Cutting your salary by 40%
codewithoutrules.com
codewithoutrules.com
Sustainable pace is super important for creating and maintaining high performance teams. Crassly, it's just a more profitable way of doing business.
I wish more managers would stop buying into the myth of "time in seat == productivity", and look at the real output of their teams. When you actually run the numbers there's a lot of results that run counter to conventional wisdom.
I'm spending the extra hours perusing/posting on HN and looking at job listings :|
Not all hours are created equally.
I do my best work with hyperfocus.
I don't just mean more work, but far higher quality work that's at the edge of my intellectual capabilities.
This is the work that's most rewarding and gives results that I'm proud of.
But I can't get significant time "in the zone" on a 40-hour week.
All the normal but necessary distractions take at least four hours a day, and I need at least an hour or two of "non-zone" work before I can hit my stride and achieve flow.
So I find 60-70 hours a week is essential to doing my best work.
But I can't sustain that level of effort continuously for years.
So I balance that out with a week a month of low-intensity "work" (slacking/procrastinating/socializing) plus at least twelve weeks per year of contiguous time for uninterrupted travel, long-distance trekking, rebuilding relationships damaged by hyperfocus, etc.
Personally, I find the usual distractions more tiring than coding, based on years of experience.
I estimate at least 2 hours of work lost per hour of meeting, once you add in meeting prep, calendar wrangling, walking, after and before meeting back chatter, realizing you have 30 minutes till lunch/commute after/before the meeting, being tired from presenting/listening/arguing, etc.
One strategy is to have meeting-only or meeting-free days, so meetings primarily ruin your productivity for other meetings and not your actual work.
Meeting-only days scale with team size, but can backfire by enabling the total number of hours in meetings to increase.
Pretty much this. When you are explaing long hours by on the job ineffectively, then you need to deal with on the job ineffectivity - especially if you are in any kind of leadership position. Otherwise you end up rewarding innefective workers and punish workers with better organizational skill.
General feeling that it is ok to work ineffectively because we stay late anyway was one of the things I resented the most in previous job. And people who caused interruptions and wasted everybody time were seen as "hard workers" because they stayed late.
Poe's Law is why the internet doesn't get sarcasm - that without additional information, it's impossible to differentiate between an extreme position and one mocking it.
This has been consistent for every job I've ever had.
Salary exempt is usually a losing game for developers. Crappy places will say "we pay you a salary to get the work done" and under staff and/or overwork. If it takes you 60 hours then you have to work 60 hours. But if it only took someone 30 hours they can't leave early because a) deadlines will be tightened to ensure 40+ hours or b) more work and assignments will be given.
> I'm expected to bill at least 8 hrs/day
I bet you're capable of far deeper, more intellectually stimulating and rewarding work than you're doing now.
For my next job I'll move to an inhouse position, hopefully things will be better in a setting like that.
W/O knowing anything about your situation sounds like some sort of financial services job.
I think a big part of this is the generally ambiguous nature of knowledge work. If you could quantify work into discrete widgets it’s easy to mark people to output, but on stuff that’s fuzzy and hard to quantify it’s not so easy.
It actually takes a fair bit of work and intimate knowledge of how stuff gets done on the ground to make realistic projections about output or to understand what “real output” even means.
Ehhhh. They’re not really as “in control” of their schedules as you would think. Their time is being boxed by financial pressures, generally imposed by insurance and Medicaid/Medicare reimbursement rates, and all the administrative requirements of both complying with burdensome regulations surrounding both their medical practice AND running what amounts to a small business.
They don’t even really necessarily like their work either. Running your own medical practice has a really high burnout rate and many of the people who do it now tend to be older and/or not fully dependent on the practice for their income (e.g. independently wealthy, willing to retire but just wants supplemental income, married and can rely on spousal support financially, etc.).
Basically self-employed people either have too little work or too much, I rarely hear from someone who has the balance right.
Also, to combat the "time in seat" fallacy, I encourage my team to take walks every couple of hours, even if it's just around the office, though they should get outside if it's not raining. They can do it in groups, pairs or alone, but I've found that developers are more creative and better able to think through consequences/permutations when they don't spend too much time being sedentary. And it has the dual benefit of breaking the notion that sitting at your desk is the modern day timecard. As you've correctly noted, getting stuff done and achieving quality are what we should measure, not ability to spend time typing and looking at a screen.
We joke if we get caught walking we tell management that we're in a meeting.
Also, our company doesn't do bonuses at all, doesn't offer anything in the form of comp time, and has an unlimited vacation policy that's basically meant 'next to no vacation' for the past half year or so. Some members of my team have hinted to me that they're looking for new jobs, but I don't think management has a clue.
Code quality shows up in your velocity over time. My favorite saying right now is "quality is future speed". We also do regular reviews to assess things like cyclomatic complexity and how well SOLID principles are being followed.
My personal suspicion is that optimal is probably in the 35-45 range, but I'd love to have more data.
Other places say Scandinavia might put it at 37 and some Asian companies might be closer to 45.
But around 40 hours pr week is where most modern societies tend to think work/life balance is reasonable both for the economy and the individual.
The old union slogan used to be 8 hours of work 8 hours of sleep and 8 hours of leisure. And in many ways that the origin of our 40 hours woork week when we only works 5 days a week.
It doesn't hold true in times of crisis, such as war. When the US ramped up for WWII, people were happily working around the clock.
And I'm not sure that it applies to the knowledge workers. My own view is that knowledge workers are productive in bursts.
For something more 'reputable' than wikipedia, check the footnotes of the article, specifically:
why not 35, 39 or 42 hours?
People sometimes work less, due to doctor appointments, child care, home repairs, and such. However, they never work more.
9-4 you'll be in the office and ready to pair, and lunch for everyone is 12-1 regardless of when you got there; but you can come in at 7 and leave at 4 if you want, or get in at 9 and stay til 6 or work at home later if that works better.
you need that strictness of "pairing time starts now" otherwise you have people coming and going and needing breaks at all different times and it gets disruptive.
I am afraid I still don't quite see what impact the total maximum hours for a week has to do with predictability of scheduling. What am I missing?
"I was born very, very lazy and I don't always practice very long, but I must say, in my defense, that it is not so good, in a musical way, to overpractice. When you do, the music seems to come out of your pocket. If you play with a feeling of 'Oh, I know this,' you play without that little drop of fresh blood that is necessary—and the audience feels it." Of his own practice methods, he said, "At every concert I leave a lot to the moment. I must have the unexpected, the unforeseen. I want to risk, to dare. I want to be surprised by what comes out. I want to enjoy it more than the audience. That way the music can bloom anew."
Not all work benefits from risk, the drop of blood, the unexpected, that are all baked into the right amount of effort, but a great deal of valuable and innovative work does.
Even the strongest advocates of "practice makes perfect" doctrines, such as Anders Ericsson, talk about something called deliberate practice, which is an expertly designed regiment, requiring exhausting mental and physical effort, the close tutelage of a veteran teacher, and adequate rest periods for its positive effects to properly ripen.
These authors typically assess that even a top motivated and well-rested individual can only engage in "deliberate practice" for 4 hours daily at the very most.
So if you want to do that, then far from almost doubling the length of your workday, you should actually cut it in half, and ensure plentiful rest and light recreation before and after your workday. Basically, mimic the way top athletes train.
