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Comment by actually_a_dog | Hacker News Reader

A couple of random and semi-related thoughts:

I'm not really good for more than 6 hours of any sort of challenging mental work in a day, anyway. I also don't think that "hours" are a particularly good thing to track for software engineers -- we have ticket tracking and project management software that track effort already.

The bit about being rewarded with a Friday off reminded me of how I'd try to get my homework done during study hall in school, so I wouldn't have to do any at home. In the real world, the reward for getting your work done early tends to be more work. Maybe that shouldn't always be the case.

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When I worked in gaming the reward for getting your work done early was... attending the same mandatory overtime as everyone else because one department going home early would "hurt team morale". Granted - the same company seemed pretty oblivious to how much underbudgeting projects "hurt team morale" but that side of the equation was never changed. I thankfully changed industries but I still live with some of the consequences of doing too much OT in my youth.

What are some of those consequences?

Not who you asked but I was working full-time and started full-time community college night classes. Monday from 6am to Friday 3pm I was 100% dedicated to work and study, I would get maybe 5 hours of sleep a night and crash when I got home Friday.

The friend group I hung with treated me like an outcast and out of about 6 only one is still friends with me some decade later. I also had to pick and choose family get togethers and some of the last years of my parents life.

I did it because I saw their health ailing and I wanted to be able to fully support myself and my brother by being more than a minimum wage retail worker, it just sucks that that coincided with them all ailing so rapidly and eventually passing by the time I was a senior in college.

Oh, obstructive sleep apnea - not worth it IMO.

The problem is in the real world it’s close to impossible to tell the difference between getting work done early and the task being easier than expected. Same the other way around.

If you are constantly putting out more and better quality work than the average, the reward is you ask for more pay or you switch to a higher paying job.

> The problem is in the real world it’s close to impossible to tell the difference between getting work done early and the task being easier than expected. Same the other way around.

I don't see why that's a problem, provided there's not a lot of constant sandbagging when giving estimates.

If estimates control how long you work, managers will tightly tune them so no one gets extra time off and occasionally people will be asked to stay back late because they didn’t meet the estimate that may have just been unfair. Any discussion around estimates will turn toxic when it’s an argument of how many hours people work.

Hours based work isn’t perfect but it means you can put in the average amount of effort and have consistent work hours without stressing over every task and if the estimate is perfectly accurate.

If that's the way it works, then estimates aren't "estimates." They're "commitments." I don't make solid commitments unless I'm 110% sure I can get what I said done by the time I said it would get done, and I imagine many others don't either. So, the rational response to "estimates cum commitments" is to only promise what one can deliver with high certainty.

This essentially leads to the same result as when estimates are actually estimates, except that I might feel free to overestimate my capabilities a little, but I'd never want to overcommit at all. In other words, if you just let me estimate instead of commit, you're likely to get more work out of me most of the time.

> In the real world, the reward for getting your work done early tends to be more work.

That's because in a well managed business there's always more work than workers. Schools on the other hand aren't designed to fully load students (perhaps they should be to keep advanced students from getting bored).

I'm pretty sure some schools are made to overload students. We showed up at 8am, had 5 80min long classes with 15 minutes in between with an hour long lunch, to go back home at 5 pm and do homework and study at least two hours a day. Those are around 9 hours of learning by brute force. No wonder I can't remember much from school.

In that case, the alternative i that, if you finish something an hour before EOD, you go for a walk or watch some TV show. Then come back and push your code.

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