Hacker News Reader

Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

It's an open secret at least in the tech world that absolutely no one is putting in a productive 40 hours of work a week. This was true well before the pandemic and is more pronounced than ever now. Everyone needs to be "present" for 8 hours a day 5 days a week, but spends their time in pointless meetings, preparing documents and powerpoints that no one will read, faux social/teambuilding events, hour long lunches, goofing off on the internet, all to maintain the pretense of office culture.

Companies that shuffle things up to prioritize productivity over simply showing up will be set to succeed over the next generation.

View on HN

We did this at my new company. One 30 minute scheduled standup. That’s the only meeting we have all week. Of course people are free to jump on a video call to work through stuff, but scheduled meetings are generally discouraged, and to date we only have the one.

Since everyone is contract, we’re seeing an average of about 26 hours per week. It’s by far the most productive team I’ve ever been on or have built. We ship new features weekly. It’s truly an incredible pace, but doesn’t feel hectic like you might think.

I think the contract only + no meetings + no HR (no culture bullshit, no “get to know people” social events, no bullshit) company setup is going to be the future. If you give people the opportunity to work on things they like working on, and don’t make work about anything other than work, you get amazing results.

> I think the contract only + no meetings + no HR (no culture bullshit, no “get to know people” social events)

So, gig economy. Or, at best, hourly wage at Amazon warehouse, but for developers. I heard those warehouses are super extra no-bullshit efficient.

It’s certainly not perfect, but I genuinely think it’s much better than being an FTE anywhere else. Of course I’m biased.

I mentioned benefits in another post, so I wouldn’t say it’s gig economy.

What other environment could give a developer $100+/hr, ability to make their own schedule, and essentially all legal protections to work on side projects, work for other companies, etc. at the same time?

Is it for everyone? No. But we’ve had more quality devs interested than we can employ at this point, so I’d say it’s attractive to a good portion of the market.

You've forgotten the core tenet of every engineering discipline is the master-apprentice relationship. The reason why what you describe is really the gig economy is because you've turned contractors into autodidacts to cut costs. You're not only expecting engineers to work for you, you're expecting them to learn their craft without capitalizing that yourself. Someone has to pay for that too; it probably won't be your other contractors -- otherwise you'd be something like a real company again.

Your success in this direction to turn software development into some kind of cattle feedlot is only a mirage. Let me make it clear in economic terms: you're up a few chips at the casino, for now, because the market allows you to be. In the long run it's not sustainable, and won't yield any major feats of engineering with any level of competence.

I really don’t understand this comment.

At what point did I say or lead anyone to believe that we 1.) expect developers to be autodidacts? Because we don’t have meetings? Seems an odd way to measure engineering culture and 2.) this had anything to do with cutting cost? Our hourly wages are high enough to where the cost savings is negligible compared to fully loaded salaries. I’d be happy to share the numbers over email.

Your idea of the master-apprentice relationship seems overtly romantic. I never said we don’t train staff, or haven’t brought on younger engineers. I literally onboarded an intern last week. They’ll likely make more working less than any intern at any FAANG is making this summer.

> Your success in this direction to turn software development into some kind of cattle feedlot is only a mirage.

I have to straight up disagree on the premise that it’s a mirage. Nevertheless, this is certainly an experiment, and one where we’ll adapt as needed.

I feel as if you’re focusing too much on the contractor concept. Would you be as opposed to this model if say I hired FTEs at 20 hours per week? So essentially half salary. How is this any different (note my previous comments about benefits).

You pay for employee training. You don’t pay for contractor training.

What training? I had to pay for my own college degree, my employer didn't pay for that, but they do require it.

College is not job training. I'm not sure why this misconception is so widespread. I have a degree but my employers do pay for relevant training for my job. It's not like the industry stopped evolving 10 years ago.

College is not job training and yet it's training that most jobs require. Hmmmmm....sounds like BS.

Is preschool required?

I did not imply that your company is an Amazon warehouse, I'm sorry if it sounded like that.

But if this "hourly wage for hourly work and nothing else" becomes a norm, that's what we'll eventually get, I'm afraid.

It's what we want. I wouldn't work any other way ever again. I don't think FTE jobs are going anywhere (companies always push to have us as FTE, not the other way around), let us be.

If you would treat devs like warehouse workers right now,all devs would run away. I mean force them to be 100% effective all the 8 hours and track every move they make. On the other hand allow warehouse workers flexible schedule and decent pay so they could live decent life by puting in 20 hours a week (even while measuring every move they make) and i bet there would be devs who would convert to warehouse workers.

If you would treat devs like warehouse workers right now,all devs would run away. I mean force them to be 100% effective all the 8 hours and track every move they make.

CleverControl employee monitoring pitch: "This software offers powerful features: keylogging, screen recording, live viewing, remote settings, clipboard control, Skype monitoring, and more. The software records time that was spent on this or that activity and shows you stats in graphs. Besides, the app captures screenshots at all important events like right-clicking and window change, and it can record activity near the device with the help of a webcam and microphone. Moreover, CleverControl records employees’ active and inactive time, letting you detect lazybones and reward hard work."

This would trigger Italian strike in me (as a dev) immediately :)

"Another unconventional tactic is work-to-rule (also known as an Italian strike, in Italian: Sciopero bianco), in which workers perform their tasks exactly as they are required to but no better."

I heard about these tracking software and I sincerely hope they won't get any more prevalent. As I see they are somewhat present in the contracting world.

I treat it as a total, humiliating devaluation of creative engineering work (and thus their identity!) to that of unskilled factory workers.

Eventually, maybe developers will realize that they have a lot more in common with those "unskilled" workers they disdain than they do with their capitalist owners.

Unions would be helpful for both, in my view.

anyone employed anywhere should be unionized, thats just common sense

can they already do this with all the data they have in github? Not that I would endorse it, but that sounds like better data for tracking. Instead of enforcing time you enforce activities.

No this is massively more invasive than checking your commit history. Github doesn't know moment to moment what you're doing while these invasive tracking programs do.

my point is that they can already do this with commit history (and more), while this is an inferior way of tracking, regardless of privacy concerns.