Otherwise, don't delude yourself that you are "practicing" or "improving". You're simply working, chugging along sub-optimally, doing what you already know without substantial improvement or room to grow or learn much.
These very same authors predict that by working a punishing 10-12+ hour daily schedule, your skills will not improve, and likely will deteriorate, since you will become deeply disengaged (cf The Power of Full Engagement).
The idea that perpetually over-worked, over-stressed, nearly-exhausted engineers are "practicing" or "improving themselves" is a romantic wishful-thinking with no basis in reality or scientific research.
Anecdotally, I've seen such places up close. Most people there burn out and/or move on quite quickly. Turnover in these companies tends to be very high, and they only keep those who can't find a better job.
Practice is important for building skills, and for knowing the piece.
The point is that you should be able to play the piece like you know how to walk.
Imagine: if you had do 'think' about walking, about every step, you would walk unnaturally. You'd certainly not be able to swatter.
When you can play as you walk - then - you can loosen up, and focus on having fun, making it creative i.e. have swagger. The actual notes are mundane, like walking, then the music can come out. If you have to think about it, it needs more practice.
Also - 'work' is not 'music'. Most of work is not practice, it's building stuff.
A carpenter who worked 1/2 days would probably get just about only 1/2 done, for example. I know tech is not quite the same, but it's mostly similar. We are not solving complex math problems, most of tech is mundane.
That does not mean highly focused effort is the only valid type of work. But, it is very valuable for most programming jobs.
Further, cutting back hours often increases productivity even if you spend the same amount of time in the office.
However, it is very relevant to getting better at exactly those specific kinds of things the company is working on.
There are a few songs that I really do think they used to do better, back when they were just starting out. Specifically, some of the fast, most technically difficult songs that they used to play right up until they were at the edge of what was possible for them. Those songs were full of an energy that they just don't have anymore, now that they can do them perfectly without a sweat.
That particular form presents an interesting challenge. Many performers tend to stay with memorized breaks, or within certain patterns, that they can do on stage without breaking a sweat. The blood only shows in jams or informal performances. Unlike jazz, where it is not. cool. to play the same solo twice anywhere.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandjazzmusic/36...
I think that the middle way is key. I've met people who think work for the sake of work is valuable. Others who wouldn't touch hard work with a barge pole. If you cherish success, both are required.
Having met virtuoso pianists, I'd say the context which Rubinstein talks from is open to misinterpretation:
Reaching the level of mastery where one can sightread any of the Beethoven concerti or a Liszt etude requires a lifetime of years/decades of dedicated practice, but it is true that once you're at that level, you can find diminishing returns on hard work which encroach upon your creativity.
I would argue that looking at sheet music and playing it requires very little creativity, if any at all. It is in that arena that practice is important. Being able to play anything put down in front of you is only possible with mastery of your instrument. However - if you are creating music mastery can get in the way. Often the best ideas come from stumbling upon things. If you know everything or know how things 'should' be done coming up with original ideas is difficult. Personally I've seen this in guitarists. There are some who are clearly masters of their instrument. They can play anything, at any speed, with a wide array of techniques at their disposal. Most of the time they don't write anything interesting.
But they write a lot of thing. And by the law averages something interesting eventually emerges.
They just shift the quantitative process to the non saturated elements in the process.
He did but I think the reason he did so was not because he felt it was better for the music but because he had children and he didn't want them to be lazy. I wish I could find the source but I suspect it was from a video interview so I'm finding it difficult to find.
A good example of this musically is Lady Gaga. She has performed the same set of songs so many times, but she has mastered her musical ability and skills so well that she uses it to her advantage (and the audience's) in a performance.
She improvises on the spot, harmonizing lyrics with herself and backup singers, changing lyrics to make them relevant to the crowd or show she's doing, and if she's on a piano sometimes changes up an entire song and adds parts to it which never existed, and may never exist again.
The result is an engaging performance that is never the same a second time around, and it leaves a lasting impression on the audience.
That's what we still SELL as the ideal of art and music, but very rarely deliver. LG is a refreshing presence in modern music.
(While discussing talented guitarists like Satriani who exhibit perfection in their performances)
"There's got to be a little danger. Some of the greatest bands, you feel as if they aren't going to make it through the song... It's captivating in a way that perfection isn't."
https://cosmicgeppetto.com/2016/08/28/episode-38-guitar-icon...
A performance I'll always remember was a community night, free entry, amateur performers. Some guy and his sister got up. The guy said 'Hey, this is my sister's first time singing in public, say Hi everyone.' And the sister looked like she was going to die. Then she sang like an angel, still looking like she was going to die all the way through. Audience went bananas.
"Godowsky, my incomparable teacher and one of the great virtuoso pianists of the post-Rubinstein era once told us in class that he never practised scales (and, of course, that was so) . Yet, he played them with a brilliance, evenness, speed and beauty of tone which I believe I have never heard excelled. He played the scales he encountered in musical compositions in the best possible manner and in this way learned to play ideally "scales as such".
[...] What was Godowsky's method of teaching? As everybody knows, he was reported to be "a wizard of technique" [...]. For this reason numerous young pianists from all over the world flocked to him, mainly in the hope of getting his recipe for attaining "virtuoso technique".
Alas for them! Godowsky hardly ever said a word about technique in the sense in which these youngsters understood it; all his comments during a lesson were aimed exclusively at music, at correcting musical defects in a performance, at achieving maximum logic, accurate hearing, clarity, plasticity, through a scrupulous observance and a broad interpretation of the written score. In his class, he valued above all the real musician and approached with obvious irony those pianists whose fingers were fast and agile while their brains were slow and dull"
(from The Art of Piano Playing)
I wish this was true about the modern coding interview.
Half the fun of karaoke is letting go and looking like a total fool!
I would guess that managers who blindly mandate 70 hour weeks are more likely to be blind to the actual work habits as well.
Conveniently forgetting all the previous effort that went into it.
the moment it starts to feel like grinding, you should stop.
For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity.
For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of people who work longer hours and do it successfully. And most of the really successful people out there will mention that they worked insanely hard at some point. Are they all lying? All wrong?
The article itself mentions people doing extra hours of coding on personal projects, and we all know some people who have started companies that way. What, do these projects simply not exist? How does that make any sense?
You can think it's exploitation to ask people to work hard, but this is to work on a team with a world-class researcher who most people would love to work with. Is it too much work for some people? Sure. Are there others for whom it is worth the trade-off? Probably. Why does everyoªne on HN just assume they know better than those people themselves, and set off to make them feel bad and exploited? Working really hard is a totally legit and rational choice under some circumstances.
(Btw, worth pointing out that this article is at least partly a pitch for a book about working less hours. Not saying this invalidates its points, but it is certainly taking advantage of the publicity Andrew Ng's post has gotten to sell a product).
And the argument with extra hours working on personal projects is ridiculous. As a matter of fact I am a heavy open source contributor and work on numerous projects in my personal time, some of them already have many hundreds of hours invested time in them. I choose to work on them for free because they interest me.
If you want me to spend that extra time working on the company instead then don't expect me to do it for free. You are basically asking to own my free time which is ridiculous.
Overtimes and their compensation should be clearly defined in the contract, otherwise you can't expect to take employees' free unpaid time outside of work hours.
