At Xamarin I left every day at 5pm
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But in terms of actual productivity, I observed lots of activity and little actual achievement. What buoyed their productivity was the technology of a freshly rebuilt economy and industry post-WW2, which, coupled with a few innovative ideas, gave Japanese industry a powerhouse advantage to the point that it almost didn't matter what the workers did. They could have worked 2 hours a day and still had the same output (not the factory line workers, of course).
When the economy went sour in the 90s, there was no change in work ethic; people still worked late into the night, and still had the same levels of activity with the same levels of achievement, but the technological industrial advantage had dissipated over the years and they were no longer competitive. Same input, less output.
Long hours work against you. We've studied this to death, and the results are clear.
Japanese lack of productivity stems from a lot of hard-headedness from their management. Anything that disrupts this is welcome in my book
Despite the fact this is actually illegal in the "host country" they still did it with no overtime paid(or claimed) . I had many Japanese friends in this company over the years and I knew they would much prefer to be off at 5pm as we were, but every time we talked about it it turned out they are 100% powerless to change it. The company not only provides a prestigious job (which was extremely important), but also provided housing in the host country, a visa, good schools for the kids etc. Additionally, every time we discussed it I got an impression they really have it easy here in comparison to how much they would have to work back in Japan. So all those people really didn't want to be sent back.
On the rare occasion when I had to work on a weekend and overnight, HR contacted me asking me to fill the overtime form :-o
I write this not as a complaint. I considered it one of my best jobs and if not that I wanted to be in a different role I would still be there, but even now years later I still remember having this weird feeling of there being a very real discrimination against other people on the basis of culture and not being able to do anything about it.
The time was paid, though. It wasn’t “time and a half,” like in the US, but people were paid for the time.
Managers weren’t paid for extra hours, but engineers were.
If we take this statement in the link:
> the intention of the Plaza Accord was to correct trade imbalances between the U.S. and Germany and the U.S. and Japan
Then:
a) Why were Britain and France interested and why are they completely omitted from the article?
b) Why didn't Germany end up in the mire like Japan?
It seems to me that Japan's officials agreed to something that either didn't suit its economy or the management of its economy was subsequently mishandled (not hard to believe given the ~25 years of finance scandals that are linked to the heart of government[1] - it's not hard to imagine things weren't any better in the preceding 15). As such, I'd also be very interested to know what OP was referring to because I'd find it hard to believe if it was the Plaza Accord.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/17/business/international-bu...
Apparently overtime is... included in advance taking the average for the company, so people feel obliged to do it since technically they already got paid.
It's basically like that team-building exercise with a dozen people trying to move a broomstick down when each person is holding it with one finger. The default reaction is to send it flying.
In any case 40% of Japanese workers are part-time - I've met one - she lived in Italy and her line of work was writing articles about life there and she couldn't pick up more hours even if she wanted to. She said it was increasingly common for people to be employed like that.
It's actually 45% of Japanese women workers. The percentage of men being part time is much lower around 12%. A big reason why your friend struggles finding anything else is that she's a woman and that Japan is an intensely sexist society.
While I get what you are trying to say, but this is not always true. There have been times where I pulled up all nighter and produced good work, specially during college or some project I am deeply invested in. But similar thing can't be achieved in a big org though. If I am expected to work for more than 5-6 hours a day to meet deadline in the office, the quality of work invariably declines.
John Carmack also defended working long hours, and admittedly he is one of the most productive developer.
“We have an emergency, the service is screwed, we really need it not to be”
“We have to deliver by the end of the week but we haven’t finished testing everything, we need some extra effort for the next couple of days to fix and validate as things come up”
These can work, in my experience, but it can’t become routine and you have to be prepared for a higher than average error rate from your people.
Exactly this. From first hand experience, when forced to deliver under time pressure, I cut corners.
This means, I might be able to deliver the feature. But the tradeoff is it adds technical debt and physical stress, which needs to be dealt with afterwards.
Furthermore, if you have a family, it also takes a toll on family life.
I'm an hourly laborer who thinks computers are fun and free software unixen are most fun, which is how I ended up finding HN. I've worked a number of manufacturing and agricultural jobs. Right now I make car parts.