Commit history only tells them when you do commits... these tools tell you what people are doing between commits. There's no way a single tool's history gives more information than logging every keystroke and monitoring the screen... At best it's a less noisy stream but doesn't contain nearly as much information.

Put so much demands that they work for 12 hours per day 6 days per week, while nominal time is 8 hours and 4 days - rest is unpaid overtime.

This is how it works already in many companies, also infamous 996

You missed the OPs point in all your heavily laden snark.

There are (sad, imo) people whose entire lives revolve around work. Their friends are there, and they enjoy social outings with their work colleagues.

To me, social outings are just an unnecessary risk. I do not talk to my coworkers like I talk to my friends, I do not want my coworkers knowing too much about my personal life, and especially when booze is involved it's too easy to find yourself on the receiving end of something awkward, or witness to something awkward.

Meetings are simple: if it's important enough to take an hour of my day it's important enough to count as seat time. When my productivity drops and my manager asks why I tell them that meetings are taking up too much time. It's their job to make sure I have what I need to do my best work. If they tell me to work later I start looking for other jobs. It's so easy to get a senior developer job now, and there's really no long term benefit staying anywhere, that I'm not exactly sorry for leaving in this case.

I have literally zero interest in "culture". I wouldn't even work for a company if I didnt need the money to live. I don't understand how you've derived the dichotomy that you can either have mindless time sink "culture" bullshit OR an amazon warehouse slaveshop.

Call me a pessimist. I think people obsessed with "work culture" are sad. You shouldn't hate the 8 hours of work you do, but you also shouldn't center your entire life on it. Afterall, it could be taken away from you with a penstroke the next time the CEO needs to make room in the budget for their salary.

> If you give people the opportunity to work on things they like working on, and don’t make work about anything other than work, you get amazing results.

That line started off well, but ended off terrible. I really don't want to be working in a place where I'm treated like a replaceable machine. You do you, man.

> I really don't want to be working in a place where I'm treated like a replaceable machine.

This seems like a leap. Where did I insinuate that anyone is a cog in a machine? Just because I said work should be about work? Why does it have to be about anything else? If you need your job to provide a social aspect to your life that’s completely fine. It’s just not a part of the business I’m building. It’s why I think having options is great. Everyone works differently.

You're getting a lot of negative feedback so I just want to say I can relate a lot to the model you're proposing (and practicing).

I interview fairly often with potential employers, sometimes just for the experience and insights. Never once did I consider taking a job for other reasons than the type of work and its pay (commuting time and factors not directly in control of the company aside).

I'm not even the type of person who hates team events and the like, at least at the companies I have been working at these usually were a lot of fun. It's just nothing that keeps me from moving on from or motivates me to take some job.

So not an hourly contract? but a per deliverable contract? How do you figure out what's a deliverable in the time - if thats what you're doing.

> I think the contract only + no meetings + no HR (no culture bullshit, no “get to know people” social events, no bullshit) company setup is going to be the future.

But in the US you see the opposite happening at a lot of large companies. I think what you described would be the future of a company with a homogeneous type of worker. However, we are humans we are not machines ignoring that we are humans can be detrimental. Not to mention worker equality is becoming important to be a stable work environment. It’s important to forget you have other roles and industries that simply cannot function the way you described (doctors, nurses, flight attendants, pilots, plumbers, etc.)

Also, I want I’m not saying the current technology corporate environment doesn’t need optimizing. It certainly does but it seems that we are moving towards that and trying to focus on what matter in HR as well.

How about benefits such as health insurance, vacation days, sick days?

I miss vacation so much.

I just fly home from the US. And … I still have to work instead of just spending time with my parents that I haven’t seen in years.

I earn more than 200k. ( not west coast ) it’s a decent salary right? Why can’t I have vacation, too? I asked and putted and asked again…

All that will accomplish one thing: one day in the next 2 years I will wake up, look at my bank account. And quit. To have actual free time.

I told that to my boss in those term, we have a decent relationship. But … he gave me some HR bullshit.

How much were you willing to sacrifice in salary in exchange for additional vacation? Was it a net-positive deal for your counter party (employer)? I ask because I hear this kind of thing all the time who want to make the same money, for less time at work.

Most people need spare time to be happy, productive, not burn out. And as a company or society, you don't want to encourage people to work too hard for money because most people are stupid and will actually work too hard for money, and not be happy, become less productive, and burnout.

That's how it works in Europe. It's common that a boss will ask an employee to work less, because the amount of time they work is not even legal sometimes, or to force people to go on vacation for weeks to use their vacation days. It's also more fair and don't put pressure for other employees that value their life outside work.

Forcing employees to take a holiday is often done purely out of the company's self-interest, as accrued leave is a liability on the books.

Also, at least in finance, they force you to take a couple weeks off once in awhile to make sure you're not up to anything illegal.

Of course I would be willing to reduce my yearly salary for 2 or 3 weeks of extra time. Should not be that hard.

It’s worth more than the proportional time I would take off. It’s very valuable to me. Like 5k / week would be a good price tag. I have no debt and more stuff than I need. Now let’s me enjoy life while I still can ( and keep working on that job that I actually enjoy )

I’m not sure to understand about the net positive. The response I got was that taking time off without pay would 1) set a bad « example » or something of that sort and 2) make it hard to plan for resource availability.

Does that answer your question?

The crux here is, of course, that one week of your time is a lot more valuable than 5k to your employer if they pay you 3.7k per week, and probably a lot more than you would be willing to part with or find reasonable (think 20k+ a week)

It's a pretty infuriating setup. From the employers perspective, the amount of money you lose by having someone not work is so obscene, so quickly, that you have to fight your monkey brain pretty hard to not be a total asshole about it.

Even in this well paying industry, you could give everyone obscene raises, before time off makes any financial sense for the average employer. I don't think enough employees realise this.

Even if their time was 5 times as valuable to the company as their pay, it seems very unfair to pay someone 3.7k per week, but require 20k from them if they want to take a week off? That basically means that if you took 3 months sabbatical, and worked the rest of the year, you would actually pay your employer 100k for working those 9 months...

