Should you work fixed hours, even if you have a flexible schedule? | Hacker News Reader

Should you work fixed hours, even if you have a flexible schedule?

remote.ma

110 pointselazzabi_78 comments

There's a difference between working fixed hours, working a fixed amount of time, and working within boundaries. I think it's a level you work your way up.

Early career, just work fixed hours. You don't have a sense for what is reasonable yet, and this is a good way to build up a work ethic and understand your limits.

Once you're comfortable there, tweak your hours as needed. This might mean working the same irregular hours every day (parents can schedule around their kids) or just making sure that when you hit a number, you call it a day (wake up early and work so you can go hiking in the afternoon).

As you get to know yourself better, you'll know when you've put in good day's work, when you have capacity to keep going, and when you need to dial it back.

This last stage is important if you aspire to leadership roles. In these roles, you are never done, there is always more you can do to improve your business, so you need to find your sustainable boundary and stick to it.

Unless you own the company, it’s not your business. Act accordingly.

What's your implication here? That non-owners are lesser and therefor should bend to the wants of the owner? That only owners have a right to the lifestyle they want?

That’s one way to look at it, but the opposite from how I read it.

My interpretation is not to ruin my health for a company I hold less than 0.5% stock (options) in. The amount of skin I have in this game is not enough to make me sacrifice the little pleasures that keep me sane.

Thanks! That reading makes sense.

My interpretation is not to ruin my health for a company I hold less than 0.5% stock (options) in.

I agree but don't ruin your health for a company you do hold significant stock in either.

There is hard work and pulling your weight. There is having faith in your vision and giving it your best shot. And then there is being just plain stupid and making yourself ill or worse for something that is still only about money in the end.

Even if you own 20% of the company, statistically the chances of it being worth anything besides toilet paper is slim.

I believe they are stating the opposite.

If it is not your company, if you don't own a large share of it, then work your hours and switch off. Any bullshit about putting in extra work because you are in a "leadership" position is just that, bullshit to extract more value from you and transfer it to the company.

Do what you are paid for, no more, no less.

Great attitude to ensure you never own a company.

Owning a company is fairly trivial. Just fill out the requisite paperwork[1] and boom, you've got a company. Making it profitable is the hard part.

[1] https://corp.delaware.gov/howtoform/

Creating a company is easy. Staying on top of taxation/regulatory filings is more difficult.

This whole grinding is the only way to make it attitude has to stop. Do the work you get paid for. I imagine if someone started their own business, their attitude would be vastly different then working for a company on a fixed salary.

Great attitude to make sure you understand the realities of the system and protect yourself from being exploited by it more than is already inherent in the relationship between wage labor and capital.

I make a lot more than most business owners as a mid level employee at BigTech without the headaches.

I worked for a startup that went out of business. You know how much sleep I lost when they were struggling? When they did finally kick the bucket, I called a few people in my network, got another job and kept it moving.

I do own my own company. It's pretty easy.

The vast, vast, majority of people will never own a significant portion of a company. Outside of normal investments and retirement funds most people will not own a company in the sense we mean here.

I'm confused. You really think a C-level exec is thinking the way you just described?

Probably not...c-level execs are usually owners of the business.

Ah The life of the C level, making commits directly to master and running your IDE with the brightest whitest background your monitors game mode can produce.

The C-level distinction is irrelevant.

The question is business owner or not. While some CEOs are also business owners, many are not, particularly for publicly traded companies.

If you are the owner of a startup, constancy, or plumbing company you put in the hours you want to maximize company profit. It is your profit!

If you are an employee, (CEO or otherwise), you put the hours you want to maximize your compensation. If putting in 80 hours vs 40 hours has no impact on your pay stub, don't do it. you don't keep the extra profit...

It was just an example, not a distinction. But most C-levels do have nontrivial equity in their company.

