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Comment by adeaver | Hacker News Reader

I suggest you examine why they are complaining. Are they being forced to work that many hours because of your process? Might want to rethink that.

Do you have so much work that it can't be done with your current staff in 40 hours/week? Hire more.

Is your management so inept that your employees are forced to work more to keep up? Training will help.

Many people will willingly work extra when they need to (trying to squash that one last bug or trying to squeeze in that new feature) but rail when it's expected and demanded for no legitimate reason.

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I agree, most of the time being in a situation where working >40 hours in a week is due to a failure in planning or estimation. Not to mention the fact that, at a certain point, putting in extra hours has seriously diminishing returns. It can do more harm than good (been there before, in crunch weeks/months).

My point is that if you are counting hours every week, then you're already doing it wrong.

You do see the irony in your statement right?

I see what you're getting at, but if you re-read my original statement you'll see that I'm targeting people that complain about working more than 40 hours.

I don't count hours, but I do notice people that clock in/out, and I definitely notice people that complain about having to work more than 40.

If you are the owner, then it totally makes sense to not count your hours since you reap what you sow. If you're nothing but an employee (without any incentives such as stocks), I don't see why you would continuously do overtime.

And as another user said, if your employees need to continuously do some overtime, there's a bigger issue underlying.

I agree, I wrote this comment on another thread before:

One thing to remember in all these discussions about working hours is that its one thing to work for yourself and another to work for someone else. I've done both. When you work for yourself you don't take much time off until things are going well, and its not a problem. I think the problem arises when people who own the business genuinely can't understand why everybody else doesn't want to put in the same hours that they do. It's about ownership. Doesn't mean that employees can't be very productive for 8 hours and then go home and do their own thing. e.g. take their kids to sport or music, contribute to voluntary organisations, work on a side project.

Each to his own.

Why would anyone be hurt/surprised that people don't necessarily like donating hundreds of hours of their time to their employer for no additional pay?

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