I don't have a choice. I check the calendar on the wall and work the hours it says or I'm fired. I work 60-70 hours a week. This is normal. The workforce is stretched thin as you can make similar money fucking around with your phone on the clock at Walmart, and bargaining power of unskilled (nee essential) labor is at an all time low.
You tech types have the best bargaining power of anyone, crazy pay, nice working conditions out of the elements in hazard free offices, and you will lose it all if you don't stand in solidarity.
At manufacturings peak in America people like me had good middle class lives but as it waned and unions were busted and we suffered title deflation (opposite of entry level coder being an engineer, machinists became operators, foremen became team leaders) quality of life and ability to dictate terms of employment faded.
Someday tech will have it's 80s, vc will stop chasing the next apple or MS, engineers will become coders, sysadmins will become IT techs, wages will stagnate, and if you're all working till 8 it will go from extra to expected.
Draw lines, stand in solidarity, set expectations, have a talk with coworkers who are pussies doing extra for nothing that they're fucking up the solidarity thing.
There are the same kinds of labor cheats done on hourly laborers, but you can measure the crime and get a significant damages pay out (at least in some states) if you contact a labor attorney.
If you are a software engineer (or even, a "coder", which I think is an incredibly apt analogy for OP to mention), does your work calendar currently say "code this week for 65 hours or else" ?
A company that pays 70 hour a week worker is paying for at least 85 hours of time or can be sued and the worker must not have any more appropriate offers that the employer tricked them out of taking.
Tell OP that. Or, maybe you could heed his warning about the future of the software industry.
My issue is mostly wage stagnation and lesser benefits, as well as the lack of security, and the way the trend isn't showing any signs of reversing leaving me worried if gen Z is even going to bother and an entire way of life won't disappear along with 'Made in the U.S.A', as well as a warning that tech field might be next up for optimization of labor costs if VCs go off to chase the next thing and CRUD stops printing money.
I don't understand this. "Stretched thin" means there are few of you. If you can make similar money in easier work at Walmart, why wouldn't you do that? Not looking to be oppositional, I just don't understand your point here. I would imagine that what you do is in fact skilled labor that should pay better than Walmart clerking.
I'm guessing most developers would prefer keeping their dev job rather than doing easier work at the same pay in a call center.
Edit: To make the analogy even more direct, I think the majority of engineers would even prefer to keep a $140k engineering job, even if Walmart were paying $140k to be a cashier.
In that case yes. I could use that 33% reduction in consumed time to work freelance developer jobs that won't endanger my livelihood if I decide to quit. If anything I would be angry at the factory workers who stay for the same pay since there are better job alternatives that could be used as bargaining chips.
I think in context you can assume OP means the people are being overworked because they are perceived as replaceable.
> I just don't understand your point here. I would imagine that what you do is in fact skilled labor.
OP likely does do skilled labor, but the employer has evolved to efficiently exploit it, by which I mean deprive these workers of adequate compensation. Part of that has been classing the labor as "unskilled."
>If you can make similar money in easier work... Nerd sniping. Some people were just born with a wrench in their hand and need to be solving practical problems. I just can't work jobs like that without being bored out of my mind and miserable.
>I would imagine that what you do is in fact skilled labor it should pay more... Buddy I can MIG TIG and stick weld, I'm a mechanic, I've worked as a qualified person on 480V three phase, and low voltage controls, as well as hydraulics and pneumatics. I can drive 10 ton trucks stick, take apart and put a motor back together, and locate the clitoris with only a bubble level, ruler, protractor, line out chalk, twine, pocket calculator, and a stud finder. Imagine what you want. Macroeconomic principles are of little comfort in the real world, where social forces and political forces collide and such simple game theory doesn't hold up.
The company can pay less and ask more, paying less and asking more has become common and nobody wants to rock the boat and lose the immense power gap between labor and management by competing on the basis of wages to attract talent. Besides, a lack of manpower means you can just go somewhere else. The world supply chain, even during covid, is so robust at scale that physical location means little, but relative economic wealth and power means a lot.
I'm not bitching, I eat three meals a day and pay rent. But tech has it good and I see a lot of people not realize how much that can change overnight. I expect a great deal more people will work in tech in the west, and less at my kind of job, so I'd like to see workers realize that they have to entrench the current available quality of life, for the future generations. Because the people in manufacturing through the 50s-70s didn't entrench the quality of life in such a way it could survive financialization and lean strategies of the 80s.
