Hacker News Reader

Comment by msbarnett | Hacker News Reader

> > Salarymen work large amounts of overtime, although much of it is for appearance’s sake

> That's just stupid.

That's overtime. Almost all overtime, even in the US, is as much about the appearance of working hard rather than any real gains in productivity.

I've lost count of the number of times I've been involved with or seen a startup that "crushes code 100 hours a week because we're out to win, man", with most of those late nights spent with a room full of people online shopping or on HN.

View on HN

I worked at a door factory. We worked 20% overtime for 6 months. We made 20% more doors.

Works great for manual labor.

Yeah, generally overtime in manual labor type jobs yield more production.

Source: woke in construction

That's the thing though, it's an old-school Fordist concept that doesn't really apply to modern service/creative jobs. Time, like place, is not related to productivity anymore, modern employers need better metrics.

Do you mean our lord and saviour kpi?

True. OP said overtime NEVER works. I think it works. Just differently in different fields.

I can code 80 hour weeks for a bit. Put out a ton of code. Can't do it for a month straight. But I could do manual labor overtime for a month straight.

You probably also earned additional pay (at a higher rate) for overtime - which can help justify spending the extra time there, at least if you value the money more than the free time lost. Which doesn't apply to salaried employees.

Yes time and a half. Which was sweet.

Factory sent from 2 8 hour shifts to 2 10 hour shifts. They got quite a bit more production without the full cost of adding a third shift.

As a programmer I'm not sure extra pay would help. My brain can only code so many hours.

I'm productive for about 20-35 hours a week I'd say. Based on how interesting the problem is and luck. The other hours I spend trying to wade through my own feelings about being unproductive.

Mm, yeah, manual labour is kind of a different story. I'm thinking programming or more generally knowledge-economy work. We have fairly precise numbers indicating that productivity goes net-negative when working much beyond 40/week after at most a couple of weeks.

Yeah my current startup, no overtime, and all our projects are on schedule, everything is going great. Previous company required 80-100 hours a week basically for show, they would break more than got fixed because at 100 hours a week your body and brain reach the breaking point, completely unproductive.

reddit. a few braver on 4chan

Reply on news.ycombinator.com