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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

When I was working before my retirement I routinely had to work 60 hr weeks since I was lead (went to every meeting) and wrote code full time along with my team. Most of our projects started with a hard deadline (estimates were only used for budgeting, the time was predetermined) and constant change was endemic during every project. No way this would fit in 32 hr weeks. Yet we still had sprints (which assumed 40 hrs of effort) and burndown charts (which is antiagile and idiotic given all the changes). The real issue is institutional insanity, assuming you can direct engineers like they were machines.

Until you fix the institution you can't change the hours.

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Absolutely. Almost every org treats engineers as an expendable resource. They do this because they fear the alternative, which requires treating people with respect, because those people are valuable to your organization.

You and I have very different career experiences. I have worked for 5 Fortune-100 technology companies over the past 20 years and never once did I feel like I was an expendable resource. Outside one particular experience, every one of my managers (Directors, Sr Directors) treated everyone with respect and honesty. Furthermore, they were genuinely concerned about health and family issues (family health, PTO, etc). Even in my current role, my company goes out of its way to provide a solid work-life balance (additional PTO for COVID, extra volunteer time, etc).

I hope others on HN have had the opportunity to work in places such as these...

Things have changed in the past decade for engineers. In the 00s, I felt expendable at every job, even at places that suffered after an exodus engineers. In the 10s, I felt necessary, but fungible. And in the 20s, I feel important and that my skills are distinct.

I'm sure this varies a lot for people working in different sectors, but I think every sector has seen the perceived importance of technology engineering increase over time.

Wow! I hope to one day work where you did and to have similar experiences. That sounds great.

>They do this because they fear the alternative

they do it because they can. Engineers have the tendency to be overly individualistic and ignore collective bargaining which is the primary means by which people can gain better working conditions. As long as people are willing to put in those 60 hours to climb up the next career rank ahead of their peers it's gonna be that way.

If you are organized you can call their bluff. But if more than a couple of people defect and keep insisting they can make the unreasonable deadlines, then those people get attention because they are saying what management wants to hear.

One of my goals in life is to get better at identifying (read, admitting/accepting) when the team has defectors and finding someplace else to apply my skills. But the few times it has actually worked are a mighty incentive to try again, even when I should know better.

Agreed. The situation you describe is one where constraints do not exist, which is cultural. You assume input, say 40 hours (input is not productivity) and keep piling on work, responsibilities and unrealistic deadlines where workers feel forced to put in as much as 60 hours. Which is again input, not output.

Where I work, we work output-based. We work in sprints where the amount of work that can be done in a sprint is fixed, expressed as velocity. This capacity is a hard constraint and immutable (unless you hire additional people).

The business is free to spent that velocity as they please, but they have no say over velocity itself. They also have no say over input (hours) or estimates (they're not qualified to do so).

These hard constraints are a thing of beauty, it forces serious prioritization. Call me old and cynical, but in my 25 years in IT, I'd say at least 80% of what gets build is bullshit. Untested brain farts from higher-ups that have no tangible benefit to any customer or user. Hence I fail to be impressed by almost any "priority" or "deadline", exceptions aside.

You always have more power than you think, and if you really don’t it’s probably time to move on.

The only thing I support more than WFH is my competitors working 20% less.

If they're doing this to compete for talent, go ahead by all means. I suspect they need to do something like this also because they're a UK SaaS company (so lower wages to start) serving the low-end of the non-profit market (price sensitive buyers). And they don't have the enterprise features to compete with Salesforce and CRM for the high-end segment.

The goal is to keep expanding these trials until labor law ratchets the work week down for everyone to 4 days. It will take time, but it will happen.

If you as a freelancer want to work five days a week (or more), by all means, spend your life in such a manner. The rest of us work to live, not live to work.

Laws mostly do not apply across borders, and many of your competitors are in other countries. How do you think you can compete if your competitor's employees work 25% more?

You disadvantage foreign firms with cross border financial/policy mechanisms, in the same way you encourage better labor and environmental practices for work outsourced abroad. This is a well worn policy path.

A race to the bottom can avoided with laws and regulation.

Sad that you call your colleagues "competitors". I guess you also missed the main point of the initiative, which is to have the same productivity in one day less. So your extra day of work effectively does nothing to the bottom line.

In case it does, all power to you. I think it's fair game that when people work more, they earn more. Nothing wrong with that.

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