Sometimes a good worker in a factory can make more money, or a plumber, electrician, etc that has his small business will make more money, a truck driver will make (a lot) more money, etc.
Are entry level mechanical engineers called mechanics? This assumes that software engineering is (only) about code, which is false.
> Someday tech will have it's 80s, vc will stop chasing the next apple or MS, engineers will become coders, sysadmins will become IT techs, wages will stagnate, and if you're all working till 8 it will go from extra to expected.
Wages may stagnate at some point because supply may match demand. However, why would job titles deflate? The skills you refer to are not comparable to unskilled factory work.
This regularily got me into fights with other execs and CEO who said "Stephan, when I go through technology at 8pm there is no one there, don't we know we're a startup?"
When a friend and I was on business in Japan we wanted to meet someone at 11pm at night. We were waiting in the business complex and lots and lots of people were leaving at that time (11pm!), then we got a call he could not leave. What a sad working culture.
Make that more like 5 weeks. The legal minimum here in the UK is 33 days (well, it might be 34 next year but we'll see), which is 5.5 weeks. Every job I've had as a professional has had more leave than that, usually 38-40 days (7.5-8 weeks), and in the last 3-4 years I've also had a weeks office closure during the summer. The feeling of taking a weeks break and coming back and you _not_ having to catch up on what's changed since you left is incredible.
Do you think this is a carryover from the 1980s, when Japan was a world-leader in semiconductors and personal electronics? Is the thinking that this culture was the reason? And an attempt to return to the glory days?
Or is it more of a social thing? With peer pressure?
As in someone at director level or even HR would come down on the _manager_ for allowing this. The view is either the employee is under delivering or the team is under resourced and in both cases it's a _manager_ problem to be solved.
This is something I never understood in US companies, I mean considering all the concerns with liability and lawsuits everyone seems pretty chilled about squeezing 20 hour days from employees.
I'd just leave. What can he do? He can't beat me up and force me to stay :D
He hated me very openly though, and refused to write a recommendation letter after the investors pulled out and closed his shitty startup.
But it makes me furious when those same people want to know why the rank and file aren’t as “dedicated” as they are.
CTO has 30% of the equity. The ‘founding engineer’ they hired has 1.5%. The next few engineers they hired have 0.5%. Pretty obvious why one of those people is OK to sleep at the office and the others have better shit to do!
I find there's like 4 good hours in the day for actual valuable creative work. The rest can be useful for grunt work, but there's rarely so much critical grunt work that one should exhaust themselves.
But it's meant as positive. "Only until 5pm!". Rush hour in my city on Fridays is like at 14 (2pm). Work 37.5h weeks, but how I spend those hours are mostly up to me as long as I partake in meetings scheduled between 9 and 15.
Yes I did some long days occasionally but I did them because I felt it was needed and because it fit my personal life on that day. Not because someone told me it was needed.
Beyond that and it's indicative of a failure of planning, to which my response is "Do not attempt to make your failure of planning my problem."
4.30 is my normal leave time now without kids though (8-4.30 with a half hour unpaid lunch break is my schedule for 40h/week).
Kids sports practice etc regularly starts at 5PM or even 4PM. Being a parent is just fundamentally incompatible with working past 6PM, at least where I live.
If someone else doesn't understand the boundaries between work and personal life, and tops it off with trying to guilt trip you, then that is on them and whatever corporate/VC kool-aid they are drinking.
You can only wish that this is something they will come to realize (hopefully not too late in their life to avoid unnecessary regret).
Before you ask your employees to do overtime you should find out what their typical day looks like. I have mostly worked for startups during my career, and all the wasted time and interruptions still blow my mind.
To make an analogy, it's like releasing a game with average graphics that a powerful GPU struggles to render, and blaming GPUs for low FPS instead of your poor software. You should optimize your game before you ask players to overclock their cards.
