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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Is there any way you could just make it physiologically untenable for anyone to stay in your office past 5PM?

Right around 6PM at my apartment, the downstairs tenants light up with the most awful, stanky skunk-weed. You literally cannot keep the windows open; and yet, in the middle of summer and no central AC, you can't afford to be there with them closed, either. So, in effect, my neighbour forces me to ensure I'm not home at that hour.

Anyone you could bribe to do the same near your office? :P

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That is like spraying perfume in a stinky room, it might work short term though. Good solution is to clean the stinky room :P

Jokes aside, I don't believe any amount of laws/hacks can completely fix the issue, they sure can help. The attitude has to change. There is more to life than work, money, titles, corner office etc.

The saddest part in all of this is a large part of the workforce has nothing to show for all those long hours they put into work. It might be a tiny bit comforting, if they at least got something in return for their hard work. They've been brainwashed into thinking "at least I have a job" :(

Some offices in Thailand will nuke the aircon to save money at certain times

Some towns in Japan and Taiwan started playing music over city loudspeakers at 6pm that basically means "it's go-home time now."

? They do that in my Japanese town of Kumagaya but that is for the kids to go home because it is getting dark. It changes to 4 or 5pm depending on the time of year. Are you sure that music is to remind adults that it is time to go home?

It is for kids.

I dunno, they did it in hachioji when I lived there several years back. I remember it being at 6 and I remember my coworkers telling me that was the reason for it but I could be mistaken.

One of the customers I've worked for in Japan has alerts over the loudspeakers when it's time to go home. The company I work for had people working insane hours (14+ daily) and acted like it was normal. The people were obviously not doing much work staying later, but they wanted to appear to be dedicated. I'd much rather my people work hard when we need it and have time to unwind when we don't. I see it as a failing of management of every day requires an emergency level of effort.

I don't imagine we will actually see this change in the way expected. Rather than companies making it so employees can leave on time and still feel secure in their job, I imagine companies will eventually find themselves destroyed by competition that are smart enough to forego having an office at all. Offices are a massive expense, and while they were crucial and profitable in the era of difficult communications, they're now nothing but a source for value destruction, amplified even greater by the tremendously negative impact on cognitive productivity interruptions have. The exact things that made offices valuable in the past, physical proximity of coworkers, are their greatest weakness now.

Maybe just turn the lights and power to the router and switched off with a timer at 5pm?

I have worked in Liberia (in fact, I just returned from a four month stay today) and since the public power company is so untrustworthy, NGOs and offices usually run their own power off diesel generators. It's common the generators are shut down at 5:30 or 6. Works out pretty well.

with the heat we have around here this summer, just shutting down the AC would make people wanna go home lol

If I shut the AC off in Houston things would break. The paint would blister.

So you mean like, eat burritos at 4:30?

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