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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

6pm? Man, I’m so glad I didn’t work for you. That is late.

Not if you don't get there until 10 is isn't. But enforcing a late start is a lot harder than enforcing an early finish. What are you going to do, refuse to let people in if they show up early? Besides, sometimes you can't help it. When I was taking BART to work, I had to get to the station before the parking filled up.

It’s still late in absolute terms. Not everything can just shift around to an abnormally late work schedule.

This sort of schedule gives you virtually no free time with kids. Get home, eat, put kids to bed, wake up early because school doesn’t start at 10am, send them to school, wait a bit, leave for work.

We are lucky that things are more flexible now. I don’t blame the manager. It was a different time. But it’s a schedule that doesn’t work well for a lot of people.

I seriously think that the specific range of hours was not at all the point of the example. Would you disagree?

If you're going to nit-pick, my kid starts school at 9am, so I can't start work before 9am. What about remote workers and the example of walking around the office?

I'm pretty sure the example was specifically to note that cutting off their work hours was a successful tactic with respect to leaving them with something to start in the morning, vs letting them finish what they're working on and then have to figure out what/how to get started on in the morning.

Literally the point of the article there, leaving your work unfinished or broken, as it were, so you can just jump in knowing the next thing you were already going to do last night, but forced yourself not to or were forced to not finish.

I’m not not picking, I’m disagreeing with the idea that the relative end time is all that matters. I specifically did not blame the manager in my comment.

It’s really not clear what you’re saying other than that 6pm would be too late for you personally.

As I’ve explained - I picked that time as the latest people were allowed to work in the office. Before I adopted this, people were randomly staying much later.

It’s true that the team was made up of mostly young, unmarried men. I think only one senior person had children. I don’t recall what his needs were, but I wasn’t a hard-ass about not leaving early if people were productive.

And certainly if the team in general hadn’t liked the hours, I’d have negotiated. We moved from 9am to 10am for that reason.

Your problem should not be how early or how late the schedule is - your problem should be that it’s arbitrary across all workers, regardless of circumstance.

We all would prefer to work a particular schedule - we all deserve to be able to negotiate our hours based on necessary overlap with our coworkers preferences.

“I wake up early so all of you have to wake up early” and “I work late so all of you have to work late” are both not nice.

Yeah - I couldn’t enforce a late start, 9am was too early to ask people to come in.

Everywhere I've worked has been 9-6, at least this is 10-6 (the 8 hour day has been a lie my whole life)

I guess I'm lucky! The most restrictive places I've worked set the hours at 8-5, so at least it didn't cut into precious evening time.

This is big generalisation. In South Europe leaving at 6pm is early. Most of the people I know have standup after 10h30 and do 1h lunch breaks.

What do you call South Europe? I'm in Toulouse, here 6pm is late for some people, "normal" for others but nobody would say it's early here.

He's saying that's the latest. You can presumably leave earlier, but you can't stay later.

Are you younger than 25? Because working 100 hour weeks used to be common in startups. Look up stories from the early days of google and Facebook. People lived in the office. It was by choice. No one forces you to do it and plenty of other companies to work for if you wanted balance.

Much older than 25 here. I still do insane hours when I'm starting my own business. But I have never, and would never, work that sort of schedule for someone else's startup (nor would I expect employees of my own startups to do so). If I'm going to kill myself like that, it's going to be to build my dreams, not someone else's.

Would love to connect with you. If you’re interested shoot me an email at me@kmarkov.io

I'm over 50. I work from home now, but when I did have to go into the office, I'd typically show up just before 10:30 standup and head out by 4. And I'd take an hour or two to workout in the one of the fitness facilities on campus in between. My bosses have always been happy with my work and output.

With an hour for lunch, that’s only 2.5-3.5 hours of work a day. Even less factoring in the stand-up.

What role were you able to be successful at while only putting in 2.5hrs of work a day?

Posted as an edit, since YC is doing its inexplicable rate-limiting on replies to this thread:

> Work != presence. In a role in which you don't have to sit in front of a computer, 3h presence could mean 8+ hours of work. … I typically start working when I step into the shower in the morning. … I think that all counts as work hours.

I work from home, but I do not count my showers as working hours. That’s patently ludicrous, and frankly, 2.5-3.5 hours of “presence” a day is unbelievable. Someone putting in so few hours is shirking their work, period.

My work is in software verification, so it’s not as if I don’t need time to think, but I also put in the actual hours required every day to appreciably kick the can forward.

I’d be livid to be stuck working with (and waiting on) someone who considered their shower and commute as working hours.