I agree with you that we should be fairly compensated, but I also agree that the dogma of "40 is the max a worker can be productive, possibly less" is wrong in a large number of cases.
But its quite important to make a distinction between manufacturing work, repetitive physical labor, and mental work. Different organs are involved and they function differently. As nice as some might imagine it would be to only employ machines, in reality we still have to put bathrooms in the workplace, give people a lunch break, and admit that they're sacks of meat. They've got limits, and ignoring them will never be productive.
However my point was that when negotiating salary you can't really say "I can be productive 70 hours per week" and therefor ask for 40% higher salary. It doesn't work that way and what you negotiate is based on your skills mostly in comparison to other people who are assumed to put in cca 40 hours per week.
So even if you can be productive for 70 hours per week, I wouldn't do it and instead invest that time in your family and yourself, making your life outside of work richer and more fulfilling. Otherwise you will just be working for free the extra 40% of the time and never be compensated for it by most companies.
Finally, you only have one life so spending most of your life in the office or commuting in and out of office is quite a waste of your time. You should use your free time to enjoy your life imho and experience more things.
It's not in the slightest bit down to convenience. It's because 40 hours was quite simply discovered to be a more productive length of day, well over a century ago, back in the later stages of the industrial revolution.
In the US, if memory serves, the move to a 40 hour working week largely started out at the Ford Motor company back in the early 1900s, after Henry Ford experimented reducing hours and discovered that the number of mistakes made by workers went down drastically, and productivity increased. This swept across the industry because the improvements were impossible to deny. Slowly but surely that spread across other industries until it became the staple.
40 hours isn't done by custom, it's done because it's proven to be the most productive working week. This isn't a case of scientists discovering that "what people are used to is what they're most productive at". For most of the industrial revolution people worked 12hr+ days, and that was considered, even by the labour force, to be perfectly acceptable. Hauling that back to 8 hour days was a herculean task that no major factory owner was going to do without damn good evidence that it would improve things.
That's a relatively biased misreading of the history of the 8 hour day. You're implying that science and factory owners decided on it. Yet the labor movement, industrial action and strife played an outsized role. The 8 hour day movement is an old one (http://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/8hourday.html), and the call for 8 hours was echoed by the labor movement for decades after.
That was true when most of the workforce was doing manual and factory style labour. To the best of my knowledge it hasn't been rigorously reproduced for works that spend their days staring at a screen thinking.
I'm also wondering how commute time (and method of commute) factors into this. Does 30 minutes of physically strenuous cycling before/after work have a positive or negative impact on office workers? Does the same time spent in a car navigating stop'n'go traffic have a different effect? Both involve some element of mental effort, but both are quite different from the rest of the days tasks. Certainly in my experience one helped my mental state and one didn't.
Unfortunately the 40-hour week seems to have been among the last big wins of the US labor movement. Hence the popular (on HN at least) idea that this win was the result of Ford's top-down pioneering.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ford-factory-work...
If you think Ford ran the best scientific business, you'd have to include this as well: http://jalopnik.com/when-henry-fords-benevolent-secret-polic...
"To qualify for his doubled salary, the worker had to be thrifty and continent. He had to keep his home neat and his children healthy, and, if he were below the age of twenty-two, to be married.
What started out as a team of 50 “Investigators” eventually morphed into a team of 200 people who probed every aspect of their employees lives. And I mean every aspect.
Investigators would show up unannounced at your home, just to make sure it was being kept clean. They’d ask questions that were less appropriate of a car company, than they were for the modern-day CIA. They’d query you about your spending habits, your alcohol consumption, even your marital relationships. They’d ask what you were buying, and they’d check on your children to make sure they were in school.
Women weren’t eligible, unless they were single and had to support children. Men weren’t eligible unless the only work their wives did was in the home.
.... spiritual smelting process where the impurities of foreignness were burnt off as slag to be tossed away leaving a new 100% American.
you needed the company’s permission if you wanted to buy a car, which included a requirement to be married and have children. "
and Ford himself retracted the whole philosophy:
"It was also highly controversial, and because of the competing economic, and ironically, societal factors, it was slowly wound down. Even Henry Ford himself found that he was against many of the program’s aspects, writing in his 1922 autobiography:
“paternalism has no place in industry. Welfare work that consists in prying into employees’ private concerns is out of date. Men need counsel and men need help, often special help; and all this ought to be rendered for decency’s sake. But the broad workable plan of investment and participation will do more to solidify industry and strengthen organization than will any social work on the outside. Without changing the principle we have changed the method of payment.”
Seriously though -- I'd like to read more about that. Do you have a source?
Relevant in case you think "Henry Ford thought of the idea, therefore it is correct."
It's probably not, for thought workers at least. The correct value is probably lower - closer to 30 hours a week. There have been studies which have begun to correlate this, but I don't have them off hand.
40 hours is for manual, repetitive labor. And from my limited experience doing manual, repetitive labor when I was younger it's a pretty good number. I wasn't so exhausted I couldn't do anything at home after work, and I had the weekends to spend with friends and family.
Working hard is a personal choice, but the chances are pretty good that the quality of work is going to drop as the hours pass.
In fact even when looking at myself, many times I was "working" lots of hours but in reality I wasn't getting anything done. When I work 40 or less hours and take lots of breaks during the day I got way more done than when I had just been a seat warmer for 70+ hours per week. This is likely due to the fact that having rest periods and breaks allow my brains diffuse mode to also help solve problems. Many of my best ideas come when I'm lifting or playing basketball at the gym.
You are not getting the best version of a person when they chose to work lots of hours and refuse to take time out for themselves. Our brains need plenty of rest in order to function optimally.
Others though, not so much. In programming, you also get better by doing it more. So even if it's not "for work", if you have side projects, you will (generally) be better than those who don't, from pure practice. The super high salaries don't just reflect a higher demand: they also reflect an expectation of higher expected output than in other professions. It's implied that you'll spend the time to stay on top of things, stay up to date with technology and other things that may require more time than your weekly allocation of jira tickets.
There's a guy in my team who probably works 60+ hours a week. I warned him about burning out, told him he didn't have to (as his manager), etc. He does it for fun. Because he enjoys it. And he's amazingly productive. He's not doing it for a promotion either, he's already pretty much at the highest level the role can be.
And while a lot of people SAY they are "more productive" working less, often it's not true. One of my buddies keep spouting that, and honestly doesn't get much done. Another also repeats it AND is the most productive person I know.
Essentially, your millage will vary, but only rarely are people at the very tip top manage to do more with less time. Some do, but they're essentially gods among mortals (or lying to themselves about it).
Personally, I generally work about 40 hours a week, but I don't pretend I'm doing more than others. I just do what I feel I'm paid for while also pursuing my career goals to go up the ladder by doing what's best for my employer.
At that level of time investment, he doesn't have time for a romantic relationship. Almost no one would be crazy to accept so little attention, but even if they would it would be a weak & shallow relationship. They probably don't have time for friendships or even spending time with their family and socialising, which will take its psychological toll.
Unless they magically find time to do some sports and take care not to sit in a chair all time, they're stressing their body a lot, which could lead to a weaker immune system and potentially musculo-skeletal problems.
In conclusion, one can behave like a machine and work 60+ hour weeks, but they're literally trading away their life in order to achieve that.
