obvious and unsubstantiated. Now, if GP had led with "In my experience," that would be different.

Don't you have workplace laws which require breaks from using a computer all day? Those breaks are by law paid. Whether you have lunch on top of those breaks or not I don't care.

I've never worked in salaried position where this WASN'T true. Lunch was never considered to be paid time.

In the US, "salaried" is not a legally meaningful designation of employment. The term that applies here is "exempt". Workers who are paid by the hour and are "non-exempt".

Exempt employees (i.e. "salaried" workers in the US) are not paid by the hour and, so, it does not matter if they eat lunch for 6 hours, code for 1, and sleep for 2.

Their remuneration has no relationship to the length of their lunch breaks nor to the length of hours they code, are in meetings, take water cooler breaks, etc.

So, if you've worked in a salaried position in the US, it is true "Lunch was never considered to be paid time" but only because for all exempt employees neither is coding/meeting/managing/planning/napping considered to be paid time.

In the US, exempt employees are remunerated irrespective of how many hours a week they work.

EDIT: spelling, capitalization.

You can use all the legal definitions you want (which, btw, I already knew all about exempt vs non-exempt employees). When did I say "salaried" was a "legally meaningful designation of employment"? No one I know uses "exempt" in casual conversation to describe what kind of employee they are. It's always "hourly" or "salaried" (or "on salary").

The point was that basically every place I've ever worked on a salary, you were expected to work at least 40 hours a week (that's the minimum). Yes, legally they are required to pay you your salary if you work less than 40 hours in a week. However, if you tried to get away with just working 35 hours, pretty much every place I've ever worked would call you on it, and if you didn't adjust you'd lose your job. They may not use "not working enough hours" as your reason for termination (they'd probably say something like "not getting enough work done"), but the real reason would be because you weren't putting in your 40.

So you can say "In the US, exempt employees are remunerated irrespective of how many hours a week they work.", and that is technically true, but the practical side of it is, if you don't work the minimum number of hours your employer expects, you won't have a job, so you'll stop getting paid at all.

There is a case where "In the US, exempt employees are remunerated irrespective of how many hours a week they work." is practically relevant -- when you work more than 40 hours a week. You will not be paid more for working more than 40 hours in a week. It's one of the downsides of being a salaried employee. But you put up with it because almost all of the higher paying jobs in the US are salaried positions.

While it is technically true that a salaried employee working 35 hours a week and taking an hourly lunch is not getting a "paid lunch", that is the way most people I know would describe it. People are geared to think of the work week as being 40 hours or more, and I'm sure that's why they'd describe 35 hours of actual work a week (with hour lunch breaks) as a salaried position with a "paid lunch".

Like I said originally, perhaps this is regional. I've only worked in the Midwest, but as far as I can tell, this is the way everyone I know perceives it.

Even service jobs occasionally give paid lunch hours. When salaried, the whole point is you don't need to track hours. Otherwise you need to bill for that 5 minutes of insight in the shower on Sunday when you have an idea that solves some important business problem. Anyway since I'm generally thinking about work related problems during lunch, frequently even eating at my desk, and lunch rarely takes a full hour, I've always considered my "lunch hour" as part of the total work day, and never had anyone higher up question it.

>When salaried, the whole point is you don't need to track hours.

Ummm... Keeping track of where man-hours is spent is good project management. Even when I worked jobs where I wasn't billing customers directly and my work was for the company's internal use I've always had to document where my hours were spent every day.

I can't imagine a project that doesn't keep track of man hours. Even if informally.

>Otherwise you need to bill for that 5 minutes of insight in the shower on Sunday when you have an idea that solves some important business problem.

I am not sure why you'd bill for that.

8 to 5 here; lunch doesn't count.

I don't know if this is an Oregon thing or national, but I believe that employers are required to give employees a paid 15 minute break for every 4 hours of work. So, at least a paid half hour break per 8 hour day is mandatory.

I've never been at a place where lunch was counted as working, and I'm in the US.

> We landed on a 36 hour work week. 8-5 Mon-Thurs, then 8-12 on Friday.

Oh yes please! The great thing about taking off early on Fridays is that you can use the time to run errands that can only be done in business hours, or you can use the time for travel and extend the weekend considerably. This is a great perk.

EDIT: Is your company in the monthly "who's hiring" threads?

That's still a 40 hour work week, just with the hours distributed differently.

9h Mon-Thurs (36h total) 4h Friday (4h total)

It's definitely still an improvement over 70 hours.

I think this presumes that there's no lunch-time....

As a consultant I never considered lunch as work because I could not bill a client for it. So to me at least 8-5 is 8 hours of work plus 1 hour break for lunch.

Consultant is a bit different than a salaried employee. I'm not sure how the language is structured in the US, but in Europe as a salaried employee, you're not producing X, you're providing labour. As in, you're hired to provide labour for 8 hours per day to an employer. The language used in our labour law is something like "employee is considered at work when present at location during time specified by employer and is providing his/her labour for use by the employer". You could skip lunch break if required, but most of the time it isn't.

That doesn't apply to all of Europe. In Norway salaried workers have a 40 hour week, but are only paid for 37,5 hours. The work day is 8 hours long, but you are not paid during the 30 minute lunch break.

It is also common to work from 8 to 4, but developers and others who are not too dependent on the outside world can have a bit more flexibility.

It is funny to see the shock in some foreigners when "nobody" is at the office after 4, when in fact they have already been at work for 8 hours.

I've always wondered why more companies don't do this. Offer a 30 or 35 hour work week and watch the top-notch candidates roll in, even though you can't offer a top-notch salary.

We went more extreme and went to 20 hours a week, though we're a little crazy when it comes to our philosophy about work.

It did exactly as you described, though. We're able to attract top talent engineers even though we're a tiny consulting company that nobody has ever heard of.

There's a ton of pressure to work more hours, from all over the place. It's way more visible than other metrics.

Project fails, the team Fred was leading was averaging 30 hours a week and everyone knows it? Fred's gone, doesn't matter how productive they were, and everyone on that team had better watch out. You tell the client features X and Y aren't gonna make the next deadline before [industry trade show], then client finds out all your people are putting in sub-40-hour weeks? Client's gone and telling anyone who'll listen that your shop is full of entitled, lazy scam artists who will take your money and fail to deliver what you asked for.

Flip that, same thing but the teams were averaging 60-hour weeks. It does not matter if that's worse for the product or if it's the cause of the failure, or it two of your best people quit over it—it means "not working enough" is off the table when the blame game comes around, and a smaller chance of getting a pink slip or passed over for a promotion or raise.

Any place where this sort of thing isn't a concern is like the eye of a storm—everything around is horrible chaos & destruction and the calm is fragile, precious, and could end at any moment.

Countering this will require a concerted effort. Providing an answer to the naysayers is what all these articles about productivity are for. Also, track something abstract like "velocity" for everything except billing.

> so while I couldn't offer the best salary, or the best benefits - I could offer a better work/life balance

That is a valuable recruiting reminder right there. For some reason, it is easy to forget that hiring is a marketing problem. It requires critical thinking about positioning and presentation. I want to poke my eyes out when I hear complaints from fellow business owners and managers saying they can't find qualified candidates. Usually they're recruiting practices suck. And it's not always about starting salary either.

Unless Friday is work from home day, and I can productively work from home, dealing with a commute for 4 hours in the office sounds terrible... Though I guess compared to the 70+ hour life it's not bad.

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