Yeah that's totally true. They often get huge equity packages so they behave more like the owners and less like employees. I think this underscores the situational incentive differences between owners and normal employees. As a rank-and-file employee, if I put in 2x to work, I don't see to the profit. That extra profit or efficiency goes to the major equity holders and owners.

I'm assuming C-levels get paid a butt load with the expectation they will do whatever it takes.

They are doing what they are paid for. If I get offered tens of millions of dollars a year I would also consider putting in more than a 40 hour week. But I don't, so I don't.

I mean do what makes you happy. But I attribute nearly all of my promotions and success to doing work I am explicitly not paid for.

I do too. But not with promotions. With the ability to job hop. But it’s not to “help the company”.

I read that as "don't kill yourself for someone else's profit."

I think scarface74 was making the opposite claim: it’s not your company so fulfil your obligation but don’t put the company’s interest ahead of your own.

There was an implication that in leadership roles there is always something more to be done, and you have to watch out you don't do too much.

But that's true for non-leadership roles just as much.

So I read it as, even if you're in a leadership position, the company isn't yours, so you don't need to act as if it is.

Well, when you accept a job, you make a promise. So do what you must to get the job done then, on time.

I make a promise to trade around 40 hours of labor for money each week.

You make a promise to do a reasonable job. Sometimes it's the company that makes a promise for you (feature and deadline specified) and then it's not really your responsibility to complete the promise.

You must have not had shit management yet, or are cruising for burn out.

Yes, and when the pay/bullshit ratio goes in the wrong direction, I get another job.

Little did they know the promise being talked about the promise sales makes to customers.

If you own your own company your hours are whatever it takes to get your bank account where you want it no more no less.

People say this all the time, but I think it's an arbitrary and self-defeating perspective.

First of all, if you want to maximize personal benefit, it's not clear that owning your own business is the way to go. Sure, there's a higher ceiling, but many rank and file engineers at big tech are making $1M+ due to stock appreciation without working particularly hard. By contrast, building a business that you can even pay yourself $100k is non-trivial—either you raise money and take on a whole new level of stress that comes with investor expectations, or you do the bootstrap grind which has a high chance of failure and almost no chance of keeping it to a solid 40 hours/week.

Second, if you have equity comp you are in fact an owner. You might not have much direct impact to that number, but at least your interests are aligned. And even if you don't have equity, the quality of your work reflects on both your reputation as well as your actual skill development. Of course you should truly evaluate whether your company is treating you fairly and expectations are realistic, but do so objectively instead of starting from a management-vs-labor ideology.

Read one of my replies below. I’m not saying you should own your own business to maximize your income as oppose to spending a few months “grinding leetCode (tm) r/cscareerquestions”. Not that I did to get into BigTech. But that’s another story.

Equity in a private company is statistically meaningless and any one person being able to move the needle on a 1.6 trillion dollar market cap company is negligible.

You're missing the larger point which is that if you make your money by working for other people, your reputation and your skillset in that environment matters. Yes, you should look out for yourself first, but that doesn't require taking an adversarial stance to management. To the contrary, if you make some effort to understand your manager and the broader business context, you can reap much larger rewards. Obviously that assumes your boss is not a muppet, but in that case you have bigger problems.

The idea that you just job hop to promos is currently true for the low end, but there's a glass ceiling there. As a hiring manager, someone who got promoted to staff+ in a reputable company with a high bar is an order of magnitude stronger signal than someone who was hired directly into that level at the same company. Also, the current market and comp for software engineers is a result of the decade bull run of big tech. This will not continue forever. I was around during the dotcom bubble as well, and I can tell you, when the music stops you won't wanna be the guy who has a series of two year stints with progressively higher salaries but no close contacts who will fight to hire you.

> Yes, you should look out for yourself first, but that doesn't require taking an adversarial stance to management.

I don't think the OP ever suggested this? Unless I'm missing something, here was the original comment:

> Unless you own the company, it’s not your business. Act accordingly.

