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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

You have a programmer who works for 13 hours a day. That programmer does three days in a row of 13 hours. That's 39 hours, not including any travel etc.

Give / force them some time off before they can start another block of 40 hour work.

"Flow" is mentioned so often, but I'd really like to see some good quality research to back it up. For sure people feel like they're in a zone, but how much of the code produced in that time is great quality, and how much is error-strewn garbage?

The need for standard weeks is still pretty strong, but that's not insurmountable problem. Really, when people talk of weeks they mean "continuous chunk of work with no 48 hour break".

A bigger problem is making people think that 60 hour weeks is normal, or honourable, and that a 40 hour week is lazy or disloyal or unproductive or harmful to the company. That's not true, and it's possibly leading to early death of some people. It's certainly making some people miserable.

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This. My experience in the software industry has generally been positive (aside from stints at start-ups)--I've been judged on the quality of my work, and my ability to produce given reasonable time lines. When I dabbled at an interactive agency, though, all of that was thrown out the window--the print folks, especially, where just expected to work 10-12 hours a day, and it would be a matter of pride to pull an all-nighter to meet a silly deadline. At one point, the agency's owner had a mural put in a common area--it was a comic about a superhero who could manage to do anything with a ridiculous time crunch. That's when I decided that industry was not for me.

I completely agree that promoting the concept that "only" working 40 hours is lazy is completely wrong. But forcing everybody to always only work 40 hours a week would be wrong too. In Italy, theoretically, overtime hours have to be paid more than normal hours, which I think would be fair and good - this alone would make managers really think about the productivity of those extra hours.

In practice, though, there is often a lot of unpaid overtime, at least in the software industry, and the situation isn't different from what the article says about the US (only, with lower salaries).

Case in point: Norway has some of the strictest labor laws in the world. The Norwegian Work Environment Act (Arbeidsmiljøloven) has very strict rules around overtime and overtime compensation, which cannot be changed through an employment contract. (Exceptions are possible where a labor union/worker organization is involved)

There are a lot of detailed regulations, but among other things, _all_ work over 40 hours a week is overtime and needs to be compensated at least 40% higher than regular work. And working more than 200 hours of overtime a year is actually illegal.

In practice, however, most employees and employers in the software industry just ignore these rules and save up these extra hours on a "flex time account" where they can take it out as paid vacation later, or with some luck, be paid in cash.

If you actually took a case like this to court and demanded the 40% bonus on all overtime, you would probably win. But there seems to be a gentleman's agreement between industry participants that this would be a bad idea. I have no idea why this is the case - I just assume that it is because a lot of IT workers have doormat tendencies and have a hard time claiming their rights.

I think that this is in part because in the software industry we feel much stronger ownership of our projects than in most other jobs... for example, a couple of years ago I put a lot of (unpaid) overtime without being forced at all, just because I wanted the project to succeed and there was no other way to achieve success than for me to work on it myself (even if in theory I was just the project manager and sales engineer).

The flip side is that the project did succeed, this success brought a lot more money than originally expected to my firm, and I didn't get a fair bonus. Now I only work (serious) overtime if they agree to pay me beforehand, and I'm working on my startup(s) on the side.

Yes, the ownership and pride aspect is probably a big part of it. I'd guess you can see the same thing with craftsmen.

Regardless though, something feels very wrong about working very hard on something that can provide a huge monetary gain for your superiors, with the very real risk that you might not get anything in return. I operate (and have always operated, due to the horror stories I've heard) the same way you seem to do now: Do nothing but what's expected of you for the company, and only do more than what you're paid for if you've got leverage to actually be compensated for the real effort that you put in.

Computer people are, by and large, way too weak in exerting their rights. Whenever I hear a story of a nerd getting screwed over in a negotiation or liquidity event, I think of a small, weak kid getting his lunch money taken by a bully and not having any power to do anything about it. We're grownups and we have a lot of tools at our disposal to push back against injustices like these. It's like Nassim Nicholas Taleb said - sometimes you just need to sue someone. It's a matter of respect.