Primarily, the employees are pushing for working overtime. There are a few reasons:
1. Many just don't do anything at all in the extra hours (remote workers are especially prone to this) 2. Some people want the overtime pay, and do not care about the reduced productivity 3. Some people just use the time to learn new stuff, I must admit I did that myself as a developer. Though, I always learned stuff relevant to work. 4. Some people do not have much life outside work, been there myself
Very seldom is it management who really pushes for overtime in mye experience. IMO the scale at which employees "fuck" employees, is much larger than the other way around. Context: I am in my mid twenties and have employed around 50 people in the nordic countries+
* someone posts the picture of a coworker sleeping in the office at twitter, saying "that's how things work at elon twitter"
* sleeping coworker replies "yeah we're awesome we're doing great things, hashtag SleepWhereYouWork"
* Former Github and Xamarin CEO comments "yeah that's how we do it in the Silicon Valley!"
* Former Xamarin CTO says "Duh at Xamarin I left every day at 5PM to set the tone of the company about work life balance, and people followed my lead"
Edit: fixed some stuff as for the following comments
It's sad and repulsive that there are people with such a cultish devotion to capitalism that they admire this behavior and culture.
Well run companies do all nighters, and aren't so cultishly devoted to a "work life balance" that implies 4 hour workdays on slack.
Well run companies also understand sustainability. Max effort will need to be demanded to exceed current capacity, but it is important not to rely on it as a crutch to get past poor design, poor process, or other management misfires.
This is something games are seeing now, most of the industry luminaries cut their teeth in an era where the whole game fit on one disk. They assume that the weekend long anger coding to bash that one bug is the same as what they're asking their company to do.
Well run companies have adequate resourcing so that staff don't need to work all night
Think of the holidays for retail - do you pay 2 to 3x the employees year round to support the November to December shopping season?
If you did that, you would be very silly.
Conditions will frequently demand that an "adequately resourced" company has to run overtime to take advantage of an opportunity, beat a competitor to a new feature, or other such situations. This happens all the time.
I made the comment about slackers because having moved from retail to military to tech, the amount of privilege shown unironically by tech employees on "crunch" is borderline unbelievable.
I think there's a valid point hidden in your insane comment: there is a competitive advantage to abusing your staff, so it's really up to governments to force companies not to. Things like reasonable holiday allowance. Good statutory sick pay. The EU working time directive (which was sadly made optional but it at least set the tone).
All of that is missing in the US which is presumably why companies there don't hesitate to push people as hard as they want.
That’s actually the law in some countries. It’s not really enforced much, but the idea is that you have a weapon to sue your company if they prevent you from taking 2 weeks off once a year.
I don't think the people that are successful working close with Elon Musk are the type that need constant validation. In my experience of having occasional day-to-day interactions, he's awkward but means well. He's just laser focused on solving problems, and it never stops. Sometimes the solution is to pay for an employee's laser eye surgery on a whim. Sometimes the solution is to fire a dozen people.
Are you specifically asking about financial compensation? There was the occasional token salary bump, bonus or stock option grant. Nothing to get too excited about. We would all laugh/cry about getting 0.7% raises and then go to the bar. I was never concerned about the details of my compensation while there, and I didn't spend any energy worrying about it. I just focused on making space ships. Financially and career-wise, it's embarrassing how positively fruitful my time there was. By far the best choice I could have made coming out of school.
Taking a year of parental leave is just a normal thing in most developed countries.
There's also secondary markets, where people are willing to pay a premium for any shares they can get their hands on. That's not in the company's best interest, though, and so it is discouraged.
I believe Elon needs SpaceX to be incredibly profitable in order to fund his Mars ambitions. I think his point is that the company's finances are a means rather than an end?
I'm not bragging about paternity leave, I was responding to the parent post's claim that I sacrificed quality family time and would regret it. The opposite is true; my time spent working there has had a compounding effect on my finances and career opportunities. I've had the luxury of working on my own terms for many years, on meaningful projects intrinsically worth my time. My memories of working at SpaceX grow fonder with age.
And you know what? Mostly it wasn't worth the time I could have spent elsewhere.
If all-nighters will make you rich, by all means, pull em. And then once you're rich, STOP.
But if all you're doing is spending your time and youth and energy to make somebody else rich and don't get rich yourself, you're a sucker. And if that person expects you to do 30 hours at a time at your workstation so they can get rich, and you do it, they're a scumbag and you're their bitch.
Don't be anybody's bitch. Don't chase after that carrot dangling from a stick in front of you forever. I wasted so many hours, days, years of my life putting my heart and soul and guts into startups that nobody remembers, that mostly never made any mark or ripple anywhere, and I never got rich doing it.