Get ready to search for a replacement or two for when/if they burn out.
If someone works 12 hour days, and then implements the, and it hurts me to even type it out, "lifestyle hacks" to further squeeze the sponge of productive hours, the sacrifice they make to their own personal lives is a big toll. 12 hour days, plus commute, plus 8 hours of sleep leaves little time for socializing, hobbies and let alone exercise.
But the bigger tragedy is, on a team where there might be competition (eg., a bonus), the guy pissing his life into his work is going to get the accolades and bonuses, or at least it looks that way, which takes a morale toll on the other members of the group. It leads to a race to the bottom.
This might be okay when you're junior, first starting out, or a partner, or someone with significant equity (read: in a few years they won't need to work), but for everyone else, there is a very high risk of a toxic work situation.
To the person above who said that we're highly paid and so forth and expected to perform - well we're not paid because we're expected to perform highly, we're paid because laws supply and demand at present benefit us. If a situation should arise where the balance of the scales reverts, I assure you you'd still be completing your beloved 12 hour days with a much smaller salary.
But really, if you replace things like kids, videogames, netflix, long commutes from the suburbs, spending time with extended families you don't care about, etc, it honestly puts the balance in favor of the person working 60 hours a week.
Now, if they don't ENJOY IT, and they rather be doing those other things, then they should do these other things. Else it is unhealthy, both physically and mentally.
But if I just take my work days + time spent playing videogames + my side projects/blogs/whatever, I come way above 60 hours a week. Sacrifice that and it comes easy.
If it came in the form of additional financial security and it lets you hire someone to clean the house, you might come up even more ahead. The important part is you have to do what you do because you want to.
So the main issue really is that that person will have what other perceive as an unfair advantage, career wise, and THAT's what all of this is all about. People in general are pretty uncomfortable with the idea that someone else is getting ahead of them because they decided to finish that prototype instead of watching Netflix tonight.
From my observations, relationships don't depend on how much people work, they depend on how much of their free time both partners like to spend together.
The biggest loss wasn't any of what was listed above. No, I knew about the risks and accepted them because I was passionate about creating and contributing. Now the passion is gone. Working and trying to improve causes so much dissonance, like trying to swallow roast beef that always seems to cause food poisoning.
Why would using your left-over time and effort for a side project that may improve your life a bad thing? Does your employer have the right to "own" that effort as well?
If so I think the pay scales need some adjusting.
As for whether or not it's "exploitive", I'm sure it is, under some circumstances. Some poor dev, trapped by an H1-B, getting ground up with hours upon hours of billable work, for example. But a lot of us are paid through equity. In such a case it's perfectly reasonable to sacrifice for the good of the company in which you have a stake.
40 hours is essentially a useful measuring stick and the accepted standard.
Now I do agree that for some people they can and do work long hours and greatly enjoy this and good luck to them. I have to assume they are working at a company where they do work they love and are proud of. I think of employees at SpaceX, Tesla, video game companies for gamer type developers and NASA.
I interviewed at a large game developer a long time ago and was asked back for a second interview. After I discovered they regularly worked past 7:30 at night I declined. I do not play video games so for me the draw was not there but I could absolutely understand how that could be someones passion and they love what they do.
For me I value my family time and when comparing jobs prefer to compare apples to apples and the main way barring a very unique work place is to compare dollars earned per hour worked (including benefits).
To your point though if someone wants to be there, they are making an informed choice and they believe it is an amazing opportunity then more power to them.
There are a lot of startups who work "smart and hard" and they don't go anywhere, and there are a lot of startups that are successful despite having spent very little, real effort on their product, because startup success is orthogonal to hours-worked. It's much more important to know the right people who can make the right introductions to investors and press.
People are not reliable narrators. If you ask a person to list off everything they've done in a day, without prior preparation to know they were supposed to remember everything, they will likely forget vast swaths of activities, busy work, and goofing off they performed as a matter of routine. I know a lot of people who claim to be busy all the time just because they are in the office for 80+ hours a week, but I know for a fact they spend most of it trawling Twitter and HN. Yes, that means they are sum-total working less than 40 hours a week.
It's extremely difficult to measure the impact of decisions on productivity when you're even trying, say nothing about when you're anecdotally claiming your success is due to habitual overtime. A person who habitually works overtime has no idea of whether they are being more productive or less than they would be if they worked fewer hours, because they never work fewer hours to be able to compare.
There are other confounding factors, but to me, these are the biggest.
You're right, it's probably actually much less. Go count how many people are browsing Facebook/etc at the start of the day, lunch, and at the end of the day. Even out of what's becoming an increasingly normal 45 hour workweek (9-6), lots of people are probably working 35 at best.
> For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of people who work longer hours and do it successfully. And most of the really successful people out there will mention that they worked insanely hard at some point. Are they all lying? All wrong?
You're comparing the outliers to the average. Some people will have an almost-linear relationship between hours worked and productivity. For most people, it'll be logarithmic.
Further, lots of bias going on here:
* You remember the successful people who worked hard more, because it furthers the idea that hard work == success
* No one's going to tell you they became successful without working hard. It's a slap in the face to everyone else, and few people are honest/tactless enough to admit they became successful without working hard.
* Most successful people would probably rationalize their success as the result of hard work (and obviously that might be true to some degree)
> The article itself mentions people doing extra hours of coding on personal projects, and we all know some people who have started companies that way. What, do these projects simply not exist? How does that make any sense?
One is self-driven and you can drop it at anytime if things get in the way (children, etc.). The other is imposed on you externally and you can't really go from working 70 hours a week to 40 hours a week. Well, you can - but it almost always involves changing jobs.
> Why does everyone on HN just assume they know better than those people themselves, and set off to make them feel bad and exploited?
Because it's downward pressure on our value as laborers. I mean - that's the real story. If you have to work twice as hard to earn 50% of the salary, your value as a laborer has just been divided by 4.
Very few people want to feel like they're becoming worth less over time. This of course can be offset if the output of your labor has more value to you (e.g. people go to work at non-profits, etc), but in general it's easy to pinpoint why most people resist this kind of pressure.
You have it reversed. Get a sample of people working 70 hours a week and see how many are successful by some chosen measure compared to those who work 40 hours.
If you're working on something you love and are good at, you're going to be productive longer. I think just measuring hours is missing the point.
I have zero interest in handing the rest of my free time over to my employer, especially for free.
The people who pull 70+ hour weeks successfully tend to have an abnormally high tolerance to stress as well as an abnormally high 'drive'. I'd be willing to bet there's a genetic component.
Or else they're just killing themselves. I'd be interested to see how they do in the long-term.
"The article itself mentions people doing extra hours of coding on personal projects, and we all know some people who have started companies that way. What, do these projects simply not exist? How does that make any sense?"
There's a huge difference between working on something for me, for which I have total ownership of, and working on something just to make someone else rich.
Now, people will vary in this, but as a general metric, if you try to get programmers to routinely put in long hours, you're on to a loser.
Personal projects are different, and are not generally deadline-riven stress-fests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day
Personally, I think that our economy is technologically productive enough, and the nature of work has changed enough in many work places, that we should be considering a shorter standard workweek.
I mean, why do you think people arrived at the 40hour/week metric? How do you think we came to standardize on it?
