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Comment by brianwawok | Hacker News Reader

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

Works great for manual labor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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