A system, where other people make more off your work than you do has pretty intrinsic problems.

Customers and clients of all sorts obtain consumer surpluses; if they were indifferent, they would not make purchases... Employers are just a different sort of customer.

Honest question: why does it “cost” the employer so much to have you on leave?

I heard this argument in North America but not here in Australia. I mean, small businesses might require critical people at critical times, but generally in larger orgs this shouldn’t be too hard.

Say your employer makes 20k a week of the produce of your work. This means you having a single, unpaid week off will directly cost your employer 20k. Even if you would willingly take a (from your perspective) pretty hefty pay cut of 4k for that week off, the employer would still be down 16k compared to before.

This is the weird and intuitively wrong stuff that happens, when employers make more through their employees work than their employees do, even after factoring in their salary.

Is your employer going to write down a loss of $20k on the books when you take a week off work? Probably not, because opportunity cost isn't actually an expense.

I would love to understand that better to negotiate my next job better on that specific issue.

There is something that make me think something is fishy in that approach : why are more and more places switch to unlimited PTO if it’s that costly to give folks time off?

I had unlimited PTO a couple of times, it can sucks ( pressure NOT to take any PTO for the company sake ) Or he just fine.

> There is something that make me think something is fishy in that approach : why are more and more places switch to unlimited PTO if it’s that costly to give folks time off

"Why do people get more time off now than ever before in human history (which they do)?"

There are now more forces than ever, that work against unlimited exploitation of human labor. For example, human beings in most countries have enforceable rights and they want time off, and the market that has to compete for those people. Humans are shitty machines. If you piss them off, they do shitty work. If you treat them poorly they leave. (In reality, "treating them poorly" translates to "treating them slightly less good then someone else") Since having someone quit working for you is pretty fucking expensive (assuming, of course, that they are actually being productive), you better make sure they do want to continue working for you and so you make it worth their while.

Another important example would be worker protection laws, that simply dictate certain amenities.

"Why is everyone doing unlimited PTO, specifically?"

Less clear on that one. Part of it is certainly it being a trend. If other people do it and employees want it, then you might have to go along, again, to not get pushed out of the market.

But since it clearly does not ever actually mean "unlimited PTO" (you'd be out of a job pretty quickly if you tried), an interesting followup question might be what the fuck it actually means and who benefits? Maybe employees are a little confused about how much time off to take and take less than before? Or maybe they feel pressured to underbid each other? Maybe it's also just that the flexibility it adds to the job leads to more loyal employers, which is pretty nifty in a market starved for workers.

By ‘net positive’ I mean willing to take a cut larger than is directly proportional to the reduction in hours worked. The reality is that reducing each person’s annual work will increase costs for the company overall, as it needs to pay additional overhead and benefits, which are related to employee count, rather than hours worked.

I think that everyone is a bit wary of setting difficult precedents in employment situations, as well as the possibility of creating rifts between people with different ‘deals’. That said, I think we should all place a higher priority on coming up with mutually beneficial arrangements.

I see : yes, I’m compensated roughly $3000 / week. I don’t know how much I do cost per week but probably around $4000 ? Idk.

As I stated it’s easily worth 5k for me. ( 7 days, 5 days would be $3500 )

That négociation did not go well. I got 2 extra day off and was told to stop making noise.

Oh. well.

Except that it increases employees morale and motivation and thus productivity, and reduces chances of burnout. There are benefits for the company too.

Exactly. I stay longer in a previous company with unlimited PTO ( real one ) for that reason.

It’s crazy how they don’t realize it’s just alienate workers.

This blows my mind. Throwing your prime (or prime-st remaining years) at an office. Can you put your foot down and take unpaid leave whether they like it or not? Come up with an excuse if you have to. They will always try to push you to follow their line but will you regret that later in life?

Yeah if a boss said I couldn't have 4 weeks off per year I'd probably tell them they're functionally incompetant.

Its always interesting to see how other people live.

I've rejected some jobs that offered less than 30 days (in a 5 day workweek) vacation per year.

Good for you! I will cash a few years more of that sweat US money and go back retire at home. Where every gas station attendant has 5 weeks of PTO.

Don't forget to live your life now as well. All fine and dandy to save for 'later', but if you keep going until you burn out you won't be enjoying your later that much. That or if you get run over by a bus tomorrow it was all for nothing.

You be you. May you have interesting times in early retirement.

If your job is getting in the way of your life goals, why don’t you find one that doesn’t?

Oh. Thanks, never thought about it that way. Sarcasm aside yes: I’m not gonna keep working in the US for that specific reason.

I could be wrong, but it seems that there's no great shortage of companies offering 4+ weeks of PTO per year in the US. Or are you expecting more vacation than that? (Or are perhaps otherwise constrained as to the choice of employers?)

I've got 4 weeks paid vacation. It really doesn't feel like much. That's only 1/13th of your weeks being work-free per year. I personally would like more. I think something like a 20-25 hour workweek plus 8-12 weeks of vacation would be good enough that I would stay in the workforce long term. As it stands today, it seems more feasible to continue working full time, hit FI in a few years and retire early rather than find such a good work-life balance.

We offer equity comp, health stipend, and equipment stipend for anyone contracted on a 20 hour per week minimum.

Sick/vacation days are harder because we pay for whatever I get an invoice for. Since we don’t track what people do on a day by day basis (I often don’t even know if someone is working that day until I reach out to them or slack, or vice versa), there’s nothing stopping them for billing me for extra hours. And to be honest I really wouldn’t care. I just care about output and quality of that output.

> I often don’t even know if someone is working that day until I reach out to them or slack

If you don't know if they're working, don't fucking slack them. How about you check their calendar or send an email.

Slack is not for asynchronous communication.

It's amazing how high and mighty people can be and then they ping people for non-emergencies while they're on vacation.

> Slack is not for asynchronous communication.

Depends on the organisation.

Where I'm currently working, we use Discord. Discord is similar to Slack.

It is explicitly for asynchronous communication. We are supposed to not expect immediate replies to questions and comments on Discord, especially as other teammates are in different timezones. Sometimes there's real time chat, but it depends who is on at the time.

