Comment by kittiepryde | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kittiepryde | Hacker News Reader

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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30793826/

Do you happen to know of good studies to back up --- organizational psych research going back decades showing that teams who work 40-hour weeks will quickly outperform teams working 60 hrs / week --- I've heard this before, but, I've never seen the studies talked about.

I found this study via Googling, it took a little longer than I would like to admit. (I'm probably using the wrong search terms)

It definitely paints a more complicated picture - from a manager perspective, they could say that more hours equals more work - except they should be measuring worker engagement according to the study I linked, because it's more heavily associated with productivity than total hours worked - but they could say this is hard to do, it's just cheaper for the company to make everyone work more? That kind of company is definitely a place I would not want to work, but more studies, might make it easier to justify a change if you find yourself in one of these organizations?

I were going to say this, but found it in the Results / Conclusions part (nice link!). So to paraphrase:

Results: Working >40 to 50 hours per week and >50 hours per week were significantly positively associated with work productivity in univariate analysis. However, the significant association no longer held after adjusting for work engagement. Work engagement was positively associated with work productivity even after controlling for potential confounders. Working hours were not significantly associated with work productivity among those with high-work engagement or among those with low-work engagement.

Conclusions: Working hours did not have any significant associations with work productivity when taking work engagement into account. Work engagement did not moderate the influence of working hours on work productivity, though it attenuated the relationship between working hours and work productivity.

In my personal experience of workplace since 90's, whenever you have the chance to "level up", work a bit extra to gain a bit more progress and experience, it's absolutely worth it. If you don't gain anything by it or have no meaningful work to do (ie. process-related tasks and projects), it is worth more to you to leave work for another day.

I've become sensitive enough I can feel the stress begin to build at the end of the day, and know which day is worth to leave work (most days), and which rare day is worth more to you to stay a bit longer just to follow that flow out to its end.

Anything new after 3PM can wait to next day. Your mind will anyways work it out in the background if it's important somehow.

Some places can thrive with lots of overtime -- if they can attract the right kind of people, like Space X can. Other places can do great if their employees have no alternatives -- like Amazon. Some can do extremely well if they use slave labor, like ancient Rome or USA.

But in the vast majority of cases a lot of hours worked cannot be sustainable or beneficial to the employee.

The main result that I’m thinking of is quite old — going back to the Ford assembly line days IIRC. NPR had a great segment on it several years ago. I’m on mobile now, but I’ll try to so some digging when I get back to a real computer.

I suppose there’s a valid question about how well those oldest results transfer from manual labor over to knowledge work like programming. The NPR guest that I’m remembering seemed to think that the effect might actually be even stronger for knowledge work, not weaker.

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