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Comment by morinted | Hacker News Reader

"I thought it would be really fun, but it felt kind of stressful," says Gabriel Peres, as he slots a Petri dish inside one of the 3D printers he's built for the company.

"It's a process and it takes time and when you don't have all that [much] time it kind of feels like skipping homework at school, things are always building up."

That's a perspective I hadn't considered. Maybe the 6 hour work day makes more sense for service-based work like nursing, fast food, etc.

For us techies it could actually be a nuisance (depending on how the individual works).

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For me, some days it would be awesome, on others it would be stressful as shit.

What I would prefer is to work as long as I need to and when I come to a logical breaking point, I go home. Some days that may be 4 hours, other days that may be 12. Some things I can't easily break down into chunks that easily fit into 8 hours and not have me lose my place by going to sleep. Some days I get into a flow and I don't even realize I'm hungry until it's dark again and I suddenly realize everyone's gone to bed and left me on my own. Other days I struggle to figure out what I'm doing and the more I fight it, the harder the struggle becomes. It's not because of a lack of discipline or lack of want to work, it's just that I struggle to connect dots that when I'm on form just connect themselves.

On days when I'm on form, I'm unstoppable, a machine that just churns out working, tested, simple, elegant solutions to problems. When I'm not on form, I can't figure out how chew gum without gagging. This seems to hinge on how much sleep I've had, which directly impedes the amount of time I have in a day... finding the balance between enough sleep and enough time to get work done to a high degree of quality is a constant struggle

So I don't think changing the length of the work day for me even enters in to my psyche. It's always either far too long or nowhere near long enough... it would be the same if the work day was 2 hours long or 22 hours long.

That's what it's like for me, I can't speak for everyone else.

This rings quite true with my experience. There are days where I leave early because I'm not being productive due to…you know, just the brain being weird.

It doesn't really make much sense to talk about the length of a work day except on average. "Six-hour work day" should just be interpreted to mean "120 hour work month" or similar.

I think many of us on this site have jobs where presence and productivity are pretty elastic.

Many workers have jobs where human presence is a key part of the job function. Being a cashier, or a nurse, or driving -- it isn't as though these things happen unless you are physically there. The quantum of human presence is "one human" :-) so even if there are no customers, the driving is boring, or the patients are asleep, it still requires you to be there on the job.

Yes, sure. I was unclear but meant in "our" field (IT).

If I was able to work with nothing but people as honest and driven as yourself then I'd have an extremely efficient company with ideal schedules.

Alas, there's only one me, so your company probably isn't :P

I kid around. Of course, we're all human and we're never all on form on the same day and shit happens and unexpected problems need to be solved right now and the only guy on form has no idea of the problem domain and the only guy who does understand it is 20 hours into a 22 hour day and has bloodshot eyes. This is life, reality. Sadly it doesn't understand ideal. It's all about compromise for the greatest good we can achieve today to meet our goals tomorrow.

C'est la vie.

> What I would prefer is to work as long as I need to and when I come to a logical breaking point, I go home.

The only issue with this approach is that what you perceive a logical breaking point and what your boss perceives as a logical breaking point will be very different. "Before you go, can you just fix ..."

Even 8 hour days can result in this behaviour becoming 10+ hour days.

That's true... I think we need to be more congizant of this - if I fix this one thing now, is it going to significantly improve ROI over if I do it tomorrow when I'm well rested?

I know someone who asked to go from salaried to hourly for this reason - he didn't want to sit there and ride the clock if he wasn't actually able to be productive during that time.

The (engineering) company operated based on billable hours, so they loved it, initially. Eventually, though, you stop fitting in to the organization when you're a part-timer.

That's what I did as freelancer. I often did my 40 hours work week in 3 days. And I think I did better work that way. In my corporate job I often don't have an inspiration at 9 am so I pretty much sit around and pretend to be busy. It would be much better to take off that time. And then you have that moment where everything makes sense and can crank it out in 18 hours.

Unfortunately programming is treated like assembly line work where every hour (and every worker) is equal. I don't think this reflects reality well.

This is how I work as well. Things stew around until everything clicks and then I crank out 3 days work in 3 hours.

If that's the case, then it really wasn't 3 days of work.

It's the same output as if you were sitting in an office 8 hours a day for 3 days.

I used to do this early in my career too, until I realized how counterproductive it was. I've found that it isn't "coding marathons" themselves that are good, but being motivated, undisturbed, structured etc. Few people are that everyday, so we have to work on it.