I posted some comments yesterday. There was one reply within a few hours, and two more this morning.

Email is pretty much deprecated. Nobody uses it, except to set up calendar entries for meetings, and formal things like HR and invoices.

Why don't you just not check your Slack messages when you're on holiday?

This sounds great. I don't want to have to pretend to care about my company or it's "culture". I just want to do some work and get paid for it.

Well the point isn’t to not care. We want devs that care about the quality of their code and genuinely want to focus on _just_ that. I get some people want more out of a job, and that’s totally fine. But I think there’s a good portion of people that just want to do work and spend the rest of their time with their family, or hobbies or whatever.

Why is contract important to this?

Contract means no perf eval, no 'culture' events participation, no leadership trainings etc., what OP classified as HR bullshit (true).

At this point is mostly a filtering mechanism for me. The types of people that want contract are typically more used to (and want) an environment without the HR bullshit.

Some, not all, but certainly some people use work as their only form of social life and interaction. Which leads to a lot of time not working. I’m not saying this is inherently bad. It’s just not the type of company we’re building. Filtering for contract work has taken care of this so far. Will continue to evaluate as we scale up.

I think it’s a confusing way to say “hourly and work as many or few hours as they feel like”.

do employees get equity?

I work at a company where it is encouraged to use the fitness facilities during work hours. 15 minutes walking to one of the gyms, 5 minutes changing, an hour working out, 10 minutes in the sauna, 10 minute shower, 5 minutes getting dressed, 15 minutes walking back. That is 2 hours of my work day right there ;-)

Very smart company. May I know the name?

For intellectual work like we what we do, the brain doesn't just stop "working". I tend to be able to come up with good solution while driving/working out/taking a walk/drinking tea...

Only at low levels that I see time-at-keyboard important. Now it's all ambiguous/large scale problems that spending time at the keyboard is a very small portion of my time. It's more productive to keep the problems in mind, then let my mind wandering and arrive at the solutions later. After you design/test/run the solutions in your mind, it only takes a small amount of time to write it out (design doc or code).

They are smart, the employees are likely to be more productive if they are healthy. Many companies squeeze up employees like tubes of toothpaste then discard them and hire a younger gen. It is sometimes not intentional, just create a stresful environment and dont allow enough time to employees to catch their breath so to speak

I felt pretty wrecked when I, mostly because of lack of affordable housing, moved to a team in a location near my home town, and found out every single employee aged <35 had ended up on sick leave. Didn't have any choise but I wish I could have just gotten out of there as fast as I ended up in it.

Why? It'd be helpful to get some idea what workplace factors led to such a negative outcome.

Thinking is work too, and you can think from anywhere

Name and promote them. They deserve the extra labour supply.

That sounds marvelous! I'm looking at a job at the moment that is mostly WFH and working out during the day is something I'm looking forward to most of all.

This has changed me - I WFH, but every 2 days I take a 2 hour walk, I walk about 7.5KM to the beach and back and while I’m tired at the end of the walk, it’s hugely invigorating and I often end up coding until well after midnight on my own projects with all the extra energy I have.

Have lost quite a lot of weight too … and it’s only been a couple of months. Go for it! Can’t recommend it enough.

Living close enough to the beach to be able to walk is one of my life goals!

I think it makes sense to have people available for regular hours, just so that if I ask someone a question I can expect a response today-ish. But, I agree that a lot of meetings should be emails, teambuilding events are usually poorly done, and procrastination is hard to avoid when you've got access to the internet.

Minor nitpick: Is an hour long lunch really that bad?

I think the point is not that there’s something wrong with hour long lunches, but that people have to find ways to fill up their day if they’re expected to be “at work” for 8 hours a day and can only be productive for a fraction of that.

As a “productive” software engineer, in the sense that I have gotten positive feedback in my career and never had a problem “getting enough done” to satisfy my superiors, it took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that I cannot productively apply myself to work for 40 hours a week. When I have to be in the office for that long, I end up slacking off for hours and hours (like reading HN). I thought for a long time that maybe I was just flying under the radar and I would eventually “get caught” but at this point I’ve made peace with the fact that my productivity comes in bursts and as long as my employer is happy with my output I don’t sweat it too much.

I learn lots of valuable stuff from hn. Its onepadt slacking, one part continuous learning

I’m the same way. I’m very efficient - when I get in an actual full day of coding it’s amazingly productive, but my usual output is still enough to satisfy my manager.

Over here lunch time is not part of worktime. Per law we need to have at least half an hour for lunch, but we can take however long (if the company allows). Dunno how it is in other countries. (I am from austria, europe)

Yeah, and hour long lunch is pretty long. Most people I know take less time than that to eat at a restaurant, let alone just grabbing your sandwich from the fridge.

> grabbing your sandwich from the fridge

Get out of the building, take the bicycle to a park to eat, take a small nap and read a book, come back to the office fresh and mind reset.

This was my routine before I switched to WFH. Official hours where 9h to 12h, then 14h to 18h. 35h workweek, 2h lunch break, (France).

35h workweek is absolutely great, but I personally wouldn't fancy a two-hour lunch break. Would _much_ rather take a shorter lunch and get out of the office earlier.

(Just highlighting that different people have different preferences. :))

Lunch isn't just about refuelling, I can eat at my desk and keep working if that was the case. It's about taking a break.

Also, for some of us it's normal to go to a restaurant or to the pub for lunch. It's been years since I've eaten a packed lunch.

Have you ever been to Central/South America or Europe? ;-)

When I started, my team took two hour lunches

Most developed countries have enforced hour long lunch breaks. Grabbing your sandwich from the fridge and eating at your desk is shunned.

I can't speak for other developed countries but here in the UK it is very much company- and industry-dependent. At my first 4-5 jobs (mostly in the finance sector), everyone ate at their desks. At my current employer (FAANG), no one does.

> absolutely no one is putting in a productive 40 hours of work a week

You are being a little broad with this statement. One can easily put in 60+ hours for weeks on end and be incredibly productive while doing it. Its all circumstantial. If you have no family, are the sole founder in the company, and really enjoy what you are doing, why the fuck would you stop at a 40 hour work week?