You might buy into the work long hours mythos of startups, but simply restating it doesn't make you any more right.
Isn't this standard fare for socialists and technocrats that HN is flooded with?
Maybe the gov't set the standard informed by our biology?
Actually 40 hours isn't "exact". It's close though. Why?
First weekends. Weekends mean that a 7 day week has 5 work days. Typically weekends are still off (bros' gotta climb El Capitan). If instead of 2 days off every 7 we had 1 every 10 (a failed metric innovation pushed during the French Revolution) we would work 26% more, or 50 hours/week @ 8 hours a day. I don't know that 2 of 7 gives us much more needed reset than 1 of 10, but that would be a sucky weekend.
To test, at an interview try to hire someone with "we work 11.1 hour days, 9 days in a row". 11.1 hour days 9/10 days = 70 hour 5/7 weeks. You'd hire no one.
So 2-7 weekends are the first restraint.
Then we have our biology. 8 hours of sleep (give or take an hour or two), leaving 16 hours.
Not doing the same activity for 16 hours straight is necessary for all humans except the most severe case of autism. 8 hours to bath, eat, greet your spouse, play with your kids, ect. These are things we're evolutionarily wired to do btw (we're social beings whose parents both contribute, typically, to child rearing).
So why 40h? Could be 30 (B. Russell argued 100 years ago that we need half that). Could be 50. Having a balanced life @ 60hr weeks (12 hr work days) is already impossible.
Finally, I want to point out two things:
1. I really doubt any of these 70hr. proponents will out-produce a 70 year old Carthusian monk who make their hipster beers. And they spend most of their days praying. Why? These monks are focused. We're all dibbling about on Facebook. 70 hrs? @ 100% yeah right! More like 70 hrs @ 30%!
2. Most developers live in our own filth (kinda hard to clean @ 70 hr weeks). That's literally[x] unbecoming.
[x] to be human is to, among other things, have a sense of aesthetic beauty and to be an animal is to have some basic sense of self-care. Even high order animals take care of/decorate where they live. Therefore, to live in our own filth, to neglect our hygiene, is to reject or very nature. Therefore, we are literally unbecoming.
It's crazy that we're all still working 40 hours a week. Didn't Keynes promise we'd have 15 hour work weeks by now? (He did. He didn't anticipate our bosses taking all the profits from our productivity gains, though.)
He also didn't anticipate zero-sum competition for inflexible goods like housing. If I want a nice house in a decent city, I have to out-compete and out-borrow everyone else who might want that house. If everyone around me is making bank and I want the nice house, then I'd better make bank too. Lots of us end up working more than we'd like, in a delicate balance between our desire for stuff and our tolerance of overwork.
Life would be a whole lot easier if we could control our desires but it's easier said than done.
Out of the 3 software dev jobs I had up to this point all the people that 'worked' over-time were just wasting more time drinking coffee and chit-chatting with colleagues. Most of the time I just want to put in a productive day, solve 1 or 2 problems and then go home at a reasonable time, so I can actually enjoy my life, not just sit in a damn office all the time.
Also, having worked a 30-hour week for a few years now, I'd actually be willing to work a 40-hour week again, but only if my job then gives me responsibilies beyond just being a coder. Putting in 4-5 hours of really productive coding work a day and then spend the rest of the time on something else, like managerial work is something I can see myself actually doing. But expecting people to produce high-quality coding work for 8 hours a day is just wishful thinking.
Why would they do that? You don't seem to have shown any initiative or demonstrated how well you would take on extra responsibility.
It's done wonders for mental health and stress levels. No more sitting in traffic all day, missing half my kids' life, stressing out about not getting stuff done around the house, eatimg crap food on the fly, being too tired to do much in the weekend, and most of all I can spend more time with my wife, which is awesome.
This is why I think FTE (Full Time Employment) should be disrupted. But it has to make sense on a societal level. Basic Income is one factor:
Here is another, which I highly recommend to entrepreneurs:
https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2016/11/properly-valuing-con...
The only downside is that I don't have as much spare money as I used to to spend on those free days (e.g. travelling or taking lessons on x/y/z), but there are other low cost hobbies I take instead (my own coding projects amongst them). Socialising has gone up as well.
Working 70+ hours can be fun at some point in life, I've done it before. But it's too easy to get stuck in there and burnout or worse.
Work hard. Study a lot. But take a breather now and then. Life is short.
Essentially I work for 5.5 hours -- my fingers are on the keyboard, I'm in a meeting, or I'm thinking through a problem for 5.5 hours per day. We also have the concept of the eight hour day in Australia (which I believe is a matter of law, in fact): eight hours of work; eight hours of social time; eight hours for sleep.
I do this everyday. It gives me a lot of freedom to do the things I want to do when I get home at about 1530 and makes me feel great. I feel healthier for it. I can innovate when I get home and work on a project, or spend more time with my fiancé.
If I ever find my self in a position with a company that the boss(es) don't like this setup, then I simply show my self the door and find another job. Life is way too short to be putting my employer before my own life, health, wishes, and dreams.
Also, I aim to find a job in which I'm solving real social problems (even in a for-profit manner) and not just doing it for the sake of it or the wage. I think this is important too.
I highly recommend you space out your working day like I have, perhaps even going as far as using a method such as [Pomodoro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique) to avoid burn out. Also, maybe do what I've done, but do it within a 9-5 window for now.
Just remember that burning out for your employer is just isn't worth it unless you're doing something highly social, like helping starving children, providing medical support, some sort of charity work, etc., things that are worth burning out for (in my opinion.) Burning out for your boss' idea of the perfect mobile game is a joke at your expense :-)
Apps that I use (iOS): "Timetable", to layout the week and get notifications on when to get up and move on to the next part of the day; "Today", for reminding me to do things and "checking in" when I've done it - this is for building habits; "Pommie" as a Pomodoro timer, but I don't use this much; and "Wunderlist" for todo lists I can share with my fiancé - I have a "Today" entry that has me checking this 2-3 times per day so I'm always aware of what's needed to get things done around the household.
Good luck.
I am so glad to work in a place that a). not only doesn't have insane deadlines and the corresponding pressure but, b). has a sub-discipline dedicated to project management. And that I get to push back with my favorite mantra, "poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part."
It's not really about your interests, it's about you being naive.
Other people have to do many things to be happy, but they found it all there! These were incredibly intelligent, incredibly creative people expressing their intelligence and creativity. They weren't lesser men for their passion. It elevated them.
Were it my job to build code, I would probably focus on the other aspects of my current role (statistics, ML, forecasting, etc.).
Keeps the ax sharp, fun to do, and leads to great friendships and networks.
I guess I could spend _all_ my time outside of family and work doing something like strategy board gaming, which I find enormously fun, but I guess I see such things are more like spice in life.
Other comments suggest that this is referring to a job posting from Andrew Ng's deep learning startup. If that's the case, you might have access to expertise and compute resources that you could only dream about if you were working on a side project.
Granted, from my perspective it appeared they needed to be heroes in the first place because they had accumulated so much technical debt they were drowning in it.
I tried silently to change their culture by coming in for 8 hours, doing my job, and leaving on time. I don't know if I was ultimately able to change their mentality, but I certainly turned some heads when they realized that when I was on a project it never sounded like my fingers stopped typing until I would leave for the day. That's the kind of efficiency you can attain when you have work life balance.
