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Comment by JamesBarney | Hacker News Reader

I imagine the optimal working day depends on the work one is doing. I used to work 8 hour shifts at Circuit City and leave with plenty of energy. But 8 hours of solid coding leaves me exhausted.

I'm more curious to see the results of Amazon's 30 hr work week because I believe that includes developers.

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And truthfully, it is going to depend on the person to at least some extent as well.

IMO, anything that doesn't include being at work as part of your actual job duties should have no number of required work hours. You either get enough work done or you don't. If you aren't getting the expected amount of work done, then you'll eventually get fired. If you can out perform everyone else on the team and work 8 hours a week, so be it(just don't expect to get any brownie points when it comes raise time unless you put in more time).

Things like retail/food service are obviously things that require being at work certain hours so talking about shortening hours for that time of work is productive. For creative work/management/executive work though, I think we should move to a more flexible approach.

When I was in sales/marketing, it was all about hitting your quota. If you were good, your boss didn't care what you were doing as long as you hit your quota every month. It gave the higher performers the leeway to work when they wanted to, and also give an incentive to the average sales people to up their game to be able to do the same.

As a developer, a majority of the companies I worked at there was no incentive to go above and beyond, even at the end of the year in terms of bonuses. Sure, the guy that was burning himself out for that extra 1% yearly raise usually got it, but it never made any sense to me to work that hard for a few more pennies over the year.

Now in my 30's, my attitude is to get my stuff done and stay off my managers radar. My sanity and work/life balance is too important at this point in my life.

your boss didn't care what you were doing as long as you hit your quota every month

Where I work (software/hardware for research) the basic principle is actually not different: boss doesn't really care what I'm doing as long as I'm not unhappy and the stuff which needs to get done gets done in time. Sure there are no fixed periodic deadlines or money-based quota, but the same principle nonetheless. I wouldn't want to work in another way because of all the freedom it gives you. I do see the same 'drawback' regarding carreer opportunities etc but the older I get the less I care. I earn enough money to sustain my lifestyle so yeah I'm definitely not going to work my ass off just to earn a bit more or get a better position, as I know that won't make me any happier anyway.

So here's a question that I continually ask myself as I work at my remote, salaried 6-hour-a-day developer job that I've been doing for the last year:

how do I know how much work is enough?

If I gauge by productivity, that's cool... I'll just be really fast and get my stuff done and then go play banjo or whatever.

But then when folks hand me a crufty WordPress site that is misbehaving and it could be anything between "visit the route that resets the route cache" and "debug three or four broken and unfamiliar JavaScript libraries and their interaction with terrible PHP code" there is a problem, because to my boss those could be the same amount of work.

When I am doing green field work, or working with very nice, clean technology that I understand well, it's easy enough for me to have expectations about how much to do, even (or perhaps especially) when I am dealing with a large, multi-month effort where there is a lot of fluidity in hitting specific goals.

But how do I say "oh, I worked enough today" if I don't have an hourly commitment? I agreed to a certain period of my time specifically because sometimes I look up and have worked 8-10 hours.

I'm the only programmer on my team, by the way, so there aren't a lot of metrics we can pull from about performance.

This is a real question I think about a lot, and I'd be happy for an answer: how do you set a workload expectation with no reference to how much effort or time I am expending when time estimation is difficult?

Absolutely. I don't fully understand workplace cultures (including my own) that claim to care more about "getting your work done" than "hours in a chair." The problem is that output is in many cases a very crude measure of effort. And not just because some people are vastly more productive than others, but also because it's often the case that when reading a bug report, you don't know if the fix will take 3 or 3000 lines of code until it's actually done.

Of course, over time your output averages out, and if you work about as hard as someone at about your skill level you'll have similar outcomes. This works ok for yardsticking at engineer-heavy organizations. Doesn't solve the problem for a solo developer like you though.

And even worse you don't know if the 3 or 3000 line fix will take more time.

Good points... It all depends on who sets the milestones for "getting the work done".

If a sales guy commit more features to the customers than reasonable, do you need to put in more hours to "getting the work done"? Does he need to stick around late till your are done to penalize him also? If a sales guy doesn't make a sale as aniticipated does he need to stick around until he makes a sale and "gets his work done"?

> The problem is that output is in many cases a very crude measure of effort.

Unfortunately, businesses and companies are mostly concerned about output. Does the line below sound familiar?

> I don't care how you do it. Just get it done.