Not all of us loathe the thing we do for the majority of our waking hours.

Yes, if you're starting your own business then it could help you to work as much as you can.

However, most people do not run their own business. Most people are low-level code monkeys in large firms where individual efforts aren't business critical. When your project gets cancelled for the 3rd time and you still get a raise, it finally clicks that your work doesn't really matter. This takes a psychological toll. As a result, most people I know in FAANG who are 28+ years old will sheepishly admit that they do very little actual work (30 hours max per week). That's the whole point of hiring people straight out of college: you get ~5 years out of them before they realize what the game is. The ones who are happy with the "truth" become managers, and the ones who aren't opt to keep their head down and coast, or just quit from "burnout".

Yeah, or you can avoid all that by going to startups.

Working 60hr/week for a startup is completely illogical. It's the sort of thing you only do drunk on kool-aid.

> It's the sort of thing you only do drunk on kool-aid

Did not realise believing in a mission is akin to joining a suicide cult.

Work doesn’t have to suck. It doesn’t have to be everyone’s calling. But it is for some of us, and sixty+ hours a week can be time well spent. My time at start-ups has been time around colleagues I love, work I enjoy and a mission I believe in. (I was also decently compensated while there and exorbitantly so on the upside.)

There are countless public servants, non-profit employees, artists and public-company workers putting in those hours and more finding reward in their work. No need to deem everyone who doesn’t fit your lifestyle an idiot.

I mean - feel free if you actually think your job is aligned with your life's goal.

Me? I'd rather do what I can to make Art. So it's nice that I can get a software company to subsidize it thoroughly.

I'm just glad I can get paid effectively for being Skilled instead of laboring with my Skill. Availability is the best ability after all.

There's a balance between passionate hustle and diving into burnout. Some people can do more than others. etc etc. It's more sustainable for mental health to not make every waking minute about work, and take breaks and vacations. If you don't have a life, there's no point to working.

It doesn't have to, but the most likely outcome in a startup is it goes bankrupt, what you did disappears into the dark hole of failed ideas, and no one sees it.

It's a suckers game: the default behavior needs to be "when the founders get greedy and kick me out...what will I do then? How will I feel about that time?"

> what you did disappears into the dark hole of failed ideas

If the work is for financing a life outside it, yes. But if the work is rewarding in itself, then said failure is—while highly disappointing—balanced by the relationships, stories and skills gained therefrom.

This is absolutely a risk tolerance and personality matrix thing. I just want to push back against this recently-popular philosophy which idealises the Western European work ethic and lifestyle. It is one among many local optima.

Working 60 hours a week probably leaves you with less relationships+stories+skills than working 40 hours a week.

I would say the opposite - the only job I can imagine (outside of the first two years of investment banking) working 60+ hours/week would be a startup - where each and every hour in those first 2-3 years can make the difference between building a Billion dollar company or just getting left behind.

The only time id do that is if I was the founder.

Employees are too likely to be screwed over, even if the company is successful

I mean, a lot depends on your level of seniority, what type of equity you negotiate, how likely it will be diluted, whether you are likely to have a $100mm/$500mm/$1B exit. A lot depends on the integrity of the CEO in the event of an acquhire (probably the most common exit) and how well the Principle engineers will be compensated (Retention Bonuses usually).

I will agree with you - it's probably batshit insane for a working stiff without a good chance of a $2mm+ payout to be working 60+ hours/week for years on end.

Define screwed over? Because in my view getting screwed over is joining the industry on promise of working on deep tech and ending up a tiny cog in a machine.

Most startups aren't engineering-bound though

Amdahl's Law

And do a lot more work for way less money? Your work will have more impact, that's for sure. But at some point you'll have a higher-level realization that you're still working in a capitalist hellhole and you're not being fairly compensated for the risk compared to the VCs or the founders. If I was going to work in a startup or FAANG from 22-30, I'd pick FAANG for the guaranteed million dollars in the bank.

The only exception I'd personally make is to found a startup with people I enjoy on a problem that I'm personally motivated by. This is basically a band for capitalistic nerds. Even then, you still have to allow VCs to suck out your soul.

And given what kinds of products and services the vast majority of startups out there provide, even "impact" is questionable.

very little work - 30 hours a week? I think "older" people at FAANGlikes put max 15 hours a week.

I read it more as "no one is having 40 hours per week of productive work continuously".

Even in your example, being productive for 60+ hours is possible, but for how long? There might be extreme (extreme!) outliers, but I think it's fair to say that at some point you will increase your productivity by putting in less hours.

In the marketing agency world 50-60 hour weeks are the norm and 70 hour weeks occur once a month or so. It isn’t really sustainable. Most people burn out and leave the agency world within three years. Those that stay often make work their life or have a way where they can set their own schedules, which is usually because they have reached marketing executive level and the work becomes different.

It is a very unhealthy industry. I am not sure if it can be sustained in it’s current form, but I don’t ever see the hours being reduced either. 4 day work weeks would just mean 12+ hour days and you would have to hope your clients aren’t open on Fridays or whatever day you decided to make your company day off. Staggering days wouldn’t work that well as most agencies have little to no redundancy by design.

How much of that is working time, and how much of it is sitting in a room not being productive? Every productivity study I've read finds that per-week productivity drops off tremendously with that level of overwork.

Productivity per hour drops, but it doesn't matter to the agency because all of their employees are salaried. It is not people sitting in a room not being productive per se, but it is a bunch of burned out employees not being as efficient as they could be.

Again, this leads to burnout and employees that are sufficiently burned out either quit or are fired for no longer being able to meet the productivity requirement and/or making mistakes. The agency does not care because the supply of recent college graduates in marketing and communications is never ending (it is one of the most popular majors at almost any college/university).

Interestingly, slower work to a point is better for the agency since they bill the client per hour. That reverses when the quality of work suffers or the employee is no longer able to get everything done that was promised to the client. The agency gets more value out of a single employee when they work longer hours. Bonuses are common in the agency world, but they are typically meager compared to the extra hours worked. Burning out their junior employees is then to the advantage of an agency that bills by the hour.

