Superheroes don’t work 90-hour weeks | Hacker News Reader

Superheroes don’t work 90-hour weeks

bbc.co.uk

107 pointspmoriarty39 comments

At a startup I worked at previously we introduced head-space and heads-down days.

Head space was an experiment where every fortnight, at Friday noon it was tools down and do what ever you want. You were encouraged to go away from the office. Ride your bike, have lunch with your wife/husband or family. What ever you thought was giving you head space.

Heads down days were every Tuesday and Thursday of every week. This meant, on those days no meetings. Work from where ever you want. Turn off Slack. Close your email client. The idea here is "planned" uninterrupted time so you get into the zone for a long stretch of time.

Edit: Oh. Forgot about this. The other Friday afternoon every fortnight we would do "refactor" afternoon. It's were the dev team would come together and refactor parts of the code base as a team. You would get to see parts of the code you'd normally never work on and some really great discussions came out of that.

And in your opinion, productivity increased or decreased?

For me personally, as a developer, the head-downs days were most successful. Having planned uninterrupted time were I know before hand that I will be able to tackle a big chunk of work or focus on a particular hard bug or whatever, was invaluable.

Head-space is great. On Friday afternoons people are usually tired and mess around anyway, so why not do something useful with that time instead of hanging around to do your 40 hours.

one of my advisers in grad school would schedule the 'show and tell' meetings for his research group on Friday afternoons so the atmosphere was a lot more relaxed, plus there was a set time limit as he would leave at an exact time to pick up his children from school :)

> Head-space is great. On Friday afternoons people are usually tired and mess around anyway, so why not do something useful with that time instead of hanging around to do your 40 hours.

Honestly, this has always been table stakes for me. I hope I never work at a place where I'm judged on "hours my butt is in a seat" instead of "actual productivity". Particularly for creative work, it's just not how the human brain works.

Isn’t that most places? It kind of makes sense, because actual productivity isn’t necessarily the easiest to measure (although I think it comes across just in attitude.. how much they care about he project.)

> It kind of makes sense, because actual productivity isn’t necessarily the easiest to measure

Not really: this is just the streetlight bias in action. A high-precision estimate of a useless metric isn't better than a lower-precision estimate of a relevant metric.

I've only worked at places well-run enough (at least in that regard) that people are competent enough at their jobs to measure overall productivity: it doesn't generalize to an automatic rubric like "# of commits" or "lines of code", but it is doable.

I've never found a magic company where this isn't the case. Also when your boss doesn't have much to do with technicalities, hours will inevitably be used as a proxy for productivity measurement.

I guess I've only ever worked at "magic" companies, because I've never found a company where this _wasn't_ the case. You shouldn't be so quick to dismiss anything outside of your experience as "magic".

Maybe it's my industry, but I've worked for quite a few companies and never seen this. I meant magic in the sense of me wishing I was working for such a company.

That’s a great idea!

I’m going to talk to my senior about trying this out tomorrow. They love stuff like this

We had a proposal for meeting free days but then a lot of people got nervous and it got reduced to a meeting free afternoon and then nothing. It seems a lot of people ca't live without meetings. For me it was perfect though.

Several positions involve interaction between people and organizations as their main responsibility, such as HR, sales, pure management, etc. What are they supposed to do on meeting free days?

Go home and re-think their lives?

"People who like meetings would have nothing to do" is so stupid yet a hilariously plausible reason why this would fail.

Organize. Go through backlogs. Read reports. Learn what engineers are up to. Meditate. People whose jobs are the non-programmatic glue in a company and thrive on human interaction would benefit a lot from stepping out of their domain in any number of ways, or destressing, sorting through their mind, etc.

I keep getting the calendar used against me.

I'm super human by all honest measures, but management without fail starts giving me guff about going to the gym and having lunches away from my desk. I can venture into justifying that I don't use social or anything on the clock which creates clear head space, etc etc, but it'd fall on deaf ears... I'm old school like that.

But the calendar creates an attack surface. I don't want to work at such companies, it's not always been that way, but it's been consistent across shit rung startups.