Being 10 years older than the rest of the crew, sadly I believe they simply perceived me as 'old'.
The real clincher was that I was let go the day I got back from vacation. The first thing after he said "I gotta let you go" was "You didn't check in at all on your vacation".
That was incredibly disrespectful to me and shows a total lack of empathy for me and my family. I am happy to no longer work for him, although I am in a bit of a financial bind now.
Companies that do this need to be sued out of existence.
Sue them like its going out of style.
I'm working in London right now, and have been looking at jobs in the US, but the workers rights seem incredibly hostile, and downright crazy to me...
What kind of a job are you looking for? I assume you're some kind of engineer, but on my phone so didn't look into anything.
Not every day - but if you have real responsibilities - others may depend on you.
I know it's not ideal ... but in a 'week off' I'll glance at my emails every few days, and maybe once or twice fire off a little note. That little note can make a huge difference to the machine.
Unless I plan to be 'in Rome' or whatever, in which case I would plan ahead, confer and make sure there was no reason anyone needed me and they knew I could not be reached.
But those expectations should be set.
He wants you to do more, he won't fire you, so he only has to see the costs properly and understand that you are more serious about the overtime than him.
I have one kid so far, and zero overtime, I can't even imagine how it will be with three.
A year of 3 day weekends did more for my life and relationships than a raise ever could have.
Unless you're making widgets on a production line, productivity doesn't linearly scale with time.
I wasn't at work on Friday, but I was still subconsciously processing what I had researched, how to solve problems, etc. It's the ultimate "sleep on it" or "get up and walk around".
It's sad that only a fraction of people in managerial positions understand this dynamic. It's always people who work 'hard', who are more in the office, get admired and promoted.
Its easy to say why don't they scale down for better work hours. If they did, they wouldn't even have those kind of projects, and by that definition you wouldn't have a job. Most companies can't do this.
Also in my early career this kind of a working environment was a boon. Sure if you are only in for a 9-5 job and money, you don't even have to sign up for something like this. But working crazy hours gives people far more disproportionately higher learning opportunities compared to peers. I have seen people volunteer and even fight with managers for these kind of projects only for the exposure. Do this enough number of years and you get very good at a lot of other things. Doing side projects, start ups and a range of other things necessary for a long haul career. Also your ability to contribute with merely participating in a project goes up way higher than your peers, and that eventually brings you more opportunities.
>>It's always people who work 'hard', who are more in the office, get admired and promoted.
Lastly, Is this really surprising to you. Look at how academic performance works, or how it is in sports, investing or for that matter in other walks of life.
Quantity of work, has a very deep effect on quality of work.
In most cases, the effort put is not in the right direction. Stroking the brush the same way a thousand times will never make you a better painter if it's not accompanied with a study of better techniques and introspection into your mistakes.
I can't deny that sometimes you can have enough motivation to have be 'the right kind of productive' for long hours but working on the same project necessitates a break. The break allows you to work out better approaches, which is not thought out by most managers.
I would be susceptible of any claim that working long hours enabled someone to learn more. I have often encountered them in my career, and it's never the case.
After a lot of criticism on a Facebook post by Andrew Ng[3] (where you can still find residual evidence of the "work 70-90 hours/week" claim), they modified it to, "many of us routinely work and study 70+ hours a week".
So to be precise, they were initially offering you a 43% to 56% pay cut.
Getting paid for 40 hours when you have worked for 70 hours is a 100 * (1.0 - 40 / 70) ≈ 43% pay cut.
Getting paid for 40 hours when you have worked for 90 hours is a 100 * (1.0 - 40 / 90) ≈ 56% pay cut.
[1]: https://www.deeplearning.ai/machinelearningsoftwareengjobdes...
[2]: https://www.deeplearning.ai/fullstacksoftwareengineerjobdesc...
[3]: https://www.facebook.com/andrew.ng.96/posts/1472272026162033
That said, I think calculating the percent pay cut feels like an awkward way to frame the issue. Very few people working 70 hours at a salaried job could get paid for 70, even contractors will normally get scaled back to 40 if they ask for 70. If you worked only 40, very few people will get another 30 hours per week job to make that extra money. (And contracts for lots of salaried employees would prevent that scenario.)
The value of hours worked above 40 is your life, not a percent pay cut. It would take a jump from a 6 figure salary to a 7 figure salary, or more, to make extended 70 hours weeks worthwhile, so I think talking about a 50% pay cut is drastically undervaluing that extra effort & time.
Do salaried jobs always specify a number of hours in their contracts? Otherwise you aren't being paid for 40 hours - you're just being paid to get the job done aren't you?
At least here in Finland when you are salaried for the standard 37.5h work week (7.5h work day with 30min lunch break) if you work more then that you log the hours as overtime and get paid for them or in some form of "flex" time that you turn into vacation days or money (there are limits to how many hours of flex you can have banked up)
I know some smaller companies/start ups work around this but they can very easily get in trouble as doing that is illegal (as in if even a single employee complains to the authorities about not being paid for overtime they are fucked)
The job advert also states "full-time", which IIRC implies a certain hours a week.
They usually also have a disclaimer that mention that one may have to work more than 40 hours per week without any additional compensation. That's just a legal disclaimer. In reality though, in every software company (except Oracle) I have worked for overtime was rewarded with free pizzas for the extra hours we spent after sunset and also additional paid time off (known as "compensation time off").
Contract workers are the ones hired for a job, not their time. Yet, actual pricing will vary and even then some contractors will insist on getting paid by time.
They want the technical wizard with no social life that will give some years for the company while being paid ~50% less. They call it "strong work ethic" I call accepting such position "being naive"
Thanks but no thanks
I'm getting to the point in this company where the risk is almost gone and all that remains is work, and the closer we get to that point the less interested I am in the business. I'm sure it will feel nice when we're consistently profitable and can hire more, delegate, etc., but it loses something at that point too. I won't be as hands-on, will have to work harder to whip the team into moving in the right direction, we'll be moving slower even if we're accumulating capital... Not my cup of tea. I find myself exploring side contracts, ideas for my own businesses, grad school, thoughts of alternative lifestyles that might make my wife and I happier... Fewer hours worked is part of that, I'd LOVE to have more time to learn and play, but it's hard to get there without putting in the effort upfront. The main thing that keeps me where I am is that I've spent years shaping my role into one where I can learn exactly what I want to learn, and I'm on the precipice of being able to finally do that. That's not something one gives up easily.
Even the term "work-life" balance seems to assume an artificial divide between the two. When work is a facet of a rich life, those extra long hours, the grueling commute, the vacillations of the newest management fad are just not worth it. Not to mention that those with families are severely disadvantaged in a workplace that values hours at the office rather than productive hours.
I am curious to find out how this becomes a culture and whether this is reversible? Does this toxic overstepping begin at companies who once valued a predictable balance between work and life or was there a mistake made in company culture from the beginning? Can a company effectively counter this tendency? However you might answer these questions, it seems clear that throwing new studies out showing that overwork is counter-productive is not changing this trend. It goes back to the age-old idea, knowledge doesn't make you good, just more knowledgable.
