Hacker News Reader

Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I went in prepared to read the "contrarian" take that working long hours can actually be good, but it is just stating the obvious.

Working for over a decade in silicon valley, I have yet to come across a company or group where the majority opinion has been that people must work more than 8 hours a day to succeed. I'm not sure if there ever was a time when overworking was a norm in the industry, but it definitely has not been the case for a while.

Heck multiple companies, including Amazon, are starting to experiment with 4 day work weeks. If you are in a position where you must justify (to yourself, management, or the public) a regular work schedule, save your energy and just quit.

View on HN

> have yet to come across a company or group where the majority opinion has been that people must work more than 8 hours a day to succeed

I've absolutely worked at companies where this was either understood but not spoken or was clearly espoused by leadership. I don't think it's rare at all, at least within a certain crowd of successful companies.

The pattern is very simple: status update and collaboration meetings grow to consume the official workday. Perhaps not 100% cover, but with few and short enough gaps that you can't really work in them. To the extent that your survival or advancement at the company depends on actually doing some work (this is not guaranteed!) you need to do it on your own time.

Yea this comes to the poor alignment point.

I recently left a company where I led a team in building a high quality and very complex product but the job felt super easy.

Now at my new gig I'm managing a new team where the product is garbage and the team is very junior. Neither of these are the cause of my overwhelming workload as the ultimate product is very low complexity. It is instead the horrible alignment of various personalities that results in an inconceivable amount of meetings and daily shifting priorities.

I believe that most management just want people to do more work for the same amount of money. It's less about how many hours are necessary to succeed, it's about "how much more can I squeeze out of my employees."

Those companies that are experimenting with work schedules are also trying to squeeze more out of their employees... just in a different way. They may recognize that causing employees to burn-out is a problem and are looking for ways to optimize the employee output.

It isn't necessarily a bad thing to optimize for employees generating better output. It's only bad when employee morale is completely ignored.

Wait, what Amazon org is doing 4 day work weeks? Not that I have a particularly rough schedule, but it could always get nicer...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com