"Act accordingly" does not mean "don't ever put any effort in". My interpretation was more along the lines of, "Don't stress yourself out over someone else's company", which is great general advice.

Well this is a reply to a reply, so it's more to clarify where my point was missed.

But to address this directly, I don't think owner/not-owner is the right mental model. Having been on both sides, you don't want to stress yourself out even if you are the owner. What's healthy is to focus on what you can control and try to get the best outcome you can. Using lack of ownership stake or impact as a reason for choosing any behavior just doesn't make sense to me as a first principle.

I realize this may not make sense to people who have spent their entire career in giant corporate moral mazes, but for me it's actually pretty important to have some integrity around my work, regardless of any lack of control and corporate bullshit I have to deal with.

No for profit company is inherently “moral”. Everything is in pursuit of either profit or an “exit”.

I never said or implied to act adversarial toward management. I have respected my last 5 managers and still meet them for lunch when I get the chance. I became friends with two of my former managers after leaving the company.

Let’s talk about the “glass ceiling”. I’ll start off with the corp dev side of the world where most people work.

I know a few guys who are in their late 40s (as am I) who eschewed management and have been moving around between various corp dev jobs for 20 years and have kept their skills up. They have never made more than the mid $100s. They have wives that are working. Their wives are making between $70K and mid to high 100s. They live in a major city in the south. Do you know how far that can go making $250K+ in most cities? You are already well within the top decile of households[1].

Now let’s look on the BigTech side. A returning intern I mentored last year, got a return offer making $150K (consulting department). They can live anywhere in the US. They are already earning more than 92% of individuals in the US.

On a more personal note, I was a senior corp dev bopping around between unknown companies like the first set of developers until 2020. I fell into a role into the cloud consulting department in BigTech. I still work remotely making about what an SDE2 makes. Guess how much I’m stressing about becoming even a “senior consultant”?

Those friends in corp dev could easily get a job as at least an SA working where I work. But they weren’t interested. Once you have “enough” making more money and promotions isn’t that important.

As the 74 implies, I was also around during the bubble. It wasn’t that bad working in regular old corp dev where you were just another employee at a profitable company. Even then I was making $70K in 2000 - twice the individual income at the time.

[1] https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/

I apologize for putting words in your mouth. I was probably associating your post with too many other things I’ve read around here in the past.

That said, I’m still curious about your original intent. How should one act differently as an owner or not an owner?

I realize that this post is old and you may never see the reply. But here it goes.

As an owner, I would work much harder knowing that my work will lead to a more direct impact on outcomes than as an employee.

I have trouble focusing and flexible hours help me avoid wasting work-incapable time on "being at work" (and not doing any). I never billed customers for additional time so was wasting a lot of it on attempts to get some work done, when I couldn't concentrate. Later I was spending additional time on doing actual work.

I'm doing flexible remote for a few years now and never been more productive. Less stress from "I can't concentrate" frustration, tidy backlog, more and better work done in less time. More time for other customers or side projects, hobbies and family/social.

I'm trying not to be indispensable. I'm there when I'm needed but there is no constant "being on call" feeling.

Sounds great. What did you do? How did you structure client communications to reduce this 'being on call' feeling, if I may ask.

That is something I struggle with currently. Working a full-time job and freelancing on the side as well.

I realized SRE is not for me and started grabbing development-like projects and agreements with longer time allotted. I document my work in a way allowing others do changes or continue without me being required to decrypt anything.

The communication question is tricky. It's smooth when it's there but I think I kind of act in a way that accents outside in outside contractor.

I try to soak as little as possible into corporate structures and from the start show that me not being there is not a problem. It's different with every client or company but I always mention upfront focusing issues. Never an issue in EU but some companies in the US looked down on ADHD as some kind of insanity.

I bring results, and in time. In the end it's about being more worth than trouble.

This is inspiring!