I can be highly productive in certain scenarios, and in others I can really drag on where others would be much faster than me. It's stuff like, I'm really good at code that involves math, I'm not so good at operations. Completely different, unrelated subject areas, but one is viewed as "harder" than the other, so if I can do one, I'm expected to be able to do the other. I often end up get a reputation for being a high-performer, because the stuff I'm good at often gets done during the initial proof-of-concept, and then start getting the screws tightened down on me from management in a really angry way as it appears I start slacking off when we hit the later-stages of a project that involve deployment management and other things that I'm just not very good at.
And it's other stupid shit, like, "if he's a whiz at JavaScript, he must be great at CSS and terrible at embedded systems." No, in this example, I'm the opposite.
Of course, it never occurs to them that maybe expecting everyone to do everything is not the right way to do things. I think, in sum total, I'm probably more skilled in a broader area of subjects than most people, but I'm not anywhere near skilled enough across every necessary subject for a full project to be able to pull one off on my own.
I don't want to focus on just one thing. I do think I provide a unique value by being very versatile. It should be used as a way to smooth over bumps in the project schedule while management rebalances staff or highers more people. I don't mind jumping from 3D graphics into web and database development, or whatever. I've always believed that all work is worth doing and none "beneath" me.
But too often, once I reveal I'm more capable than the original position to which I was hired, I'm expected to do everything, all at the same time. And that's when things get out of hand. It has at least always appeared like the people who keep their heads down and their mouths shut during meetings and don't volunteer anything beyond their job description have a much better time of their jobs.
In both cases, companies seem to intentionally exploit this by explicitly filtering out candidates not willing to go such lenghts. Pretty pathetic.
[1]: https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/97039/how-to-a...
https://www.deeplearning.ai/machinelearningsoftwareengjobdes...
Who knows, maybe being upfront about it causes the applicants for the job to self-select for those who are confident that they can productively work 70 hours? Maybe the research only applies to normal people like us and the mythical super engineer they are looking for can do it (pure speculation, I don't know the research - I guess even super programmers have biological limits).
Then again, it's probably right to be wary of such job postings so that they don't create a general atmosphere in the industry that such working hours are necessary, whether you want it or not.
The biggest problems I have are meetings. I can do research and code for 12-15 hours straight on weekends, but 8-9 hours on meeting days are utterly exhausting. Got to figure out a better way.
Kids would be the real obstacle to my current output.
People outside Spain usually make jokes about Spanish "siesta", but in fact we are exploited in the same way this article describes.
( making jokes of course is ok, what is not ok is the exploitation )
In my experience, people involved in the IT/CS are very passionate about their work but often less outspoken than people in other industries, like finance and business. To see people taking advantage of these qualities for their gain is very frustrating and I hope it doesn't work out in the long run for this company and others like it.
I'm a firm believer that success is defined by balance. Balance in all aspects of life - balance between family and self, balance between pursuits in which you are driven and those which you enjoy, balance between being social and productive. I regret to say that I have only achieved this on rare occasions. I am a work-a-holic, and frankly I think that's a bad role model for my children to see.
Well rested, happy people with healthy social lives can accomplish twice the work in half the time as a constantly stressed work-a-holic. When crunch time comes, they can spend the extra hours and put in that extra effort. Somebody who is already run down when crunch time comes not only has less to give, they have other priorities fighting for that time - because those other priorities are ALWAYS fighting for that time and losing.
I don't put in 80+ hour weeks because I want to stay where I'm at in my career. I become involved in more and take on more reliability because I want more responsibility I the future. I work twice or more what I'm paid to work because I want to earn at least twice as much in the future.
Worrying about how many hours you are putting in against your current paycheck isn't very forward looking for your career.
Noble sentiment, but in reality you are just marking yourself as a fool, especially to everyone above you. You seem to think that over achieving now will translate to future gains in either salary or position, it won't. You'll simply be exploited and marginalized by those who play the political game better than you. If you're goal is to move into management, then you have to play the politics where day to day competency is just a formality. Actually you don't even have to be competent, you just have to have perceived competency.
In seems to be en vogue to despise hard work today (unless it is manual labor).
Also for software engineers you have to take into account continuously upskilling yourself to know the latest tech is something which takes a lot of time and is mostly done outside of work as there's never time at work for that.
So most great software engineers I know might work 40h for the company per week but in order to keep on top of their game they spend portion of their free time for that.
Just as you said "I want to know more about all facets of the firm", most good engineers want to have a deeper understanding of specific tech and finer details.
But aren't you just trading the location of work for the most part? I get that experience from within my firm on projects I'm working on while others still work on their skills just outside their employment? It is still "work" in a sense. I realize many don't get the same intellectual benefit from employment that i enjoy but trashing people who do and take advantage of it doesn't seem appropriate.
I've also learned that just knowing how to code better doesn't help you deliver a better product always. For example in my case, even though I mostly work front office I need to know how the back office works as well as how our fiber and colo facilities run. I've done everything from trade strategies to program them to installing rack system to work on fiber negotiations to deal with trade breaks to etc... It has helped me tremendously add value to the firms I work in. There is a lot to be said about knowing your business as well as knowing how to code.
You feeling you need to work excessive hours to progress in your career does not make anything about it right, quite the opposite actually.
I don't like the judgmental attitude against those of us who decide to make different judgement calls in life.
I have oscillated both ways on the spectrum of less compensation and more time/happiness, and maximizing income at the expense of other areas of life.
"Things never get easier, you just get better."
There is always a focus on what value someone is paid, instead of the value they add and create.
Having a value adding focused mentality (making sure you add value, and knowing how, and having agreement on it), there is less of an issue with facing pay cuts, when you are returning several multiples of your compensation, whatever it might be. Being essential without being irreplaceable is a valuable lesson to learn.
If you want to limit it to 40 hours a week, it has to be that much more organized, focussed, effective to have meaningful impact.
There's also 3 number to think about. What you absolutely need, what you should be getting, and what you want. Aligning your life with where you are at on those 3 fronts will help lower the dissonance a lot more and comparing yourself to the perceived location of others.
The other thing that changes in your 20's is you. You become more well rounded from experience and discover, magically, that you might be good at a few things and like spending your time on other things too.
One reality is the newer you are to working, the more hours you have to work to compare to someone who has 5, 10, or 20 years of development experience to compare. It's less about becoming a 10x developer, and more about learning how to structure and focus your time for maximum benefit both to the employer and yourself on mutual goals.
There's a reason why inexperienced talent is cheaper, and it's an incredible opportunity to soak up more things than you think you can handle. Learning to drink from a firehose isn't for everyone, but it is an invaluable experience to learn how you want your work/life harmony to be.
https://www.deeplearning.ai/fullstacksoftwareengineerjobdesc... http://startupjobs.asia/job/33056-backend-developer-fast-gro... https://www.deeplearning.ai/machinelearningsoftwareengjobdes...
- Forcing only 40 hour work weeks - Not forcing, but expecting 40 hour work weeks - Not forcing, but expecting overtime work weeks - Forcing (or talking positively about) over 40 hour work weeks
All the blog posts and comments talk about how necessary those standard weeks are (I absolutely agree), but knowing the commonality of both would be great to see.
In my case, I'd guess forcing of 40 hour work weeks is more common than we think.
It's not uncommon for people to have literally nothing to do for long stretches while say waiting for clearance paperwork / between contracts / etc.