Did you negotiate the 6-hour-day up front or just...uh...you know...work 6 hours, as it were?

I started out as an hourly contractor doing projects for a really good salesperson, and then she bought all my time that I cared to sell (about 30 hours a week), and then we formalized it as a w2 position about 10 months ago.

It's a very small company with doing web dev projects; there's only the boss (who pretty much just does sales), the "Design Dept. Head" out in SF, the "Chief Project Manager" in Az, and me (I'm an hour outside of Austin), plus a couple of off and on freelancers.

TBH, the expectation is mostly that "we get stuff done"; for example I had to meet with a client for a sub-contracted NSF gig on our NYE holiday. Or I have had to fix broken stuff in the middle of the night/ work late to make some magic happen occasionally. That has been rare enough so that, like the once or twice a year I have to travel, it's novel and kind of fun.

But between the limited sales pipeline, higher-margin clientele, and being fairly efficient the formal office hours that I agreed to are easy to maintain.

I play a lot of music, and I suspect that it's very much like being in a successful band would be like (I wouldn't know specifically what that is like, though, I only gig on the weekends at bars).

> and then go play banjo or whatever.

I'm taking this example. This is mine now. Thanks. :)

At least part of most people's job is being available, however. If you work on a team or are even nominally in a support role, you've got to be available for questions, meetings, collaboration, and so on. Very few people at places I've worked in the past have a job that can be easily defined by "I cranked this many widgets, now I can go."

Additionally, the 40 hour week protects people who got a difficult task from being held over. I realize there are stories of working 80 hours a week, but in my experience most people leave at 40 hours, which forces managers and sales people to set realistic delivery dates based on those hours.

I understand the concept of being "available" because my employer has a rule of core hours that one can be expected to be available for questions/meetings/whatever.

At the same time though, sometimes you can learn a lot by not being available. There's documentation that can be written, and sometimes users need to actually read the manual instead of interrupting you to answer a question you've already answered to them three times before.

Sigh. That last one is the worst. Especially if you've written documentation, pointed it out to them before, and been told "I don't have time to read that".

> I'm more curious to see the results of Amazon's 30 hr work week because I believe that includes developers.

I hope you're joking, otherwise you don't know Amazon at all. (source: I worked at AWS for six years)

I believe he's referring to Amazon's pilot program for part-time employees doing 30 hour workweeks:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/08/26...

Funny to see this now. I left Amazon about 3 years ago, because there was no career path advancement for fewer hours.

I would've stayed at Amazon longer if at the end of the year instead of paying me more money they would've been willing to just make me work fewer hours.

That's interesting. 8 solid hours of coding leaves me wanting to go for a run or go out singing with my friends.

OTH, back when I was paining houses and hauling ladders around all day, I felt like sitting down in front of a computer for the rest of the evening after finally getting home.

Me too; not that I often code 8 solid hours (I take out time to walk in the mountains and cook for instance) but when I anything more than 4 hours solid I have tons of energy. After 3 hours of meetings however, not so much.

In the article though, the benefits to nurses weren't disputed. It was a success from a quality of life perspective. Costs were the issue.

Possible that costs might vary from role to role, but that's less satisfying if the goal is to improve life.

It also mentioned patient care was improved, which is important because it establishes that the gains went beyond the employees who got two extra hours of free time. That could establish the groundwork for some similar studies in different disciplines where perhaps the costs don't increase in the same ways.

I believe Amazons program was something like come to work from 10:00 to 14:00 Mon-Fri. The problem with this is that I think it's a lot easier to be pressured to stay longer over the course of a week than if you only worked 3 days a week.

This is why I like Google's version, where you can work on personal projects. You are still around if people need you, but you can work on other things as well rather than burning out trying to work on one thing for 40+ hours a week.

Last I heard that 20% time thing was pretty dead in reality, or that it became 120% time, no?

I heard once anecdotally that google side projects are sometimes "supposed to be work related" so not quite as free as you'd imagine, FWIW...or perhaps they're not dunno never worked there.

I think they are supposed to be work related, but that's still a change of pace. There are things I want to fix at my job that will never be fixed because it isn't anybody's job, and nobody would let you mess around with it because it would be circumventing the normal decision making process. It would be really nice to just say "I'm just trying something out," without needing to schedule an hour-long meeting with 8 people to create a roadmap.

Ouch. I feel lucky to have enough autonomy I can blow a few hours out of a week "just trying something out" without being grilled why I wasted a few hours over it.

If I were being grilled I'd consider a new job.

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