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Comment by xf1cf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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