Now I get up at 8am, I start working at 9am, I peace the fuck out at 5pm and I don't think about work code until 9am the next morning. On weekends and evenings I write my own code, and I hang out with my wife and my cat and I watch old movies.
That sounds like old people shit when you're 22 and all this stuff is new and you think that if you just put in enough crunches, that sempai or the Money Gods will notice you and throw some your way. And yet there are millions of us in this industry, and a lot of us are well paid, but most of us don't ever get rich and we damn sure don't change the world. We just make useless crap that makes rich dudes richer that will be utterly forgotten by history, and that's not worth giving up your youth and energy and life to.
I know most of y'all won't believe me. That's how this whole youth/middle age thing works, right? Stupid old man who never got successful grousing at the kids.
But man, I'd give anything to have not done most of the work I've ever done for other people, and spent that time wandering penniless around the world instead. Or had better luck early enough to make enough money to stop working a long time ago. But the key word there is "luck". That's almost always all it is.
Go home at 5, man. Trust me. The code and the capitalism will still be there in the morning, but that great meal, that night of partying, that mysterious stranger across the bar? They may not be.
Not once has my overtime paid off in any sense - not even been recognised, costing both my physical and mental health.
Never again.
> Not once has my overtime paid off in any sense - not even been recognised, costing both my physical and mental health.
I hard disagree. In an environment where the norm, and expectation is to leave on time, a _very rare_ overtime ask can make a significant difference. There's a difference between an occasional ask of overtime, and a culture of the team working 50+ hour weeks. In that world, the difference between a 50 hour and a 55 hour (i.e. 2 evenings of staying later than normal) is minimal, and doesn't pay off.
Some of my biggest successes in my career have been because of overtime, a very occasional weekend, but they are the absolute exception, not the norm.
While your point is valid, your opener could use some work.
Wasn't worth it.
If you read this fresh from graduation and you think people give you opportunities, and “chances” by working for free, or intern stuff, or low ball wages with the “promise” of upgrading… skip that stuff. To people just starting out and anyone : you are a business. More money needs to come in than energy wasted and going out. Your year ends balance should be positive, both monetary and energy wise. At the end of the year, not just 3 years into a startups future that might never arrive.
I worked for a new business once, and they whinged because "everyone else stays past 5:30 but you always leave on time". I just replied "it's not my business". They never said anything again.
However, that established clear boundaries. Once - and only once - I went in on a weekend for some out of hours work (a database migration or something), and in the following pay review they gave me a large raise specficially citing that I worked when they needed me. If I'd always provided free labour I doubt I'd have got the same raise.
The funny thing was, they asked me once what they could do to improve things and I suggested flexitime. They said they'd get back to me.
A few days later they came back and said, "we're going to be honest. Everyone else out there stays past 5:30 for nothing. We're not legally allowed to only give you flexitime, so we won't give it to anyone since they already work for free". Fair enough. My colleagues trying to earn brownie points screwed us all over by providing free work.
Boundaries are important. Don't let bosses treat you like a mug.
But even if I was offered paid overtime, and at a rate higher than my regular salary, I wouldn't work overtime. I'm in my mid-50's and Monday to Friday, 9am-5:30pm is enough time to spend doing work. I have hobbies and interests outside of work that are far more interesting.
Wait, what?? Every single of my employment contracts had a line like this, but I always assumed it was paid work. I can't imagine it meaning "from time to time you may be required to work additional hours for free". In fact all the contracts I remember that had this sentence also had an "overtime" section where there were things like:"if you work over 10h on a weekday every additional hour is at overtime pay rate of 1.5x, all hours worked on Saturday are at 1.5x rate, Sundays and Bank Holidays at double rate". That was pretty much standard in many companies I worked at. So not only the contract stated those additional hours were paid. They were worth more than the "normal time" beyond a certain amount of time worked per day.
In addition one company I worked at even had a section in there that if I work more than 24h straight there must be at least 24h of rest. If I work Sundays I have an option of taking Sunday double pay or having a weekday off no later than 14 days later if I want. Etc. Etc. Good companies exist. Anyone miserable in their work, please do look for a better place. Unfortunately many people just don't like changing jobs. My own sister was "stuck" in a miserable job for 5 years because I couldn't convince her to put real effort into looking for another one.
