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Comment by pan69 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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 :)

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