I can work 55 hours a week in perpetuity as a founder, with the exception of four off grid, week long vacations a year. Even two weeks over 60 hours (e.g. fundraising across timezones) and I rapidly lose it.

But is your overall productivity higher with 55 hours than it would be with less hours?

It's the kind of question where I wouldn't really believe your answer, unless you've actually tried to experiment yourself where is the cutoff (for your specific situation) between hours / productivity.

Not because I think you would answer in bad faith, but because it's a really complex question. What if working less hours over multiple years would let you pursue some hobby, turn you more sociable and thus a better leader/CEO?

Or maybe it would make you just very slightly better at decision making. You would have less time to manage your company, maybe relying more on others, but in exchange you would have more energy for the really crucial decisions. Or enough energy for extending that 2-weeks international crowdfunding effort into a 3-weeks.

Yes, over the course of a 12 year full time career, if I go above 55 it gets worse, but I can sustain 55. In terms of trade offs, there's something to be said for parkinson's law. If I have way more than 55 hours a week of stuff, I know I have to fit it into 55 or I'll burn out. If I aim for less, I find I never end up working less than 40, even if the absolute amount is much lower.

I would just say that choosing to work more than 40 hrs per week is very different to being forced to work 40 hrs per week. Simply because someone can happily choose more work hours does not mean that the de facto standard should be that high or even at 40 hrs.

> are the sole founder in the company

yeah in this case, if its really your dream, go right ahead.

most workers aren't the founders of the company.

> One can easily put in 60+ hours for weeks on end and be incredibly productive while doing it.

Do you have an objective measure of that? I've worked with plenty of people who thought they were being productive for 60+ hours/week, but none of their productivity actually stacked up. Founder/CTO types were the worst, they'd bypass process and cause outages but because of their position everyone had to coddle their ego and pretend that they were doing good work and the trouble wasn't their fault.

I can do 60s in bursts, and the bursts have lasted as long as 2 months before. I usually burn out as soon as we hit the finish line, and work 10-20 hour weeks for a while until all the comp-time is used up. But I can really do a fantastic amount of programming when I dedicate my entire brain to the project and completely exclude all other thoughts. OTOH I have to admit that both of the biggest production screwups I ever made happened in those crunch times. But seeing myself hit those levels of productivity actually gives me a ton of satisfaction. Some of my normal 40 hour weeks when my head isn’t in the game are so un-productive that it depresses me.

You asked about objective measures, but I’m not sure how programming can really be quantified. All I can say is my “hyper-mode” has caused projects to reach deadlines that others on the team thought were unlikely.

Can you give us some advice on how you recharge effectively between such bursts? Since starting receiving salaries I am staying within 40+ hours work weeks but it does depress me because indeed my head is not always in the game. I thought about only doing the necessary busywork for some weeks because I want to get difficult projects done that just won’t work out if I’m not full-in. But I get feelings of guilt whenever I do that, and that prohibits recharging.

> If you have no family

So that's... maybe 20% of the workforce?

> are the sole founder in the company

And with this we narrow it down to maybe 1% or less of the workforce.

He can be broad because your conditions don't apply to the overwhelming majority of workers. Statistically, your conditions cover an insignificant group.

"Absolutely no one" and "1%" have entirely different meanings to me. I thought it important to highlight the "insignificant" case (of which I am a member) to avoid some notion that this applies to 100% of people in reality. The way we usually go on about work around here concerns me, and I fear we risk alienating a very energetic and well-meaning segment of the community.

HN comments (and in general, forum comments) are not PhD theses, they're generic, casual comments that in many cases try to tell a story.

Hyperbole is to be expected.

Hyperbole or not it has an impact when repeated like some religion. This comment thread is making me not want to participate on hackernews.

I think (I don't know you) that I wouldn't want you to do that, but to each their own.

You sound like you're having a bad day outside of HN, as this has been just a regular and might I say, civil, chat, otherwise.

A temporary break from HN (or social media in general), might not be a bad idea :-)

What’s wrong with an hour long lunch? Isn’t that normal?

It is normal, but if you think about it, it doesn't really take an hour to eat lunch - and sometimes it would be preferable to eat in 5 minutes and leave at 4:05 instead of taking an hour to sit around the office. Every reasonable employer would permit this but I have learned from reading HN comments that not every employer is reasonable.

Break times also tend to be regulated in most countries I believe. I.e. here in Japan 60 minutes break time is required if you work for more than I think about 6ish hours.

When I used to work in Japan I hated that rule. One day I feeling not so great, so I took the morning off. But we had an important release, so I still went to the office in the afternoon. The release ran into few issues, so I had to stay past the regular finish time of 6pm. I started to feel no so great again, so I wanted to finish the release and head home as soon as possible. But at 7pm, my boss came running towards me and forced me to take one hour break. I tried to explained to them (unsuccessfully) I only have about 5-10mins to finish the release. So I spent another one hour with watering eyes, massive headache, and chills, just to finish 5mins of work.

I mean, it's a sensible regulation but there should be some leeway for edge case situations like yours (if there aren't already - since you were actually sick that should make it OK for you to leave ASAP one would hope)

it easily does- 20-30 min to walk/bike/drive back and forth to cafe / restaurant- 5-10 min to order/get food, 15-20 min to eat.

If and when companies stop treating employees like children and more like adults who can decide for themselves when to take breaks, work, and take vacations, they might just watch productivity and morale soar. Netflix generally has the right idea on this.

Can also highly recommend Google (from first-hand experience). While there are pockets where this isn't 100% true, internal mobility is first-class so it's easy to improve things if you don't land well.

These kinds of rules are usually put in place because without them, companies treat their employees like slaves.

Yea, I haven't heard of a job that wouldn't have an hour long lunch. It's a part of labor laws at least in Illinois.

This appears to be incorrect. Illinois only requires a 20+ minute lunch at or before 5 hours into a shift of 7 and 1/2 hours or more: https://www2.illinois.gov/idol/FAQs/Pages/meals-breaks-faq.a...

