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Comment by bborud | Hacker News Reader

Depends on the work.

Based on experience I would rather have a happy, well-rested developer working for me who is aching to get to work in the morning and who has the brains to leave for home as soon as he or she feels tired or unfocused. If that happens at 2pm or 4pm, I don't actually care. If people are still at the office at 6pm, or if I see people are tired, unfocused or are only goofing off, I ask them to go home.

To the degree that I care about the hours they work I only care if they spend too long doing something (they're stuck and need help perhaps?) or if they work too many hours (they'll write shit code we have to fix later so I get to pay for it 2-4 times over).

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Makes total sense to have a worker well rested and happy (40 hours does that sufficiently well). Your submission works if it is a task such as programming. A programmer can finish their week's tasks in 3 days or less and you'd be fine with that. That's not most programmers though.

Moreover, I have had other businesses where the time you pay for as an employer totally matters if you're to get an ROI.

If I need you for 8 hours a day and there's an amount we've agreed on as compensation, then that's exactly what I need.

It doesn't really work if for instance it is a restaurant and you need to have waiters, dishwashers and cooks round the clock as patrons visit your establishment.

If they'd rather work fewer hours and get less money, who am I to argue? I'm just saying they'll be poorer for it and contrary to what you posited, they won't be too happy about it either.

I think the reason most programmers are relatively unproductive is that they don't step away when they are not being productive. Stepping away from work when you are not performing well has (at least) two positive effects. One is that you get some rest. The other is that the change of context is good for problem solving. It helps to go home and do something else while at the back of your mind you are still trying to solve problems. I try to avoid just hanging around the office when I'm kind of half stuck or fully stuck. Because I'm not really all that productive.

Programming really isn't about hours but about the quality of those hours.

For manual labor things are of course entirely different. But I'm not talking about manual labor.

(Of course, in some companies, programming is seen as a kind of manual labor where people naively assume that hours spent working translates in some linear fashion. To quote something an executive at a large company said in a meeting: "I don't understand how there can be more productive programmers and less productive...they're just writing code, right? So any developer is interchangeable with any other, right?".)

> they don't step away when they are not being productive

I agree that taking breaks is definitely a good thing. The brain can only handle so much after all.

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