Management wants me at my desk 12 hours a day and always on call, and makes "jokes" about anything that I mark as time I want away from my desk. Often 2 hours discussions start 15 minutes before I have an outside event noted.

I quit these jobs when the abuse threshold is crossed, but the departments are made up of mostly people on visas etc so they're not so lucky. It should never strike management as a surprise when I leave, but I get the impression they're used to dishing out abuse to "non-compliant" programmers. The bros thrive, the meek get beat down and go home to lonely apartments full of cats where they passionately code themselves to sleep with Netflix.

lousy management, they don't seem to understand that most of the metrics they can measure in the time span of a week are not going to be useful for predicting success

If someone told me that I had to have lunch at my desk, I'd tell them to pound sand.

In both jobs I've had, the opposite has been encouraged. At my current job, we go out for a team lunch most days (sadly not paid for by the company). I'd lose my shit if I sat at my desk for 9 hours straight.

At my old job, I used to go to the gym at lunch, and it had to be at a set time due to classes. I blocked it out in my calendar indefinitely and made sure everyone knew. I also made my displeasure very apparent the few times it was booked over.

As far as I was concerned, going to the gym was more productive than any meeting I could participate in, my productivity was at its peak right after the gym.

I quit when they expect me to stay beyond 5pm. It's software. It can wait more often than not.

I've found that a lot of problems solve themselves if you stay away long enough. I can't count the number of times that some urgent issue came in when I went on vacation and by the time I got back there were more emails saying that it wasn't needed after all, or "nevermind".

There are not many people that actually work x hours even though they are at the office for x hours. So when they say they work 90, does that mean they actually is focused and doing actual work for 90?

"Working" or just in the office doing 90hr/week is going to destroy your sanity/life outside of work regardless.

When you play Risk, do you consider yourself to be playing Risk only during an expansion and to not "actually" be playing Risk during consolidation?

Taking a breath, zooming out, and creating mental space to switch tasks is still work.

I think there are some high performance work athletes who can work 90 hours in a focused manner but there are also a lot of pretenders who just hang around and do nothing.

I think the number of people who can consistently produce output 90 hours per week, over 50 weeks, is so small as to barely even exist.

The people that claim to work 90 hour weeks are generally entrepreneurs who include lunch meetings and things like thinking about strategy outside of the office, in those hours. If you own the business you never really stop thinking about it, but that is a completely different measure than for an employed individual contributor.

I'd bet those "high performance work athletes" are probably also taking "performance enhancing drugs".

If only that worked over the long haul it would be great. But as it turns out you can only spray gas in the carb infrequently or you eventually wind up even further behind the non overclockers with still working engines pass you right up.

Yes, the idea is a mainstay of children's stories and american culture: "The Tortoise and the Hare".

At least, it used to be. It seems a lot of people have forgotten these lessons.

Very possible. I just wanted to emphasize that in the same way there are a few people who can run 10.5 over 100m without training (I knew one of them) there are also most likely some people who have a natural ability to do more work than a regular person ever will be able to.

I think it means that people that say they work 90 hours a week have no other life obligations (or ones that they have accepted) and have internalized their company's mission as their own reason for living. They may be _working_ those 90 hours but that definition is effectively meaningless because if the company mission is their mission then peering into their own navel is justifiably work. Whether that is productive or valuable for the company is unknown.

I got down to 10 hours a week at one job. They never bothered to give me a pay rise, so I continued to do the same quantity of work, and tapered down my hours to compensate.

I never once heard them complain about my output.

That's my "secret" strategy too. I gradually lower hours I actually work and spend remaining times learning new things so I can get a better job. Never had complains too, so I see this as win-win situation -- employee get the work they pay me for done and I don't feel too bad about not being compensated enough. Funny thing though, every time I say I quit in such situation, I get a counter-offer of similar size or even bigger.

For everyone interested there's an excellent book on running a bussines called Rework with exact same phrase "you're not a hero if you work long hours".

If ya wanna see a hero go to the morgue.

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN?

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