No, you're expected to eat at your desk and type while chewing.

Once upon a time, I worked at a nuclear engineering consultancy. One engineer ate a hamburger and french fries over his keyboard, using it as a placemat, and never cleaned it up. In order to fix his computer, I first used a bottle of alcohol to clean the brown and black muck and hunks from the keycaps. It honestly smelled like a dumpster.

I would just toss that

It was his favorite keyboard. He would've cried, TBH.

Consider it was a place where one guy hoarded 15 years of WSJ in his office.

When staff are excellent professionals in the field, they get to do all sort of weird things.

Weekly Shounen Jump or Wall Street Journal?

This question comes to my mind as well everytime I see that abbreviation.

In that case whenever I need to do anything on his machine I would just bring my own keyboard. Regardless that’s gross and unsanitary, probably attracted all sorts of pests.

No lie my first job out of college expected you to eat at your desk and not leave for your lunch break.

An insurance company I did some work for had a bell go off for your two coffee breaks and lunchtime. You spent half of your lunchtime waiting for elevators.

Whaaaat? What year, country, and/or location was this? Call center?

I saw something similar in Tokyo. It was at a telco office. A bell would ring (at 1pm IIRC) and an entire skyscraper's worth of office workers would get up and try to get to street level. Every day.

I was visiting a Western company that was renting a small space in the same building. Their routine was to never get caught up in the great migration (in either direction).

That was the routine at Safeco in Seattle well into the 90s. My wife temped there over summers during grad school. Although she says they played Muzak instead of bells. So, in fact, it was much worse.

D: What slave-drivers.

If I ate lunch I was expected to stay from 9 to 6.

Get a new job? Do they actually pay attention to when you show up and leave, or do they treat you like an adult?

I have never ever worked a job where 9-6 was not the standard, and I don't really know anyone who took an entire hour for lunch either, at least not as a regular thing. This is in NYC. Do 9-5 jobs really exist these days?

From what I have seen 30 mins is standard but some companies have an hour lunch and ask you to start 30 minutes sooner.

I like one hour lunches.

My biggest issue is, that in an office environment I can't use it as effectively as I would like to. At home I tend to spend 20-30 minutes taking a short nap and it really pays off as it boosts my productivity for the afternoon. At the office, I don't have that opportunity :-/

In my state 30 minutes has been the standard for a long time. Usually in the service industry they don't even give you a lunch break.

It's too short is what's wrong!

At least in the states most places require you to "make up" your lunch. So normally you'd show up at 8 and work until 5 to make up for an hour lunch. This is true for both hourly and salary.

That’s insane. I’m in the states, but my company treats us like adults. I roll in when I want, work out in the gym for 2 hours during the day, leave whenever I want. I can’t imagine working for a place that tracked my hours.

You've never worked at a job where you had to submit time sheets at the end of each week? Lots of "professional" gigs where people have to do that in order to accurately track time to customers - particularly when they are billing you out at $500/hour on the contract.

"Billable hours" != "Working hours". A lawyer may work 70 hours/week to produce 40 billable hours/week. That doesn't mean that they aren't working for 70 hours per week. It just means that the "8 for what we will" and "8 for sleep" have been shaved thin and added to the "8 for work" by shady accounting of time.

Yup - I stumbled into consulting in my first job and carried on doing it in my second, timesheets are the main source of misery/annoyance for me. Non-consultant, non-sales roles are hard to find for people who are technically focused but not actual software developers.

Nope. Never. I guess I've been lucky, but now that I know how pleasant work can be, I don't think I'd ever stay with a job that was that way.

Most software employers I’ve worked for had us fill out time sheets, and they didn’t do hourly consulting so no need to calculate hours for clients. I only recently found an employer who does not require a time sheet. I thought this was pretty standard, at least in the USA. There will definitely be someone who replies to this comment and says “I’ve been working 20 years and never had to fill out a time sheet.” So it’s probably not universal.

Lucky for me, I’ve had the same experience at multiple jobs. I’ve kept these kinds of “lax” habits at places where other people spend 9+ hours at their desks every day. I always thought it was a waste for other people to work long hours when it wasn’t even a company policy and I never got flak for my hours. Maybe more people at bigcorps can do this if they explain it and show they can still be productive.

True in a lot of places, e.g. even in pretty labor-friendly Denmark, most union agreements in the private sector call for a 37-hour work week, but with lunch not counted as working time. So workers typically take short 30-minute lunches to avoid extending the day more. The public-sector unions have managed to get 37 hours with a 30-minute lunch counted though.

I think the question is whether that "make up" time is always 1 hour or can be adjusted. At my previous job I would regularly take 15 minute lunch breaks and leave 45 minutes early (compared to a 1 hour lunch).

Where I work now local laws require taking at least 1 hours of breaktime per day so I can technically not do that.

> Companies that shuffle things up to prioritize productivity over simply showing up will be set to succeed over the next generation.

I tend to disagree, but don't argue either way for four or five day weeks, but because it seems success and productivity are only loosely coupled.

Company financial success, and / or long term viability, I believe, is largely random. Large, already successful companies will, largely, continue to be so, small to medium enterprises will survive the next five years at about the same rate they historically have. Small business will continue to fail all over the place.

People will continue to be super intelligent, flawed and incompetent, easily distracted, lack focus, and easily corrupted by power and vice.

And start ups, to anyone who's been paying attention, is almost entirely a branch of gambling for a specific type of whale.

I predict that on the whole the next decade will be largely like the last ten years, and there's approximately nothing to be gained from chasing tiny productivity gains.

At least WFH would be normalized which is a big win

It's not just tech, it's office jobs in general. People doing 40 hours of actual, necessary work in that environment are the exception.

It is an open secret that people who are productive only 2/3 of the time in 40 hours/week would be productive only 2/3 of the time in 32 hours/week as well.

I hear what you're saying, but anecdotally I just cut my days back and find myself a lot more energised and engaged when actually at work. I haven't really compared my degree of output yet, but I can at least say I'm a lot more emotionally invested in the results of my work and my job satisfaction is higher. One's mileage may vary.

