Comment by cryoshon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cryoshon | Hacker News Reader

>Perlow describes how she developed a solution to white-collar peonage at Boston Consulting Group. She called her strategy “PTO”: predictable time off. It didn’t seem like a big deal. Teams would pull together to arrange one weeknight off per member per week.

what a nightmare to read. i wish i could say i have never worked with any company so apocalyptically dysfunctional as to need a policy like this.

after 5PM on a weekday and for 100% of the weekend, the default expectation should be that 100% of teammates are not working and are unreachable, even if there is an "emergency". yes, even if it means you or the team is blocked from doing something because you need their input. yes, even if it is "just one tiny question". yes, that means that clients will get mad sometimes.

the team doesn't need to be pulling together to ensure that one person's time off on a weeknight is not interrupted. the team needs to be pulling together to tell management that work stops at 5, every night. then, they need to follow their own rule and be unreachable by 5:01 PM, as a group. this is a problem of labor against management, and the solution is for labor to organize aggressively and set ground rules rather than being picked to pieces by their own sense of industriousness and their desire to please authority by working longer than required.

Completely agree. After a few years as a startup founder (ie: in super high stress environment), I now no longer work anywhere where time outside of contractual work hours are not 100% mine, I don't do "on call" anymore and won't work anywhere that contractually asks me to work longer than normal for my country hours or on weekends.

This means that I leave/stop as soon as the day ends and am not reachable for work stuff.

Yes, I will make the occasional exception when it really is an emergency, but in return I expect that the company makes occasional exceptions for me when I need some flexibility.

Its been much less stressful.

I'm about to make this transition

I'm kind of worried that my skills will atrophy because I'll be working less, but I almost dont care at this point, because I'll finally have a social life

There's productivity studies that argue that your skills are as likely to atrophy when overworked (one factor in burn out), and that especially for things like programming skills the best daily skill usage ratio is much closer to 4 hours per day tops than to the 8 hour work day, much less the 12+ hours per day often encouraged in startup culture.

You will atrophy when you never learn new things. Time off does not prevent you to learn.

Yes, it can even give you more opportunities that you otherwise would have missed.

I think what you're working on has a much bigger effect on skill improvement/retention than hours worked, except maybe for retaining large amounts of trivia.

My brother and sister-in-law work for BCG. There are no secrets about what you're signing up for when you take a job there, and they're paid a premium for it. Their clients pay for fast results, and the best way to do that is have employees work long hours. "We have smart people working long hours on your problem" is their entire business model.

Every single person at BCG could easily find another job that turns off at 5:01pm if they wanted to. They choose not to.

From a quick Googling of BCG salaries for Principals, I'm a little shocked at the (relatively) low rates that people are willing to sell all their leisure for, esp assuming that they're generally talented white-collar workers. Though the caveat is that this was a cursory search: the data could be bad or hiding details like TC vs salary.

What particularly made it dystopian to me was the acronym choice. PTO is already the most common acronym to corporate accounting departments for paid time off. Reusing the same acronym for predictable seems to send a dystopian message that paid time off is no longer a norm, and one should just be happy if their time off is predictable.

I'm still not sure that sort of Orwellian new-speak was intentional by Perlow, but I also cannot imagine a world in which a highly paid management consultant is unaware that PTO was already a commonly used acronym.

The problem is that if BCG didn’t work so hard then Bain/McKinsey/Deloitte (or whoever else) are willing to work harder/longer and will steal clients. And if some employees don’t want to work past 5pm well there are plenty of other fresh, young graduates who are willing to work these crazy hours because of prestige and high pay.

I work at an investment bank so I am no stranger to crazy hours. I’ve tried to think of a more sustainable alternative model but I haven’t found a compelling one.

There are plenty of companies with the expectations that you're describing, and nobody is forced to work at Boston Consulting Group or goes in not knowing that it's a long-hours environment. I don't see any problem with BCG being the way it is and other companies being the way they are. Vote with your feet.

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