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Comment by r_hoods_ghost | Hacker News Reader

Because there is a very strong negative correlation between overworking and productivity / quality of work. When I've been line managing people I find that if they work over 40-45 hours a week their actual productivity (as opposed to their self perceived productivity) starts to fall off a cliff after a couple of weeks, so I ask people to only work their hours. I've sometimes had to implement technical measures to enforce this when someone gets too obsessive about their work(and have done it to myself a couple of times!). I've never had to fire anyone for working too much and dragging down productivity in a team but I've come close a couple of times.

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> Because there is a very strong negative correlation between overworking and productivity / quality of work

Working outside of business hours is not the same as overworking.

I have some days packed with meetings and calls, and I actually find it refreshing/relaxing to work on more down to earth matters in the evenings or weekend.

Sometimes I even take vacations just to code on some work-related projects that I find super interesting and wouldn't have enough focused/dedicated time on normal business days.

Overall the whole hard distinction between work and non-work is overstated IMHO. I choose my work places because I genuinely like what I would do there.

I will even go further: If I end up with colleagues that are _not_ genuinely interested in what we do to at least think about interesting problems in their free time, then it's a bozo job, I don't want to work with these people. Nothing great has been achieved by teams where people shut down their brain after 6pm.

Now don't get me wrong, I understand that there are gruntwork places out there, where the job is writing braindead CRUD apps all day long, and I wouldn't want to think about it after-work. But then again, I wouldn't work there on the first place.

I'm 62 and have been in this industry for 40+ years. The BIGGEST regret in my entire life has been the time I spent as a young man working stupid hours on "super important" jobs, and missing seeing much of my kids growing up.

First, very funny that with each comment the author is older. Second, I’m 33 and regret yet. I misunderstood every customer is king with every customer is important and has the right to call me outside of work.

I worked 7 years about 60-70 hours each weak for customers which „are so important“ to work at weekends.

No one will give you the time back you could have spend better by developing yourself, family time or staring your own carrier. But working for a company is most of the times lost time.

"First, very funny that with each comment the author is older."

Yeah, not quite as quick off the mark as you youngsters :-).

I posted a similar comment to yours in 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27065714

Whatever you do with your life, you'll always regret not doing something else.

Grass is always greener.

> I choose my work places because I genuinely like what I would do there.

That's great and so do I, but I still don't see that as reason to work in my free time. I do some personal projects as well, and those are usually even more interesting but also more beneficial for myself. Of course I still think about stuff from work now and then, maybe I see an interesting solution when casually surfing the web, but I'm not going to do more about that than write a note for the next work day.

> Nothing great has been achieved by teams where people shut down their brain after 6pm.

Citation needed

Edit: Also most teams never work on the next exceptional thing that will be remembered in 30 years, so why work as if it was?

    Nothing great has been achieved by teams where people shut down their brain
    after 6pm.

Why do you think that the only options are:

1. Thinking about work

2. Shutting your brain down

If I want to go hack on some Clojure after work, when the day job is in Python, then what's wrong with that?

> If I want to go hack on some Clojure after work, when the day job is in Python, then what's wrong with that?

That is of course perfectly fine, but to me that represents a not-so-ideal fit between your interests and your job.

Realistically, you will spend more engineering time on your job than on your hobby project.

From my experience, that means my out-of-working-hours projects tend to be driven by needs or limitations I encounter at work.

I then find it more optimal to embrace and leverage that relationship between during-working-hours and out-of-working-hours projects.

This is the best of both worlds, you get work on more green field projects, have flexibility to choose what you work on, under the constraint that it solves something for your job, but under the assumption that your side projects are anyway often inspired by work, it's a fit by construction.

Let me give you an example:

Some years ago I used to manage some high performance computing cluster, with storage nodes attached to compute nodes as the jobs were very IO intensive. We used glusterfs, which at the time got acquired by RH and maintenance stopped. Me and a coworker started to dig into glusterfs to solve our issues. We spent months reading the code on our free time, reading papers on distributed filesystems, fixing issues in our fork (hoping that RH would pick up maintenance after the transition). That's an example of an out-of-working-hours project, inspired by work, that got used at work, and thus counts as work, while still being very interesting.

