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Comment by sjtindell | Hacker News Reader

Personally being a tech worker in Silicon Valley, I’ve found the big barrier to this now to be cultural and personal. All my companies (large and small) have had incredibly relaxed policies around when to arrive, leave, remote work, time off, bereavement. Even in what have been SRE or Software Eng roles with on-call. I get the sense that if I’m doing my work, I could do whatever I want. But I still feel some pressure, some voice in the back of my head that thinks other people will look down on me or I won’t be deserving my high salary. Like anytime I have downtime I feel guilty, and I see others behave the same way.

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Am I the only one who feels like a 40 hour work week is excessive? I feel like 8 hours of work in a day is eeking out diminishing returns on a persons productivity.

Secondly, if you account for "productivity" hours instead of "waking" hours. You spend more of your "productive" capable hours in your life working, by a large margin.

Or maybe I was just born with a lazy brain /shrug.

I have noticed that a lot of people treat work as a social event. They spent a significant amount of their day shooting the shit. As an introvert who can't stand smalltalk, I don't. I think 40 hours or more makes sense for employees who spend half of their day chatting or surfing the internet. When I'm at work, I am working. I still do more than 40 hours, but I'm not sure if it's sustainable. I was recently asked to increase to a minimum 48 hour workweek and turned it down because I know it would upset my work life balance and not increase my output.

Like... it is. "Company" has roots in the latin word Pan or Pain, as in bread. Con Pan, literally who you break bread with, as in "we had company for the weekend".

Assuming 8 hours a day you're spending 1/3 of your work week with these people. It doesn't have to be a social bonanza every day but if you dislike making smalltalk with these people, or are actively disdainful of their chatting and web surfing then maybe you should change jobs. Cuz it sounds like you're spending a lot of time around people you straight up don't like.

Nah, they're actually fantastic people, and I don't begrudge them their small talk. I just don't join in, and am noting that it's a difference in time accounting. Our work is fascinating and there's a lot of bigtalk too. And actually I'm totally happy to small talk with them in a social setting, I just don't like to be at the office when I'm socializing.

Please don't. If you commit to a 48 hour workweek you're taking a loan on your future health. When that due date comes you'll pay it back with interest...

Thanks for the reinforcement. If I wasn't a surfer I might go for it but I won't let them take my sessions :-)

Yeah most studies I've seen shared online put us at about 4-5 hours of useful work a day. This seems to be what I settle into at home when left alone too.

It can of course go higher when you have a specific goal and you're running on adrenaline or are truly enraptured by what you are working on. But a typical 8 hour day is often packed with chitchat, meetings, administrative busywork and so on to help pad out those hours.

I did work one place that stressed to us to allocate no more than 5.5 hours of work-work a day when estimating jobs due to the above, and it seemed roughly accurate.

I agree, I have about 4 - 5 "good hours" a day. But I'm expected to deliver 6 - 6.5 billable hours a day in my job (exluding admin work). It's frustrating as I know that a billable hour before 10am and after 4pm is worth far less than a billable hour between 10am and 3pm. It's especially frustrating when I'm expected to work on something that involves a high cognitive load all day long due to tight deadlines. Account managers, project managers and sales people seem to think that all work is the same and you can work at max capacity all the time, regardless of the complexity of the task.

As a SWE, I have 20 productive hours a week, approximately. The other 20 are wasted, and I would be better off just not being at work and relaxing. Unfortunately, "that's just not how things work".

Same here, software developer. Any code added after 3pm is full of bugs and little mistakes to fix the next morning. Not worth it. Now I just slack off when I feel like it but it's not the way

Why not become a remote consultant?

This.

Sometimes I get more done in 15mins of my personal projects before work than a day of work, due to meetings or being blocked. Companies are usually not nearly as efficient as they could be.

I think 90% of work gets done in the first four hours for me.

This is why I opt into an 8am - 4pm schedule - I can usually squeak out just a bit more productive time if I start before anyone is online or in the office.

For me, I feel like it is highly dependent upon what I’m working on at the time. Some projects are motivating and 40 hours a weeks isn’t enough—I want to work more than that. Other times I work ~40 but a lot of it is wasted by by working inefficiently (when the drive to work on the project isn’t high enough to outweigh fatigue)

Personally I think a fair amount of the worst decisions people make tend to be motivated by an irrational sense of guilt.

I've always wondered why, with all the other emotional dispositions that people accuse pharma companies of "medicalizing" in order to sell them a drug treatment for, we've never seen any attempt to medicalize the Puritan work ethic.

Maybe it's because it'd mean that pretty much every medical doctor would themselves be technically (or not-so-technically) considered mentally-ill?

(Gosh, imagine a world where all the doctors got treatment for their floating guilt, and then suddenly woke up to their severe overwork, and so did a 180 on their previous push to the medical-bar to lower acceptance to increase wages, instead pushing to increase acceptance and lower wages in an attempt to increase the number of doctors a hospital can employ on a given budget, and therefore decrease hours worked per doctor?)

I don’t think a puritanical work ethic necessarily is unhealthy, but in your example I would consider the guilt aspect to be.

In your example puritanical work ethic + (irrational imo) guilt = you exceed your contractual requirements to deliver work to your employer.

Keep the work ethic but take the guilt out and perhaps instead you’d meet but not exceed your contractual obligations to your employer, and then organise the rest of your time around industriously working on something else that you’re personally passionate about.

The second example could be unhealthy depending on how you approached it, but I wouldn’t say that it necessarily is, and I would say that it’s a big improvement over the first example.

"Puritanical" is definitely meant to imply unhealthy, which is why it's got such a negative connotation. I think even in your example, you substitute "wasted" productivity (in the sense of going beyond contractual obligations) with other productivity, albeit towards another direction. I think that's what the parent's post is pointing out: this obsession/compulsion with filling in all time with productivity. Why can't time just be "wasted"?

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