That's patently untrue: most of my colleague working 3 or 4 days a week are more focused their days in.

The invert is true though: a task will evolve to take the time alloted to it, I see that regularly with "unconstrained" project running amok. Those with fixed time are way more efficient and finish with a minimum of overtime.

I work as a lawyer. When I do brain work such as research, contracts or court meetings, I believe 3-4 hours a day is the max I do continuously. If I have more phone calls, client meetings etc., it's easier to do the 8 hours.

I spend 2-3 hours working, and 3-4 hours commuting, and other time in staring each other and rumbling in some meeting, and have a rather relaxed lunch with friends talking nonsense...

This was when I was in Google

I wonder if it's also an open secret that 99% of office jobs today are typewriter jobs of a few decades ago - soon to be gone.

Good riddance if people with a working brain were given any power, we'd all be at 2-3 hours of work per day with robots doing the rest by now.

meanwhile, China is doing 996 - 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week.

Obviously people hated it. But it is happening and no wonder China tech is catching up fast / winning in some areas already.

From my experience with Chinese working culture, half of that time is most definitely spent not working.

I’d bet the factors are much more political in nature than productivity on the individual level.

It is normal for Chinese to sleep/take a nap by the desk during the day.. Pretty sure they are catching up because of other reasons than being most of their waking hours at work..

As someone who has worked in a dev office in Beijing for a bit - no. Devs routinely took up to 2 hours for lunch breaks, and took numerous breaks in a day. I didn't blame them, mind, because the reason was obvious - for most people, it's just not possible to be completely engaged and invested for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, forever. I'd estimate there was about 4-5 hours a day of properly productive work going on.

Winning what? A totalitarian government where the people are all treated like shit? They may be winning the GDP game but that's not translating to any improvements for their citizens or the world.

The only people winning in China are the people at the top of the communist party.

or maybe they are faking their gdp numbers with reckless real estate ponzi schemes

Australia calling: 37.5hr week please. It be law.

It's law, but it still gets abused quite frequently (outside of tech, at least).

Anecdotally speaking, all my mates who work in private construction office jobs regularly do quite a bit of unpaid overtime. It's very much a combined cultural and managerial issue, clocking off at the correct hours gets you the stink-eye, and the volume of work assigned necessitates overtime.

One of the things I love most about Australia (New South Wales at least) is the mandatory 2 months long service leave after 10 years of service

https://www.industrialrelations.nsw.gov.au/employers/nsw-emp...

I bet you're envious of the typical US 2 weeks vacation allowance.

20 years in with two rounds of long service leave that would be "no"

I sense there are colorful words before that word "No".

Still way too long.

I feel like I generally am reasonably productive for 40 hours. Of course I'm not constantly super focused, but if I were to work fewer hours I would get less done. Every once in a while you have a meeting that isn't totally necessary, but reducing working hours wouldn't get rid of those.

> It's an open secret at least in the tech world that absolutely no one is putting in a productive 40 hours of work a week.

Is this true only in the US? What percentage of companies is this true for? How many jobs will tolerate this reality?

Yep, I've had full time six figure jobs where I was literally working 5 hours per week including meetings. I've never had a job where I worked more than 20 hours a week, including a hectic 7-employee startup.

> It's an open secret at least in the tech world that absolutely no one is putting in a productive 40 hours of work a week.

Be grateful for your privilege. Most employees aren't tech.

The workers at companies that schlep things around are working a real, non-stop 8 hours. This is why Amazon warehouse jobs are so shitty.

Teachers are pretty much non-stop as well. This is why so many of them have medical issues with their bladders.

The vast majority of workers are in positions that really do put in 40 hours of hard work a week--and they don't get paid anywhere near as much as tech.

I wonder if this is related to the fact that my computer seems to have more bugs in it than a hive of angry bees.

Indeed, there’s a sort of Moneyball aspect here. Companies that can accurately pay out only for productive time instead of assuming all 40 hours of a work week are spent producing will make huge savings in payroll, increasing cost efficiency and making it feasible to hire larger cross functional teams. A software engineer probably only really works about 20 hours a week. That’s a 50% savings right there.

What’s the definition of “really working?”

I once told a freelance client (hourly) that I solved most of the tough problems while I thought about things in the shower. On that project, very little of my time was spent coding. Client then said I ought to pad my hours by 5 per week. He “got it.”

If simply “coding” is what constitutes “really working,” that seems problematic.

Why would any software engineer take an equivalent paying job that micromanages their every minute to make sure the company gets a full 40 hrs out of them, unless the pay were much better than what they'd get otherwise (eating in to that 50%) or they were desperate?

This would be a huge mis-optimization IMO. Good luck attracting "top" workers and retaining them with this model. It's just "butts in seats" taken to an extreme.

I mean what you’re basically saying is you want to work at inefficient companies that pay more than they actually need to.

If you’re not working, you shouldn’t be paid. Fair is fair.

Perhaps instead of paying per hour a company should offer pay per week, and it’s up to the developer to decide how many hours they will end up actually working that week and if the offered pay is worth it.

I would take a paycut to have much less work hours. Could be a win-win but maybe a lot of people prefer to earn more.

Equally speaking, if I realise how to fix that bug when I'm out with friends one night, should I present my employer with an extra bill for those hours spent drinking and relaxing, putting my mind in a state where it could fix the issue?

Should a factory worker be paid for resting their body to get ready for the next day of work?

They're not assuming/under the impression that all 40 hours are spent working. This wouldn't work because this type of tacit admission works for everyone when they need it, even if that happens to be continuously.

You can't actually enforce that. The standard is salaried, at-will employment. The savvy, skilled remote worker is going to be able to put 20-30 hours in - literally just take off 1-2 days a week. But get paid for the "40hrs."

Basically, the rules of the game mean a salaried, remote employee can easily work half time at full pay - gg

> hour long lunches

Are one hour lunches not the norm? I've always worked 0900-1730, with an hour long lunch.

what's wrong with hour long lunches?

You are subtly implying incorrectly that people are working lesser number of hours while working from home. This is farther from the truth. If anything all the time saved in commute is spent in coding

Reply on news.ycombinator.com