Sure, you get paid less but cost of living is also less and frankly your often working on things more important than selling Ad's.
As for 40 hour workweeks, most startup jobs have 20+ hours of overhead: commuting, breaks, meals, random email, "status update" meetings, etc. If you're working 40 hours, you're getting 15 hours of real work done ( https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver... ). Even "real work" includes repetitive tasks and not focused learning. At hour 40, the boring stuff is done and you're working towards Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours of focused learning.
tl;dr: if you're motivated by 9-to-5 and 10% raises -- then a startup isn't for you. No need to crap on the rest of us who love it.
Even excluding googlers and facebookers, I have dozens of friends who've made millions apiece. Bay area mortgages paid off, kids off to college debt free, parents healthcare paid for, etc.
It is worth understanding that this is what a manager is for.
Imagine that you are working on your own pet project and you are the only person working on it. You are the stake holder. You are the customer. You are the user. You are the developer. In that atmosphere, you can easily spend 100% of your time doing productive work. All of your time is spent either coding or experimenting with different UX designs. Not only that but you are completely free to try different development approaches, different coding ideas, etc, etc, with absolutely no overhead trying to convince anybody else to go along.
Add an external user -- now you have to gather information. Add an external stake holder -- now you have to provide planning information and status updates. Add an external UX designer -- now you have to coordinate UX requirements and development activities. Add another programmer -- now you have to argue about how to indent your code (amongst other things).
A good manager is able to coordinate and facilitate communication and development activities. You can measure how good your manager is by how close you come to putting in 40 hours of real-work with 40 hours of bum-in-chair. Not only that, but it's actually completely quantifiable - real-work / bum-in-chair = management efficiency.
I highly recommend measuring this value and holding your management accountable.
Of course there is a potentially massive downside if your management is relatively bad: they will simply remove all the communication from the project. Then you will be spending all of your time hacking, but getting nothing done because you are working against all your teammates/customers.
It's quite difficult to find ways to keep the communication flow up while at the same time reducing the amount of time spent on communication. The best way is by building processes where the artifacts are obvious: well developed stories, prioritised backlogs, defined sprint commitments, visible code merges, visible acceptance test results, etc, etc. Then the manager must summarise the information in ways that allows all of the workers to coordinate easily without having to spend time searching for information.
More than complaining about overtime, developers should (IMHO) demand that management actually provide value for the premium salary that they receive. Don't accept 20 hours of screwing around in a 40 hour week (some people on HN swear up and down that more than 4 pomodoros a day is impossible -- they really need to find a better job!). Demand that your time is not wasted.
When you're efficient, you get more things done. Normally that comes from working more, either by doing more hours or cutting out distractions. So you might get more done in a week.
Being efficient does not mean you are productive. Productivity I think of as getting more value out of less effort. It comes from good prioritization, working on what matters most, focusing on the important.
Depending on the work, you'll need to be more productive or more efficient. In programming, equal effort tasks have very different outputs. So much that no amount of efficiency can catch up to good productivity. Choosing priorities is critical. Being productive is harder, because its a skill, you have to develop an intuition, measure, reason about the opportunities, predict which tasks are worth a lot and which are useless.
Efficiency vs Productivity is one of the bigger difference between a junior and a senior developer. Its the difference between good management and bad.
One of the issues is management schools do teach a lot about techniques to make people more efficient. And certain jobs benefit, like maybe a call center, a truck driver, etc. Not programming though.
This seems like a little bit of a leap to me. Is it obvious that these two aspects of a manager are inherently related? In my experience, I have also seen that solving a problem by throwing longer hours at it is a net-negative in productivity. You may hit a tight deadline or put out a fire, but it tends to be followed by a period of lower productivity from exhaustion. Overall, your team has picked up increased volatility with a lower average output. You'd be better off if you could predict and catch the problem early.
I could imagine a team, though, that is accustomed to putting in 70 hours a week, and a manager that carefully manages the process to make sure that those 70 hours are as predictable as possible. The post would imply that all managers who ignore one aspect of a healthy team or project (sane work hours) would be ignoring all aspects. I don't know if that's a fair leap, but maybe in practice it is true.
Then came the investment and the big client and the 'big time' and i spent 6mo doing 12-14 hour days and managed to do less work per day. And i never recovered in that job.
It took changing jobs twice to get my swing back (didnt help that job 2 was the total opposite, lazy uninspired team)
This will eventually create a lot of long term problems for non-participants in this crazy work hours work life. There fore they ask for some sanity as a overall work culture.
This is nothing new to software. My dad was a bus driver at a factory, he used to tell me that people who picked up over time work were routinely hated, by the remainder who didn't want to or couldn't.
Nobody likes to watch themselves being at an disadvantage due to their own actions.
Some people might want more than a job. They want a lifestyle. A new family, a tech monastery if you will. They want to immerse themselves in work. Even with sleep, there's plenty of time for family, just not hobbies.
Of course, if you're looking for just a way to pay the bills, it's not a very good one.
Most of the companies that work extra long hours don't really accomplish anything though, and the extra time is used for busywork that doesn't change the bottom line. If your metric is hours worked and not work done, you tend to do a lot more light tasks that you can do for long hours, instead of the short, intense, really important ones.
http://startupjobs.asia/job/33056-backend-developer-fast-gro...
But I can't believe the blanket assertions I've seen that working 40 hours a week is the proven output maximization limit. If I work 40 hours from monday to friday, and I have nothing to do on Saturday, and a strong desire to implement a an important customer request, how is working 4 or 5 hours on my day off going to result in negative output?
I don't think these sort of things _work_ for companies, but to appease a manager they likely have to be done at some point. Long-term I don't think this is a viable solution, but sadly it will keep happening for the time being :/
http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_...
The use of "study" suggests to me that the job posting is not as slavish as it sounds. "Late into the evening" could mean 6pm.
I recently read an MIT career guide that recommended aiming for a 60 hour week - 40 hours for your current employer, and 20 hours for your career.
And the salary looks pathetic (in USD)
What happens when every company is doing this ritual?
I'm starting to notice a very bad trend. Just like how LA has record numbers of homeless people, it also has a high vacancy rate.
Similarly, despite plenty of "open positions", candidates are being denied left right and center, even as they do their best to signal that they will do anything for the job.
Just look at Japan to see what a 12+ hour / day work culture looks like. Their population and their economy are both slowly going down the shitter thanks to it, depression is widespread, etc.
I totally agree with the health problems it causes though.
Also, aren't we supposed to be accepting of all cultures? If that's the Japanese culture, why is it okay to disparage it?
If you're looking for businesses who operate in marathon mode you may have to look outside SF/SV or NYC (those are the top 2 markets for long hours built into the economic model and high employee turnover). Once the economic model for an area is based on 50-70 hour weeks then it gets baked into pay, baked into cost of living, etc. This is certainly a longer topic than I have time to comment on right now fully.
All their business knowledge goes out the door with them. You end up wasting time with the hiring process and then finally hiring someone who costs more money who doesn't understand your business at all and won't be really able to contribute at a high level for 6 months while getting up to speed.
Yes, some companies have poor management, but these companies are also not exclusively tech companies.
[0] Yes, sometimes we all work a bit of overtime because of issues in the field, or one poorly run iteration. These things happen. The critical thing is how management works to avoid those situations in the future.