This is just an example, but overall I kept that mentality and have been doing that kind of things for more than a decade. You just need to find the right job where you have 1) interesting problems to solve that inspires you to do more 2) the freedom to push your projects 3) the drive to work out of office hours to prove that your projects are worth it and push them.

All the colleagues I have respect for do the same. And someone that does not have this spirit, for me, is not someone I want to work with.

    That is of course perfectly fine, but to me that represents a
    not-so-ideal fit between your interests and your job.

If the day job were Clojure, I'd be hacking in Python in my spare time. Or some other language (Rust, Haskell, etc.). Or not even hacking at all, but reading a book, or doing something else. The entire point of having hobby projects for me is that they're not what I'm working on during the day. They're an opportunity to broaden my horizons.

    Me and a coworker started to dig into glusterfs to solve our
    issues. We spent months reading the code on our free time, reading
    papers on distributed filesystems, fixing issues in our fork
    (hoping that RH would pick up maintenance after the transition).

That just sounds like a lot of unpaid overtime to me. It sounds like you enjoyed it, but I'd find that experience absolutely miserable. Working intensely on a project is great, but I need time where I'm thinking about something completely different, otherwise I burn out fast.

The difference is a a single question: “do you have family/kids?” This is also the main reason for ageism in the industry, where employers prefer to hire younger people.

I love programming, but I love my family even more.

I have a wife and a kid.

Do you spend 100% of the your non-working hours with them?

I manage to have a job, spend time with my wife, my kid, learn guitar, code & think on my free time, and I run 3 times a week.

I don't watch TV though ;}

How many hours per night do you sleep and how much per week do you spend on each of those listed endeavours? No attack, just curious

I sleep around 7h per night, sometimes 8h.

I do 1 to 3 runs per week, between 45m and 1h15 each.

I have a guitar teacher coming 2h/week, the rest of my practice is random: could be from 0 to 6h per week.

Since I basically WFH 100%, I have no commute time, which helps a lot.

And that's why I only work about half the day during 9-5, and the other half after 6pm. Because little kids don't disappear from 9-5pm and I like spending time with them.

> Sometimes I even take vacations just to code on some work-related projects that I find super interesting

> what we do to at least think about interesting problems in their free time, then it's a bozo job

> Overall the whole hard distinction between work and non-work is overstated IMHO

Look, I continue to code and study in my free time, and I am still passionate about learning SoftEng and CompSci fundamentals, but the shit you're saying sounds super-sad and I definitely wouldn't want to work with someone who takes vacations to work on _work_ problems, either.

I'll take a seasoned and passionate engineer who has a family (even though I don't have one!) and has to work around that any time of day. In the vein of what GP was saying, bounds on limited resources like time can produce very effective work habits and conversely, seeing time as an unbounded resource (which is a phallacy anyway) sounds like the recipe to have a culture of sociopaths.

You’re either:

- management pretending to be a wagie as a psyop

- extremely privileged and never had to grit your teeth to pay the bills

- going to have a rude awakening when the crop of younger millennials and Gen Z hits your workplace and you realize these bright young things with dreams and desires are only in software because it’s one of the few lucrative careers left in this proto-fascist shithole of a dying civilization.

This is pretty extremist. If you think this is proto-fascist, you must not be aware of what fascism is like. As far as a “shithole” or “dying” civilization, I mean what is an example from of civilizations that are tremendously better or more “living?” I would agree that leftist culture is pretty depressing but I GenZ is a good example of the kind of generation that subsequent generations will react against, though it takes time. As far as Gen Z “hitting the workplace,” the kind programmers you’re talking about don’t seem to know a lot about computing other than React and mashing up APIs; I’m not sure “older” engineers that know things need to be that concerned.

Income inequality and social stratification have both increased dramatically in my lifetime, and QoL and resilience of various systems necessary for civilization have decreased.

As far as fascism goes, as you say, these things need time… but I’m sure a yet unwritten history book can enlighten you, right next to the passage on the gen Z backlash.

This is not really relevant, I was merely provoking emotional response for rhetorical effect (a useful and effective tool in the business/realpolitik toolkit)

And I’m sure these younger engineers are happy collecting their paycheques, scheming their schemes and thinking of what to disrupt next with all the free time they have because they roll their eyes at guff like the parent comment. Maybe that’s how we can all be happy.

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