However, having said all that I have to say I had ocassional situations for various reasons when I didn't claim overtime. There are times one can benefit more by not asking for overtime.
For example I once had a job at a small family run business with a profit share bonus at the end of the year. That bonus was worth a lot more to me than throwing a wrench in the works by declining to work on some emergency in a middle of a night for sake of a few hours of overtime here and there. And during my time there the business went from employing 4 people in a basement to 30 people in a shiny new "office unit" in a business park. I had a big share in this success and I was compensated well there.
Then another job was in a large company that paid me more than double of what I made before as a normal daily rate. I think there was an office move on a weekend once when I never claimed overtime for because my request for an overtime form were met with silence. It was worth more to me to "give up that overtime" than raise stink for my manager risking my contract will not get renewed.
So my point is, you should decide if you want to be paid overtime. Is your free time worth double the money to you or is it unsellable? Perhaps you have family you prefer to spend time with? If you do, look for a job that treats you well.
That is why one of the worst things that can happen to an economy IMO is unemployment. I'll take inflation every day over unemployment. Sure inflation consumes your savings, but high rate of unemployment makes work miserable for everyone. I still remember when we used to have 20% unemployment in the 90s in Poland. Back them the power dynamic was such that when your boss asked you to work overtime you didn't even ask for an overtime form. You pretended to be glad the company offers you great opportunity to spend time with them on a weekend instead of being "bored at home". Seriously, I had colleagues say this to me with a straight face.
Then Covid came along in 2020 and my freelance work dried up. I reluctantly and fearfully started looking for full time work and was lucky to join a company that takes good care not to burn out their staff. Been here now for a decent amount of time and rarely work more than my contracted 37.5 hours a week, and it's fully remote.
> Don't be anybody's bitch. Don't chase after that carrot dangling from a stick in front of you forever.
This. I was made promises about being "looked after" by the last company, especially around the time it was up for sale. It was all bullshit.
In the end, work your contracted hours then go home/switch off. Don't let your life be held hostage by companies that expect you to burn both ends of the candle. Burn out is no fun.
What is rich? 100k? 5m? 100m? I know what your answer will be: "you decide what is rich". Well, maybe the people who work a lot want to be a lot more rich than you.
I doubt anyone will trade becoming rich for meeting mysterious strangers at bars and partying at night. Both these things involve drinking, and really it's just a drug out of misery.
Ultimately, your gripe is not that you worked a lot but just that you didn't make money out of it. Now, you are just fantasizing and romanticizing being penniless (without ever being in such a situation).
Life is for living. Whatever that means to you, not your boss.
Even when my boss is me, working out what life means is tough. It won't be found in toil for others.
Does it mean Nat thinks that not having crunch time at Xamarin was a mistake?
(Maybe they each need to resurrect the apology cards!)
I doubt he can offer rational and impartial arguments.
The times I worked past my hours were for team dinners/events, problems that piqued my curiosity, and large launches/conferences. All which had me in a bed at a reasonable time.
I'm sure they are savoring this moment when they can "put the peasants on their place" but if they keep pulling the rope they are going to find themselves with a tech union that will grind their businesses to a halt forever
But. This shouldn't ever be the norm, and it shouldn't ever be expected as the norm. It should be exceptional circumstances that have people working at 150%, not business as usual.
If it's business as usual making this happen, there's something badly wrong with the business.
In my humble, 40-hour-a-week, love-life-more-than-work-have-a-family opinion.
<3
I don't know if you can make a more obvious example as to why the elite needs to hang.
it just makes logical sense. If you want more productivity, have two shifts.
but at some point people become anti-productive. that takes many forms, some in terms of mistakes that cost time, accidents, or just faffing about and not actually doing work
I don't believe in overworking, I believe in steering the work in the wrong direction. Staying at your desk just to attend a meeting, working without feeling like you are contributing much, these things are productivity killers, not the other way around IMHO
All I am saying is: at some days I work 15 minutes longer and on others 15 minutes shorter. Same work quantity with the difference that I stop working at a meaningful point and not let everything drop at a fixed point. I buffer a bit to my private duties (kids in my case), so I do not have stress in any direction.
At least for men, I feel we need to distance ourselfes from the paradigm of being valued only as disposable providers.