I just started as a freelancer month ago and it's hard for me to get out from 9-5 mindset. I'm not yet sure if I'm expected to put in full hours or just do my best. At the beginning I worked full days but past couple weeks I've billed 6-7 hours a day with the same input as before. I'm also having ADD but haven't brought it up. Still the honeymoon phase of the new project so it's quite easy to get immersed with my super focus.

Wow. Cool. Like that approach. Two questions.

- SRE? - outside in outside contractor?

Not sure what these mean.

Thanks an awful lot so far.

Site Reliability Engineering and I meant that I'm acting more like an outside contractor than part of a company ("<insert brand> family"). Making friends etc, just not giving in to corporate cultism.

I also can't always focus (I am human), but that's why I want to have fixed hours. Sometimes the non-focused hours are during work and sometimes during my own time. That's fair.

Hahaha yes. I ended up with a different balance but I respect this. Why would I optimize my days so that my employer gets all of my most focused, productive, engaged time and energy. It's a limited resource. Don't I deserve some of that too? My family?

I started to notice that what is important for me is how I mange my focus hours in a work day. By that I mean hours where I actually generate a product ( writing code, archtectiing etc) as there are days in which I spend just in them meeting and that is exausing.

The reson for this is mostly my feeling of days work done, If I dont do at least 3-4h of higly productive focus time I get this feeling of an incomlete day and tend to get lazier over time.

So, bar the unforseen, I try to have that checked of my list and it was very beneficial in increasing my efficiency but also being ready to endure meetings.

Anyone else feeling odly exhausted after a meeting but not after hours of code?

This is the sort of thing that's just going to be different for everyone.

I personally hate fixed hours. I rest when I need to, work when I have focus. I fit all the aspects of my life in when it's best for me.

Some people seem to thrive on regularity and order, which is also fine.

Indeed. One should always be sceptical about the idea of “one size fits all”. That’s rarely the case.

I always preferred flexible hours and still mostly do, however I have a lot of stuff to juggle in my personal life and I found that just allocating a few hours in 2 or 3 slots in my day helps me achieve more.

So I started doing that. Gym's over, I got my meal, rested for an hour, started feeling energized and I am like "OK, time for a 3-4h work session". I make tea and prepare a 2L of water bottle next to me and I get to it. When I feel even little tired, I stop and rest for a bit, maybe eat again. Rinse and repeat. Works pretty well for me during the last year or so.

So if you're flexible hours advocate I'd say combine both. You might not work 8h in one sitting but it will still pay off huge dividends to your mental health to have allocated time slots for focused work.

I find keeping a regular timetable, even when I don't need to, is beneficial to my mental rythm and body clock. Too much reactive/responsive work puts you on permenant alert.

Personal opinion

Until I'm free (FU money) seems have to stick to 9-5. Especially if you coordinate/work with other people at normal business hours.

I develop/maintain the tech/servers and I was sleeping during business hours one time and something broke... yeah. Panic like "it's broken help" but I was not there.

My problem is my sleep pattern keeps shifting... I'll get back on 9-5 then I overshoot it, I'll force myself to stay up to the next day so I can sleep just before normal time and wake up normally eg. before 9 AM.

The goal will be to not care/not need to abide by 9-5.

Or get another person that is like me so they can cover/replace me.

Business still operates Monday through Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM where I'm from (Northeast US). While I can work anytime, anywhere my clients don't, and therefore I work normal hours. I also have kids so that pretty much decides my schedule for the majority of the year.

I’ve been working remote with flexible hours since 2008. Back when I was younger, I preferred flexible. I’d often sleep in, and work late. Nowadays, I wake up between 4 and 5, start working at 6, and finish around 14. Sometimes this gets moved around a bit, but mostly it’s fixed.

I found that working really early is a key to enjoying remote work. Being done by 2PM lets me get out and do things in daylight regardless of season.

My boss is very different, he starts working between 8 and 12 and finishes late at night. But he tends to take longer lunch breaks. And he technically works in the office, but the distance from his home is only about 10 meters ;)

As someone prone to procrastination, I find keeping a regular routine essential. I tried flexible working but it just became an excuse for doing nothing.

