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Comment by isatty | Hacker News Reader

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.

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?

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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