Nowadays instead of coding full out until I go home and crash on the couch I try to spend the last hour of the work day documenting what I've done, what need to be done tomorrow and even what I'm doing this evening. That way I've probably had some decent time off, I know what to do the next day and can more easily get started. Even if I'm not motivated I can do something simple for a couple of hours, at which point I usually get motivated again.

Coding marathons feels good when you do them, but they also builds up debt. Both in the structure of the project and in motivation. It's quite natural that it's hard to get started if you don't have an obvious starting point and you anticipate that you have to do a full 8 to 10 hours and be completely spent at the end.

Yes, it's not the coding marathons themselves, it's being in a moment of intense focus and flow where your fingers really seem to be coding on their own. Time becomes meaningless, ceases to exist even because you're lost in your own world and everything just makes perfect sense.

What I'm saying though is that we perceive "coding marathons" as good because we can only do them when we are in a good state. Say you have five coding sessions and in four of them you run into some problem, you get disturbed (or demotivated) or something else that halts your progress. While in the fifth none of that happens, so you end up having a long period of "flow". Then one might conclude that it's the coding marathon or the flow itself that is good when in reality it's the really the other factors that correlate with having a long session that really matters. And if you practice you can make more headway each day, even achieving flow in shorter sessions, than you ever could only being motivated to do coding marathons sometimes.

of course, there are moments of interrupted zen as you describe. But I was mostly not considering interruptions, distractions and diversions. I was mostly considering that if I were left to my own devices entirely undisturbed... you can have a half hour, hour, 2 hour or however long you're in your state of zen coding marathons... perhaps I don't consider them coding marathons as such, perhaps I consider them more like a state of meditation. Though, I could see how other people would describe them as marathons.

I think what you are trying to say is consistency is better than inconsistency given the same amount of work. The consistent worker will be able to get items done in 5 days, but the inconsistent one will take 3 of those days, do the work, then twiddle thumbs at work for the next two days to regroup. Both are "ready" back on the start of day 1, but which one is more efficient?

One could argue that the person can make a better use of the two extra days spent working but not productive on items related to specific work items. So it may not increase productivity to the employer but it increases productivity to the employee.

I suppose it depends whether six hours is a hard maximum.

If you're being kicked out of the building in six hours, that could be stressful.

But if six hours from now you have the option of leaving with no one looking askance, that's nice. (Until everyone tries to prove they're more hard-core than the next guy.)

It seems like the tech sector _was_ starting to realize that people can get more done in five hours of "flow" than eight hours of forced confinement to a desk.

>If you're being kicked out of the building in six hours, that could be stressful.

With proper handover procedures it would be an interesting experiment to actually implement a hard maximum in my opinion.

> For us techies it could actually be a nuisance (depending on how the individual works).

I doubt very many people can regularly engage in 6+ hours of deep work, day after day after day. I think a more common pattern is 3-4 hours of deep work, then a similar amount of time processing email, playing code janitor, going to meetings, and screwing around on the web.

For some jobs, that might be the case. Other jobs... well, it doesn't matter if you work for 6 or 8 hours, you work just as hard. You don't get email breaks, just a couple 10-15 minute breaks (if you are lucky) plus a lunch, which can be as little as 30 minutes. Those two extra hours make a huge difference in energy levels. Cashier, nurse, CNA, janitorial work,factory workers and likely construction crews to a point. Teachers, in a way, have this as well, only theirs is counted in number of classes they teach and the amount of kids in the classroom. Teaching 6 periods of class is different from 7, for example.

Additional nurses were brought in to spread the workload for the official study, and the general feedback was positive.

In the private sector that informally participated, apparently no staff adjustments were made (or at least not mentioned).

I'm not sure it depends on the sector.

it kind of feels like skipping homework at school, things are always building up

There's always more work to do! No surprise! This is why we automate so that the amount becomes smaller and that's why we cut things we don't need.

I'm "salaried", technically hourly but guaranteed 40-hours/week. They haven't approved us for overtime or comp time so I'm done when I hit 8. That hard stop has motivated a great deal of my automation at work. Projects I got pulled into had me doing 2-3 hours of busy work a couple times a week. Things that occupied my PC and attention for way too long. A handful of scripts later, I cd to the right directory, type the right command, and get back to whatever I'm supposed to actually be working on and that work that used to take almost a full day a week is done in the background in 20-30 minutes (less once they replace my computer with a new one, hopefully soon).

Perhaps tech workers could instead work three ten-hour days instead, if indeed it's not just a symptom of deeply ingrained conditioning towards work-a-holic behavior.

I have a hard time accepting "please just let us work longer again" as the only viable option, or even close to the most popular one among a group of employees.

I'd go with a 4 day workweek instead

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