Work != presence. In a role in which you don't have to sit in front of a computer, 3h presence could mean 8+ hours of work.

I typically start working when I step into the shower in the morning. (I have a typical coder job.) Thinking about what to work on today, remembering the problem I left off yesterday (having parked downhill), etc. It's a great distraction-free environment. Some of the best ideas come there. No slack, no email. No CI pipeline that screams at me. Sometimes I keep thinking after the shower before turning on the laptop. Just sitting on the sofa. By the time I log in, I may have already worked for an hour. Or perhaps two, if I started thinking about work right after waking up. On office days, I typically think work during the commute. There mostly, but often even on my way home. I think that all counts as work hours.

Seconded. My daily walk to Starbucks is my time to meditate on my coding issue of the day, free from distractions of emails, office visitors, and meetings. Many coders I’ve met say a change of scenery can help you solve a problem you were stuck on. Also a chance to say hi to the local crows who appear to recognize me nowadays and don’t fly away when I walk by :)

I work from home, but I do not count my showers as working hours. That’s patently ludicrous, and frankly, 2.5-3.5 hours of “presence” a day is unbelievable. Someone putting in so few hours is shirking their work, period.

My work is in software verification, so it’s not as if I don’t need time to think, but I also put in the actual hours required every day to appreciably kick the can forward.

I’d be livid to be stuck working with (and waiting on) someone who considered their shower and commute as working hours.

The whole concept of salaried roles is that you're being paid to achieve enough to keep your employer happy. If my boss feels like he's getting his money's worth based on my output, it really shouldn't be anybody's business whether I'm achieving that in 3 hours or 12 hours. In fact, if I can produce a satisfactory work output in 3 hours versus somebody else's 8, then I'm not shirking at all, I'm simply better at my job.

And as a knowledge worker, I'm being paid to solve problems, and have and structure the knowledge to solve problems in the future. If I'm solving problems for work in the shower, or on my way to lunch, or while making coffee in the morning, I'm literally being paid to do my job. As a software developer not responsible for operations, literally nothing in my job can't wait 30 minutes. Even if I was at my computer, actively coding, it would probably take around that long for me to get to an appropriate stopping point to respond to a message.

Some people at a previous job used vscode, passed their day clicking at stuff with their mouse, navigating directories via a native file explorer, using GUIs to commit their changes, using windows with no knowledge related to virtual desktop management, automating nothing etc... That wasn't no problem at all : they did their job and at the end of the day they wrote code. But then, with the right tools you could have done what they did in half the time, minimizing all the unnecessary micro-movements with some keybindings and some editor plugins or some really good text editor. Now, if paired with this mechanical mastery you have a good ability to pack related problems/functionalities to implement and are efficient at solving them/implementing them; then you can add some multiplier to the mechanical speed explained in the previous paragraph. That's some weird way to think about this, but let's say the ideal instance of the project requires X lines of code; if you work faster, then you reach a higher level of expertise on the project codebase and by this excess of expertise you gain speed relatively to others which in turn makes you more expert and so on. Except, working "fullspeed" is more tiring than working "normally" and you usually don't want to have a tornado in your team that write 50+ -major changes- commits a day and that cannot cooperate with others because they cannot follow up and are "too slow" to even review those changes. You decide to fire "slow" workers, but then the tornado must work 9+ hours a day to keep up with your expectations and finally burn-out leaving a work that every other member of the team fails to understand, due to too much litterature to read written by some sort of alien. So I'm fine with programming 2 to 4 hours a day, since, as an alien-tornado, I prefer my code to be read, reviewed, and understood by my peers.

Some of us are good at our jobs, use our tools well, and work for the hours we’re paid to work.

You’re not a 10x “alien tornado”, you’re just a fish in a very, very, very tiny pond.

What I am saying is that this conception of work is absurd. The truth is you are hired to build stuff, not for being at an office during X time. I like fishes, that's cute.

I’m hired to spend the time I’ve been paid for building stuff.

If I only dedicate 2.5 hours every day to my work, I’m not meeting that obligation.

If I start accounting for my showers and commute as working hours, I’m being dishonest with both myself and my employer.

Working 2.5 hours per day is enough for me some days to meet expectations. If the person you work for is happy about your output, then should you care ?

If you’re okay working to such low expectations, and do not fear being replaced by automation, then that’s your prerogative.

I would not feel secure in the stability of such an easy job, nor proud of my accomplishments. I also expect that we work in very different stratums in both skill and renumeration.

Somebody got a case of the Mondays!

Well working 100 hours is still common in investment banking. But why focus on these subsets of jobs?

You are actually forced to do it if you choose to work for a place like that.

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