In the end, I guess that it all depends on who your superiors are. Before this episode I worked with other people, and my extra effort was rewarded - nothing spectacular, but I both got a monetary compensation, and the possibility to pursue a project of my own proposal.

With my current manager it took me some time to understand that his promises were written on water. Add to that a daughter, a mortgage and the crisis, and he probably felt it safe enough to screw me. I hope to prove him wrong soon enough ;)

I like working a lot, making great stuff. Some people don't. But that's not my problem.

Asking me not to work, just because some body else doesn't want to, is injustice.

I have faced this situation in the past. I used to get a lot of work done in my last company(I was productive and used to push crazy hours) and by that definition I was learning, making and getting a lot of recognition.

Soon a bunch of girls went and complained to the manager its becoming a one sided game. And the suggestion they gave to solve their problem was to stop me from putting those extra works. Now here is my problems, for whatever reason if you can't/don't want to do something big in life. I doesn't mean everyone should do the same to make you feel good.

This is more or less like socialism. You force the rich to become poor just because the poor don't want to be rich.

EDIT: C'mon guys why would you downvote this? Choice to choose a worklife style is upto to the individual. Stopping Individual from achieving their goals is in direct contradiction to freedom to pursuit of happiness.

HN is becoming like reddit, things get up/downvoted on mood not on merit.

I didn't downvote, but you might want to consider comments like

> Soon a bunch of girls went

Which appears to be fantastically sexist. (Although that's another huge thread.)

How is that sexist?

I was careful to use the word "appears" - it's sexist because there's no need to mention the sex. "A bunch of people" works just as well, and avoids the "macho == works hard" / "girls == wimps" imagery that is problematic.

I didn't down vote, and agree that people should be able to work as much as they want.

However, when I read sloppily written comments with poor grammar and syntax, I always wonder if the author also writes code in a similar manner. I kind of take it as an insult when author's don't do their best to make their work easily understood by others.

I am from India, and English is not my mother tongue.

Sometime I make mistakes, but I correct them often when some one points out.

I don't think its a big issue, I don't see this as a problem while coding, interaction or even while writing documentation.

Sometimes I make a mistake because of my mother tongue influence over English.

Wouldn't applying some of your extra productivity to an open-source project be more beneficial to more people? Instead of having a difficult work environment with your co-workers you would have learned, created great stuff and been recognized by peers.

Yes this is true, and you would be definitely helping a lot of people.

One of my long term goals is contribute to a open source community.

"Choice to choose a worklife style is upto to the individual. Stopping Individual from achieving their goals is in direct contradiction to freedom to pursuit of happiness."

Some might have goals similar to you. Others might aspire to work a 40-a-week job, be there for their spouse and children and not feel burnt out every day. Yes, there are people like you who might enjoy working crazy hours and being super productive. However, the person who is truly most productive in a 40-a-week job should also be able to achieve their goals without this cultural stigma around working a normal amount of time.

Please note the person who works 8 hours a day sincerely is getting what he is supposed to get.

Also the person who works for 8 hrs + x hrs is getting what he is supposed to get.

If you are saying despite working for ( 8 + x ) hrs he must not get anything extra or he and the guy who works for 8 hrs must both get the same, defeats the very laws of karma.

Besides, The 8 hrs guy has a problem only if gets into comparisons with the ( 8 + x ) hours guy.

The expectation that one must get paid the same but do little work compared to somebody else generally makes a classic case when the individual blames others for merely being lucky for the comparative success.

The 8hour worker is getting what they're supposed to get.

The 8 + x hours worker is getting less than they're supposed to. Often they're doing x hours for free.

There can be several problems with that. Sometimes the company gets a lot of value from the x hours, and sells lots of product for lots of money, but doesn't give any money to the worker.

Or sometimes the worker is doing poor quality work, but getting personal value from the x hours (perhaps seen by managers as being more productive) and the other workers have to fix the errors, but are not seen as productive.

> The expectation that one must get paid the same but do little work compared to somebody else

Quite often overtime is unpaid, or is paid at low rates.

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