I've seen a lot of new-to-remote engineers get themselves in trouble with this. The ideal case is that you can just work whenever and submit/review any PRs asynchronously.

What happens instead is that they hit a problem and are blocked or spinning their wheels at 2am because nobody else is awake to help them. Alternatively, they toss something over the fence, disappear, and their work is useless for another full day until they address a comment or last-minute issue.

I’ve worked remotely for 9 years now. I’ve worked at jobs with 100% flexible hours for 6 of those. My approach is always changing depending on my life circumstance and the time zones involved.

Your home life (significant other or no? Children? Age of children?) wildly changes the calculus.

I believe my success in flexible remote work is directly a result of my ability to adapt to either scenario.

Fixed hours are convenient in that they allow you to reject non-work demands over work time or work demands over non-work time.

Fixed hours work for me. Obviously it helps with keeping up with colleagues, but it also somewhat automatically puts me in "work mode" when the clock is there. Being "regular" also helps with goodwill from the employer when I now and then need/want to take extreme advantage of the flexible hours.

I work very fixed hours. If anyone needs me outside of that, fine... but I have an "online and working" start and end date, every day.

I've worked in start-ups where people come and go at random hours, including the founders. Consistency hasn't always been treated as a positive trait.

I'm a bit older now, I work in the enterprise, I WFH, I keep my set hours. Some in my current enterprise have "unlimited vacation". They tend to keep very inconsistent working schedules. It's a mixed org in that sense.

It started because I never wanted to miss my gym times. I work out before work but don't alter that schedule for anything.

I very much prefer fixed hours while keeping some leeway. If nothing is planned or extraordinary happens, I like to start at 8-8:30 and then do my normal hours, but I do like the flexibility of starting later when there's something happening in the morning or leave early sometimes. But I think in most teams I've worked I've been one of the more boring "probably available at the default times" person. But I think it 90% boils down to the fact that I like to finish early. If I was just doing 4h per day I could do the "start at noon" thing, but I would probably still try to be done by 2pm - and this is not related to liking or disliking my current job, even if I love it I prefer to finish at 5 over 8.

Depends on how good you are at organizing and how much you have to work to pay for your life.

I have to work 10-20h a week, which is rather easy to distribute around the week.

But some people have to work 40-100h a week, which can get problematic if they don't plan them early on.

I am most productive fixed hours (5 am to around 11am) but I usually work flexible because of ‘life’. So then I get around to 7-8 hours a day instead of doing the same work in 4-6 hours. That is ok for me.

This is really a question of the value of having a routine. Routines are a habit-forming exercise and are useful.

One thing that's often ignored in such discussions is how your habits affect other people. Chances are you're not holed up in a closet coding in a silo. You're dealing with other people. There will be varying needs fo synchronous communication. Your predictability will help other people do what they need to do.

>Chances are you're not holed up in a closet coding in a silo. You're dealing with other people.

I work for myself and having a routine works the best to be productive for me. I suppose it depends on how one handles uncertainty.

I agree with the article. Either you working for yourself or working as employee, it is important to have a rhythm. It is for both mental and physical preparation. For me, I turned all my commute time into exercise, waking up 3 hours earlier, not waking up later than usual when not working and shortene my working hour. It felt so good

If you have a flexible schedule, usually your coworkers / bosses will expect you to be flexible to some degree. Whether that's positive or negative depends on your expectations and your employer's culture. Some companies idea of flexibility is pretty linear and predictable, while others are all over the place.

I've been keeping a list of remote companies who offer flexible hours here if anyone is interested: https://remotehunt.com/remote-companies-with-flexible-workin...

Let me know how to improve this!

This is similar to the common advice of "always get dressed before you start work". Maybe that's helpful to a lot of people, but I get just as much done in pyjamas.

Yes

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